Born: 27 July 1740, France
Died: 5 August 1807
Country most active: International
Also known as: Jean Baret
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Friday essay: who was Jeanne Barret, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe?
Danielle Clode, Flinders University
In 1765, a young, peasant woman left a remote corner of rural France where her impoverished family had scraped a living for generations. She set out on a journey that would take her around the world from the South American jungles and Magellan Strait to the tropical islands of the Indo-Pacific.
Jeanne Barret (also Baret or Baré) was the first woman known to have circumnavigated the world. Abandoning her bonnet and apron for men’s trousers and coats, she disguised herself as a man and signed on as assistant to the naturalist, Philibert Commerson on one of the ships of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s expedition around the world.
During that voyage, Jeanne helped Commerson amass the largest individual natural history collection known at the time. Thousands of the plant specimens can still be found in the herbarium of the Paris natural history museum, although few bear Jeanne’s name.
Despite Jeanne’s singular achievement, she left no account of her journey or her life. She might have been entirely forgotten were it not for a dramatic revelation on a Tahitian beach in 1768.
Bougainville’s voyage famously promoted Tahiti as a utopian paradise of beautiful women and sexual freedom. But the Tahitian men were equally keen to meet European women and, despite her disguise, they swiftly identified Jeanne as one.
This revelation caused consternation on board and Bougainville was forced to intervene. He described Jeanne’s confession briefly in his best-selling narrative of the voyage. Having nothing but praise for her work, Bougainville ordered she be left alone to continue her work as a man.
Jeanne had done nothing wrong. French naval regulations did not forbid women from embarking, but there were penalties for men who brought a woman on board. Both Jeanne and Commerson insisted he was unaware of Jeanne’s ruse and that they did not know each other prior to the journey. As soon as the voyage reached French territory, the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Jeanne and Commerson disembarked.
Jeanne’s adventure was soon retold in a book on celebrated women and in the philosopher Denis Diderot’s famous Supplement to the Bougainville voyage. She was ultimately awarded a French naval pension for her services.
The only known image of Jeanne appeared in a book of famous voyages, drawn long after her death. The image is probably allegorical. Loose sailor’s clothes represent her voyage, a bunch of flowers represents botany and the red cap presents her as Marianne, an iconic revolutionary symbol of liberty and the new French republic.
In reality, a servant and botanist like Jeanne would have worn gentleman’s clothes, carrying an assortment of pins, knives, bags, weapons and papers for collecting. Plants were pressed in the field in a portable plant press.
Despite such early renown, details of Jeanne’s life beyond her famous voyage were scarce. For many years, little was known about her past, what happened when she left the expedition in Mauritius in 1768, how she returned to France or what she did with the rest of her life.
Simplistic stereotypes
Writing the biography of a woman about whom we knew so little was always going to be challenging. I found myself searching for a pre-existing model to base Jeanne on — in fiction or in history. But in literature, as in reality, women, the poor, the illiterate, the nonconformists and those from other cultures and languages are poorly represented.
When they appear, they are simplistic stereotypes — supporting characters for a lead role reserved for a wealthy, white man. A woman like Jeanne could be a peasant or a servant, a wife or a fallen woman — there was no conventionally acceptable opportunity for her to be an adventurer or an independent woman of her own means. She had to create that opportunity for herself.
Initial accounts of Jeanne focused on her work, appearance and sexual conduct. She was described as being indefatigable, an expert botanist and a beast of burden who carried heavy provisions while plant collecting. Men noted she was neither attractive nor ugly, but she behaved with “scrupulous modesty”.
Commerson suffered from an incapacitating leg injury during his journey, which limited his mobility. Jeanne was probably responsible for collecting most of the South American plants, of which over a thousand are still found in herbariums today.
When museum scientists began posthumously publishing some of Commerson’s species descriptions, pioneering evolutionary biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the only one who mentioned Jeanne’s contribution and courage. She was a servant, after all, so hardly warranted acknowledgement.
Commerson himself rarely mentioned Jeanne. It was not until after they left the voyage that he named a plant after her: Baretia bonafidia (now known as Turraea rutilans).
In his description of this plant, Commerson recognised her “thirst for knowledge” and that he was indebted to “her heroism, for so many plants never before harvested, all the industrious drying, so many collections of insects and shells”.
Nineteenth century accounts of Jeanne appeared as footnotes in the biographies of great men. Avoiding all impropriety, she was presented as Commerson’s “faithful servant”, like Crusoe’s Man Friday, or Phileas Fogg’s Jean Passepartout. An early biographer, Paul-Antoine Cap recounted a family story in which Jeanne loyally cared for Commerson on his deathbed in Mauritius and that she returned to live in his hometown in France.
“By way of remembrance and veneration for her former master, she left all she possessed to the natural heirs of the famous botanist,” he wrote. It was a story of boundless devotion much repeated in subsequent accounts.
Partial details
It has been left to female researchers to uncover the details of Jeanne’s life. Attention has shifted to Jeanne as an individual, rather than an addendum to Commerson’s or Bougainville’s story.
In the 1980s, a local historian from Burgundy, Henriette Dussourd, uncovered the parish record of Jeanne’s birth in 1740 to a poor peasant family in the town of La Comelle. She also found a declaration of pregnancy (obligatory under French law) signed by Jeanne when she was 24-years-old. When she was five months pregnant, Jeanne had fled to Paris with Commerson, travelling under a new surname, as his housekeeper.
The circumstances are suspicious. Jeanne had presumably been working as a servant for the recently widowed Commerson and they moved to Paris to escape a local scandal. Early Parisian parish records were destroyed in the Commune fires of 1871, but Dussourd suggests a son was born, left in the Foundling Home and died young.
Since then, I have found that Jeanne had a second son while in Paris, who appears to have died while she was away on her voyage.
More recently, a biography in English has attempted to fill in the gaps left in the archival record. Glynis Ridley’s popular biography has been criticised for scientific errors and speculation, but her version of Jeanne’s story has propagated widely across the internet.
Unlike the loyal servant trope of the 19th century, Ridley utilises a modern cautionary tale to fill out Jeanne’s story – the well-rehearsed narrative that adventurous women inevitably come to a sticky end.
Ridley’s biography seeks to give Jeanne an agency that she lacked in 18th and 19th century accounts. She argues Commerson sought Jeanne’s advice as an expert herbswoman. Was an unsigned list of medicinal plants among Commerson’s archives, she asks, actually Jeanne’s work?
Appealing though this idea is, Commerson was, however, renowned for his medicinal teas, and herbal remedies were a staple of medical treatment at the time.
Nor is there any evidence Jeanne was taught to read and write by her mother, as Ridley suggests. My archival research found her mother died when Jeanne was 15- months-old. It seems more likely Commerson taught her to write and trained her in botany.
More controversially, Ridley contends that the story of Jeanne’s revelation as a woman in Tahiti was a cover for a gang rape on New Ireland, off Papua New Guinea. And that Jeanne fell pregnant and gave birth to a son in Mauritius.
This story originates from a description by the doctor on board Jeanne’s ship, Francois Vivez. Vivez disliked Commerson and intended to publish a salacious account of his servant when he returned to France.
In his manuscripts, Vivez describes Jeanne being attacked by her crew mates and her gender exposed after her identification by the Tahitians. While Vivez greatly embroiders his accounts, there is enough confirmation from other journals to suggest they are based on facts. On balance, it seems likely that Jeanne was identified as a women in Tahiti and some of the crew decided to confirm this for themselves when they were next ashore.
But was there a rape? It is difficult to interpret these 18th century accounts, written in either French or Latin and laden with historical contexts and classical metaphors that have long since lost their associations for modern readers.
Bougainville had ordered that Jeanne was not to be harassed. Rape was punishable by death in the French navy. Could a naval commander tolerate such a serious crime and insubordination to go unrecorded and unpunished?
It seems unlikely. In his only comment on the subject, Commerson noted Jeanne “evaded ambush by wild animals and humans, not without risk to her life and virtue, unharmed and sound”.
In any case, there is no evidence that Jeanne, suffering from scurvy and malnutrition, conceived a child on the voyage, nor of the obligatory declaration of pregnancy, or a child born in Mauritius.
A woman of means
Jeanne’s life in Mauritius and her return to France were actually more interesting than dramatic denouements that fulfil conventional expectations. The adventurous woman did not come to a sticky end.
She was not the faithful servant, comforting Commerson on his death bed. She was not left “alone, homeless, penniless” after his death, waiting for a man to rescue her. She did not return to Commerson’s hometown or remember him in death.
The archives tell a different story. I found Jeanne was granted property in her own right in Mauritius. When Commerson died, Jeanne was running her own profitable business. She bought a license to run a lucrative bar near the port.
By the time she married Jean Dubernat, a soldier in a French colonial regiment, she was wealthy enough to require a pre-nuptial contract. Her husband brought 5000 livres to the marriage while Jeanne brought a house, slaves, furniture, clothes, jewellery and a small fortune of 19,500 livres – two thirds of which would remain in her control. She was a woman of means.
Further research by Sophie Miquel and Nicolle Maguet in Dordogne, where Jeanne lived out her life after her return to France in 1775, has revealed more details. She purchased various properties including a farm, which is still recognisable today.
Her husband signed another legal document acknowledging these properties were shared equally with his wife. Jeanne gathered her family around her, including her orphaned niece and nephew, and ran a successful business as a landowner and trader – a far cry from her illiterate, impoverished childhood in Burgundy.
If we need a conventional story arc for Jeanne’s life, it should be rags-to-riches, rather than the loyal servant or road-trip tragedy. But better, surely, to construct Jeanne’s story with an objective attention to the archival record.
Jeanne was full of contradictions. She was a devoted aunt, yet left her own children in Paris to an unknown fate. She struggled to escape the constraints of France’s rigid class system and patriarchy, but also owned slaves. Her life does not always fit a comfortable familiar narrative structure.
What we do know reveals Jeanne as a confident, capable, resilient woman — neither victim nor hero but a complex, inspiring and unconventional role model.
Danielle Clode’s new biography of Jeanne Barret, In Search of the Woman who Sailed the World, is published by Picador Australia.
This biography, written by Glynis Ridley, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
What happens when a woman refuses to conform to male expectations of what she can be and what she can do?
Historically, types of both physical and intellectual labour have been demarcated as either “man’s work” or “woman’s work”. For a woman to show herself capable of thinking and acting in defiance of allotted roles is to threaten the status quo. Such a woman is dangerous – because her refusal to conform is a very visible demonstration that there is nothing that should be a male-only preserve.
The first woman known to have circumnavigated the globe refused to accept the gendered and social limits placed upon women in her society. In 1766, Jeanne Baret, the daughter of illiterate French peasants, disguised herself as a teenage boy and presented herself for hire as principal assistant to the expedition naturalist on the first French circumnavigation of the globe. For two years, her floating home was the sailing ship L’Etoile: a supply ship 102 ft long and 33 ft wide that Baret shared with 115 offices and men. The larger vessel that they accompanied, La Boudeuse, brought the expedition complement up to 330, with Baret the only woman among them. French royal ordinances did not allow women on board naval ships, not even if they were the wives of officers, as was permitted in the British navy at the time. But Baret was no one’s wife.
Signing on for a projected three years at sea, she was accompanying her lover, the expedition’s official naturalist, Philibert Commerson. Working as his assistant, Jean Baret, she shared his cabin and botanised with him whenever they could be set ashore. The social gulf between them could not have been greater. Her parents signed their parish register with a cross in lieu of their names: his parents had sent him to university to follow in the family tradition of practising medicine. Women of Baret’s background were destined, at best, to be the servants of men like Commerson: in the field she met him as a fellow botanist. Her discovery of the showy vine that would be named Bougainvillea in honour of the expedition commander, Louis Antoine de Bougainville is, today, the most visible sign of her botanical skills. Yet Baret has, until recently, been largely overlooked in history books: her achievements glossed over. When Louis Antoine de Bougainville finally acknowledged in his expedition journal that a woman had defied all injunctions meant to keep her ashore and in her place, he presented Baret as someone other women would not choose to emulate:
Baret, with tears in her eyes, admitted that she was a girl, that she had misled her master by appearing before him in men’s clothing at Rochefort at the time of boarding…that moreover when she came on board she knew that it was a question of circumnavigating the world and this voyage had excited her curiosity. She will be the only one of her sex to do this and I admire her determination…The Court will, I think, forgive her for these infractions to the ordinances. Her example will hardly be contagious. She is neither ugly nor pretty and is not yet 25.
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Journal, 28-29 May 1768.
It is striking that Bougainville assures his readers not once but twice that they should not be alarmed at the prospect of more women following Baret’s example: she is less a contagion than an aberration. And this is surely one of the occupational hazards of the dangerous woman: if she cannot be contained in life, her life may be marginalized in the written record; presented as too singular to be a model for others.
The matter-of-fact tone and single paragraph that Bougainville devoted to admitting that a woman had managed to get herself aboard his expedition did not encourage any reader to linger on the episode. This was convenient for the expedition’s royally-appointed naturalist, Philibert Commerson. Sharing a cabin, it was inconceivable that Commerson did not know Baret to be a woman and, indeed, the two had been lovers for at least two years prior to the expedition setting sail in 1766. But the plan to disguise Baret and have her join Commerson is unlikely to have been simply a grandiose romantic gesture: whatever else Baret brought to her relationship with Commerson, she brought knowledge that Commerson valued. What knowledge could an eighteenth-century peasant woman possess that would be of interest to a university-educated doctor? The one known image that purports to be of Baret offers an intriguing clue.
Dating from 1816, the engraving that appeared in an Italian edition of James Cook’s voyages shows Baret dressed in striped fabric not popular with sailors until the 1790s. She is pictured wearing the red liberty cap of the French revolutionaries. But despite these anachronistic puzzles (inappropriate for a woman who set sail in 1766), Baret is shown with a sheaf of flowering plants in her hand and such posies were a well-established iconographic shorthand for the the medicinal value of a botanical garden. In other words, the anonymous engraver suggests that Baret herself possessed botanical knowledge, independent of Commerson. If so, then she was likely a “herb woman”, working in a largely oral, traditionally female preserve, dispensing folkloric remedies while also supplying male physicians and apothecaries with the raw plant materials that were the foundation of their medicine cabinets. If Baret was an herbalist before she met Commerson, then it is easy to imagine the herb gatherer and the passionate botanist meeting in the field; Commerson recognizing Baret’s knowledge as complementary to his own. So when Commerson was named ship’s naturalist on Bougainville’s proposed first French circumnavigation of the globe, and was mandated to collect flora and fauna to feed and clothe France’s imperial masters and subjects, who better should he appoint as his expedition assistant than the woman who was already his lover, housekeeper, and fellow explorer of the plant kingdom? Together, Baret and Commerson hatched a plan whereby she would present herself on the dockside as a young man, eager to sign on as Commerson’s assistant. But while the ruse apparently worked in getting Baret on board, the couple had not foreseen what might happen once she was there.
From the various journals kept by members of the expedition, it is clear that rumors that Baret was really a woman started to circulate within a few days of the ship leaving port. The naturalist’s assistant was never seen to relieve ‘himself’ at the heads like other men and, when challenged by hostile crew members below decks, Baret claimed to be a eunuch, taking care always to be armed with pistols after that confrontation. When L’Etoile sailed across the Equator on 22 March, 1767, Baret was the only crew member to remain clothed for dousings associated with the naval rite-of-passage of Crossing the Line. Given the limited dimensions of her floating world, it was inconceivable that Baret’s true sex was not known. Journals kept by expedition members other than Bougainville hint at a mix of feelings towards this single woman among so many men; animosity and superstition among the crew being tempered with grudging respect for Baret’s tireless physical work. With her breasts flattened uncomfortably by strips of linen wound tightly around her upper body, Baret went ashore to botanize under Commerson’s direction at every opportunity, hauling the cumbersome equipment of an eighteenth-century field naturalist for her ‘master’.
From early December 1767 to late January 1768, the expedition ships inched through the Strait of Magellan, repeatedly sounding the depth so as not to risk ripping open the hulls on submerged moraine. All this time, Baret’s exertions ashore were visible from the ships’ decks and an officer characterized her as Commerson’s “beast of burden”, labouring up the slopes of the Strait under the burgeoning weight of specimens and their containers.
According to Bougainville, Baret’s story finally unravelled in April 1768 on Tahiti. As the officers and men were surrounded by Tahitian women making clear their offer of multiple sexual partners for each man, Baret was apparently surrounded by a group of Tahitian men who saw through her disguise. Bougainville’s best-selling journal, the Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flute L’Etoile 1766-1769 (published in Paris in 1771) would claim that Baret admitted to her disguise as she called for help to extricate herself from an uncomfortable situation. But Bougainville’s account of events on Tahiti is only one version of what occurred there.
Four other narratives of the expedition – two journals kept by the surgeon François Vivès, one kept by the Prince of Nassau-Siegen, and a memoir by naval officer Pierre Duclos-Guyot – all insist that nothing unusual happened regarding Baret on Tahiti, but that she was forcibly stripped by crewmembers when the expedition stopped to re-provision on New Ireland in the New Hebrides. Why is the truth of what happened so elusive?
In locating Baret’s exposure on Tahiti, Bougainville’s narrative sanitises the later actions of his crew and exculpates expedition officers from earlier failures to act on the widespread belief that Baret was indeed a woman. Had Bougainville knowingly allowed a woman to remain on board in contravention of the royal ordinance prohibiting women on navy ships, he would have rendered himself liable to court martial on his return to France. Had he acknowledged that Baret was finally forcibly exposed by members of the crew on New Ireland, he would have cast aspersions on the conduct of the French and jeopardised his naval career by having allowed such a breakdown in discipline to occur. The fiction that Baret chose to reveal her identity on Tahiti in order to save her honour was a fiction that protected his.
From New Ireland, the expedition sailed on to New Guinea, Java, and Mauritius, where Commerson was released from his expedition contract to stay and work in the French East India Company botanic garden of Pamplemousses at the request of its director, Pierre Poivre (the Peter Piper who picked a pepper of nursery-rhyme fame). Baret stayed with Commerson. Bougainville’s problem of a woman aboard was solved. But after Poivre’s recall to France, and Commerson’s death from fever in March 1773, Baret was thrown out of their shared home, separated from over 6000 leafy, flowering, squawking, scuttling specimens forming a record of the circumnavigation and representing seven years of Baret’s life. She would never see the collection she had helped to build again: its final destination would be the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, where it today forms part of the French national herbarium. When Baret was finally able to secure a passage back to France and landed in La Rochelle in late 1775, nine years after first setting sail, she became the first woman to have completed a circumnavigation of the globe.
Baret spent the next year litigating to receive monies she knew Commerson had willed to her; competing for a share of his estate against the claims of his brother-in-law. Quite separately, Bougainville petitioned the Ministry of Marine for an annual pension for “this extraordinary woman”. When the petition was finally granted, Baret became the first woman known to have received a state pension on account of her service to the advancement of knowledge.
Though Baret charted her own unique path, she never told her own story – that was left to a handful of men, all compromised by the truth of what had happened. When she died in 1807, the single genus that Commerson had named in honour of her, Baretia, had already been reclassified and renamed Quivisia, inadvertently writing Baret out of the history she helped to make. And so it would be until 2012 when a new species, Solanum baretiae, was finally named for her.
Dangerous women may sometimes be erased from conventional histories, but they have a habit of returning – embodying the perennially potent idea that the seemingly impossible is sometimes achievable, and that gender is no barrier to achievement.