The stranger proved to be "a heavy-looking ship without any top-gallant masts up." On the Investigator hoisting her colours, Le Geographe "showed a French ensign, and afterwards an English jack forward, as we did a white flag." Flinders manoeuvred so as to keep his broadside to the stranger, "lest the flag of truce should be a deception." But the demeanour of the French being purely pacific, he had a boat hoisted out and went on board, Le Geographe having also hove to.
On the French vessel, meanwhile, similar curiosity had been provoked as to the identity of the ship sailing east. Captain Baudin's men had been engaged during the morning in harpooning dolphins, which they desired for the sake of the flesh. Peron, in his narrative, waxes almost hysterically joyous about the good fortune that brought along a school of these fish just as the ship's company were almost perishing for want of fresh food. They appeared, he says, like a gift from Heaven.* (* "Cette peche heureuse nous parut comme un bienfait du ciel. Alors, en effet, le terrible scorbut avoit commence ses ravages, et les salaisons pourries et rongees de vers auxquelles nous etions reduits depuis plusieurs mois precipitoient chaque jour l'affreux developpement de ce fleau." Voyage de Decouvertes 1 323.) Unlike the bronzed and healthy crew of the Investigator, the company on Le Geographe were suffering severely from scurvy. The virulence of the disease increased daily. They were rejoicing at the capture of nine large dolphins, which would supply them with a feast of fresh meat, when the look-out man signalled that a sail was in sight.* (* Mr. T. Ward, in his Rambles of an Australian Naturalist (1907) page 153, relates that in 1889 he harpooned a large dolphin, Grampus gris, in King George's Sound, and that whalers told him that dolphins were at one time common in the Bight, in schools of two and three hundred. As to dolphin flesh as food, the reader may like to be reminded that Hawkins's men, in 1565, found dolphins "of very good colour and proportion to behold, and no less delicate in taste" (Hakluyt's Voyages edition of 1904 10 61). So also in 1705 a voyager to Maryland related the capture of dolphins, "a beautiful fish to see...it is also a good fish to eat." "Narrative of a Voyage to Maryland," printed from manuscript in American Historical Review 12 328.)