Jeanne Baretthe WorkbenchISTP

Around the turn of 1768, in the snowy hills along the Strait of Magellan, a valet went ashore with the French naturalist Philibert Commerson. The valet carried the food, the guns and the plant notebooks, so tirelessly that Commerson, hobbled by a bad leg, gave his servant a nickname. The valet was 27, and a woman named Jeanne Baret.

She was a labourer's daughter from Burgundy, born in 1740. Somehow, with almost no way in for a poor country girl, she had learned botany. She became Commerson's housekeeper, and then his partner.

In 1766 he was taken on as naturalist for Louis-Antoine de Bougainville's voyage around the world. Women were not allowed aboard. So in December 1766, at Rochefort, Baret boarded the Étoile dressed as a man, as Commerson's valet.

It was the only way in. To do the work, she had to do it under another name, as somebody's servant: skilled enough as a botanist to be useful, plain enough as a valet to be overlooked. Workbenches often know a milder version, like the self-taught engineer whose skill nobody questions until somebody checks the paperwork.

It was meant as praise, the kind a man gives a servant who never tires. It also shows how the work was split. She did the carrying and much of the hands-on collecting. The title of naturalist was his.

Rumors about the valet had gone round the ships since early in the voyage. She kept carrying the plant books.

Bougainville later wrote that she was found out on Tahiti in April 1768 and confessed to him in tears. Other men on the voyage told a harsher story. In July 1768, on New Ireland, a group of men from the expedition caught her off guard and stripped her to see for themselves. The disguise was torn off her.

She had chosen the disguise. It was a tool, like a plant press or a good knife, and it got her onto the ship and around the world. Workbenches are often like that about titles. They will wear whatever name the job requires, until the day someone uses it against them.

Bougainville punished neither of them. When the ships reached Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, the pair stayed behind, and she went on working with Commerson there until he died in 1773.

The next year she married a soldier, Jean Dubernat, and by about 1775 she was back in France. With nobody marking the moment, she had become the first woman known to travel all the way around the world.

Commerson had named one of the voyage's flowers after the commander: bougainvillea. People sometimes say Baret found it, though nobody can show that. What is certain is whose hands did much of the expedition's collecting.

She left no diary and no letters. She died in France on 5 August 1807, at 67.

The flower carries the commander's name, and the plant collection carried Commerson's. The notebooks came through the snow on her back.