Original manuscript from the voyage of the corvette URANIE

Single manuscript with the signatures of every officer on board URANIE. The survival of this official record is due to the unusual collecting and keeping habits of the commander of the voyage, Louis de Freycinet.

This piece of paper remained, with others relating to the progress and subsequent publication of the URANIE voyage, in the Freycinet family archive until very recent times. While the document shows Freycinet at his most precise, indeed what might today be called micro-managing where one might expect delegation, it is that very mindset that made his voyage and its ultimate publication extraordinarily important, and such attention to detail was the hallmark of his illustrious career as a naval hydrographer and chart maker. It is also the very mentality that caused this manuscript to survive, for it is well known that most other officers either kept such documents with the official logs given to the Ministre de la Marine (for the English, the Admiralty), or simply discarded them once the moment was past.

The document is written in Freycinet’s own hand, not by his clerk Gabert as would have been more usual. It reads: “Les officiers militaires et civiles, éleves de la Marine et aides chirurgiens, embarqués sur la Corvette l’URANIE, ont recu un Tableau des observations et des recherches à faire pendant la Campagne, qui leur a eté adressé par M. Le Commandant de la dite Corvette. Rio Janeiro le 28 Octobre 1818”.