eration in your position, for the first, although false, is the
most tenable post of the two.

Trusting that upon a due consideration of all the circumstances, you will
be pleased to fulfil the intention for which the passport was given, I
have the honour to be,

From my confinement,
Your Excellency's obedient servant,
Dec. 25, 1803.
Matthew Flinders.

In the evening, a letter was brought me by a soldier from general De
Caen, and the haste with which it had been sent inspired favourable
hopes; I did not expect the visit of the interpreter until the following
day, and therefore attempted to decipher the letter by the help of a
French dictionary, with a degree of anxiety which its contents were but
little calculated to satisfy: it was as follows.

I did not answer your letter of the 21st December, Sir, because it was
useless to commence a debate here between you and me, upon the motives
well or ill founded from which I took upon myself to stop the Cumberland
until further orders. On the other hand, I should have had too much
advantage in refuting your assertions, notwithstanding the reasonings and
quotations with which you have adorned them.

I was still willing to attribute the unreserved tone you had used in that
letter, to the ill humour produced by your present situation. I was far
from thinking that after having seriously reflected upon the causes and
circumstances, you should take occasion from a silence so delicate to go
still further; but your last letter no longer leaves me an alternative.

Your undertaking, as extraordinary as it was inconsiderate, to depart
from Port Jackson in the Cumberland, more to give proof of an officious
zeal, more for the private interests of Great Britain than for what had
induced the French government to give you a passport, which I shall
unfold at a proper opportunity, had already given me an idea of your
character; but this letter overstepping all the bounds of civility,
obliges me to tell you, until _the general opinion judges of your faults
or of mine_, to cease all correspondence tending to demonstrate the
justice of your cause; since you know so little how to preserve the rules
of decorum.*

[The text of the letter, in French, was set out in the book, but is not
set out in this ebook.]

The accusation of not preserving the rules of decorum, seemed not a
little extraordinary from one who had kept me above two hours in the
street when I had gone to wait upon him, and wh