Rose Marie Pinon was a 19-year-old, well-educated, middle class girl when she married the 35-year-old Louis in 1814. In September 1817 she joined her husband on the Uranie disguised as a man until they left port. She was the first woman to complete an account of the three-year circumnavigation in a ‘series of intimate letters which took the form of a diary’. Rose recorded life aboard ship, observations of the people and places they visited, scientific work of the expedition, relationships between men and women, and the work of artist Jacques Arago. She had a keen eye for detail and created vivid descriptions of the strange and exotic places they visited.
Rose and her ‘diary’ survived the dangers of the voyage and the shipwreck in the Falkland Islands. Her life was tragically cut short when she died of cholera in 1834, aged 38 years, after nursing Louis through the same illness.
It was not until 1927 that an account of her journey appeared in a French publication of her letters, with the first English translation in 1962.