The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Glynis Ridley, Fourth Estate, $29.99
An extraordinary true-life tale of a remarkable “herb woman” from an impoverished peasant family in the Loire Valley region of France, destined to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world — and more importantly to fight eighteenth century moral codes, to blossom as a brilliant botanist, all the while dressed as a teenage boy.
Jeanne Baret bore French expedition naturalist Philibert Commerson a son, before giving the child up as a foundling, and accompanying him on a treacherous 1766 two-year sea passage with more than 100 men, her chest painfully bound to cover her womanhood.
Under constant suspicion, Baret is believed to have survived a horrific gang rape, and the barbaric ritual “baptism” (tarring and feathering) of an ordinary seaman, against a backcloth of the tantalising first sighting of the Great Barrier Reef (in 1768) and the personal discovery of medicinal Bougainvillea (named after the expedition’s commander).
Ridley pieces together a unique slice of geography, history, discovery and adventure, recording one woman’s courageous stand to experience all the “new world” had to reveal, at a time when traditional sexual roles were at their most limited.
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