Louis De Freycinet, 1818
In 1818 in the Uranie, French explorer Louis de Freycinet, who had been an officer in Hamelin's 1801 crew, sent a boat ashore to recover Vlamingh's plate and substituted a lead plate, which has never been found. His wife Rose de Freycinet, who was on board, having stowed away with her husband's assistance, recorded the event in what was in effect a diary of her circumnavigation. After being shipwrecked in the Falkland Islands the plate and other materials from the Uranie voyage were later transferred to another ship and taken to France, where it was presented to the Académie française in Paris.
After being lost for more than a century, the Vlamingh plate was rediscovered in 1940 on the bottom shelf of a small room, mixed up with old copper engraving plates. In recognition of Australian losses in the defence of France during the two world wars, the plate was eventually returned to Australia in 1947 and is currently housed in the Western Australian Maritime Museum in Fremantle, Western Australia.
Read more about this topic: Hartog Plate
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