Louis de Freycinet in Bunbury

The words on the ban­ner say ‘LC Freycinet, Navigator’

Hav­ing met with his great, great grand­son, Henry, in Paris recently, imag­ine how sur­prised I was to see Rose’s hus­band, Louis de Freycinet, in the main street of Bun­bury, West­ern Australia!

Peter and I were on our way to Mar­garet River, where the Freycinet name was, for many years, attached to one of the motels. We hap­pened to stop off in Bun­bury and there was Louis. His por­trait is, at the moment, sail­ing high above the main street in a very colour­ful yacht, in the com­pany of some other famous sea­far­ing explor­ers who vis­ited our shores in the days before the British flag was firmly planted in the sand at King George Sound (Albany), thus adding the whole of Aus­tralia to the British Empire.

In 1801 Louis de Freycinet was a nav­i­ga­tor on board the Nat­u­ral­iste which sailed in con­voy with the Geo­graphe. Both ships were under the com­mand of Nicholas Baudin whose explo­rations of our south west coast have left us with the last­ing lega­cies of Cape Nat­u­ral­iste and Geo­graphe Bay. Although there was no love lost between the two men, Baudin did rec­og­nize Louis de Freycinet’s excep­tional tal­ents as a nav­i­ga­tor and leader by pro­mot­ing him to Cap­tain of a ship (Casua­r­ina) that had to be added to the con­voy when the Nat­u­ral­iste was sent home to France car­ry­ing all the sci­en­tific mate­r­ial and records of the voy­age up to that point.

It was dur­ing this expe­di­tion with Baudin that Louis began map­ping the coast­line around Shark Bay and dis­cov­ered its amaz­ingly dry air, clear skies and unin­ter­rupted view of the heav­ens. Thir­teen years later the mem­ory of these per­fect con­di­tions for obser­va­tion no doubt had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on Louis’ deci­sion to per­suade the French Gov­ern­ment to send him back to Shark Bay, to con­tinue the work he had begun with Baudin.

Enter Rose … the beau­ti­ful, charm­ing, intel­li­gent, but head­strong and deter­mined girl Louis had recently mar­ried. And that’s where my lat­est story begins.