obliged by distress." Such
was the case; and it was this very distress, and the generous alleviation
of it by the British colonists, that make the singular turpitude of Peron
and Freycinet in pursuing nefarious designs of their own and plotting to
rend the breast that fed them. The great war gave rise to many noble acts
of chivalry on both sides, deeds which are luminous with a spirit
transcending the hatreds of the time, and glorify human nature; but it is
happily questionable whether it produced an example to equal that
expounded in these pages, of ignoble treachery and ungrateful baseness.

Flinders, when reviewing the unjust account of his own discoveries given
by Peron in his Voyage de Decouvertes, adopted the view that what he
wrote was under compulsion from authority. "How came M. Peron to advance
what was so contrary to truth?" he asked. "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." Could Flinders have known what
Peron was capable of doing, in the endeavour to advance himself in favour
with the rulers of his country, he would certainly not have believed him
so blameless.

That Port Jackson was never attacked during these years of war was not
due to its own capabilities of defence, which were pitifully weak; nor to
reluctance on the part of Napoleon and Decaen; but simply to the fact
that the British Navy secured and kept the command of the sea. In 1810
Napoleon directed the equipment of a squadron to "take the English colony
of Port Jackson, where considerable resources will be found."* (*
Napoleon's Correspondance Volume 20 document 16 544.) But it was a futile
order to give at that date. Trafalgar had been fought, and the defence of
the colony in Australia was maintained effectively wherever British
frigates sailed.

Peron's report, then, did no mischief where he intended that it should.
But by inflaming Decaen's mind with suspicions it may not have been
ineffectual in another unfortunate direction, as we shall presently see.

The action of Peron in trying to persuade Decaen that the object of
Baudin's expedition was not truly scientific was all the more remarkable
because he himself, as one of its expert staff, did work which earned him
merited repute. His papers on marine life, on phosphorescence in the sea,
on the zoology of the South S