Born Rose Pinon to a middle-class family in Saint-Julien-du-Sault in north-central France. Her father died when she was young, and she took care of her little sister while attending a boarding school for girls that her mother managed. In 1813, at 19, she married 35-year-old Louis Claude de Saulces de Freycinet, an aristocrat who participated in the Baudin voyage to New Holland (today Australia) and was the first European to produce a complete map of Australia’s coastline. In 1817, her husband received the command of the ship Uranie to explore the South Seas. The journey went through Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, New Holland, the Pacific Islands, and Cape Horn. At the time, women were not allowed aboard Navy vessels, and to join the expedition, de Freycinet cut her hair short and disguised her gender by wearing men’s clothes. To hide from the 120 male crewmembers, she spent most of the time in the extended living quarter her husband refurbished especially for her. Only at Gibraltar did she feel safe enough to reveal her presence on the ship. She joined her husband when he came down to the coast, participating in receptions, dinners, and balls of the local governors. In early 1820, the Uranie hit a subterranean rock near the Falkland Islands. All the people on board made it to shore, where they lived in makeshift tents and endured harsh conditions that affected their health. After two months, an American whaling boat rescued them and returned to France. During her three years journey, de Freycinet documented her experiences in a diary she wrote for a friend and letters she wrote to her mother. By that, she became the first woman to record a circumnavigating the world. Her documentation provides a rare female point of view of life on board and the ways of living of both colonialists and locals in the places they visited. These include her impression of fashion, social norms, social gatherings, and encounters with the locals, such as armed Indigenous warriors. Her diaries and letters were supposed to stay private, but a French publisher found and published them in 1927, almost 100 years after she died of cholera at 38. Read more...