The first woman to circumnavigate the world was an eighteenth-century botanist. True, Jeanne Baret lacked a formal, academic education. Nevertheless, she became recognized, if somewhat belatedly, with a government pension and still more recently with that ultimate in scientific acknowledgement, a plant species.
Her early life is clouded in mystery. Born in Burgundy, then an impoverished region of France, on 27 July 1740, she was unusual in being literate, uncommon to the area and time for a female. Of her parent and possible siblings, nothing is known. It has been established that by the early 1760s she was servant to naturalist Philibert Commerçon. Following his wife's death soon after their marriage, Jeanne became his housekeeper. She had also become his lover, giving birth to his son.
Commerçon had been appointed naturalist on the expedition led by French admiral and explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville on his 1763-69 voyage around the world. Beret was to accompany him as the naturalist's assistant. Commerçon brought her aboard dressed as a man--women were not allowed aboard French naval vessels. He certainly could do with her assistance. He suffered from ill health with ulcerating legs. Jeanne turned out to be a skilled botanist, frequently collecting specimens for him ashore.
Many writers have questioned how she could have gone undetected amid close quarters with hundreds of sailors. The mystery is easily solved. Commerçon was carried not in Bougainville's lead ship but in the accompanying store ship. Anticipating being years away from replacement supplies and equipment, he brought vast quantities on board, so much to that the vessel's commander gave up his large private cabin to him and his assistant. Included in these quarters was a private toilet.
Bougainville, a thrice wounded hero of campaigns in Canada, may or may not have had his suspicions of Baret's gender. Certainly, such had long been a source for enthusiastic focsle gossip. Still, it was not until the explorers reached Tahiti that the island's less inhibited inhabitants dropped Jeanne's deception.
She continued to accompany Commerçon on the voyage until returning to France in 1769. By way of recognition, he named the genus
Baretia for her. Unfortunately, it was a short-lived honour; later the genus was renamed
Turraea. It is a pleasure to retort, however, that she received more substantial and remunerative rewards. When Philibert Commerçon died in 1773, she was remembered in his will. The following year Jeanne m married Jean Dubernat, an NCO in French Army. And then in 1785 the Ministry of Marine granted her pension of 200 livres a year. She passed away, age 67, in the village of Saint-Aulaye in the Dordogne of southwestern France.
But botanists have long memories. In 2012 a trailing vine from southern Ecuador and northern Peru was named
Solanum baretiae by Eric J. Tepe, Glynnis Ridley and Lynn Bohs in the open-aces journal
PhytoKeys. Found alongside roads, in pastures and understorey of montane forests the flowers white to violet. According to Tepe, he has not tasted them so does not know if the fruits are edible but, he says, they smell off-putting.
