Glynis Ridley · 2010 · sea

In 1766 a peasant woman from the Loire bound her chest with linen and signed on to a French circumnavigation as a teenage boy, assistant to the expedition's naturalist. She spent two years on a ship with a hundred men, collected thousands of specimens including the bougainvillea, and came home the first woman to sail round the world.

1. 1
   Rochefort

   December 1766, and a peasant woman from the Loire binds her chest with linen strips and signs on to the storeship Etoile as Jean Baret, assistant to the naturalist Commerson - who is her employer, her collaborator and her lover.

2. 2
   Montevideo

   The Rio de la Plata in July 1767, and eleven months at sea already - Commerson too ill to work, so Baret does the collecting, the pressing, the cataloguing and the carrying, which is most of what the expedition's botany amounts to.

3. 3
   Rio de Janeiro

   Where she finds the flowering vine that gets named after the expedition's commander rather than its discoverer - bougainvillea, which Ridley argues was Baret's find and which is the best-known plant nobody credits her for.

4. 4
   The Strait of Magellan

   Thirty-eight days working through the strait in bitter cold with no French chart to go by, botanising ashore between squalls - which Ridley says is the stretch that makes it impossible to dismiss Baret as a passenger.

5. 5
   Tahiti

   April 1768, and Bougainville's version is that the Tahitians recognised a woman where a hundred Frenchmen had not - though three crew journals suggest the ship had suspected within a fortnight of leaving France.

6. 6
   New Ireland

   The chapter Ridley calls the location of hell - the Melanesian anchorage where Baret is assaulted by members of the crew, after which nothing about the voyage can be presented as an adventure any more.

7. 7
   Mauritius

   Isle de France, where Bougainville puts the pair ashore in November 1768 to be rid of the problem - and where Baret stays for years, running a household and continuing the collecting after Commerson dies.

8. 8
   Madagascar

   Botanising across the channel, still working, still cataloguing - and by now the thousands of specimens that will go back to Paris under Commerson's name and be attributed to him for two hundred years.

9. 9
   Rochefort

   1775, and she comes home after nearly a decade, having married a soldier to get a passage - the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, and later granted a royal pension as an extraordinary woman, which is at least something.