When Nicolas Baudin left the Normandy port of Le Havre in October 1800 bound on a voyage of discovery to the Southern Lands, he set out in the expectation of attaining the status of James Cook (Horner 1987: 80; Allorge 2003: 589). Four years later, despite all that had been achieved, his expedition would return to France shrouded in disgrace. It was a dramatic reversal of fortune that was all the more remarkable considering the lofty ambitions that had inspired the voyage's conception and planning, the large amount of money that had been invested in the expedition and, last but not least, the considerable esteem in which its leader had been held. The government response to a voyage deemed to have gone wrong was an eloquent silence, but, if the expedition received little by way of official recognition, its memory was nonetheless preserved – mainly in the writings of the expeditioners themselves, who were anxious to justify their own achievements, and in the reports of their defenders in the scientific establishment, whose own interests lay in providing them moral support. In the years that followed the expedition's return, and far into the following century, such self-interested narratives, which knowingly denigrated Baudin or underplayed his achievements in order to enhance those of their authors, were by far the most influential source of information on the voyage. It is precisely the history of these stories that concerns us here and how the misrepresentations upon which they were based became interwoven into the history of the expedition to the Southern Lands.