15

journey’s end

Mauritius, November 1768–1770

The Boudeuse arrived off Mauritius in early November 1768, just as night fell. They fired their guns to request a light on Gunners Point to guide their safe passage in through the shoals. But there was no response.

They picked their way carefully around the offshore reef and tacked back and forth off the port through the night, firing their guns at intervals, until finally, near midnight, a pilot came to guide them – and promptly drove the ship aground in the shallows of the Bay of Tombs.

Bougainville fumed as he ordered the sails backed while the crew prepared to bail and lower the boats. The ship heaved itself off the shoal, stripping off most of the false keel in the misadventure.

‘What a fate it would have been to come aground in port through the fault of some ignoramus paid by the king and for having followed the rules!’ the commander railed.

The Étoile arrived the following night and more cautiously stood offshore, waiting until daybreak to approach.

They had finally reached home soil, a little outpost of France in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where they would greet old friends, hear news from home, eat their own food and speak their own language. For many it was the end of their long journey.

And for many who have told Jeanne’s story over the years, Mauritius was the end of hers too: a place where she disappeared, died or simply faded from their interest, as if her life was never anything more than a minor accessory to the story of more famous men.

I have never approached Mauritius by sea, so I can only imagine how its sharp distinctive mountains might have risen from the water to welcome weary sailors back to a distant garrison of France. It is striking enough to arrive by air. As my plane tilts on its final descent, there is a sharp gasp from the passengers as we catch a glimpse of our destination in the late-afternoon sun. Angular volcanic peaks jut almost vertical from a green plateau, ringed by glistening white beaches in a sea of the most astonishing blue. Ripples of reef enclose viridian bays protected from oceanic breakers. In its pristine isolation in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Mauritius presents a picture-postcard image of idyllic tropical beauty.

By the time we land, night has fallen with sudden equatorial surety. The dark warmth gusts through the open-plan airport, redolent with the earthy aromas of fecund humidity and decomposition. Tourists struggle to pile overloaded suitcases into taxis, on their way to beachside hotels and villas, and trailing the scent of coconut sunscreen and holiday indulgence. I lower the window of the taxi, enjoying the warmth. As we slip between rows of thick vegetation, I catch glimpses of vast sugarcane fields through tangled regrowth of guava, eucalypt, lantana and privet. Weeds, I think instinctively. I can’t help myself. Tropical paradise or not, Mauritius is famous among conservationists for reasons other than its beauty. It is an island synonymous with extinction. ‘Dead as a dodo,’ as they say. The state symbol of Mauritius is a bird that went extinct so long ago that we barely even know what it looked like.

I’m not travelling to Mauritius to research Jeanne’s life explicitly. My research is never so convenient and linear. I am attending a conference on climate change, and I can hardly resist the temptation to visit the island that was the centre for so many of the French voyages of discovery to the Pacific. Such research always comes in handy one day.

It’s one thing to fly for eight hours across the Indian Ocean to a research location, but it’s quite another to strip back the layers of history, undo centuries of development, revegetate the mountains, learn to recognise the differences between British and French colonialism, and try to see the traces of the past written into the landscape, hidden in the backstreets, in museums and landmarks.

I can barely match the modern Port Louis to the one in the engravings from the late 1700s. I can see the same layout of streets, the same shape of the harbour, but I can’t reconcile the concrete docks, cranes and steel-hulled supertankers with the port that the Étoile and Boudeuse entered, scattered with shipwrecks and debris washed down from the mountains. This redeveloped foreshore filled with high-rise hotels bears no resemblance to the view that Jeanne would have had as she arrived. I take my bearings from the Jardin de la Compagnie, Petite Montagne and the angular mountain Le Pouce that rises behind, but I quickly get lost in a labyrinth of alleyways and side streets that feel more Asian than European, more European than African, and more African than Oceanic.

Port Louis is nothing like ‘the Camp’ Bernardin de Saint-Pierre described when he arrived in Mauritius a few months before Jeanne and Commerson. He thought that the capital was located in the ‘most disagreeable part’ of the island.

‘The town,’ he wrote, ‘has scarcely the appearance of a market town, is built at the bottom of the port, and at the opening of a valley . . . formed by a chain of high mountains, covered with rocks; but without trees or bushes. The sides of these mountains are covered six months in the year with a burning herb, which makes the country appear black, like a colliery. The edge of the rocks, which form this dismal vale, is broken and craggy . . . As for the town or camp, it consists of wooden houses of one story high; each house stands by itself and is enclosed in palisades. The streets are regular enough, but are neither paved nor planted with trees. The ground everywhere so covered, and as it were flaked with rocks, that there is no stirring without danger of breaking one’s neck.’

Perhaps it was not so disagreeable to the expedition members, who vacated their ships like proverbial rats. Everyone wanted to go ashore: to feel firm land beneath their rubbery sea legs; to breath fresh air and taste fresh water; to eat fresh meat and vegetables that had not been salted, stewed, dried or putrefied; to drown their sorrows and forget their hardships in bars and brothels. Only enough crew stayed on board to tend to the needs of the ships.

One hundred and sixty-one men were sent to the hospital to recuperate. Not all of them would return. The fevers of the tropics had not yet claimed all their victims. And the ships, too, needed tender care. A sheltered place behind the causeway linking Tonneliers Island to the mainland provided just the right slope for vessels to nudge themselves ashore on a falling tide – with barely an hour or two to strip off their verdant slimy undergrowth as it dried and stank in the heat, before the sea rose and tipped the ship to the other side. Rinse and repeat.

As the smallest person on Caliph, I remember crawling beneath the hull to clean near the keel, a task I completed neither efficiently nor enthusiastically. It was my second-least favourite chore of childhood, surpassed only by hanging upside down in the chain locker to stow the wet, muddy, finger-crushing anchor chain and narrowly beating pumping out the bilges. So much for the romance of the sea.

The Boudeuse’s sheathing was worm-eaten and the masts needed repair, but it was otherwise sound. Bougainville transferred all the healthy sailors to his ship and prepared to depart. The Étoile would need a good month longer in harbour to make all the necessary repairs. There was no need for the ships to travel together on this homeward stretch.

On the eve of his departure, Bougainville tallied up the gains and losses to his crew.

‘I left behind for the King’s service in the colony,’ he recorded, ‘the Reverend Father Lavaisse, chaplain; Messrs Fetch, volunteer; Verron, pilot observer; Oury and Oger, first and second pilots; De Romainville, infantry lieutenant sailing in the Étoile; Pierre Duclos’ son, volunteer ditto; Commerçon des Humbert, naturalist ditto and his valet, a girl as a man.’

Commerson and his ‘girl as a man’ would have been met by Pierre Poivre, the intendant or administrator of the island. Poivre was a handsome and charismatic man by all accounts – tall, good-humoured and with a profound knowledge of, and passion for, natural history. It was Poivre who would finally break the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade, establishing nutmeg, pepper, cinnamon, star anise and cloves as well as avocados, mangoes and cocoa crops in the French colonies.

Poivre and Commerson were friends. They met in 1758, when they both lived in the Lyon area. They met again in Paris in 1766, when they were both preparing for their respective departures: Commerson, with Jeanne, on their expedition around the world; and Poivre, with his new wife Françoise Robin, to take up his post as the administrator of Mauritius. It is likely that Poivre would have met Jeanne in Paris, or at least have known of her contribution to Commerson’s work. Whether he knew she would be travelling with Commerson is uncertain, but he would have known who she was when she arrived in Mauritius.

Poivre knew Commerson was coming to Mauritius and he desperately needed a botanist to help him with his garden at Pamplemousses and to document the potential of the native flora. Bougainville, preparing to leave for France, no longer had any need of Commerson’s services.

It is tempting to imagine that Bougainville disembarked Commerson and Jeanne at Mauritius to avoid any controversy when he returned home. If and when they returned to France their conduct would no longer be Bougainville’s problem. But Bougainville had never seemed particularly concerned by the illegality of Jeanne’s actions.

‘The Court, I believe, will forgive him for breaking the ordinances,’ he said.

In any case, a great many people transferred from ship to shore at Mauritius. Bougainville replaced all his sickly sailors with healthy ones ready to make the trip back to France. He left behind all his expeditionary stores, a platoon of soldiers, and all the building materials and medicines he could spare. Both his scientists, Véron and Commerson, stayed on to complete their research. Véron wished to track the transit of Venus in India. Commerson had his eye on Madagascar. There was still much work to be done.

For many years I puzzled over the origin of the strange little broken rings that so often washed ashore on our beaches. They looked like some kind of plumbing fitting – a flange or washer – moulded out of ‘plasticised’ sand. It took me some time to discover that these collars of sand encased the eggs of the predatory moon snail, which is also responsible for drilling holes in cockle shells.

The egg cases of molluscs are often washed up on the shore, mysterious and diverse. Not all of them are as elaborate, or as carefully cared for, as that of the paper nautilus. Some are plain and utilitarian. Others are elegant, spiralled, symmetrical, ribbed, fluted, coiled, filamentous and beaded – like some space-age alien’s medical equipment. They are as diverse as the creatures they grow into.

Some shells guard their eggs, others equip them with robust housing and leave them to their own devices. Some of the eggs hatch into tiny shells, miniature adults, but more often in a marine environment they hatch as free-floating larvae. These trochophores metamorphose into variously shaped veliger phases, hitchhiking on the ocean currents or on fish, to disperse before finally settling – and emerging butterfly-like – into their final form. Some stick themselves to the rocks near where they were born and resist all efforts to be dislodged. Others readily let go and drift, confident that they will land somewhere else where they can be equally at home.

Not all of us know what our final form might be. It takes a while to find the right place, the right life, to settle into.

There is something about the tropics – that rich abundance of biodiversity, the lush forests and fertile soils, the speed of growth – that inspires both admiration and complacency. The garden surrounding our house in north Queensland was filled with both exotic and native wonders. Green tree frogs took up residence in the toilet and the kettle. Geckos and bright jumping spiders patrolled the ceilings. Happy plants that sold for $50 a foot in Sydney soared up to my first-floor window, filling the night air with their pungent purple perfume. A giant raintree cast its lacy umbrella over the backyard and house. Orange starbursts of epiphytic native orchids wove through the shrubbery. Delicate ferns with iridescent shades of blue and pink coated the bank. Mowing the grass was a weekly task simply to avoid a jungle.

My parents took to the overgrown garden with vigour, stripping the ferns back to bare earth and removing the happy plants from my window to make way for new stumps under the house. But the garden did not recover as quickly as we thought it would. The red earth baked hard beneath the unaccustomed sunlight, soil washing in deeply carved rivulets down the bank and onto the driveway. Across the river, in the farmland and canefields, you could see the same pattern exacerbated – land stripped bare and unable to regenerate in the unforgiving conditions. Cleared land cut into forest, which sealed their open wounds with vigorous climbers and invasive weeds. Small wounds can heal, as our garden did, but larger gouges leave openings for invasion, infestation, infection and disruption.

My classmates did not see always this. They had grown up surrounded by vigorous healthy forests that seemed insurmountable and inaccessible. They had so much water that they routinely left hoses running full bore into the gutters. Few of them had travelled – even Brisbane was the ‘far south’. Some of them had never crossed the ranges inland to the desert country. The notion of environmental protection was anathema to many of them.

One of the maths teachers spoke to our geography class about conservation and the threats to the nearby Daintree Rainforest. He spoke quietly, as if confessing a sin. He asked us not to mention it to anyone for fear of losing his job or suffering reprisals. He sweated profusely and his hands shook as he spoke.

The Daintree National Park should have been safe from development, particularly along the coast where the Great Barrier Reef adjoins the land. But the local council wanted to push a road through to open up access to the north. Despite vocal opposition, the roadworks began in 1983. Predictably, the wet season halted construction for six months as landslides deposited mountains of silt onto the World Heritage–listed Great Barrier Reef.

How easily such riches are lost and despoiled, sacrificed to human growth, expansion and survival. The road is sealed now, and few would even remember the thoughtless damage done by its construction. But the reef itself continues to suffer from a thousand cuts – run-off from agricultural and industrial developments, or overfishing, or dumping from dredging, or broadscale coral bleaching from an ever-warming climate. The great reef may well be beyond saving now.

We have lost our reef-builders in every mass extinction event the earth has witnessed. They are always the first to go, and each time it has taken over 100 million years for new species to take their place. They do not recover quickly and there is no reason to think they will this time either. They will join the list of other human-caused extinctions, which is so much larger on long-isolated land masses like Australia and Mauritius.

Isolated for millions of years, the rich endemic plant and animal life of Mauritius diversified and evolved almost without any mammals – without humans. Fruit bats were the only mammalian colonists, and bird life flourished – much of it unique to the island.

Despite lying just off the coast of Africa, both Madagascar and Mauritius were isolated from human contact until relatively recently. Remarkably, Madagascar was first settled, not by Africans a short distance from the west, but by Austronesians on outrigger canoes from Borneo, in about 550–350 BCE. The tiny pinprick island of Mauritius took even longer for humans to find. It was depicted on Arab maps in 1502, and by 1507–13 the first Portuguese sailors visited the area, giving the Mascarene island group its name. In 1598 an expedition of Dutch ships on their way to Indonesia landed here after bad weather, naming the island Mauritius after one of their ships, and establishing the location as a safe stopover. Like many introduced species, establishment of a viable human population on Mauritius took effort and persistence. For more than a century, the early Dutch settlements struggled to survive in the face of cyclones, illness and starvation, yet left a considerable legacy. By the time the Dutch abandoned the island, they had introduced sugar cane and rats, eradicated the dodos and giant tortoises, and cleared large swathes of forests of ebony.

The French moved quickly to claim the abandoned colony in 1715, and the arrival of the Breton governor Bertrand-François Mahé de la Bourdonnais in 1735 saw Port Louis successfully established as an administrative and port facility with the foundations of a viable agricultural industry.

By the time Jeanne and Commerson arrived on Mauritius, the long fingers of deforestation were already spreading up the valleys from the main coastal settlements into the hinterland. Within 50 years, when the English had taken over the island, almost half of the land was cleared, and within a century less than a quarter of the native vegetation remained. Today less than 2 per cent survives. The rest is cultivated for agriculture or covered with a mongrel mix of introduced environmental weeds.

It’s hard to even imagine the ebony forests for which Mauritius was once famous. Ebony provided the highly prized black timber for piano keys, furniture and jewellery. The largest trees were thousands of years old, their stocks soon exhausted by harvesting. Today, the remaining protected forests are dominated by small trees and harvesting is no longer possible. Almost a third of the island’s endemic plant species are critically endangered, some represented by just a handful of known specimens.

In the 400 years since human settlement, over 100 plant and animal species have disappeared, including two giant tortoise species, a giant skink and two fruit bats, thirteen birds, and at least thirteen endemic snails. Like the dodo, many went extinct before even being described – the early victims of rats from ships, as well as introduced cats, mongooses and monkeys.

It’s impossible to protect things that you don’t understand, things you don’t even have names for. Commerson and Jeanne’s work could have made a huge contribution to protecting and valuing the forests and the animals they supported. The palms alone were worthy of their own book, or perhaps a volume in a series on the natural history of the islands. What difference might an early publication on the unique species of these islands have had? We will never know.

While Jeanne and Commerson settled into their new land-based life, the Boudeuse headed back to France, arriving at Saint-Malo on 16 March 1769 and thus completing France’s first successful circumnavigation of the globe. And when Ahutoru stepped onto the docks at Saint-Malo, he became the first Pacific Islander to discover France. Unlike those who travelled to his country and based their observations on a brief and bloody stay, Ahutoru was an attentive and diplomatic guest when he arrived in Paris, despite his lack of French and his host’s lack of Tahitian.

‘He went out by himself every day, and passed through the whole city without once missing or losing his way,’ said Bougainville. ‘He often made some purchases, and scarce ever paid for things beyond their real value. The only show which pleased him was the opera, as he was extremely fond of dancing. He knew perfectly well on what days this kind of entertainment was played; he went to it by himself, paid at the door the same as everybody else.’

Furthermore, he made friends – and seemed to value the gift of their kindness and concern much more than he did any material offerings.

‘Were these Savages?’ the generally pragmatic Fesche had asked of the Tahitians. ‘Certainly not, on the contrary we were the ones who had behaved like barbarians and they acted like gentle, humane and well-regulated people. We murdered them and they did only good to us.’

Bougainville, meanwhile, was kept busy publishing his account of the journey. Many considered the voyage a success, and Bougainville would go on to have a long and influential career in the navy, sciences and political diplomacy. He had completed the first French circumnavigation, with the loss of only seven lives. The public appetite for travel narratives was strong, their value as documents of national status was well appreciated, and the importance of publishing his own account before any of his other officers could was pressing. If Bougainville needed convincing of the urgency, a letter sent to the French Academy of Sciences, and published in the Mercure de France in November 1769, would only have reinforced his haste.

The letter had been sent by Commerson to his friend Jérôme Lalande shortly after they arrived in Mauritius, who forwarded it on for publication. His ‘Postscript: On the Island of New Cythera or Tahiti’ (as Ahutoru called it) was a sensation. A land ‘without vices’, recognising ‘no other god but love’ and populated with beautiful sisters of the ‘utterly naked Graces’ without shame or modesty. Perhaps it is fortunate that Jeanne’s family were unlikely to be reading this publication.

European imaginations required no further prompting to adopt the notion of the ‘noble savage’ and extol the virtues of a state of nature, for all Ahutoru assured them that reality did not live up to their Romantic notions.

Bougainville’s account of the voyage was published 1771, and was quickly translated into English by George Forster, who travelled with Cook on his first circumnavigation, thereby giving him the authority to contribute numerous quibbling and often irritating commentaries in the footnotes of Bougainville’s account. As Bougainville himself noted acerbically in his introduction:

‘I am a voyager and a seaman; that is, a liar and a stupid fellow, in the eyes of that class of indolent haughty writers, who in their closets reason ad infinitum on the world and its inhabitants, and with an air of superiority, confine nature with the limits of their own invention.’

It is hard to know what impact the publications about the voyages in France might have had, if any, on the lives of Jeanne and Commerson. But in the long run, the publication of Bougainville’s narrative publicly identified Jeanne as the first woman to sail around the world. And later, Denis Diderot’s idealistic and fictionalised Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, written in 1772 but not published until 1792, irrevocably connected Jeanne in the public imagination with Commerson and his accounts of Tahiti’s free and easy life of pleasure.

If Jeanne Barret had been with child from a rape in New Ireland, she would have been three and a half months pregnant on her arrival in Mauritius.

Even though I know there is no evidence of a rape and that these events are implausible and unlikely, I still feel obliged to search for proof. Perhaps this is the curse of the scientist – rather than searching for evidence that supports our theories, we compulsively search for evidence that will prove them wrong.

So I keep looking for a child born in the middle of April of 1769. Barret is and was a common name on the island. But I can find no records of Barrets born in 1769 or the 1770s in Mauritius. I search through a website of Catholic parish registers transcribed by volunteers, but there are no records of any births under Barret, Bonnefoy or Commerson, or any myriad alternative spellings.

That’s not to say they weren’t there. I know that records exist that are missing from this list. An absence of evidence is not proof of anything. Some proof might turn up in the future. But I can find nothing to support an already implausible argument.

When the Étoile finally departed for France, Jeanne’s connection with the expedition ended. If Commerson was no longer the King’s Naturalist on the Bougainville expedition, was he still employed by the crown, could he still draw his 2000 livres per annum salary and could Jeanne still be paid a measly twelve livres per month to be his servant?

By some wrangling, Poivre managed to gain approval for Commerson’s expenses to be transferred, so that he received 3000 livres for salary and housing plus payment for an illustrator at 1800 livres. There is no mention of a servant’s salary, although Commerson’s own budget would have been more than enough to accommodate that small expense if he chose. Biographers differ in their accounts of where Commerson lived. Some say Poivre installed Commerson and Jeanne in a large house next to his own. But Commerson’s brother-in-law, Father Beau, recalled differently.

‘Poivre, who was then intendant of the Isle of France, declared himself the zealous patron of this scholar,’ said Father Beau. ‘This generous protector gave him an apartment in his house large enough to be able to prepare and conserve the plants, birds, insects, shells and quadrupeds for Commerson’s collection. For almost four years he gave him his table, servants to serve him and finally very generously provided him with all the services necessary to make his talents productive.’

The Poivre residence was Château Mon Plaisir in the Pamplemousses Gardens just outside town. Was this where Commerson lived, with Jeanne in the servants’ quarters? It seems an idyllic location for a botanist, within a botanic garden, watching over the progress of the seeds and plants he brought back for his friend as they germinated and grew.

The garden at the time was filled with cinnamon trees, palms, a varnish tree and the only specimen of Tahitian mango tree to have escaped its homeland – which can only have been brought by seed or as a sapling by Commerson. There were ‘a multitude of trees and shrubs arranged in the finest order’, plants both rare and useful according to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

‘A brook circulates and maintains the freshness of these charming places: the bamboo alleys that surround it, and which resemble from afar our willows, the beauty of the plain and hills dotted here with houses and groves, and even the neighbouring church and bell tower add to the pleasure of the landscape: it gives it an air of France.’

Today, the Pamplemousses Gardens are cool and shady, popular with visitors and locals alike. The carpark is full and buses regularly disgorge restless passengers who tumble hurriedly into the gardens, before slowing and dispersing under the meditative influence of their surroundings. A sign exhorts me to keep to the path, while another warns not to walk under the trees. All the paths are lined with trees. The fierce biting sun persuades me to ignore the risk of falling branches.

I walk under vast twisted fig trees that guard the gate towards the open lawns featuring an arboretum of trees, decorative shrubs and elegant palms. The Tahitian breadfruit tree filters light through its deeply lobed leaves. I admire the pink and white flowers fallen from a tree before I realise that it is the box fruit or sea poison tree that Bougainville wanted to name bonnet carré after the square medical graduate’s cap that Commerson would have worn.

A row of young saplings has been planted along a path by various dignitaries, commemorating the significant plants of the island, both native and introduced. A nearby marble column is inscribed with familiar names, beginning with the founding governor Labourdonnais, who first purchased Mon Plaisir as a vegetable garden for the colony, then Poivre, Cossigny and Commerson. Other familiar names, from other stories, are scattered below – Rochon, Baudin, Lahaie. Nearby, a bust of Pierre Poivre, with tip-tilted nose, smiles cheerily at visitors. He looks the perfect model for the Peter Pepper who picked a peck of pickled peppers from beneath Dutch noses to grow in his garden.

Although the garden began with Labourdonnais, it is Poivre who is regarded as its founding director, the one who transformed it from a utilitarian vegetable and flower garden into the first botanical garden in the tropics. He restored the neglected Château Mon Plaisir, which still stands in the heart of the Pamplemousses Gardens, as a home for his wife and children.

Mon Plaisir is a simple but elegant ‘plantation-style’ building: two storeys with wide verandahs all around, a simple slate roof and multiple large French doors from every high-ceilinged room. Unlike much colonial English architecture, this early French colonial approach adapted swiftly to the climate. The building is closed when I visit, but the shutters on the French doors are open, allowing a glimpse of light-filled entrance rooms with glossy timberwork and a carved staircase leading to the upper floors. It would have been a comfortable, but by no means spacious, home. I cannot see how Commerson’s collections would have made convivial housemates in this modest chateau. As Lalande recalled, ‘it was difficult to find shelter elsewhere with the prodigious clutter of his collections, and the kind of infection caused by his plants and fish, an unbearable smell for anyone who did not share his passion for natural history’.

My memory recalls to me the faintly fetid aroma of my cabin’s cupboards as a child, reminiscent of garden fertiliser, which came from the more freshly prepared shell specimens. I did not mind the smell. It was nothing compared to the stench of actually cleaning the specimens that had been hung in the sun for several days sealed in a plastic bag. I held my breath to avoid gagging as I drained the toxic black liquid over the side before rinsing them in a bucket. It was a smell that lingered.

But for all I like the idea of living in Mon Plaisir, I soon realise that neither Pierre Poivre nor Commerson, nor Jeanne, lived there.

‘I hardly ever enjoy M. Poivre’s company,’ wrote his wife pointedly to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. ‘I would be charmed to talk to him a little if he comes on Sunday, and I would not be sorry if he came alone.’

While his wife and family enjoyed the more pleasant and healthy climate of the country, a 12-kilometre horseride from town, Poivre’s own archives reveal that he lived in the Hôtel de l’Intendance, opposite Government House in the centre of Port Louis. It was in this more spacious building that Commerson also lived and worked with all his collections.

But I don’t know where Jeanne lived, or in what guise. As either a man or a woman, she seems to have slipped into the fabric of island society almost without notice. I don’t think she would have stayed in her masculine guise and continued her work with Commerson. Commerson was now Poivre’s guest and Poivre knew that Jeanne was a woman. I wonder if the intendent of the colony could afford to be associated with such scandalous behaviour. And so I assume she transformed, on her return to French society, back into a woman. Either way, her presence certainly did not seem to cause any great fuss. Neither Poivre nor Bernardin de Saint-Pierre mentioned any scandal when Bougainville’s ships arrived. There was hardly any mention of Jeanne at all.

This absence is not for a shortage of documents. An astonishing archive exists online of all the documents relating to Pierre Poivre in Mauritius. It is a digital treasure trove. Every letter, every inventory, every report – transcribed, typed up, digitised and annotated by Jean-Paul Morel. There are thousands of documents here. The archive is searchable. The name Commerson prompts 114 documents. But in all the pages of letters, complaints, irritations, instructions and orders, Jeanne Barret’s name never appears. I search for Baret, Baré, Barré, Bonnefoi, Bonnefoy, but there is nothing. I search for femme, fille, valet, domestique, serviteur, gouvernante. I can find no reference to Commerson’s loyal and hardworking servant. She is invisible, like an item of clothing or a piece of luggage that follows him wherever he goes – unremarked and unnoticed – perhaps to be discarded when no longer required.

There are three large folio boxes in the archives of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, filled with images of the plants Commerson and Jeanne collected. They are drawn in exquisite and precise detail by Paul Philippe Sanguin de Jossigny, mostly pencil sketches, some in ink. Jossigny frames his images beautifully, sometimes cropping larger specimens so that more detail can be seen – giving the images a modern look.

Jossigny arrived in Mauritius as aide-de-camp to the new governor, François Julien du Dresnay, better known as Desroches, in June 1769. His artistic talent was immediately recognised, and Desroches allowed him to work for Commerson alongside 21-year-old Pierre Sonnerat, the great-nephew and godson of Pierre Poivre. Commerson was very happy with his two illustrators, ‘who make me the most beautiful ichthyography that has yet appeared’. The feeling was not mutual. Jossigny found Commerson too exacting and demanding. It took all of Poivre’s tact and persuasion to convince Jossigny to remain at his task.

As I search through the archive, it takes me a while to realise what these drawings are for. They are sorted by taxonomy: ferns, fungi, grasses, cycads and palms. Sometimes there are brief Latin descriptions on the back in Commerson’s hand. A few also bear Commerson’s signature – an ornate official signature, an imprimatur, complete with his doctoral qualifications. Or instructions for the engraver underneath the image – ‘remove three leaves in shadow’ or ‘ensure all pores are illustrated’. Many of them are numbered as plates. Commerson was preparing the manuscript for a book – Histoire Naturelle des Îles de France et de Bourbon. These completed plates, signed off and numbered, show that he was well underway.

Now he had a team to help him with this grand task, perhaps he no longer needed Jeanne. But Commerson was single-minded in his drive to complete his life’s work. He spent every penny he had, and some that he didn’t, on this task, maintaining a driving pace that not everyone could keep up with. I cannot imagine that he would give up a patient, trained and hardworking assistant like Jeanne so easily. There was still plenty of work to do, drying and preparing specimens. If she was as valuable as everyone says, I can’t imagine Commerson letting her go.

In the time Jeanne and Commerson were in Port Louis, Pierre Poivre’s wife Françoise wrote to the incurably romantic and chronically depressed Bernardin de Saint-Pierre about his life choices. She advised him to retire to the country and live a simple life. Had she been a man of independent means, she said, she would not marry a well-off woman but rather ‘the daughter of a labourer whose greatest merit would be to love me, to take care of my house, and to raise her children. Admit, sir, that this life would have its charms.’

Françoise Robin would have known Jeanne too. I can’t help but wonder if Jeanne was the model for this loyal, faithful and hardworking peasant woman who might make someone’s life so happy.

Amongst the Mauritian plants that Commerson found, one puzzled him greatly.

‘It is a charming shrub,’ he wrote to a friend knowledgeable about Mauritian botany. ‘I am frantic, either because of the singularity of its leaves, or because it gives me a new kind whose character is unique. I am asking you to tell me, in regards to the leaves, whether the larger ones (the better formed ones) are at the top of the tree and whether the most irregular ones are set on the lower branches. The fruit, the fruit don’t forget about it, please. In the past I named it bonafidia for this reason.’

Today this rare plant is not known by the name Commerson first gave it, but as Turraea rutilans, and is found only in the dense, high-altitude forests of the Mauritian mountains. It was once found on Réunion but hasn’t been seen there recently. The leaves of the plant, like many in this genus, are ‘heterophyllous’, with many different shaped leaves. Early in his life, Commerson had been a devotee of a system of taxonomy based on leaf shape, rather than the Linnean focus on flowers and nuts. Turraea rutilans illustrates why the ‘external’ garb of the plant, or its leaf shape, can be a deceptive identification tool. Commerson named this plant after its perplexing ‘vestitu’ or ‘foliis’ – its clothing or leaves.

And it was for this trait that he named the plant Baretia bonifidia, after Jeanne.

Commerson found other plants belonging to this genus, all of which exhibited the characteristic variation in leaf shape. Jossigny illustrated three of them – Baretia bonafidia with its slightly rippled leaves, Baretia eumonia with oval-shaped leaves and Baretia astata with lobed or oak-shaped leaves.

The flowers of the plants in this genus are bisexual or hermaphrodites. I frequently find comments, on blogs and in serious papers, suggesting that these ‘very doubtful sexual characteristics’ were the reason Commerson named the plant after Jeanne. This seems like an unlikely thing for a botanist to have said. Around 90 per cent of all flowering plants are hermaphroditic, having both male and female organs. Commerson would surely not have found this trait either distinctive or even particularly interesting, for all his biographers do. I can find no record that Commerson ever said this.

There are thirteen specimens of this genus in the Muséum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle herbarium collected by Commerson, representing seven different species: Turraea rutilans, T. lanceolata, T. oppositifolia, T. ovata, T. thouarsiana, T. herbacea and T. lateriflorus. None of them are recorded under the name Baretia. Commerson never published his description and no-one else published it for him, so the first published description is that of Turraea, with various incarnations as Quivisia or Gilbertia.

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. This history is literally written all over Commerson’s specimens in the museum herbarium, affixed with multiple labels of differing names written by different hands. Many of Commerson’s specimens only have a place of collection and his name written on them. Some don’t even have that.

But Turraea rutilans has one small panel written in Latin, in ink that has bled brown into the paper over the centuries. All of Commerson’s technical descriptions are in Latin, the common language of early science and botany, of which Commerson was a master. The writing is Commerson’s, engraving the name of his hardworking helpmate, Jeanne, forever into the scientific record.

Baretia bonafidia – the true or authentic Barret.