colony. I conclude by observing that scarcely any coinage is to be found in circulation there. They use a currency of copper with which they pay the troops, and some paper money."
There is no need to emphasise the circumstances in which this piece of duplicity was perpetrated. They are made sufficiently clear from the plain story related in the preceding pages. But it should be said in justice to Baudin that there is no reason to associate him with the espionage of Péron. Nor is it the case that the expedition originally had any intention of visiting Port Jackson, for this or any other purpose. As explained in the chapter relating to the Encounter Bay incident, it was Flinders who suggested to Baudin that he should seek the succour he so sorely needed at Sydney; and Le Naturaliste, which preceded him thither, was driven by a like severity of need to his own. "It does not appear by his orders," wrote King to Banks "that he was at all instructed to touch here, which I do not think he intended if not 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 Péron 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 Péron in his Voyage de Decouvertes, adopted the view that what he wrote was under compulsion from authority. "How came M. Péron to advance what was so contrary to truth?" he
