Decaen was pondering over Peron's inflammatory memorandum when the lame little Cumberland staggered into Port Louis. Here, a victim ready to hand, was one of the instruments of the extension of British dominion, the foremost explorer in the service of the British Crown. True, Flinders had a passport from the French Government, but it was made out, not for the Cumberland but for the Investigator. To take advantage of such a point, when the Investigator had had to be abandoned as unseaworthy, was manifestly to seize the flimsiest pretext for imprisoning the man whom the winds and waves had brought within his power.* (* "C'etait une chicane," says M. Henri Prentout, page 382.) But Decaen was in the temper for regarding the English navigator as a spy, and he imprisoned him first and looked for evidence to justify himself afterwards. He had just read Peron's report; and "it was not unnatural," says a learned French historian somewhat naively, "that the Captain-General should attribute to the English savant the intention of playing at Port Louis the role that our naturalist had played at Port Jackson."* (* Ibid.) The imputation is unjust to Peron, who had not "spied" in Port Jackson, because the English there had manifested no disposition to conceal. Nothing that he reported was what the Government had wished him not to see; they had helped him to see all that he desired; and his preposterous political inferences, though devoid of foundation, hardly amounted to a positive breach of hospitality. Besides, had Decaen feared that the release of Flinders would be dangerous because he might report the weak state of the defences of the island, the same would have applied to the liberation of the junior officers and men of the Cumberland. They, however, were permitted to return to England after a brief period of detention. Decaen also alleged that Flinders was personally rude to him in presenting himself before him "le chapeau sur la tete." Flinders was undoubtedly smarting under a sense of wrong at the time, but discourtesy was by no means a feature of his character; and to imprison a man for six and a half years for not taking his hat off would have been queer conduct from a son of the Revolution!