Born a commoner in Saint-Martin-de-Ré on the Île de Ré on 17 February 1754,[1] Nicolas Baudin joined the merchant navy as an apprentice (pilotin) at the age of 15; he was then "of average height with brown hair".

Since the atmosphere between the French and American crews on Lion became unbearable, Baudin was assigned by Lamotte-Picquet to Duc de Choiseul, a ship equipped by Jean Peltier Dudoyer.

Appointed captain of the transport vessel Amphitrite, he was sunk by the English 160 nautical miles (290 km) out to sea, rescued in a rowing boat and made his way to Cape Cod and then Boston.

Having returned to Nantes, and to the annoyance of Beaumarchais, the owner of the vessel, Baudin's uncle entrusted him with the command of Aimable Eugenie, a ship of 600 tons, to go to Saint-Domingue and then to the US.

On 30 August he resold the boat, which in the meantime had become Union des 6 Frères, to Robert Pitot, a shipbuilder from the Isle de France who had just been freed from an English prison, and established himself as a trader in Bordeaux.

He apparently arrived at Canton from Mauritius under the flag of the US, probably to avoid the possibility of having his ship seized by the Chinese for payment of the debts owed them by the Imperial Asiatic Company of Trieste.

[7] Baudin made his way to Mauritius, where he purchased a replacement ship, Jardinière II, but this vessel was wrecked in a cyclone that struck Port Louis on 15 December 1789.

Placeres called at the Cape of Good Hope where it took on board the large number of plant and animal specimens collected in South Africa for the Imperial palace at Schönbrunn by Georg Scholl, the assistant of Franz Boos.

On its return voyage from Canton, the proposed expedition would call at the Cape of Good Hope to pick up Scholl and the remainder of his natural-history collection for conveyance to Schönbrunn.

[10] From the Cape of Good Hope Jardinière sailed across the Indian Ocean to the coast of New Holland (Australia), but two consecutive cyclones prevented the expedition from doing any work there and forced Baudin to take the ship to Bombay for repairs.

The museum and the French government accepted the proposal, and Baudin was appointed commander of an expedition in Belle Angélique, with four assigned botanists: René Maugé, André Pierre Ledru, Anselme Riedlé and Stanislas Levillain.

[12] The expedition returned to France in June 1798 with a large collection of plants, birds and insects, which was incorporated into Bonaparte's triumphal procession, on 27 July, celebrating his recent Italian victories.

[13] On the recommendation of the Naval Minister to the Directory, Baudin was reinstated into the navy with the rank of Chief of Staff to Admiral Bruix, who at his request, granted to Marie-Etienne Peltier the command of a corsair, the Virginie.

On 24 July 1798, at the suggestion of the Ministry of Marine, Baudin presented to the Assembly of Professors and Administrators of the National Museum of Natural History a plan for a hydrographic-survey expedition to the South Seas, which would include a search for fauna and flora that could be brought back for cultivation in France.

The expedition would then continue into the Pacific Ocean, including a visit to Tahiti and the Society Islands, and would be completed with a survey of the yet unexplored south-west coast of New Holland (Australia).

He had two ships, Géographe and Naturaliste captained by Hamelin, and a suite of nine zoologists and botanists, including Jean Baptiste Leschenault de la Tour.

The over-long voyage, with early rationing, left sailors and scientists feeling discouraged, but the colony was happy to build up the crews in case of conflict and to make use of the new skills they brought with them.

[citation needed] In April 1802, Baudin met Matthew Flinders, also engaged in charting the coastline, in Encounter Bay in present-day South Australia.

According to recent research by academics from the University of Adelaide, during Baudin's expedition, François Péron, who had become the chief zoologist and intellectual leader of the mission, wrote a report for Bonaparte on ways to invade and capture the colony.

[15] Realising that Géographe could not venture into some of the shallow waters along the Australian coast that he was intending to survey, he bought a new ship, Casuarina, named after the wood it was made from, and placed it under the command of Louis de Freycinet, who would, 15 years later, make his own circumnavigation of the world in the corvette l'Uranie.

However, the historian Edward Duyker likes to think that Baudin was buried in Le Cimetière de l’Ouest in the district of Port Louis, "just a few hundred metres from the explorer’s certain love: the sea".