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[Page 3]
barest justice, I prove myself innocent of any hostile act or intention against the French;- that I have been treated with indignity, inhumanity, and my life hazarded by close imprisonment in the scorbutic and debilitated state in which I arrived here; and this at a time when from my passport, from having suffered shipwreck and being in distress, as well as from the acknowledged hospitable treatment of the French ships at Port Jackson, I had claim to all the assistance and kind treatment they could give me. I am yet unwilling to lay these charges to the French government, or the perhaps more serious one of impeding the progress of geographical and nautical knowledge; for it is probable that they know not what a violent and arbitrary man is their governor in the Isle of France; though I should think the complaints of the inhabitants must already have given them some acquaintance with it.
I have continued to forward, extend, and make accurate the accounts of our voyage, as far as I am able, but indifferent health, lassitude arising from want of exercise and some change, and the delay of justice until hope is almost worn out, have a good deal deadened my exertions; fourteen months of imprisonment without any given point of expiration is a greater trial of both body and mind than I had thought it to be, where food was not so wanting; having, however, a due sense of the honour inferred upon me in being chosen to command the Investigator, and of what will be expected from me when the long delayed period of my liberation shall arrive, I shall continue to struggle against the stream, and still be proud, Sir Joseph, to sign myself
your most obliged and most faithful humble servant
Matthew Flinders
[Written in French by Flinders]
Je soussigné, médecin en chef, certifie avoir visité Mons Flinders, capitaine Anglais, prisonnier au jardin Desphaux. Depuis trois ans il est attaqué de coliques néphritiques; et souvent ses urines charrient des graviers, et beaucoup de glaires. Il se plaint que ses incommodités s'augmentent tous les jours. Ce déperissement de sa santé est une suite necessaire de défaut d'exercise et de dissipation, auquel il est forcé, et de la mélancholie qui s'est emparée de son esprit. Il a perdue le gout du travail de cabinet, qu'il aimait beaucoup; desorte qu'il est tombé dans une inactivité de ses facultés phisiques et morales, qui
[Translation]
[I underwrite, Chief Medical Officer, certifies to have visited Mons Flinders, English Captain, prisoner in the garden Desphaux. For three years he has been attacking renal colic; and often his urine carries gravel and a lot of mucus. He complains that his discomfort is increasing every day. This loss of health is a necessary consequence of the lack of exercise and dissipation, the strength and melancholy which has seized upon his mind. He lost the taste of cabinet work, which he loved very much; when he falls into an inactivity of his physical and moral abilities, which]