Had the selection of a site for settlement, rather than research, been intended, it seems most likely that Napoleon, with his trained eye for strategic advantages, would have directed particular if not exclusive attention to be paid to the north coast of Australia. If he had taken the map in hand and studied it with a view to obtaining a favourable position, he would probably have put his finger upon the part of the coast where Port Darwin is situated, and would have said, "Search carefully just there: see if a harbour can be discovered which may be used as a base." The coast was entirely unoccupied; the French might have established themselves securely before the British knew what they had done; and had they found and fortified Port Darwin, they would have captured the third point of a triangle--the other two being Mauritius and Pondicherry--which might have made them very powerful in the Indian Ocean. And that is precisely what the East India Company's directors feared that Napoleon intended. One of them, the Hon. C.F. Greville, wrote to Brown, the naturalist of the Investigator, "I hope the French ships of discovery will not station themselves on the north coast of New Holland";* (* January 4, 1802. Historical Records of New South Wales 4 677.) and the Company, recognising their own interest in the matter, voted six hundred pounds as a present to the captain, staff, and crew of the Investigator before she sailed from England. But instead of what was feared, the French ships devoted principal attention to the south, where there was original geographical work to do--a natural course, their object being discovery, but not what might have been expected had their real design been acquisition. Peron censured Baudin because he examined part of the west coast before proceeding to the unknown south; and when at length Le Geographe did sail north, the work done there was very perfunctory. Baudin himself was no fighting man; nor was there with the expedition a military engineer or any officer capable of reporting upon strategic situations, or competent to advise as to the establishment of a fort or a colony. Captain Hamelin and Lieutenant Henri de Freycinet afterwards saw active service with the Navy, but the staff knew more about flowers, beetles, butterflies, and rocks than about fortifications and colonisation. In recent years research has concentrated powerful rays of light on the intricacies of Napoleonic policy. Archives have been thrown open, ransacked, catalogued and codified. Memoirs by the score, letters by the hundred, have been published. Documents by the thousand have been studied. A battalion of eager students have handled this vast mass of material. The piercing minds of eminent scholars have drilled into it to elucidate problems incidental to Napoleon's era. But nothing has been brought to light which indicates that Australia was within the radius of his designs.