Life of Captain Matthew Flinders | Page 6

navigators, and continued at different periods
by Cook, D'Entrecasteaux, Vancouver, and your memorialist. He was
furnished with a passport by order of His Imperial and Royal Majesty,
then first Consul of France; and signed by the marine minister Forfait
the 4th Prarial, year 9; which passport permitted the Investigator to
touch at French ports in any part of the world, in cases of distress, and
promised assistance and protection to the commander and company,
provided they should not have unnecessarily deviated from their route,
or have done, or announced the intention of doing any thing injurious
to the French nation or its allies: Your memorialist sailed from England
in July 1801, and in April 1802, whilst pursuing the discovery of the
unknown part of the south coast of New South Wales, he met with the
commandant Baudin, who being furnished with a passport by the
Admiralty of Great Britain, had been sent by the French government
with the ships Geographe and Naturaliste upon a nearly similar

expedition some months before. From Port Jackson, where the
commandant was again met with, your memorialist, accompanied by
the brig Lady Nelson, continued his examinations and discoveries
northward, through many difficulties and dangers, but with success,
until December 1802, when, in the Gulf of Carpentaria
32. PORTRAIT OF FLINDERS IN 1808.
(From portrait drawn by Chazal at Ile-de-France.)
33. SILHOUETTE OF FLINDERS, MADE AFTER HIS RETURN
FROM ILE-DE-FRANCE.
(By permission of Professor Flinders Petrie.)
34. REDUCED FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
DEDICATION OF FLINDERS' JOURNAL.
(Mitchell Library.)
To
the right hon. George John, Earl Spencer, the right hon. John, Earl of St.
Vincent, the right hon. Charles Phillip Yorke, and the right hon. Robert
Saunders, Viscount Melville, who, as first Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty, successively honoured the Investigator's voyage with their
patronage, this account of it is respectfully dedicated, by Their
Lordships most obliged, and most obedient humble servant Matthew
Flinders
35. PAGE FROM MANUSCRIPT OF FLINDERS' ABRIDGED
NARRATIVE (UNPUBLISHED).
(Melbourne Public Library.)
from the general's conduct, that he has sought to impose upon him, and
this for the purpose, perhaps for the pleasure, of prolonging to the
utmost my unjust detention.

But if apprehensions for the safety of this land are not the cause of the
order of the French government remaining unexecuted, what reason can
there be, sufficiently strong to have induced the captain-general to incur
the risk of misobedience, first to the passport, and afterwards to the
order for my liberation. This I shall endeavour to explain in the
following and last chapter of this discussion; promising, however, that
what I shall have to offer upon this part of the subject, can only be what
a consideration of the captain-general's conduct has furnished me, as
being the most probable. I am not conscious of having omitted any
material circumstance, either here or in the narration, or of having
misrepresented any; as if after an attentive perusal, the reader thinks my
explanation not borne out by the facts, I submit it to his judgment to
deduce a better; and should esteem myself obliged by his making it
public, so that it may reach so far as even to me.
Chapter XII.
Probable causes of my imprisonment, and of the marine minister's
order for my liberation being suspended by the captain-general
Before explaining what I conceive to have been the true causes which
led the captain-general to act so contrary to my passport, as to imprison
me and seize my vessel, charts, and papers; it will be proper to give the
reader a knowledge of some points in His Excellency's character, in
addition to those he will have extracted from the abridged narrative. At
the time of my arrival, he entertained, and does I believe still entertain,
an indiscriminate animosity against Englishmen, whether this arose
from his having been deprived of the advantage of fixing the seat of his
government at Pondicherry, by the renewal of war in 1803, or from any
antecedent circumstance, I cannot pretend to say; but that he did
harbour such animosity, and that in an uncommon degree, is averred by
his keeping in irons, contrary to the usages of war, the first English
seamen that were brought to the island (Narrative page 58 and 70); by
the surprise he testified at the proceeding of a French gentleman, who
interceded with him for the liberty on parole of a sick English officer;
on which occasion he said amongst other things, that had he his own
will, he would send all the English prisoners to the Marquis Wellesley

without their ears: this animosity is, besides, as well known at the Isle
of France, as the existence of the island.
It is probably owing to an original want of education, and to having
passed the greater part of his life in the tumult of