Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1766, Jeanne Barret dressed as a man and became the first woman to sail around the world, accompanying naturalist Philibert Commerson. At the close of their journey they disembarked at Mauritius, where Commerson located a ‘charming shrub’ with leaves of many different shapes. He named it Baretia bonafidia for the woman whose clothing, or leaves, concealed who she was. As Jeanne’s biographer Danielle Clode writes, ‘It is an apt plant to name after Jeanne – rare and difficult to find, with very little written about it, and a complex history of misidentification and reclassification’. The plant’s qualities – rarity, elusiveness, an identity difficult to pin down – also reference the challenges Clode encountered in researching and writing In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World. The records in the archive do not amount to much: ‘a handful of documents, a signature here and there, a reported conversation and descriptions from others, some malicious but mostly admiring. Most of the accounts were written or rewritten long after the event’.' (Introduction)