Experimental Blog #78

Comments on "The Discovery of Jeanne Baret" - A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe by Glynis Ridley

The subject of this book, Jeanne Baret, left France with the Louis-Antoine de Bougainville expedition on February 1, 1767. This expedition became France's first successful circumnavigation of the world when it returned to France on March 15, 1769.

France became the third country in the world to achieve this distinction, but Jeanne Baret, who had been disguised as a man for at least 15 or 17 months, had been left at French possessions in the Indian Ocean and did not return to France until late in 1774 or early 1775.

Jeanne Baret did not write a journal or book or, it seems, even letters of any kind in her entire life. It is recorded that she had two children; the first child before the voyage and the other child before the voyage was completed. The author, Glynis Ridley, concludes from a careful study of the 4 accounts that were written about the voyage by participants, including the account written by Bougainville, that Jeanne Baret was "gang raped" not very long after it was finally revealed that she was a female; and using her extremely vivid imagination she tells the story of the life and voyage of Jeanne Baret, along with a great deal of interesting 18th century history and natural history.

Thanks to Glynis Ridley, despite all the resistance of male denial and rationalizing, the world now has a very fine unlikely-likely account of Jeanne Baret, a very strong and hard-working, but, it seems, not very articulate or educated lower class French woman from the 18th century.