This July 27, 2020, Google's Doodle tribute to botanist Jeanne Barret. She is the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe.
Jeanne Barret is the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
This July 27, 2020, Google pays tribute to the French botanist Jeanne Barret, born July 27, 1740 and the first woman to have traveled around the world. To be able to board, the young woman, an orphan, will disguise herself and call herself Jean Baré.
A brave young servant
Count Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a great navigator, was a frigate captain in the 1760s. The royal administration then sent him around the world, accompanied in particular by the naturalist Commerson, the astronomer Véron and the cartographer Routier de Romainville. The frigate La Boudeuse left Brest on December 5, 1766. She was joined in June 1767 by a cargo ship, the Etoile. The Sulky continues its route in the Pacific, finally reaching Tahiti. During the departure, a young Tahitian is taken away. He befriends a particularly courageous young servant in the service of Philibert Commerson:Jean Baré. If the officers pretended to ignore Baré's clear voice and silhouette for a while, the news finally spread:it was a woman.
An "extraordinary woman"
Jeanne Barret had been in Commerson's service since September 1764, with whom she then had a romantic relationship. The naturalist teaches him the rudiments of botany. The two therefore boarded with no secrets from each other and together search for new species of plants on their journey under Bougainville's orders. But the ordinances prohibit any woman from sailing on the king's ships.
Once the secret was revealed, Commerson and Jeanne Barret landed together on the island of France, the current island of Mauritius. After the death of her companion, she finally returned to France in 1775, remarried to a soldier. Barret was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. In addition, it will have collected 3000 plants still unknown in mainland France. According to France Culture, in 1785, Bougainville pleaded for her to receive a royal pension, which she would obtain from Louis XVI, who then named her “extraordinary woman”. She died on August 5, 1807.
To learn more about the expedition of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, also find the article "Scandal on the Boudeuse " on the website of the magazine Historia .