Nouvelle Hollande: Baie des chiens-marins, presqu' ile Peron: entrevue avec les sauvages

Images(2)

Nouvelle Hollande: Baie des chiens-marins, presqu' ile Peron: entrevue avec les sauvages

Artist Jacques Etiene Victor Arago (French, 1790 - 1855)

Date1825

Object number00003616

NameEngraving

MediumInk on paper

DimensionsOverall: 405 mm, 0.65 kg

ClassificationsArt

Credit LineANMM Collection

Terms

DescriptionA hand coloured engraving titled 'Nouvelle Hollande: Baie des chiens-marins, presqu' ile Peron: entrevue avec les sauvages' ('Western Australia, Shark Bay, near Peron Island, meeting with the natives') based on an image by Jacques Arago. Plate 12 from 'Voyage autour du monde ... 1817-1820. Atlas historique' by Louis de Freycinet recounting the voyage of discovery aboard the URANIE.HistoryLouis de Freycinet left France in 1817 for an expedition to the Pacific with the purpose to "circumnavigate the globe and conduct research into the shape of the earth, meteorology and terrestrial magnetism". His ship was the URANIE and Jacques Arago was one of the artists aboard. It was Freycinet's second voyage south after having completed an earlier expedition with Nicolas Baudin in 1801 as a cartographer/surveyor. Freycinet was highly skilled and became the first European to publish a full outline map of Australia, known as the 'Freycinet Map', in 1811. His expedition in 1817 took in Australia again and this time Freycinet moored off Shark Bay in Western Australia on September 12th 1818. Rose Freycinet, Louis' wife who had secretly accompained him on the voyage, talks of an encounter ashore with the local Indigenous population: "21 September ... The natives, no doubt frightened off by the number of people coming ashore, had retreated on the day we first saw them. The previous day, after much hesitation, they had come up to the men in the first camp and had exchanged their weapons for tin, glass necklaces and so on." Jacques Arago, the illustrator of this image in the Australian National Maritime Museum, has recorded an encounter similiar to thatt in Rose's memoir, possibly the same one. SignificanceFrench exploration voyages of the Pacific took off in the period of the late 18th and early 19th century, and resulted in a further opening up of the Pacific. In this period of intense rivalry between France and Britain, the French voyages were major scientific expeditions which took great interest in the ethnography of the regions they were exploring.