Certainly he was no common man to whose memory stands that tall monument at Botany Bay.  It was erected at the cost of the French Government by the Baron de Bougainville, in 1825, and serves not only as a reminder of a fine character and a full, rich and manly life, but of a series of historical events that are of capital consequence in the exploration and occupation of Australia.

It will be appropriate to conclude this brief biography with a tribute to the French navigator from the pen of an English poet.  Thomas Campbell is best remembered by such vigorous poems as “Ye Mariners of England,” and “The Battle of the Baltic,” which express a tense and elevated British patriotism.  All the more impressive for that very reason is his elegy in honour of a sailor of another nation, whose merits as a man and whose charm as a writer Campbell had recognised from his boyhood.  The following are his.

Lines written in A blank Leaf of Laperouse’s “Voyages”

Loved Voyager! whose pages had a zest
More sweet than fiction to my wondering breast,
When, rapt in fancy, many a boyish day
I tracked his wanderings o’er the watery way,
Roamed round the Aleutian isles in waking dreams,
Or plucked the fleur-de-lys by Jesso’s streams,
Or gladly leaped on that far Tartar strand,
Where Europe’s anchor ne’er had bit the sand,
Where scarce a roving wild tribe crossed the plain,
Or human voice broke nature’s silent reign,—­
But vast and grassy deserts feed the bear,
And sweeping deer-herds dread no hunter’s snare. 
Such young delight his real records brought,
His truth so touched romantic springs of thought,
That, all my after life, his fate and fame
Entwined romance with Laperouse’s name. 
Fair were his ships, expert his gallant crews,
And glorious was the emprise of Laperouse—­
Humanely glorious!  Men will weep for him,
When many a guilty martial fame is dim: 
He ploughed the deep to bind no captive’s chain—­
Pursued no rapine—­strewed no wreck with slain;
And, save that in the deep themselves lie low,
His heroes plucked no wreath from human woe. 
’Twas his the earth’s remotest bounds to scan,
Conciliating with gifts barbaric man—­
Enrich the world’s contemporaneous mind,
And amplify the picture of mankind. 
Far on the vast Pacific, ’midst those isles
O’er which the earliest morn of Asia smiles,
He sounded and gave charts to many a shore
And gulf of ocean new to nautic lore;
Yet he that led discovery o’er the wave,
Still finds himself an undiscovered grave. 
He came not back!  Conjecture’s cheek grew pale,
Year after year; in no propitious gale
His lilied banner held its homeward way,
And Science saddened at her martyr’s stay. 
An age elapsed:  no wreck told where or when
The chief went down with all his gallant men,
Or whether by the storm and wild sea flood