Encounter Bay.'] 
TERRA AUSTRALIS. 
193 
nions, I think Mons. Bonnefoy, " Captain, if we had not been kept 1S02 - 
April. 
" so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen's Fridays. 
" 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 gene- 
rally 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 fore runner 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. 
M. De Fleuribu, 
