She collected the specimens. His name went on them.
She bound her chest, took a man’s name, and signed onto a French naval expedition that forbade women outright. For three years she collected plants across four continents. When the expedition’s botanist was too ill to work, the collecting was hers alone, including the vine now in a million gardens.
Her name was Jeanne Baret.
The disguise
Baret was born on 27 July 1740 in La Comelle, a village in Burgundy, into a family of day labourers. She became housekeeper, then assistant, then lover to the naturalist Philibert Commerson. When Commerson was appointed botanist to Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s round-the-world expedition in 1766, he could not manage the work or his own poor health without her.
A royal ordinance banned women from French naval vessels. So Baret bound herself, dressed as a man, and went aboard the Etoile as Commerson’s valet and assistant. She held the disguise through Rio de Janeiro, the Strait of Magellan, Tahiti, Mauritius and Madagascar. She became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, and she did it while doing a scientist’s full labour.
The labour was hers
This is the fact the credit was built on and then taken from. Commerson was frequently laid up with seasickness and an ulcerated leg. When he could not go into the field, Baret did. She hauled the equipment over rough ground and brought back the specimens. On the Patagonian excursions he called her his “beast of burden.” The expedition gathered more than 6,000 plants, now held in the French national herbarium, and a large share of that collecting passed through her hands.
Among the specimens was the flowering vine the expedition made famous, named for its commander: Bougainvillea. The most celebrated botanical trophy of the voyage carries the name of the admiral who ran the ships. The woman doing the collecting when it came in got nothing on the label.
Commerson knew what she was worth. He set aside a genus to name for her, a shrub he called Baretia. It was to be her mark in the botanical record, the standard way a naturalist is remembered.
The name that could not stand
Commerson died in 1773, on Mauritius, before he could publish most of what he had named. And this is where the record closed on her.
Baretia was never secured. By the time his reports reached Paris, those plants already carried an earlier published name, Turraea, honoring an Italian naturalist. Under the rule of botanical priority the older name wins, so Baretia was void before it could take hold. No one had to strike her name out. The bookkeeping did it. Meanwhile more than seventy species were published with the epithet commersonii, tying plant after plant to Commerson across the literature.
Set the two side by side. The botanist has seventy species and a permanent place in the naming of plants. His assistant, who did the collecting he could not, who circled the earth in disguise to do it, had one genus meant for her, and the record erased it on a technicality without a second thought.
That silence held for more than two centuries.
What is documented, and what is not
Female Obscura routes this through the record, so two things need to be marked clearly.
The credit erasure is documented. The intended genus Baretia, its absorption into Turraea, the seventy commersonii species, the herbarium holdings, these are in the botanical literature and stand on their own.
The lurid version of her story is not documented, and this archive will not lean on it. Glynis Ridley’s 2010 biography reconstructs a violent unmasking of Baret on New Ireland in mid-1768. It is contested. Bougainville places the discovery in Tahiti, months earlier, when Tahitians on shore identified her at once. The surgeon Vivès, who was hostile to Commerson, gives the New Ireland version, and two other diarists mention that island without detail. Reviewers in Nature and the Wall Street Journal fault Ridley’s book for speculation beyond the sources. The assault account may be true and it may not, and no honest telling can present it as fact. Baret does not need it. The loss of her name is enough, and it is documented.
Late and partial repair
There is a coda, and it is exact about how little was returned and how late.
In 1785, near the end of her life, the French Ministry of Marine granted Baret a pension of 200 livres a year. The document called her “this extraordinary woman,” noted that she had circled the globe in disguise, and credited her courage in sharing the labours and dangers of the naturalist. The state paid her. The science still had nothing bearing her name. She died on 5 August 1807, aged 67.
The correction came in 2012. The biologist Eric Tepe named a newly described vine from the Andes Solanum baretiae, its leaves as variable in shape as the plant Commerson had first meant to name for her. Two hundred and five years after her death, and two hundred and thirty-nine years after Commerson’s notes were set aside, she finally had a species. The first woman to travel the whole world waited that long to be named in the record she had spent her life filling. A 2023 attempt to revive her genus, Baretia lanata, remains unplaced. The species from 2012 is the one that holds.
The archive grows. The silence shrinks. Enter the archive.
Sources:
- Jeanne Baret, botanist and first female circumnavigator, finally commemorated in name of new species — Pensoft, 3 January 2012, on the PhytoKeys paper by Tepe, Ridley and Bohs. Source for the intended genus Baretia, its preemption by the earlier name Turraea, the seventy commersonii species, the 6,000 specimens, and Solanum baretiae.
- Jeanne Baret — Anna Dubey, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Source for the biographical frame, the disguise, and her standing as the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
- Jeanne Baret — Wikipedia, drawing on the Dunmore, Clode and Ridley biographies. Source for the 1785 Ministry of Marine pension of 200 livres and its “this extraordinary woman” wording, Commerson’s “beast of burden” line, the Baretia and Turraea priority question, the conflicting discovery accounts, and the 2023 Baretia lanata.