Download The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe AudioBook Free
The year was 1765. Eminent botanist Philibert Commerson acquired just been appointed to a grand new expedition: the first French circumnavigation of the world. As the ships' standard naturalist, Commerson would seek out resources - medicines, spices, timber, food - that can give the France an edge in the ever-accelerating race for empire. Jeanne Baret, Commerson's young mistress and collaborator, was desperate not to be left behind. She disguised herself as a teenage boy and authorized on as his associate. The trip made the 26-year-old, recognized to her shipmates as "Jean" rather than "Jeanne", the first girl to ever before sail around the world. Yet so little is well known about this remarkable woman, whose achievements were regarded as subversive, even impossible for someone of her intimacy and class. When the ships made landfall and the secret enthusiasts disembarked to explore, Baret taken heavy real wood field presses and heavy optical tools over beaches and hillsides, impressing observers on the ships' decks with her evident strength and stamina. Less evident were the whitening strips of linen wound firm around her upper body and the weeks she had spent perfecting her masculine disguise in the roadways and marketplaces of Paris. Expedition commander Louis-Antoine de Bougainville saved in his journal that interested Tahitian natives shown Baret as a female, eighteen months in to the voyage. However the true story, as it happens, is more complicated. In The Finding of Jeanne Baret, Glynis Ridley unravels the conflicting accounts saved by Baret's crewmates to piece together the real history: How Baret's identity was in fact greatly suspected within simply a couple of weeks of embarking, and the agonizing consequences of those suspicions; the newly found out notebook, written in Baret's own hand, that proves her scientific acumen; and the thousands of specimens she gathered, most famously the showy vine bougainvillea. Ridley also richly explores Baret's uncomfortable, sometimes dangerous interactions with the men on the ship, including Baret's enthusiast, the obsessive and sometimes prickly naturalist; a fashion-plate prince who, with his sophisticated wigs and velvet apparel, was often recognised incorrectly as a female himself; the sour ship's physician, who despised Baret and Commerson; a good Tahitian islander who signed up with the expedition and asked Baret showing him how to respond like a Frenchman. However the central character of the true history is Jeanne Baret herself, a working-class girl whose scientific contributions were silently dismissed and written out of record - as yet. Anchored in impeccable original research and bursting with remarkable characters and unique settings, The Finding of Jeanne Baret offers this forgotten heroine an opportunity to bloom finally.
