Rose de Freycinet journal written while on the Uranie voyage, 1817-1820, together with a transcription of her letters to her mother, 1817-1819, transcribed before 1842.

fonds

1817-1820, and before 1842

1060974

In 1817 Louis de Freycinet, an aristocratic naval officer and veteran of the Baudin expedition which circumnavigated Australia between 1801 and 1803, was given command of a Pacific scientific and exploring expedition. As captain of the Uranie, Freycinet secretly planned to take with him his 21 year old wife, Rose, a well educated and cultured woman. Because this was very much against regulations, Rose slipped on board dressed as a rating, and stayed in Louis’s cabin until they had cleared Gibraltar.

The Uranie expedition was a significant achievement, supported by scientists, ethnographers and artists. It was one of the major expeditions into the Pacific in the early 19th century. The expedition sailed, via the Cape of Good Hope, to Shark Bay, in Western Australia, before sailing to Timor, Indonesia, the Caroline Islands, and Guam. The expedition then sailed across to Hawaii, and then down to Sydney where they stayed for a month in November 1819, exploring the town itself, Parramatta, and some expedition members travelling even as far afield as Bathurst. The expedition left NSW at Christmas 1819. The Freycinet’s formed many strong attachments to Sydney society: they were friendly with the Macquaries, the Macarthurs and the Fields. Rose records all of this social detail with a great deal of interest and excitement. Interestingly Macquarie noted the arrival of the Uranie in his journals, but expressed no surprise at the presence of Rose

Rose returned to France more than three years since embarking on the voyage which had taken her to South America, South Africa, Mauritius, West Australia, Timor, the Moluccas, New Guinea, the Carolines, Guam, Hawaii and New South Wales. Rose's name was not listed in any official account of the expedition nor the enquiry that followed the loss of the ship at the Falklands. However Louis discreetly named an island in the Samoan chain `Ile de Rose' in her honour as well as Cap Rose in Shark Bay, WA.

Rose de Saulces de Freycinet died in Paris on 7 May 1832 while nursing her sick husband who was struck down with the cholera epidemic of 1832. She was initially buried in Paris, but her remains were transferred to Saulces cemetery in 1849.

Reference:
Mitchell Library correspondence file
A Woman of Courage: the Journal of Rose de Freycinet / Marc Serge Rivière

The Freycinet archive was substantial and remained in family hands for many years, before being gradually dispersed throughout the 1960s and 70s. This collection was acquired by an Australian collector in 1983, but other material has appeared on the market over many years, most recently in a major Christie’s sale of 2002. The journal was given in 1820 by Rose de Freycinet to her close friend Caroline de Nanteuil, for whom it was created during the voyage. It remained in the Nanteuil family until it was gifted by Caroline’s grand-daughter Geneviève, Baronne de Rotours, to the Freycinet family in 1913. Subsequently the three notebooks bound together as a single volume were sold by the late Baron de Freycinet before 1983 but after 1962 (when it was seen at the Freycinet home by Lady Bassett). It was not among the Freycinet family material sold at auction in London in 2002.

Item 01: Journal particulier de Rose pour Caroline, September 1817-October 1820

Item 02: Lettres de Mme. Louis de Freycinet écrites pendant le voyage autour du Monde de la Corvette l'Uranie, 1817-1819, transcribed and edited by Louis-Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, after 1820 and before 1842

Rose’s journal has been known since the 1920s, but what has been published has been poorly transcribed and heavily edited. In 1927 a combined version of the journals and letters was published in France by Charles Duplomb. The first English translation was published by Marnie Bassett in 1962 as Realms and Islands. An English translation of the Duplomb publication was published in 1996 by Marc Serge Rivière as A Woman of Courage: the Journal of Rose de Freycinet.

Rose’s journal and letters provide a significant counterpoint to the carefully crafted and finely resolved published expedition accounts. Louis’s official account, Voyage autour du monde : entrepris par ordre du roi ... exécuté sur les corvettes de S.M. l'Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820 comprised eleven volumes of dense facts, words and illustrations, and was published progressively between 1824 and 1844

The other major account of the voyage of the Uranie was provided by Jacques Arago, an expedition artist, in his Promenade autour du monde of 1822. Arago’s romantic, excitable account falls in between Louis’s and Rose’s. A particular interest of his was Indigenous people, and he provided an extensive account of Aboriginal people he encountered in NSW.

Rose’s letterbook and journal record much more the social aspects of expedition life: the importance of rank and class, the issue of appropriate dress, the protocols of official visits, as well as astute observations of the cultures the expedition encountered. Indeed the importance of these records is much more than their Australian content. This is a record of a major international Pacific scientific and exploring expedition – the voyage of the Uranie does not seem to have had geopolitical overtones – in which a major European power was attempting to define the Pacific region through science, documentation and art. Rose, for instance, also records important details about Timor (now a key ally of Australia but then still a Portuguese colony), Guam and the complex and fluid political situation in Hawaii. She also describes in some detail the baptism of Kalanimoku, a leading Hawaiian chief, into the Catholic faith. Kalanimoku was the first chief to be accepted into the Catholic church.

It is a period in which Australia’s place in the Pacific was being written into a broader understanding of the region as a whole, and in this regard rich records such as this are not only internationally important, but also locally vital to a collection such as ours, as we document how our nation begins to be defined in European consciousness.

Charles Duplomb’s edition of Rose’s journal, which is the basis of all recent editions of her work, omits significant proportions of the letter book, with many of the letters remaining completely unpublished. Duplomb based his work largely on the journal, incorporating material from the letter book only where there were gaps in the journal. While the two accounts are obviously similar, they present different emphasis and sometimes detail. Her letters about the expedition’s time in both Shark Bay and Sydney, for instance, are not published at all, and there is detail in them which is not in her Journal.

Reference:
Mitchell Library correspondence file

Out of copyright:
Please acknowledge:: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Duplomb, Charles, ed. Campagne de l'Uranie (1817-1820) : Journal de Madame Rose de Saulces de Freycinet d'après le manuscrit original accompagné de notes. Paris: Société d’éditions, 1927. [A reworking of the original text, heavily edited and with sections omitted] Bassett, Marnie, ed. Realms and Islands : The World Voyage of Rose de Freycinet in the Corvette Uranie, 1817-1820 : From Her Journal and Letters and the Reports of Louis de Saulces de Freycinet, Capitaine De Corvette. London ; Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962. Rivière, Marc Serge, ed. A Woman of Courage : The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on Her Voyage around the World 1817-1820. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996, 2003. [An English translation of the Duplomb publication] Motta, Federico, ed. Rose de Freycinet : Una viaggiatrice clandestina a bordo dell'Uranie negli anni 1817-20. Verona: Edizioni il Frangente, 2017. [A translation of the original journal and letters into Italian]