Glynis Ridley - The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe

Claras Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in
Eighteenth-Century Europe

Copyright 2010 by Glynis Ridley
Reader's Guide copyright 2011 by Glynis Ridley

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ridley, Glynis.
The discovery of Jeanne Baret : a story of science, the high seas, and the first woman to circumnavigate the globe / Glynis Ridley.
1. Baret, Jeanne, 17401807. 2. ExplorersFranceBiography. 3. Women explorersFranceBiography. 4. BotanistsFranceBiography. 5. Women botanistsFranceBiography. 6. Commerson, Philibert, 17271773. 7. Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, comte, 17291811. 8. Bougainvillea. 9. Voyages around the worldEarly works to 1800. I. Title.

G440.B225R53 2010
910.4092dc22

[B]

2010016778

eISBN: 978-0-307-46354-8

v3.1_r2

Js book

C ONTENTS

Baret, with her face bathed in tears, owned to me that she was a woman; she said that she had deceived her master at Rochefort, by offering to serve him in mens clothes at the very moment when he was embarking; that she had already before served a Genevan gentleman at Paris, in quality of a valet; that being born in Burgundy, and become an orphan, the loss of a law-suit had brought her to a distressed situation, and inspired her with the resolution to disguise her sex; that she well knew when she embarked that we were going round the world, and that such a voyage had raised her curiosity. She will be the first woman that ever made it, and I must do her the justice to affirm that she has always behaved on board with the most scrupulous modesty. She is neither ugly nor pretty, and is no more than twenty-five.

L OUIS -A NTOINE DE B OUGAINVILLE, JOURNAL , M AY 2829, 1768

I swear that man
never knew animals. Words
he lined up according to size
I strung words
by their stems and wore them
as garlands on my long walks.

The next day
Id find them withered.

I liked change.

S USAN D ONNELLY , E VE N AMES THE A NIMALS

INTRODUCTION

I N A PRIL 1768, two French ships, the Boudeuse and the toile, rode at anchor off the coast of Tahiti as 330 officers and men took their first shore leave in nearly a year. The ships constituted an expedition, under the command of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, to circumnavigate the globe and claim lands for France.

On the beach a single woman stood surrounded by a group of men whose looks required no translation. Fearing herself in danger of an imminent gang rape, she screamed an appeal to a French officer to save her. But to the wonder of the French, the woman was not an islander but one of their own crew. As one of the French observers recorded the event, with a striking restraint given what was being described, They have discovered that the servant of Mr. Commerson, the doctor, was a girl who until now has been taken for a boy.

For two years on board, Jeanne Baret had presented herself as a young man, using the name Jean Baret, and had worked as principal assistant to the expeditions naturalist, Philibert Commerson. When an old leg wound prevented Commerson from collecting specimens around Rio de Janeiro, it was Baret who had ventured inland and had brought back the showy tropical vine that would be named in honor of the expeditions commander: Bougainvillea. When the ships made slow passage through the Strait of Magellan, Baret and Commerson had been put ashore, their every move visible from the ships decks. Accounts written by observers on board testified to the stamina of Commersons assistant, who was always lagging behind him laden with boxes and papersthe cumbersome paraphernalia of eighteenth-century plant collecting. In an effort to avoid suspicion that she was anything other than a strong young man, Baret imagined the work that such a man might be capable of and then worked even harder. With her breasts flattened by strips of linen wound tightly round her upper body, she sweltered when others chose to strip, and checked every impulse that might expose her true identity.

But once ashore on Tahiti, Baret found herself surrounded by male islanders, whose gestures made plain the same offer of multiple sexual partners that Tahitian women were extending to the rest of the crew. Easily seeing through Barets disguise where the Frenchmen did not, the Tahitians effectively forced the end of a nearly eighteen-month-long charade: Baret abandoned the fiction she had worked so hard to maintain to save herself from what seemed certain to be a sexual assault.

Or so official accounts of this extraordinary story would have us believe.

In addition to maintaining an expedition log in spare, navy boardmandated prose, Bougainville also kept a more expansive journal that he intended to publish upon his fted return to an adoring France. But in neither document could Bougainville admit any knowledge of the rumors that had started circulating about Baret within a few days of the expeditions launch from Rochefort. For Barets behavior was soon noted to be odd on several counts. Doubled up with retching from acute seasickness, the naturalist Commerson found his symptoms eased if he sat on deck, feeling the reassuring solidity of the main mast behind him. Baret was also sick, but kept to Commersons cabin: an unprecedented privilege for the mere assistant of a gentleman scientist. Novice sailors quickly grew accustomed to relieving themselves at the headsholes cut into an area of decking that jutted out over the open oceanbut Baret was never seen there. When the expedition sailed on to the equator and the crew stripped for the ritualized anarchy of Crossing the Line, Baret was noticeable as the only clothed figure among the participants. Confronted by a handful of the crew determined to know the truth, Baret insisted that she was a man, though, as she expressed it, a man of the sort from which the Turkish sultan chose the guards of his harem. Barets claim that she was a eunuch was well calculated; the traumatic past that it implied would, she hoped, prevent further inquiry, either verbal or physical.

But on all of these aspects of the voyage, Bougainvilles official log and his private journal are silent. To acknowledge that there had been rumors of a woman on board ship, in contravention of French naval regulations, would be to acknowledge that the expedition commander had done nothing to investigate a possible breach. And from Bougainvilles point of view, an investigation at sea would have been ugly. Had Baret refused to admit to her disguise, only a forcible stripping would have settled the question. Yet what commander in his right senses would want to reveal to his crew that there was a lone, physically vulnerable woman among 330 men? In saving herself from the Tahitians by admitting her lie, as Baret was supposed to have done, she also saved Bougainville from having to act upon an increasingly untenable situation.