Edmund Fanning was a seal skin and merchant trader who'd read the expedition journal of English navigator George Vancouver.

Union departed New York late September, 1802,[3] for a brief stop in Stonington, Connecticut, before making the hop to Nantucket where she embarked a 12-man seal hunting gang led by Owen Folger-Smith.

Union departed Nantucket 10 October 1802, with 36 men, then stopped by the island of Sal in the Portuguese out-post of Cape Verde before continuing to South Georgia to commence seal hunting.

[3] At King George's Sound (near present-day Albany, Western Australia) Pendleton met Nicolas Baudin who was captain of Le Géographe.

Acting on this advice Pendleton proceeded to Kangaroo Island, and in April 1803 decided to spend the winter there, at an inlet now known as American River, and to build a small sealer, the schooner Independence.

The woman turned out to be Elizabeth Mosley (or Mosey, or Morey), the sole survivor from Duke of Portland, which had called at the island some two years earlier and whose crew the natives too had killed.