Jeanne Baret

Jeanne Baret: The Botanist in Disguise

A royal ordinance forbade women aboard French naval vessels. So when the botanist Philibert Commerson joined Louis Antoine de Bougainville's circumnavigation in 1766, his assistant boarded the storeship Étoile at Rochefort under the name Jean Baret, bound the chest, and did the work. By the time she came home, the illiterate day-labourer's daughter from Burgundy had become the first woman to sail around the world — and had personally handled a large share of the six thousand plant specimens that went into the French national herbarium.

A Peasant Who Learned to Read

Jeanne Baret was born on 27 July 1740 at La Comelle in Burgundy. Her father Jean was a day labourer and probably illiterate; her mother died when Jeanne was barely fifteen months old. Almost nothing survives of her childhood, and she does not reappear in the records until 1764 — by which time she could write. How she got an education is simply unknown, and that gap is the first measure of the odds she was working against.

What she did have was the practical botany of the countryside, the herb-woman's knowledge of which plants grew where and what they were good for. It was exactly the knowledge an academic botanist lacked and needed.

Commerson

Philibert Commerson, born 1727, qualified in medicine by 1754 and was consumed by botany. His wife died in childbirth in 1762, and sometime between 1760 and 1764 Baret entered his household as housekeeper. The relationship became more than that. In 1764 she became pregnant, and on 22 August, five months gone, made the *déclaration de grossesse* French law required of an unmarried pregnant woman. She refused to name the father — though Commerson, who arranged the proceedings himself, was almost certainly the man.

A son, Jean-Pierre, was born that December. The couple moved to Paris, where Baret used the alias Jeanne de Bonnefoy; the infant was given up to the Paris Foundlings Hospital in January 1765 and placed with a wet nurse, and died that March near Dreux. A second son, born in May 1766, disappears from the record entirely.

Paris was also where her training became formal. Commerson certainly instructed her in botany; she attended the public lectures at the Jardin du Roi, and may have learned plant drawing from Françoise Basseporte.

Jean Baret, Valet

When the invitation to join Bougainville's expedition came in 1765, Commerson hesitated: he was chronically ill and depended on Baret's nursing. The regulations were absolute, so the answer was a disguise. She enlisted as valet and botanical assistant to Commerson under the name Jean Baret, and in late December 1766 they joined the Étoile at Rochefort, under Captain François Chenard de la Giraudais.

One piece of luck made the deception survivable: because Commerson's equipment was so extensive, the captain gave them his own large cabin — which meant private toilet facilities rather than the shared quarters of the crew.

The work itself was brutal, and most of the physical part of it was hers. Commerson was violently seasick and suffered a recurring leg ulcer. At Rio de Janeiro, with Commerson officially confined to the ship, they collected the flowering vine he named *Bougainvillea*. In Patagonia, while the expedition waited for a wind through the Strait of Magellan, she went with him over savage terrain and earned a reputation among the crew for courage and strength. Commerson called her his beast of burden.

Found Out

The accounts of her exposure conflict, and the conflict is itself revealing. Bougainville wrote that rumours had circulated for some time but that the truth came out at Tahiti in April 1768, where Tahitians surrounded her on landing and cried out that she was a woman; he interviewed her aboard the Étoile weeks afterwards. The surgeon François Vives recorded that when confronted by La Giraudais she claimed to be a eunuch. Other journals place the discovery in New Ireland in mid-July, in an ugly incident in which she was stripped and "examined" by a group of fellow servants. Modern scholars have suggested the Tahitian observer Ahu-toru may have read her as *mahu*, a third gender — though Tahitians told James Cook in 1769 that a woman had been with Bougainville's ships.

At Mauritius, Commerson found his old friend Pierre Poivre serving as governor, and he and Baret stayed on as his guests. Bougainville, who now had an illegal woman aboard, very probably encouraged the arrangement. She likely accompanied Commerson collecting on Madagascar and Bourbon between 1770 and 1772.

Innkeeper, Wife, Pensioner

Commerson died in Mauritius in February 1773, leaving "Jeanne Baret, known as de Bonnefoi, my housekeeper" 600 livres, her back wages and the furniture of the Paris apartment. Stranded on a trading island with Poivre recalled to France, she made her own way: she held property in Port Louis from 1770, ran a tavern, and in 1773 was fined fifty livres for serving alcohol on a Sunday.

On 17 May 1774 she married Jean Dubernat, a French army NCO, bringing substantial money of her own to the marriage. They sailed for France around 1775 — and with that landfall she completed the circumnavigation. In April 1776 she petitioned the Attorney General and collected what Commerson's will owed her, and the couple bought property at Saint-Aulaye in the Dordogne.

In 1785 the Ministry of Marine granted her a pension of 200 livres a year. The document is the closest thing she got to a medal: "Jeanne Barré, by means of a disguise, circumnavigated the globe on one of the vessels commanded by Mr de Bougainville... Her behaviour was exemplary and Mr de Bougainville refers to it with all due credit."

She died at Saint-Aulaye on 5 August 1807, aged sixty-seven.

Why Jeanne Is Called a Genius

The quality to name here is not theoretical brilliance — she published nothing and formulated no system — but competence of an extraordinarily rare and hard-won kind, sustained under conditions designed to make it impossible. She began illiterate and peasant-born, taught herself to read, absorbed formal botany in Paris on top of the practical plant knowledge of her class, and then executed the fieldwork of a major scientific expedition largely alone, because the man officially responsible was too ill to leave his bunk. The botanists who named *Solanum baretiae* for her in 2012 put the layered improbability plainly: "A woman dressed as a man, a female botanist in a male-dominated field, and a working class woman who travelled farther than most aristocrats of her time." When Commerson's health failed, in their assessment, she "was responsible for all collections." The expedition's haul of more than six thousand specimens sits in the French National Herbarium at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle.

The honest counter-case is that her achievement was one of endurance, nerve and craft rather than intellect — and that we can only infer the scale of it, because everything she collected was credited to Commerson and she left no writings to argue her case. As the modern citation notes, "a royal ordinance forbade women from being on French naval vessels; prejudice and custom prevented their participation in science." The disguise that let her do the work is the same reason the work is not securely hers. Calling her a genius of botany overstates what the surviving record can prove. Calling her one of the most formidably capable people aboard any ship of that century does not.

Legacy

Commerson meant to name a Malagasy genus *Baretia* after her, but died before publishing. It took two centuries to correct. *Polyscias baretiana*, *Solanum baretiae* and *Acalypha baretiae* now carry her name, and in December 2023 the botanist Martín E. Timaná described *Baretia lanata*, creating a genus expressly in her honour. The New York Botanical Garden holds a specimen credited to Commerson but believed to have been gathered by her. In 2018 the International Astronomical Union named a mountain range on Pluto Baret Montes. She was among ten French women honoured at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, and has been proposed for inscription on the Eiffel Tower, whose seventy-two engraved names of scientists are all men.

Achievements

• Expeditions: circumnavigation and circumnavigation of Earth
• 72 scientist women names on the Eiffel tower
• Recorded as botanist, explorer and naturalist