his ship under a guard, and forbidden all communication with the shore.
If he gives satisfaction, he is conducted from the General to the
Prefect, to answer his questions, and if he satisfies him also, is then
left at liberty to go to his consul and transact his business. The
letters and packets left with the General, if not addressed to persons
obnoxious to the Government, are sent unopened, according to their
direction. I will not venture to say that the others are opened and
afterwards destroyed, but it is much suspected. If the newspapers contain
no intelligence but what is permitted to be known, they are also sent to
their address. The others are retained; and for this reason it is that
all the copies of the same paper are demanded, for the intention is not
merely to gain intelligence, but to prevent what is disagreeable from
being circulated."

Decaen's conduct in refusing to liberate Flinders when the order reached
him need not be excused, but it should be understood. To impute sheer
malignity to him does not help us much, nor does it supply a sufficient
motive. What we know of his state of mind, as well as what we know of the
financial position of the colony, induce the belief that he would have
been quite glad to get rid of Flinders in 1807, had not other and
stronger influences intervened. But he was a soldier, placed in an
exceedingly precarious situation, which he could only maintain by
determining not to lose a single chance. War is an affliction that
scourges a larger number of those who do not fight than of those who do;
and Flinders, with all his innocence, was one of its victims. He was
thought to know too much. That was why he was "dangerous." A learned
French historian* stigmatises Decaen's conduct as "maladroit and brutal,
but not dishonest." (* Prentout page 661.) Dishonest he never was; as to
the other terms we need not dispute so long as we understand the peculiar
twist of circumstances that intensified the maladroitness and brutality
that marked the man, and without which, indeed, he would not perhaps have
been the dogged, tough, hard-fighting, resolute soldier that he was.

Flinders could have escaped from Ile-de-France on several occasions, had
he chosen to avail himself of opportunities. He did not, for two reasons,
both in the highest degree honourable to him. The first was that he had
given his parole, and would not break it; the second that escape would
have meant sacrificing some of his