The Uranie in Guam

IIn March 1819 the French corvette Uranie let go its anchor in Umatac Bay in southern Guam, at the half way point in what was intended to be a scientific circumnavigation of the globe. The event was recorded by the captain's wife, Rose de Freycinet. 'The Lord be praised', she wrote in a letter to her mother, and with good reason. Supplies were running low and many of the crew were ill, with scurvy, malaria or dysentery, and the ship remained in harbour for almost three months while...
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IIn March 1819 the French corvette Uranie let go its anchor in Umatac Bay in southern Guam, at the half way point in what was intended to be a scientific circumnavigation of the globe. The event was recorded by the captain's wife, Rose de Freycinet. 'The Lord be praised', she wrote in a letter to her mother, and with good reason. Supplies were running low and many of the crew were ill, with scurvy, malaria or dysentery, and the ship remained in harbour for almost three months while waiting for them to recover. Rose was not ill herself but for her the long stay ashore was a more than welcome escape from a cramped and restricted existence on a rather small sailing ship that she shared with a hundred and forty men. She was not supposed to be there at all. The French Ministry of Marine did not allow women, even captains' wives, to sail on their ships, and she was only on board because her husband had smuggled her on dressed as a man on the night before the ship left Toulon. When, after three years away, she returned to France she became only the second woman ever to have been all the way around the world. Perhaps more importantly, she was the first to leave an account of her journey, in letters to her mother and in a journal she wrote for a close friend. They remained hidden away in the family archives for a hundred years.Rose was not the only diarist on board. Inevitably, her husband wrote the official report, and the expedition's artist wrote his own very unofficial one, which was the first to be published after the return to France. The assistant surgeon, who doubled as a zoologist and ethnologist (and who made copious measurements on the bodies of the peoples he encountered), also kept a diary and the section covering the time spent by the expedition in the Carolines and the Marianas appears here, in translation, for the first time anywhere. Inevitably viewpoints amongst the diarists differed, and dominating all their accounts is the controversial figure of the longest-serving of all the Spanish governors of the Marianas, Don José de Medinilla y Pinéda.