Amber pages
Sir William Herschel, Discoverer of the planet Uranus, born today in 1738
Georgia O'Keeffe, artist, born today in 1887, at Sun Prairie, Wisconsin
Daniel Barenboim, musician, conductor and spouse of Jaqueline du Pré (click here), born today in 1942
And reversing those numbers, the first recorded reference to tobacco was made, today in 1492, though whether it was by the Spanish explorer Cristóbal Colón or the Genoese explorer Cristoforo Colombo is open to as much debate as you can manage, preferably without too much coughing and spitting, and No Smoking in the chamber thank you very much.
First papal visit to West Germany in 200 years, today in 1980. Yes, but did it achieve anything?
Jeanne Baret (1740-1807),
though the captain’s log for ship-date November 15 1766 definitely has her as
Jean, a cabin-boy; in fact she was a field-naturalist by profession, and is considered to have been the first woman ever to have circumnavigated the globe.It happened like this: About six months earlier, France’s most respected
botanist, Philibert
Commerçon, was appointed to a post that he didn’t really want but how
could anyone refuse it: the opportunity to set out with Louis de Bougainville on a two-ship expedition
that would circumnavigate the globe, partly to build a commercial empire - his
principal brief was to track down sources for medicines, spices, timber and
food - but also to enhance scientific knowledge of the planet through the same
investigation. Philibert was in love, and had no wish to leave the woman, not
for two years minimum and the risk of shipwreck; and anyway, if the world
weren’t so patriarchally misogynistic, she was as good a botanist as he was any
day, a claim clearly verified by the journals that she left behind, complete
with all her scientific observations.
So, dropping the last two letters of her first-name, cutting her hair, and
wearing clothes that made it virtually impossible to tell that this apparent
teenage boy was twenty-six, and female, she-he signed on as Commerçon’s
assistant, and any sailor hearing sounds of passion in the night just passed
by, fully aware of the effeminate wigs and velvet gowns Jean liked to wear, and
wishing they could be so fortunate.
It can’t have been easy though. Exploration involved carrying heavy equipment -
wooden field presses, bulky optical instruments, whatever plants they found -
over beaches and across hills. Eventually she was bound to be suspected, and
then found out. Bougainville’s journal, eighteen months into the voyage, claims
that some curious Tahitian natives exposed her - literally. Either way,
she was outed, and illegal. When the ship reached Mauritius, Bougainville dumped the couple - fortunately the island’s governor was an old
botanist-colleague of Commerçon, so dumping was simply a negative way of
describing three years of intense botanical investigation there, and on the
nearby islands of Madagascar and Reunion as well.
Commerçon died in February 1773, and a year later Jeanne resolved her state of
poverty by marrying a French non-commissioned officer named, ironically, Jean Dubernat. If it were known, I would place this tale on the date of their return
to France rather than the setting out of the Bougainville expedition, because
that was when she became the first woman believed to have sailed around the
world. But the exact date isn’t known: simply “late 1774”. Eight years. And
unlike the royal welcome-home that Bougainville received, nothing, no one, not
even her name included on the list of the voyage’s achievements, and this
despite the fact that records of the expedition identify more than six thousand
plant specimens collected by her on the voyage, and also make clear that
it was she, not Philibert, who made the greatest discovery of them all, the
plant pictured at the top of this page, one that they found in great abundance in Brazil, the
spectacular pink vine named in honour of their captain.
Thanks to money from Commerçon’s will and a French state pension, Jeanne lived out the rest of her life in the village of St Aulaye in the Dordogne with her second husband. She died at home on 5th August 1807 at the age of 67. In 2012 she was finally recognised for her contribution to science, with a species of nightshade - Solanum Baretiae - named after her. In 2018 the International Astronomical Union named a mountain range on Pluto in her honour, though it is by no means obvious why.
And if you thought that tale was remarkable, go to May 7, and to another of my pages for “Woman-Blindness”, this one in the the Napoleonic Era, and read about Rose de Freycinet; several other women who went to sea disguised as men here
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