No one noticed anything untoward for more than a month.
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| Bare: feminine hips |
Jean Baré, a 26 year old valet, had signed up to take part in one of the greatest voyages of exploration - Louis de Bougainville’s 1766 circumnavigation of the globe.
Jean was to work as assistant to Philippe Commerson, the expedition’s naturalist. It was a role to which he was well suited, for Jean was himself an expert botanist.
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| Commerson: needed his valet at all times |
After four weeks at sea, some of the crew aboard the Etoile began to spread gossip and rumours about Jean and Philippe. Why, they wanted to know, did Jean always sleep in Philippe Commerson’s cabin? And why was he quite so attached to his master?
Jean confronted the rumours head on. He told Francois Vivez, the Etoile’s surgeon, that he slept in the same cabin on account of Commerson’s sea-sickness. He wanted ‘to be within reach to assist him.’
This explanation was plausible, for Commerson had indeed suffered from terrible sea-sickness and it was only natural for his valet to be by his side. But there were sufficient concerns for the rumours to be taken to Louis de Bougainville aboard the expedition flagship, La Boudeuse. According to one account, Louis de Bougainville didn’t want to know. ‘[He] pretended to be unaware’ of the crews’ prattling.
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| Arrival at Tahiti spelled doom for Bare |
The gossip was soon to take a more dramatic turn. In the third week of March, 1767, the two ships came in sight of Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean. They ships dropped anchor at the island of Otaheite - which Bougainville called Cythera - and the crew prepared to go ashore. Among the landing party was Commerson and his valet, Jean Baré.
‘Baré followed him [Commerson] in all his botanizing, and carried weapons, food, plant notebooks with a courage and a strength which had earned for him … the title of his beast of burden,’ wrote Bougainville.
The other crew followed the two men onto the beach, eager to explore this paradise island.
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| Tahitians knew a woman when they saw one |
Suddenly - and unexpectedly - there was absolute commotion. The local islanders rushed to the beach and surrounded Baré and started touching him and shouting that he was a woman in disguise. For reasons that remain obscure, they seemed to have some sort of sixth sense in questions of sexuality. Now, they were intent on raping Baré.
Bougainville’s officers feared trouble and rescued him, but the event reawakened their earlier suspicions.
‘Everything indicated in him a feminine man,’ wrote Francois Vivez, ‘small of stature, short and plump, wide-hipped… a prominent chest, a small round head, a freckled complexion, a gentle and clear voice, a marked dexterity and a gentleness of movement that could only belong to that gender...’
Vivez asserted that Baré was indeed a woman in disguise, albeit one who was ‘fairly ugly and unattractive.’
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| Bougainville: kindly soul |
This was a serious accusation, for a royal ordinance made it strictly illegal for women to sail aboard expedition ships. Transgression of this law carried severe punishment.
Baré had to think fast. He told Bougainville and his fellow officers that he was not a woman, ‘but in fact belonged to the one from which the Mighty Overlord selects the guardians of his seraglio’ - in other words, he was a eunuch.
Bougainville was not to be fooled: he demanded proof of Baré’s sex. It was to prove his unmasking: Baré, with tears in his feminine eyes, admitted that he was actually a girl, and that she had misled her master by appearing before him in men’s clothing in order to disguise her sex.
While the various accounts of Baré’s ensuing trials aboard ship do not entirely tally, one thing is certain: she was now in severe danger of sexual molestation at the hands of the crew.
‘She had to seek an asylum in the ordinary quarters in a hammock under the quarterdeck with the other servants.’ Vivez says that she always carried ‘two loaded pistols … by way of precaution.’
She escaped punishment from Bougainville, perhaps because she and Commerson had found, and named, the spectacular flower Bougainvillea.
On her return to France, she found herself celebrated as the first woman ever to circumnavigate the globe.
‘I admire her determination all the more,’ wrote Bougainville, ‘because she has always behaved with the most scrupulous correctness.’
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| La Boudeuse; Bougainville's ship |
When summoned to court and asked to explain why he did not punish Baré, Bougainville begged the court to ‘forgive her for this infraction of the ordinances.’
He added that ‘her example will hardly be contagious.’
Jeanne Baré would live to a ripe old age and earn considerable fame for her circumnavigation.
Regarded as ‘an extraordinary woman’, she was eventually given a substantial royal pension of 200 livres in celebration of her achievement.
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