He was born at
Montélimar, Drôme. Louis-Claude de Saulces de Freycinet was his full name (many calling him Louis de Freycinet). His mother was
Élisabeth-Antoinette-Catherine Armand. He had three brothers, Louis-Henri de Saulces de Freycinet, André-Charles de Saulces de Freycinet and the youngest, Frédéric-Casimir de Saulces de Freycinet (father of
Charles de Freycinet). Louis-Claude was the second oldest. In 1793 he joined the French Navy as a midshipman, and took part in several engagements against the
British. In 1800, Freycinet was appointed to an exploration expedition to Southern and South-Western coasts of
Australia under
Nicolas Baudin, on
Naturaliste and
Géographe. Freycinet's brother, Louis-Henri de Freycinet, was also part of the expedition. Between September 1802 and August 1803, Freycinet captained the schooner
Casuarina, surveying the Australian coastline. He then transferred to
Naturaliste, and returned to France in 1804.
Matthew Flinders was being held captive by the French on
Mauritius, thus many of his discoveries were revisited and unintendedly claimed by
François Péron, and new names were given by this expedition. In 1824, it was remedied in the second edition of
Voyage découvertes aux terres australes. In the end, Baudin and Freycinet managed to have their
map of the Australian coastline published in 1811, three years before Flinders published his. An inlet on the coast of
Western Australia is called
Freycinet Estuary.
Cape Freycinet between
Cape Leeuwin and
Cape Naturaliste and the
Freycinet Peninsula with
Freycinet National Park in
Tasmania also bear the explorer's name. In 1805, he returned to Paris, and was entrusted by the government with the work of preparing the maps and plans of the expedition. He also completed the narrative, and the whole work appeared under the title of
Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes (Paris, 1807–1816). The plant genus
Freycinetia (
Pandanaceae) was named in his honor, as was the
Hawaiian native tree/shrub
Santalum freycinetianum.
Circumnavigation on Uranie In 1817, he was given command of the French corvette
Uranie (1811), especially reconfigured to a new exploration voyage.
Uranie carried the marine
hydrologist Louis Isidore Duperrey, the naturalists
Jean Quoy and
Joseph Gaimard, the artist
Jacques Arago, and his junior draughtsman
Adrien Taunay the Younger.
Uranie sailed to
Rio de Janeiro by December 1817, taking a series of pendulum measurements gather information in the fields of
geography,
ethnology,
astronomy, terrestrial magnetism,
meteorology, and for collecting specimens in natural history. For three years, Freycinet cruised about the Pacific, visiting Australia twice (1818 and 1819),
New Guinea (1818-1819), the
Mariana Islands (early 1819),
Hawaiian Islands (August 1819) other
Pacific islands,
South America, and other places. Notwithstanding the loss of
Uranie on the
Falkland Islands during the return voyage, Freycinet returned to France with fine collections in all departments of natural history, and with voluminous notes and drawings of the countries visited. The results of this voyage were published under Freycinet's supervision, with the title of ''Voyage autour du monde fait par ordre du Roi sur les corvettes de S. M. l'Uranie et la Physicienne, pendant les années 1817, 1818, 1819 et 1820'', in 13 quarto volumes and 4 folio volumes of plates and maps. near
Saulce-sur-Rhône, Drôme in 1841. ==Journals of the Voyage 1817-1820==