New South Wales and the western land called New Holland were part of the same landmass. In March 1802 he reached Kangaroo Island, and was surprised to find it uninhabited. French Captain Nicolas Baudin was also on a survey mission in 1802, independently charting the southern coast of the Australian continent with the French naval ships the Géographe and the Naturaliste. The British and French expeditions sighted each other on 8 April 1802, and despite believing that France and Britain were still at war at the time (neither knew that the War of the Second Coalition had ended), they met peacefully at Encounter Bay. Following the discovery of Kangaroo Island by Flinders, lawless sealers known as "Straitsmen" (they mainly lived on the islands of the Bass Strait) came to the island. Their main work was hunting seals and whales. Once they had become established on the island, to satisfy their need for wives the sealers kidnapped Aboriginal women from Tasmania and the mainland and brought them there. By 1820, there were reportedly nine sealers living on the island with Aboriginal wives, and by the mid-1820s as many as 30 of them. The "wife-collecting trips" to the mainland were violent affairs, sometimes involving killing the women's husbands. Charles Sturt led an expedition from New South Wales in 1829, which followed first the Murrumbidgee River into a "broad and noble river", which he named the Murray River. His party then followed this river to its junction with the Darling River and continued down river on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea. He wrote: Sturt recommended further examination of the area, and New South Wales Governor Ralph Darling sent Captain Collet Barker to carry out a survey of the area in 1831. After swimming across the mouth of the Murray River alone, Barker was killed by Aboriginal people (Sturt thought this might have been out of revenge for the atrocities committed by sealers). Despite this, his more detailed survey led Sturt to conclude: While traveling through the lower regions of the Murray, Sturt also wrote that he was surprised by the large number of Aboriginal Australians he encountered, but the Aboriginal population of the region was struck by an epidemic at the same time as Sturt's expedition (likely smallpox), leading to a much smaller native population when colonists arrived seven years later. British preparation for establishing a colony In 1828