When the Uranie entered the roastead of Port Louis, Mauritius, a British frigate was already there, and for Rose de Freycinet there was a surprise in store. She discovered the frigate captain’s wife often accompanied her husband on his voyages. Were French and British naval practices so very different in this respect?

Following his return to France in 1829 from serving on the Astrolabe during Dumont d’Urvilles’s first voyage as expedition commander, Gaimard continued to write to his former commander on the Uranie, Louis de Freycinet. Two of his letters described the July revolution in 1830 Paris and its aftermath.

In October 1825, Volume XX of the Asiatic Journal carried an announcement by Admiral Thomas Manby of the probable discovery of relics of the LaPérouse. expedition. But from where did Manby get his information?

In October 1827, a brief note appeared in the Bulletin de la Société de géographie, informing its readers of the contents of a letter, dated 17 January 1827 sent from the survey ship belonging to the Honourable East India Company. However, the 26-year-old author of the letter, Eugène Chaigneau, was French. How did he come to be on board?

There are plenty of places where it is recorded that Jacques Arago spent some time in the mental hospital run by Esprit Blanche and his wife in Montparnasse. That, however, is as far as the information goes. We do not know why he was consigned to the hospital, when this happened or how long he remained incarcerated. But we do, al least, have his own account of the experience.

On the 5th of April 1827, the survey vessel Research anchored off Hobart. The next day her captain, Peter Dillon, was arraigned for assault and wrongful imprisonment by the ship’s doctor, Robert Tytler. He was convicted, fined fifty pounds and sentenced to two months imprisonment. But was that justified?

In 1790 the cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith produced a comprehensive map of the world. It was an impressive achievement, but how accurate was it, as far as Micronesia was concerned?

The third of Jacques Arago.s four visits to Rio de Janeiro was made during the reign of Dom Pedro II. His account of his relations with the emperor is very different from that provided by at least one other French visitor to the city.

An essay with the title HISTORY and GEOGRAPHY of the ARCHIPELAGO of the MARIANAS, in the 1809 volume of the journal Annales des Voyages de la Géographie et de l’Histoire, may well have been Louis de Freycinet’s main source of information on the Marianas when he was planning his voyage. What he read there may have been a factor in his decision to send three members of his état-major on a rather risky voyage with a Carolinian fleet from Guam to Rota and Tinian.

Most of what has been written about Jacques Arago concentrates on the voyage of the Uranie, and only to a lesser extent on his literary career in the 1830s. Mentions of his second major journey, which began with a plan to join the California gold rush, are far less common.