Published by the National Library of Australia
Imagine the prospect of a dangerous three-year sea voyage into unknown territory, encountering exotic cultures and possibly hostile local inhabitants, and being exposed to tropical diseases, scurvy and dysentery, as well as unbearable climatic extremes - all for love!
Married just three years, 22-year-old Rose de Freycinet refused to face a painful separation from her husband, a naval officer appointed by the French Government to command a round-the-world scientific expedition. Instead, flouting officialdom, Rose and her husband, Louis, daringly plotted for Rose to stow away - one woman on a ship of 125 men!
Leaving the port of Toulon in September 1817 on board the Uranie, Rose documented her extraordinary three-year adventure in the form of letters to her dear friend Caroline and to her mother back in France - an intimate and colourful account of strange customs and little-known locations, ranging from the flamboyant and conceited behaviour of Mauritian Creole women, encountering pirates in the waters off the New Guinea coast, the excessive greed of the Hawaiian nobility and the warm hospitality of Sydney society, to being shipwrecked in the windswept Falkland Islands.
Until now, Rose de Freycinet's fascinating story has been read by only a handful of French scholars. A Woman of Courage, translated by Professor Serge Rivière of James Cook University, presents the complete journal in English for the first time.
Rose de Freycinet showed remarkable courage, resilience, determination, inexhaustible good-humour and devotion to others as she endured life on board the Uranie. A woman ahead of her time, her story demands to be heard.
ISBN 0 642 10676 2, hb, 216 pp.
Price: $34.95
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