j 9 4 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
Marion and Kerguelen preserved the historic continuity 
of French interests in the southern hemisphere. And not 
in this way alone. More than one great expedition for 
scientific exploration of the Pacific Ocean was fitted out 
in France, a country which always — even when the worst 
passions were raised against his land — cherished a de- 
voted admiration for the work of James Cook such as 
one nation rarely extends to the subject of another. 
The expedition of La Perouse in 1785-88 and the mys- 
tery which enshrouded its fate increased the interest of 
the French people in the Pacific to a pitch not now 
easy to realise, and the successive search expeditions of 
Bougainville and d’Entrecasteaux kept that interest alive 
for many years. 
Amongst French naval officers of that period the glam- 
our of the Great Ocean seemed to dominate the life of 
one in a preeminent degree, and indirectly led to an im- 
portant step in Antarctic exploration. At the age of six- 
teen Jules Sebastien Cesar Dumont D’Urville after failing 
to enter the Polytechnic, joined the navy. From child- 
hood he had been devoted to the study of travels and 
especially of voyages of exploration, and he rapidly dis- 
tinguished himself by his remarkable powers as a lin- 
guist, and his enthusiastic interest in various branches of 
science, especially ethnology. He was destined to touch 
history in several points curiously remote, but all em- 
braced in the duties or opportunities of a naval officer. 
When engaged with the fleet in the eastern Mediterran- 
ean in 1820 the French consul in the island of Melos took 
him to see an old Greek statue recently unearthed, and 
Dumont D’Urville wrote home in terms of such rapturous 
appreciation of its beauty that an order was sent to secure 
the statue for the Louvre at any cost. To the majority of 
