Jeanne Baré

Jeanne Baret (sometimes spelled Baré or Barret) (July 27, 1740 – August 5, 1807) was a member of Louis Antoine de Bougainville's expedition on the ships La Boudeuse and Étoile in 1766–1769. Baret is recognized as the first woman to have completed a voyage of circumnavigation of the globe.

Jeanne Baret joined the expedition disguised as a man, calling herself Jean Baret. She enlisted as valet and assistant to the expedition's naturalist, Philibert Commerçon (anglicized as Commerson), shortly before Bougainville's ships sailed from France. According to Bougainville's account, Baret was herself an expert botanist.

Jeanne Baret was born on July 27, 1740, in the village of La Comelle in the Burgundy region of France. Her record of baptism survives and identifies her as the legitimate issue of Jean Baret and Jeanne Pochard. Her father is identified as a day laborer and seems likely to have been illiterate, as he did not sign the parish register.

Nothing definitive is known of Baret's childhood or young adulthood. She later told Bougainville that she had been orphaned and lost her fortune in a lawsuit before taking to disguising herself as a man. While she might well have been an orphan given the low life expectancies of the time, historians agree that other details of the story she gave Bougainville were a fabrication to shield Commerson from complicity in her disguise. Burgundy was at this time one of the more backward provinces of France in terms of the condition of the peasant classes, and it is likely that Baret's family were quite impoverished.

One of the mysteries of Baret's life is how she obtained at least the rudiments of an education, as her signature on later legal documents provides evidence that she was not illiterate. One of her biographers, Glynis Ridley, suggests that her mother may have been of Huguenot extraction, a group that had a higher tradition of literacy than was otherwise typical of the peasant classes of the time. Another biographer, John Dunmore, suggests that she may have been taught by the parish priest or taken on as a charity case by a member of the local gentry.

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