Already a Botanist

Food, weapons and folders of plants: these were among the things Jeanne Baret carried on collecting trips through the snow and mountains around the Strait of Magellan. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, the expedition’s commander, recalled the loads in his published account of the voyage. He also supplied a description of the person carrying them. Baret, travelling under a man’s name, was already an experienced botanist.

She had joined the store-ship Étoile at Rochefort in 1767 as assistant to Philibert Commerson, the expedition’s naturalist. Bougainville’s two ships were making a French royal voyage around the world. Women were prohibited aboard royal naval vessels, so Jeanne became Jean Baré, entered as a servant. Commerson had obtained provision for an assistant; Baret had already been helping him with botanical work before they sailed.

One surviving plant takes their working story beyond the ships. It was collected on Mauritius in 1769 and is now preserved in Paris, its branches flattened against a herbarium sheet. An old handwritten label calls it Baretia bonafidia. A much later slip identifies it as Turraea rutilans. The museum’s collection record names the collector as P. Commerson.

Folders under an arm

Collecting required people to get off the ship, find plants worth keeping and bring the material back. Commerson’s work depended on the distance he could cover and what could be carried. A leg ulcer made walking difficult for him. Baret gathered specimens and transported equipment, sharing the physical work that allowed the voyage’s botanical collection to grow.

The collection also occupied room aboard Étoile. The equipment was heavy and bulky enough that, as the Muséum’s history records, the captain’s cabin was set aside for the two botanists. Plants brought in from successive landing places had to remain usable during the long passages between them. Field collecting and the management of material aboard ship were connected problems.

Bougainville’s description gives that work an uncomfortable nickname. On the strenuous Magellan excursions, he wrote, Commerson had called Baret his beast of burden. Yet the same passage described an accomplished plant collector. In the French, she was a botaniste déjà fort exercé: already well practised. The loads included cahiers de plantes, plant folders or folios. These were part of the work, carried alongside the provisions and arms that sustained and protected a collecting party away from its ship.

Her official status as a servant leaves much of her judgement undescribed. Recognising a promising plant, selecting useful material and keeping its parts together all affected what another naturalist could eventually study. A dried specimen without an intelligible origin or the features needed to distinguish it from similar plants was a less useful object. Carrying a collection safely was work on the evidence itself.

The surviving Mauritian sheet illustrates the result. Branches retain their leaves and clusters of reproductive structures; the label links the material to the island where it was gathered. Later botanists could revisit the identification because a physical plant remained available beside its written history. Nothing on the sheet establishes which of the two collaborators chose this particular branch, prepared it or wrote its first label.

At Tahiti Bougainville again placed Baret ashore with plant folders under her arm. His book describes participation by someone who knew the expedition, even though it cannot provide a complete division of their daily tasks.

A journey longer than the voyage

Bougainville’s account is also part of the history of Baret’s concealment. He placed the public discovery that she was a woman at Tahiti and described a later conversation with her aboard Étoile. He reported that she said she had offered herself to Commerson at Rochefort just as he was embarking. That version sits uneasily beside their established working relationship before departure. What she is reported to have told a commander about getting aboard cannot simply be used as the whole history of how the partnership began.

The voyage took Baret from the Atlantic through the Strait of Magellan and across the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. When the ships reached the Île de France, now Mauritius, in 1768, she and Commerson stayed. Bougainville continued towards France. Their botanical work carried on for years after the expedition that had brought them there.

Mauritius brought them into the botanical world of Pierre Poivre, the French administrator associated with the island’s gardens. The neighbouring island of Bourbon, now Réunion, also figured in Commerson’s plans. He began a manuscript flora of the islands in December 1768. Its Latin title, Insularum Borbonicarum florilegium, announced the region whose plants he intended to describe. The surviving volume contains 150 paper folios bound in parchment.

The 1769 specimen belongs to this Mauritian period. It is a particular piece of their working environment that can still be examined, rather than an illustration of a plant chosen centuries later to stand for the voyage. The old name on its label contains Baret’s name. Commerson was considering a botanical honour for the assistant whose work Bougainville had described in such physical terms.

Baretia on the paper

The honour did not settle into print. In the manuscript flora, according to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle’s account of its holdings, Commerson struck through Baretia bonafidia and substituted Arabella. The label on the preserved plant retained Baretia. The two surviving traces record different stages in a naming project that he did not complete.

Commerson died in 1773 before publishing the work. When the specimens reached Paris, the relevant group of plants already had a published name, Turraea, assigned by Carl Linnaeus. An intended tribute in a working manuscript was therefore different from an established botanical name that other scientists would use.

Names continued to change around the surviving material. The sheet carries a determination by A. J. Scott from 1978, and Jean Bosser’s identification as Turraea rutilans from 1997. Keeping the older labels allows the object’s scientific history to remain visible when the identification changes. The plant did not have to be collected again for another botanist to reconsider what it was.

The record still chiefly preserves Commerson’s name as collector. The Muséum acknowledges that some of the material attributed to him may have been collected or identified by Baret, while stopping short of distributing individual specimens between them.

A closer look · 2:48 · French

Baret’s botanical work and the surviving evidence

Play film

A name, and a life afterwards

In 2012 Eric J. Tepe, Glynis Ridley and Lynn Bohs gave the name Solanum baretiae to an Andean plant from southern Ecuador and northern Peru. It was a modern commemoration of Baret, rather than the delayed publication of Commerson’s Mauritian specimen. The new species had leaves ranging from simple blades to compound leaves with seven leaflets. The authors made that variability part of their explanation for choosing a tribute to her.

Baret’s own life had continued beyond both the expedition and Commerson. On 17 May 1774 she married Jean Dubernat, a French soldier, at Port Louis on Mauritius. They later returned to France, completing her journey around the world.

Back in France, she settled beside the Dordogne in her husband’s region and was awarded a royal pension in 1785. She died in 1807. Her later affairs left another kind of paper trail. Historian Sophie Miquel’s study of the local records describes Baret’s will: her servant Gaussinte was to receive her wardrobe and 600 francs, and the poor of the parish 100 francs. Her husband received the use of the remaining property during his lifetime, with relatives named as heirs. She signed it Janne Barret.