She bound her chest, signed on as a manservant, and went all the way around the world.
In the last days of 1766, a twenty-six-year-old woman from a Burgundy village climbed aboard the storeship Étoile at Rochefort in a man's coat and signed on as "Jean Baret," manservant to the expedition's naturalist. The law was unambiguous: no women on the King's ships. She sailed anyway — across the Atlantic, through the Strait of Magellan, into the Pacific — hauling the packs when the naturalist's leg gave out, pressing and labelling a collection of more than six thousand plant specimens that would go home under his name and not hers.
Bougainville, who commanded the voyage, called her an expert botanist. She was also, by the time she set foot in France again, the first woman known to have gone all the way around the world. It took the French state until 1785 to say so in writing. It took everyone else rather longer.
A village girl, a global circle
The lifeline
1740
Born 27 July at La Comelle in Burgundy, daughter of a day labourer
1764
Enters the household of the botanist Philibert Commerson; they move to Paris
1766
Boards the Étoile at Rochefort as "Jean Baret" — women barred by law
1768
Her sex becomes known in the Pacific; she is left behind on Mauritius
1775
Reaches France, most likely this year — the circle closed at last
1807
Dies 5 August at Saint-Aulaye, Dordogne, aged 67, a woman of property
By the numbers
The measure of her
26
Her age when she walked aboard the Étoile at Rochefort, in disguise
6,000+
Plant specimens she and Commerson brought home — now in the Paris herbarium
1st
The first woman known to circumnavigate the globe — and she did it hidden
200
Livres a year: the pension France finally granted her in 1785
What she carried, found and endured
The work
1767
Rio de Janeiro. With Commerson confined to the ship by an ulcerated leg, the pair collected the flowering vine he named Bougainvillea for his captain. By long tradition it was Baret who found it — though the record does not say so outright.
1767
Patagonia. Waiting out the winds before the Strait of Magellan, she carried the equipment over broken ground on the hardest excursions. Commerson, limping behind her, called her his "beast of burden."
1768
The Pacific. As the ships ran desperately short of food, she went on pressing, sorting and cataloguing — the labour that turns a heap of cuttings into a scientific collection.
1770–72
Madagascar and Bourbon. Put ashore on Mauritius, she kept collecting across the Indian Ocean until Commerson died there in February 1773.
1773–74
Port Louis. Left with almost nothing, she ran a tavern — and was fined 50 livres for serving drink on a Sunday — married a French soldier, and bought herself the last leg home.
Erased, then engraved
Recognition
In her lifetime
French law forbade women aboard navy ships; she could sail only by vanishing
Quietly left behind on Mauritius in 1768 — a problem the expedition set down
The specimens were filed under Commerson's name; hers is on almost none
Commerson named a genus Baretia for her — Paris struck it out as a duplicate
Today
Solanum baretiae, named for her in 2012 — 205 years after her death
Baret Montes, a mountain range on Pluto, approved by the IAU in 2018
The first English biography appeared only in 2002; the world caught up slowly
In 2024 she rose gold out of the Seine at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony
Where a labourer's daughter learned to read
La Comelle
She was born in a small village in the granite hills of the Morvan, in inland Burgundy — about as far from blue water as France allows. Her father was a day labourer, almost certainly unable to sign his name. How his daughter learned hers, nobody knows; but by 1764 she could write it on a legal document, and two years later she was at sea with a botanist's press under her arm.
1740
Baptised the day after her birth — one of the few papers of her early life that survives
~400 km
From the Morvan hills to Rochefort, the naval port where she boarded
1764
The year she signed her own name — proof she had somehow been taught to write
"Jeanne Barré, by means of a disguise, circumnavigated the globe… She shared with great courage the labours and dangers of this savant. Her behaviour was exemplary."
— Ministry of Marine, France granting her pension, 1785
Not a word of her own survives. We have her only in other people's handwriting — a captain's journal, a will, a fine for Sunday liquor, and this.
