Page:The life of Matthew Flinders.djvu/261

 by no means the kind of officer whom Napoleon would have selected had his designs been such as have commonly been alleged.

Two ships of the navy were commissioned for the service. Under the names La Serpente and Le Vésuve they had been built with a view to an invasion of England, contemplated in 1793. ) They were re-named Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste on being allotted to a much safer employment. Both were described as solidly built, good sailers, and easy to control; and the officer who surveyed them to determine whether they would be suitable reported that without impairing their sea-going qualities it would be easy to construct upon their decks high poops to hold quantities of growing plants, which it was intended to collect and bring home. On these ships Baudin and his selected staff embarked at Havre, and, a British passport being obtained under the circumstances already related, sailed south in October.

If Baudin had been the keen and capable commander that those who secured his appointment believed him to be, he should have discovered and charted the whole of the unknown southern coast of Australia, before Flinders was many days' sail from England. The fact that this important work was actually done by the English navigator was in no measure due to the sagacity of the Admiralty—whose officials procrastinated in an inexplicable fashion even after the Investigator had been commissioned and equipped—but to his own promptness, competence and zeal, and the peculiar dilatoriness of his rivals. Baudin's vessels reached Ile-de-France (Mauritius) in March, 1801, and lay there for the leisurely space of forty days. Two-thirds of a year had