In 1817, while Napoleon was mewed up in St. Helena, and a Bourbon once more occupied the throne of France as Louis XVIII, the ships Uranie and Physicienne were sent out under the command of Captain Louis de Freycinet, the cartographer of Baudin's expedition.* (* Voyage autour du Monde, entrepris par ordre du Roi, par Louis de Freycinet, Paris 1827.) They visited some of the scenes of former French exploits, and Freycinet took advantage of his position on the west coast to pull down and appropriate for the French Academy of Inscriptions the oldest memorial of European presence in Australia. That is to say, he took the plate put up by the Dutchman Vlaming in 1697, in place of that erected in 1616 by Dirk Haticks on the island bearing the name of "Dirk Hartog," to commemorate his visit in the ship Eendraght of Amsterdam.* (* Ibid 1 449.) Freycinet had desired to take the plate when he was an officer on Le Naturaliste in July 1801, but Captain Hamelin, the commander, would not permit it to be disturbed. On the contrary, he set up a new post with the plate affixed to it, and expressed the opinion that to remove an interesting memorial that for over a century had been spared by nature and by man, would be to commit a kind of sacrilege.* (* "Il eut pense commettre un sacrilege en gardant a son bord cette plaque respectee pendant pres de deux siecles par la nature et par les hommes qui pouvoient avant nous l'avoir observee." Peron, Voyage de Decouvertes 1 195.) Freycinet was not so scrupulous. Again, in 1824, the Baron de Bougainville, a son of the older navigator, and who as a junior officer had sailed with Baudin, took out the ships Thetis and Esperance on a voyage to the South Seas, for purely geographical purposes;* (* Journal de la Navigation autour du monde de la fregate La Thetis et de la corvette L'Esperance, pendant les annees 1824-1826; publie par ordre du Roi. Par M. le Baron de Bougainville.) and still later, in 1826 to 1828, during the reign of Charles X, Dumont d'Urville, in the Astrolabe, did valuable exploratory work, especially in the Western Pacific.* (* Voyage de la corvette L'Astrolabe, execute par ordre du Roi, pendant les annees 1826-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont D'Urville, Paris 1830.) The whole of these expeditions, with the partial exception of that of Marion-Dufresne, were conducted in ships of the French navy, commanded by French officers, supported by French funds, and their official records were published at the expense of the French Government. A certain unity of purpose characterised them; and that purpose was as purely and truly directed to extend man's knowledge of the habitable earth as was that of any expedition that ever sailed under any flag.