“L’ile principale de ce dernier groupe” (their Archipel Berthier) “se dessine sous la forme d’un immense hamacon.” (Thistle’s Island seems to he here meant.) “Independamment de toutes ces iles, il en existe encore plus de vingt autres disseminees aux environs de la pointe occidentale du golfe et en dehors de son entee:  chacune d’elles fut designee par un de ces noms honorables dont notre patrie s’enorgueillit a juste titre.” p. 327.

Voyage de Decouverte aux Terres Australes, redige par M. F. Peron, Naturaliste de l’expedition, etc.  Paris, 1807.]

It is said by M. Peron, and upon my authority too, that the Investigator had not been able to penetrate behind the Isles of St. Peter and St. Francis; and though he doth not say directly that no part of the before unknown coast was discovered by me, yet the whole tenor of his Chap.  XV induces the reader to believe that I had done nothing which could interfere with the prior claim of the French.

Yet M. Peron was present afterwards at Port Jackson when I showed one of my charts of this coast to captain Baudin, and pointed out the limits of his discovery; and so far from any prior title being set up at that time to Kangaroo Island and the parts westward, the officers of the Geographe always spoke of them as belonging to the Investigator.  The first lieutenant, Mons. Freycinet, even made use of the following odd expression, addressing himself to me in the house of governor King, and in the presence of one of his companions, I think Mons. Bonnefoy:  “Captain, if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen’s Land, you would not have discovered the South Coast before us.”

The English officers and respectable inhabitants then at Port Jackson can say if the prior discovery of these parts were not generally acknowledged; nay, I appeal to the French officers themselves, generally and individually, if such were not the case.  How then came M. Peron to advance what was so contrary to truth?  Was he a man destitute of all principle?  My answer is, that I believe his candour to have been equal to his acknowledged abilities; and that what he wrote was from over-ruling authority, and smote him to the heart; he did not live to finish the second volume.

The motive for this aggression I do not pretend to explain.  It may have originated in the desire to rival the British nation in the honour of completing the discovery of the globe; or be intended as the forerunner of a claim to the possession of the countries so said to have been first discovered by French navigators.  Whatever may have been the object in view, the question, so far as I am concerned, must be left to the judgment of the world; and if succeeding French writers can see and admit the claims of other navigators as clearly and readily as a late most able man of that nation* has pointed out their own in some other instances, I shall not fear to leave it even to their decision.