In 1766, Jeanne Baret disguised herself as a male sailor and boarded the Étoile. She wasn’t looking to make history, but, in boarding the ship, she became the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Now, almost two-hundred years after the fact, her feat is being honoured with the naming of a newly discovered species of plant called the Solanum baretiae.
During the mid-eighteenth century, France, along many of Europe’s other colonial powers, undertook countless expeditions to explore the world. One of those expeditions, captained by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, hired the famous French scientist Philibert Commerçon to serve as the trip’s botanist. Like many of his contemporaries, Commerçon was allowed to bring an assistant with him on the trip. The often-ill botanist depended on Baret, his live-in companion, for his care, so she would have been a perfect fit. Unfortunately, a French royal decree prohibited women from boarding a French navel vessel, so the two concocted the scheme that would see Baret dress up as a man to try and board the ship. Thankfully for Commerçon, Baret was successful (though the crew and its captain had their suspicions) and, throughout the expedition, she would help Commerçon document, catalogue, and name countless plants, including the Bougainvillea – named after, of course, the expedition’s leader (more on Baret’s fascinating life can be read on her Wikipedia page).
Commerçon had planned to honour his constant companion by naming a plant after her. However, he died before he could publish his findings. So, it came to Eric Tepe, a biologist at the University of Utah and University of Cincinnati, to make up for the fact. After discovering a distant relative of the tomato and potato plants that grows in Peru, Tepe decided to name his discovery in honour of the intrepid female botanist after he had heard an interview with Glynis Ridley, author of “The Discovery of Jeanne Baret,”discussing Baret’s life on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” [Live Science]
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Igor Bonifacic is a writer working for the Toronto Standard. You can follow him on twitter at @igorbonifacic.
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