In the letter to his ‘friend Mr King’, Baudin in fact wrote less about British claims to the possession of Tasmania than about the colonization of Indigenous Australians. On this point, he was again concerned about territory, though not in relation to the rights of discovery but to the laws of nature and the corresponding duties of government. ‘I have never been able to conceive’, revealed the commander,

Baudin opined, in fact, that

Based on a firm assumption about the universality of the human race, it was both the rights and the progress of humanity – across the divides of class and region as well as colour – that concerned Baudin. These were the concerns that moved him to criticize the British colonial project in New South Wales. If the above ‘principle had generally been adopted’ by King and his fellow British authorities, argued Baudin, they ‘would not have had to form a colony of men branded by the law and abandoned to themselves.