additional comments
I take this opportunity to offer an additional comment on Mr Scheps’ dismisal of the relevance of d’Entrecasteaux’s journal for researchers in the biological sciences: ‘his botanical expertise was in tropical plantation crops’.  The accounts of early explorers are often an indication of ecological change.  They are also a very valuable aid for the determination of collection locations for type specimens.  The naturalist on d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition, Jacques Julien Houtou de Labillardière, published what was in practical terms the first flora of New Holland, but there are anomalies in his habitat statements:  Western Australian and Tasmanian habitat locations are confused in several places.  This may not have been Labillardière’s fault since his specimens were for a time in British hands and thus his herbarium sheets and notes could have been shuffled. Be that as it may, d’Entrecasteaux’s journal (and its detailed navigational data and accounts of landfall) would suggest that at least nine species have anomalous habitat statements which cannot be explained as a result of human interference with the collection, for their distribution patterns do not coincide with any location visited by the expedition.  It is possible that some of these species described in the Novae Hollandiae plantarum specimen may actually have been collected by Louis Leschenault de La Tour during Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia.  The journal accounts from d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition have already been used by a number of botanical researchers with impressive effect: they include Jocelyn Townrow for the genus Stipa  and Bradley Potts from the Department of Botany, at the University of Tasmania, and Gintaras Kantvilas  who verified the type location of Eucalyptus cordata on Penguin Island.  (In the nineteenth century Joseph Hooker and George Bentham both believed Recherche Bay was the type location; in the twentieth century Joseph Maiden and others had held the same opinion.) Today Eucalyputus cordata is a rare and endangered species with scattered populations in south-eastern Tasmania suggestive of post-glacial relict distribution patterns. The stand on Penguin Island is protected as part of the South Bruny National Park.  Undoubtedly other researchers, with broader intellectual horizons than Mr Scheps, will put d’Entrecasteaux’s journal to other good uses.