Rose de Freycinet

Rose de Freycinet, born Rose Pinon, (1794 – 7 May 1832) was a Frenchwoman who, in the company of her husband, Louis de Freycinet, sailed around the world between 1817 and 1820 on a French scientific expedition on a military ship, initially disguised as a man. While not the first woman to circumnavigate the world, she was the first to record her experiences, in a diary. Being not intended for publication and being both frank and personal musings about people, places and events, her writings represent an important anthropological resource.

De Freycinet was born Rose Pinon in Saint-Julien-du-Sault, in the Yonne department, to a middle-class family. Her mother was possibly called Jeanne Pinon; the name of her father is not known today. Jeanne Pinon ran a boarding school for girls. Rose was educated in that school, along with some 40 young ladies from Paris.

Rose was the oldest daughter. Her father died while she was relatively young, followed by her brother, leaving Rose with the responsibility of looking after her sisters. She had a younger sister, Stéphanie, who later also took to the sea and sailed for Mauritius in 1818; Stéphanie married a civil servant, M. Maillard, who later repudiated her.

At age 19, Rose married 35-year-old Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, a member of the French aristocracy. The difference in social class proved no impediment for a happy marriage; by all accounts her in-laws loved and respected her, and throughout her life Rose maintained an animated correspondence with her in-laws, wherever her travels took her.

Louis de Freycinet had earlier participated in the Baudin voyage that produced the first map of the Australian coastline in the period 1801-3. It is on that voyage he would have been aware of his leader Nicolas Baudin's meeting with Matthew Flinders and of their virtually simultaneous proving that New Holland of the Dutch and New South Wales of Cook were part of one island continent Australia. Displaying considerable cartographic skill, when Baudin's second ship was sent home under Jacques Hamelin laden with specimens and records, de Freycinet was elevated above others to command Casuarina, a small vessel purchased in order to continue the surveys. After finalising an account of the voyage after the death of both Baudin and the voyage anthropologist François Peron who attempted to complete the account, in 1817 he was given command of the Uranie on an expedition under the auspices of the French Navy and the Ministry of the Interior, in which Louis Isidore Duperrey, Jacques Arago, Adrien Taunay the Younger, and others went to Rio de Janeiro to perform various scientific measurements and to collect specimens in natural history. Newly married to Rose Pinon and perhaps aware of Flinder's imprisonment and his enforced separation from his wife Ann, they conspired to avoid a similar fate aboard. Dressed in men's clothes; Rose deFreycinet became the first woman to write an account of her experiences circumnavigating the world.

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