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It was Dentrecasteaux's hydrographer, Beautemps Beaupre, whose charting of part of the southern coast of Australia was so highly praised by Flinders. The expeditions thus enumerated were all despatched before the era of Napoleon, and appreciation of their objects cannot therefore be complicated by doubts as to his Machiavellian designs.
Bougainville's voyage, and that of Marion-Dufresne, were promoted under Louis XV, that of La Perouse under Louis XVI, and Dentrecasteaux's under the Revolutionary Assembly. Each was an expedition of discovery. Next came the expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin, with which we are mainly concerned, and which was despatched under the Consulate.
He had therefore been just four months in this region, when he left his anchorage at Kangaroo Island four months of incessant daily and nightly labour diligently directed to the task in hand. Always generous in his praise of good work, he paid a warm tribute to the quality of the charts prepared by Beautemps Beaupre, "geographical engineer" of La Recherche, Dentrecasteaux's corvette.
They indicated the advisableness of exploring the eastern coast of the island, of traversing Bass Strait with a view to a more complete examination than appeared to the Institute to have been made up to that time, and of pursuing the southern coasts of Australia as far as the western point of Dentrecasteaux's investigations, especially with the object of searching that part of the land "where there is supposed to be a strait communicating with the Gulf of Carpentaria, and which, consequently, would divide New Holland into two large and almost equal islands."
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