A fine marine chart of the southern Atlantic ocean published for the French Dépôt générale de la Marine in 1818. A series of pencil markings on the map would seem to have been added by Henri de Freycinet, the veteran of the Baudin expedition and older brother to the explorer Louis de Freycinet.

A fine marine chart of the southern Atlantic ocean published for the French Dépôt générale de la Marine in 1818. A series of pencil markings on the map would seem to have been added by Henri de Freycinet, the veteran of the Baudin expedition and older brother to the explorer Louis de Freycinet.

The map records two main pencil tracks: one starts off the chart to the north (roughly in the vicinity of Sierra Leone), heading south and then west, ending up in the southern Indian Ocean (16 December 1820-31 January 1821); the second traverses the Ocean to the north-west from Table Bay to the vicinity of Cayenne (11 January-12 February). The map also has, to the south-east of the Cape of Good Hope, in a fine pencil hand, notes on various rocks and landfalls reported over the years.

The map is known to have been in the Freycinet family archive, which was dispersed in the 1970s, but given its date could not have been associated with the sailing of the Uranie in 1817. Rather, the connection is almost certainly with Henri de Freycinet, who in 1821 was made governor of Île Bourbon (Reunion), and in 1827 sailed for Cayenne having been made governor of French Guyana. It seems very likely that the two voyage tracks here plot the course of Henri first from France to Reunion, and later, the main voyage from South Africa to taking up his governorship post in Cayenne.