When they sailed through Sydney Heads in the early winter of 1802, Nicolas Baudin and his men entered upon an unscheduled sojourn that would present them with their most prolonged cross-cultural encounter of the voyage and their only opportunity to observe Aboriginal Australians in a colonial environment. In the nascent British penal colony of Port Jackson, it might be assumed that the Baudin expedition had found the ideal situation for addressing one of its most vital tasks: gathering ethnographical data to advance understandings of the nature of Man. However, there are differences in the tone and extent of their records about Port Jackson's Aboriginal people which suggest that the Frenchmen were either reluctant or found it difficult to conduct ethnographic work during these months in port. It is well-established, for instance, that they wrote far less on the original inhabitants of Port Jackson than on the colony itself, primarily its European inhabitants and the nature of its progress. What they did record about the Aboriginal people is brief and fragmented. There are bursts of detail, and sometimes insight; however, it is detail recorded at a distance – summaries and evaluations of characteristics generally observed, rather than descriptions of actual contact, of the gestures, words or gifts exchanged.