16

a woman of means

Mauritius, 1770–1773

I am scanning through the digitised Mauritius archives – page by page – when, quite by chance, a name catches my eye. The document is written in ornately obscure writing. It is formal and hard to read, but is clearly a land grant dated 12 August 1770. The letter is signed by Pierre Poivre and General Desroches, granting a concession for a block of land on the ‘new street’ that comes down the Petite Montagne, over which Fort Adelaide now towers.

The name on the document is not Commerson’s. It is Jeanne Barret’s.

Under the authority granted by His Majesty and with His Majesty’s pleasure, we have conceded to Dame Jeanne Baret a site located in Port Louis, district of Petite Montagne on which are two buildings, one in stone, the other in wood, which belong to her.

Almost nothing is known about Jeanne’s life in Mauritius – where she lived, what she did, how she dressed or how she supported herself. But just as I had hoped when I started this project, there is new information to find in the archives, if we take the time to look. Here before me is previously unknown evidence that, just one year and eight months after her arrival here, Jeanne became a property owner in her own right.

It was not much – two small buildings – one of which had to be demolished so as not to obstruct the new road. The old French measurements translate to a property that was 5.8 metres deep and just 22.4 metres wide – an area, roughly, of between 117 and 131 square metres. Jeanne’s property, I realise, was the same size as a single-fronted tiny three-room workers cottage I rented years ago in Melbourne.

Like most modern cities, Port Louis today is a mismatch of old and new, of varying architectural cultures and styles. Rampant development has battled against variable building regulations and controls, blocking drains and ignoring the flood-mitigation structures built in colonial times. In 2013, eleven people died in flash floods, which many blamed on poor development regulations.

It takes a while to see the layers of history along the modern streetscape. Old wooden French houses lean over street corners next to the upright pillars of English-era administrative buildings. Shanty shopfronts hang precariously over footpaths in makeshift expansions alongside traditional-style mosques and ornate Catholic churches. But the roads still follow old paths, the creeks and rivers still flow along their old courses beneath the ground, and occasionally surge forth swollen and angry through the streets and underpasses. Today, the ‘new street’ in Petite Montagne is named after Dr Joseph Riviere and leads from the citadel, past the peeling paint and packed windows of tiny shopfronts, towards the grand Jummah Mosque.

I find an old photograph of historic houses on a nearby street from the 1920s. The Citadel rises up in the background. They are old houses even then – their steep slate roofs, decorative eaves and finials and wooden shutters clearly marking their French architectural heritage, for all they are small, cheap and modest. Stone and timber patch together thin buildings just one or two rooms long. Shuttered gables make use of ceiling spaces, overhung by the spreading canopies of tropical trees that still manage to squeeze between the urban sprawl. This must have been the kind of house, the kind of streetscape, that Jeanne moved to and took her next step, away from her impoverished peasant childhood towards a more prosperous future, to financial security and respectability as a property owner.

My first thought on seeing this document, with Poivre’s dramatic flowing signature inscribed beneath, was that perhaps Poivre had stepped in to tidy up the messy personal arrangements of his friend Commerson. But this is not a personal bequest from Poivre. This is one of dozens of standard formal documents that he signed, along with Desroches, as part of their everyday bureaucratic tasks in the colony. Why do I assume that it was Poivre or Commerson who arranged this land acquisition rather than Jeanne herself?

These land concessions were not purchased, but rather granted under conditions of use (agriculture, industry or residential) for twenty or fifty years. Only the income generated from the property was taxed.

Perhaps it was Jeanne herself who requested this property. She may well have realised that she could no longer maintain the required level of respectability while living with Commerson and acting as his servant. Some degree of separation must be observed for propriety. But whatever her motivation, one thing is clear – she was living in Mauritius as a woman, in her own home and with some degree of independence from Commerson.

It’s a shame, I think, that mammals aren’t hermaphrodites. It’s such a common strategy in so many other taxonomic groups, particularly molluscs, and comes in so many shapes and sizes. I think we’ve missed out. Simultaneous, cyclic and sequential – some species are both male and female for their whole lives, others swap back and forth between the sexes, and many start out male and then, when they reach a certain size, become female. Females need to be bigger because they produce eggs, which are larger and more costly to produce than sperm. Female argonauts, for example, are eight times larger and 600 times heavier than the males, which cling to the females and leave a detachable arm to transfer sperm to the female, often mistaken for a worm or parasite. They have reduced themselves to an appendage.

Nobody really pays much attention to the life histories of shells, unless they are commercially important, so I’m not entirely sure which ones are sequential hermaphrodites or not. But I know which of my shells were old animals. You can tell by the weight and the heft. My favourite tiger cowrie must have reached a venerable age. Its shell is thick, smooth and glossy, like well-glazed pottery, quite different from the thin, slip-coated younger shells. I wonder if it was a female. Tiger cowries are supposed to be either male or female, no switching, but I wonder if anyone really knows. No-one seems to have done any ecological studies on them since the 1970s. Maybe it’s just one of those things we assume because no-one has looked carefully enough yet.

Within two months of Jeanne obtaining her house, Commerson was ready to leave for Madagascar. He had been planning to go for some time but he had suffered from several bouts of ill health – gout, rheumatism and dysentery – that kept him confined to his room. Madagascar was also dangerous to visit between December and May, when ‘the season of epidemics’ reigned.

‘I embarked from Port-Louis, Isle of France, October 11, 1770,’ wrote Commerson. ‘I was accompanied by Mr. de Jossigny with the task of drawing everything I find most remarkable in the field. Mr. Poivre has left me nothing to be desired on leaving in the way of facilities and comforts for the trip.’ His expedition was large and well funded.

There is no evidence, either on this trip or on the subsequent trip Commerson made to Réunion (then known as Île Bourbon), that Jeanne travelled with him. The timing of her land grant two months before his departure makes me think that they had planned to secure Jeanne’s future on her own.

Whatever the rationale, it seems most likely that from here on, Jeanne’s collecting days were done. Perhaps she was disappointed to be left behind. Or maybe she was too busy and occupied preparing for her own new adventures ahead. It could well be that she was simply happy to finally be in command of her own journey.

Commerson’s plans are confusing, but it seems he left for Madagascar in October 1770 and arrived at Réunion in December of the same year. He stayed for a year before returning to Mauritius after a trip to Réunion’s famed volcano in December 1771. All in all, he was away from Mauritius for little more than a year.

He made good use of his two months collecting on Madagascar. Even though he was restricted to the vicinity of Fort Dauphin (now Taolagnaro) in the south-east, the records of the global herbarium reveal 331 plants collected by Commerson in Madagascar and a further 496 from Réunion. His notebooks contain written descriptions of 68 Madagascan species. Commerson’s contributions to the region’s botany would have been substantial, had these descriptions ever been published. But this collection seems to have been completed without Jeanne’s assistance.

Commerson had plenty of other assistants now, including a slave boy from Mozambique with an eye for plant collecting, despite Commerson’s disapproval of slavery. Jossigny, however, soon had enough of working for the demanding botanist. This was not the only bad news. While Commerson was on Réunion, the authorities in Paris decided he should not continue his work, because another botanist had already been sent to Madagascar and it would be an unnecessary duplication of expenses. After extensive entreaties from the administrators of both Réunion and Mauritius, Commerson was finally approved to continue his work, but the stress took its toll.

When Commerson returned to Mauritius in January of 1772 he was exhausted but satisfied with his work.

‘I do not know anything that I’m happier with than this job,’ he wrote to Lalande. ‘Nature has given Europe the weak examples of what she can do. It is at Réunion, as also in the Moluccas and the Philippine Islands, that Nature has fixed true pyrotechnical furnaces and laboratories. I have collected astonishing observations on their phenomena, of which the public may expect a large quarto volume, after I have given the Academy the first fruits of my labours.’

Jeanne’s time on Mauritius coincided with a nexus of voyages through the Indian Ocean, of which she was one small part. Bougainville, Kerguelen and Marion du Fresne all passed through here. Mauritius was their staging post, a French safe haven from which to launch or recover from a daunting voyage into the alien, the exotic, the other and the foreign. This isolated outpost in the Indian Ocean sat at the crossroads of many journeys. I am accustomed to thinking of them as distinct, separated and linear, and yet here they all intersect, interfere with one another and go their separate ways.

There is a story that when Ahutoru was in Paris, he came across a mulberry tree. In Tahiti the paper mulberry is grown in every household plantation for making the tapa cloths that play such a central role in Tahitian ceremony and culture. Ahutoru wrapped his arms around this beloved tree and wept in memory of his homeland. It was time for him to go home.

He returned to Mauritius while Commerson was still away in Madagascar, entrusted to the good care of Pierre Poivre, who had befriended him when he first passed through on his way to France in 1768. Poivre was impressed by how Ahutoru remembered everyone who was kind to him, and how enthusiastically he sought out all his old friends. Surely that would have included Jeanne, given that Ahutoru, according to Vivez, ‘took pleasure in being wrapped, powdered and dressed by her, which she did with good grace’ and ‘regretfully’ parted from her when he transferred to the Boudeuse. In a town of some 15,000 people, 80 per cent of whom were slaves, surely over the course of twelve months they would have run into each other.

There is no record of what Ahutoru thought of his time in Paris, or Mauritius, or on the French ships. His Tahitian vocabulary was documented, but nobody recorded the stories he told to the great amusement of his friends. I am surprised that there are no portraits and few descriptions of him. Like Jeanne, he is both invisible and unknowable – a tear in a carefully constructed historic painting that suggests an absence without telling what is missing. Few people even mention him.

His time in Paris had changed him. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre reported that on his way to Paris, Ahutoru had been ‘open, gay and a little of the libertine’, but the man he observed on his return, while still very intelligent, was reserved and polite. He had learnt the rhythms of Parisian society – not just the airs and dances he enjoyed, but also the measure of its time in the form of a watch which dictated the ‘hour of rising, of eating, of going to the opera, of walking, etc.’

The astronomer Alexis-Marie de Rochon, who habitually used the title Abbé, felt that Ahutoru had absorbed the worst aspects of Parisian society.

‘He had acquired to some extent the art of flattering the men he felt he needed. He studied them so as to provide clever caricatures,’ reported Rochon. ‘This Indian was of a frivolity which passed all measure . . . he said that in his country man was born to laugh and amuse himself.’

Everything I read about Ahutoru seems to fit the description of a member of the elite social class the Ariori – his dancing and chanting, his frivolity, the tattoos on his thighs and his beauty, his interest in sex. These are possibly not interests that the Abbé Rochon shared. I would be fascinated to know what Ahutoru thought of French society. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre must have wondered this too.

‘Ahutoru seemed chagrined at his long stay in Mauritius. He walked, but always alone. I perceived him one day in a profound meditation, looking at a black slave at the door of the prison, round whose neck they were riveting a large chain . . .’

Ahutoru never returned to Tahiti and never saw the waters of his Pacific Ocean again. It was a year before Marion du Fresne agreed to take him home, via Madagascar, but he died en route of smallpox. News of this death would have travelled back to Mauritius quickly. I wonder if Jeanne was saddened to hear of Ahutoru’s death, or sympathised with his inability to go home. He may well have been a confronting figure – a large and powerful man who expressed his sexual attraction to her in unambiguous terms. But he had also respectfully acknowledged her position as someone who had chosen to step outside the social confines of her gender. That, in itself, must have been a rare thing.

It was not just the arrival of people to Mauritius that unleashed a torrent of extinctions but the associated raft of introduced species, too. Clearing the land replaced the complex ecologies of forests, grasslands, mangroves and heaths with simplistic monocultures. Plagues of insect pests fell on these new crops, uncontrolled by the predators and constraints that had previously limited them. And like the old woman who swallowed a fly, the solution was always to introduce more new species.

‘It is a misfortune that we do not have here more birds destroying the insects,’ declared Commerson to his friend Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny. ‘This island offers the spectacle of great forests without any woodpeckers. These are the great enemies of cariats [beetles], ants, small and large caterpillars. What service would we not give to this colony if we could to introduce species of shrikes, Dominicans, tyrants, flycatchers, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and other insect-eaters which never attack the grains; small hawks, butcherbirds, the birds of the night to balance the multiplication of granivorous chicks; as well as innocent snakes to destroy rats?’

It was a popular notion: Cossigny thought giant rats from Thailand might be a good idea to manage the plagues of grain-eating domestic rats. Or more cats to eat the rats. Sonnerat was keen on introducing more birds of prey and shrikes, even while the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus) declined to the point where it was the rarest bird in the world. Commerson also wanted frogs, ‘to purge the stinking waters of the prodigious quantity of larvae that swarm there’.

Fortunately many of the introduced species didn’t take, despite the best efforts of the acclimatisers. But even so, Mauritius today still struggles to deal with the impact of cats, toads, monkeys, pigs, rats and deer, just as other island ecologies like Australia contend with their own plagues of cats, foxes, horses, camels, pigs and buffaloes.

I have a particular interest in feral animals, although it wasn’t what I thought I’d work on when I was a child. By the time I left school, I had abandoned my dreams of being a marine biologist. I thought I couldn’t do science because I was bad at maths and had not taken physics or chemistry. That wasn’t true. I took politics and psychology instead, quickly discovered animal behaviour and, by the time I started postgraduate studies overseas, I found myself unexpectedly reclassified as a zoologist. I toyed with different projects – rats, hedgehogs, meerkats and South American bush dogs – but eventually settled on studying the impact of feral American mink on seabird colonies in the offshore islands of the Outer Hebrides. Studying feral animals, I imagined, would be a useful skill when I returned home to a country overrun with them.

I had no idea what the Outer Hebrides of Scotland would be like. My only expectations were shaped by the New Hebrides, the colonial name for Vanuatu, and a belief that the main impediment to field work was too much heat. Neither of these proved useful on the windswept North Sea islands that rarely reached above 20 degrees Celsius in summer. But as I sailed from island to island in a little gaff-rigged cutter kindly lent by a resident – measuring and monitoring tiny tern chicks as they grew; identifying fish bones in mink scats; watching otters dive for fish in the lochs; and eating fresh scallops from the Sound – I realised that I was not so far from what I had once imagined when I had dreamed of being a marine biologist, after all.

In early 1773, there was bad news for Commerson. His friend and protector, Pierre Poivre, and his family, were leaving the island and Commerson himself was seriously ill with dysentery.

The new intendant was Jacques Maillart du Mesle. What he may have lacked in charm or flamboyance, he made up for in solid and reliable administrative skills. He could not particularly see the need for a botanist and, more importantly, he could not find mention of one in his budget either.

Maillart demanded that Commerson move his collections out of the intendant’s residence, forcing Commerson to purchase a new property at 194 Rue des Pamplemousses. It seems that Commerson did not have the ready cash to pay for this house and did so on a promissory note.

Maillart was not entirely cold-hearted. He instructed Jossigny to continue his work with Commerson for some months before allowing him to return to work in Réunion. But Commerson did not seem grateful for these leniencies.

‘I found myself as another Prometheus,’ he complained, ‘nailed to the rock, and I must, with added misery, begin to move from the small apartment in the Intendant’s house, that I have always occupied. Judge what it’s like to move natural history collections for a man who cannot walk two hundred paces without being out of breath.’

Maillart lost his patience.

‘He did not enjoy many friends nor public esteem,’ Maillart told the minister. ‘He was considered to be very debauched, and people regarded him as a wicked man, capable of the blackest ingratitude.’

The ingratitude is probably a fair accusation, but the debauchery and wickedness is unexpected. Perhaps Maillart is referring to Commerson’s admiration for Tahitian free love. Or perhaps, more locally, he is referring to Jeanne and the scandal of living in sin with a servant.

Commerson always planned to go home. He dreamt of being feted in Paris, at least, for his achievements. I imagine Jeanne did too, that she wrote to her family and looked forward one day to being reunited with them.

But then everyone on Mauritius claimed they wanted to go home.

‘Each man is discontented,’ said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. ‘Each man wants to get a fortune – and to leave the place. To hear them talk one would think the island would be again uninhabited, every man declaring he will go away next year, and some of them have held this intention for thirty years past, yet remain to make the same declaration the year ensuing.’

But Commerson never returned to France, never received the acclaim he deserved, never saw the son he left behind. Lalande always said that he had had a sense of foreboding whenever Commerson had mentioned working on his martyrology of botanists.

‘When he mentioned that work to me I foresaw,’ Lalande claimed, ‘even then, that he, himself, would, one day, be placed in this list of martyrs.’

Lalande described his friend ‘in a retired country place, where he had neither emulation, nor even society to animate him, passing whole weeks, night and day, without interruption, sleep, or repose, in botanical studies, and arrangements. He came often from his botanical excursions, in a piteous condition, bruised with falls from the rocks he had been climbing, torn with briars, emaciated with hunger and violent exercise, and with narrow escapes from torrents and precipices, where his life was exposed to the most imminent danger’.

He could have been describing Commerson’s last years on Mauritius.

In early May of 1773, Commerson was in the mountains above Port Louis, in the town of Ville Bague, when he fell ill. He was planning to take a boat to the Grande Rivière on the east coast of the island to recuperate, before travelling to Grand Port, further south. But instead he went to the house of Jean Nicolas Bezac, a surgeon in the district of Flacq.

Commerson was said to have had a deposit on his chest and feared that he was going to die. He apparently had his will made by the priest at Flacq although no-one has found a record of it. He had a few notebooks of natural history plants in a leather wallet and some 300 piastres.

He died at 11.45 in the evening of 13 May.

Maillart dutifully informed the minister and made arrangements to ensure that his papers and effects were sealed and an inventory of them made.

One of Commerson’s biographers tells the story of his death relayed to him by a member of Commerson’s family by marriage, handed down over generations.

‘He had a faithful servant left,’ Montessus reports, ‘who had witnessed all his troubles, all his dangers. His gentle hand was there to render him great service: his word was there for him to bring consolation and exhort him to hope. It is often enough, indeed, when abandoned, for a zealous servant to provide relief from human miseries and Jean Baret was this servant.’

It is a lovely story, a sweet imagining, of loyalty and servitude. And it is retold in various guises throughout the stories of Jeanne and Commerson.

But I’m not sure it’s true. There is no indication that Jeanne was either travelling or living with Commerson any more. Bezac does not mention Commerson’s servant travelling with him; in fact, he explicitly says that Commerson saw no-one but the priest.

Jeanne may not have been at Commerson’s side when he died but there is no denying the constancy of her loyalty. Loyalty, virtue and industry are the three traits mentioned by every single first-hand account of Jeanne. Even if she was not with Commerson when he died, I think it is fair to believe she would have wanted to be.

Jeanne certainly knew when Commerson had died. Just four days later, she wrote to inform Clériade Vachier, their friend in Paris who was in charge of Commerson’s apartment and was, in effect, the executor of his estate. The letter is mentioned by Vachier, briefly and in passing, in the legal documents about Commerson’s estate. Did she write the letter herself or was it dictated to a letter writer? Did she write with the sad duty of informing a close friend of their mutual loss? Or was this a business letter to initiate the execution of Commerson’s will and remind Vachier of her belongings in the apartment and what belonged to her? I am tantalised by the prospect of this letter, which offers the promise of finally reading Jeanne’s own voice, her own words. Such letters reveal so much: conscientious care or a wavering scrawl, tight lines squeezed onto cheap paper or grandly spaced on quality cotton paper, stains, smudges, erasures, misspellings and even tears from a centuries old grief.

I doubt we will ever know. Perhaps the letter is still somewhere, in the Vachier family or departmental archives. But so far, Jeanne’s letter has not been found.

It is impossible to say what the status of Jeanne and Commerson’s relationship was at the time of his death. The true nature of their relationship, personal and professional, is lost in time. But for all their relationship is concealed, I am certain that Commerson retained a deep and abiding respect for Jeanne. He told us himself, in his own distinctive and idiosyncratic voice, of the true value she held for him. He even offered an account of the difficulties she faced as a woman, and very clearly declared that she successfully defended both her health and her virtue.

This note is written in Latin, in his notebooks, which have not been digitised, analysed, published or even fully transcribed. The note in the text that should have been published with the plant Baretia bonafidia records the words Commerson chose to put on the public record about his assistant and companion.

This plant showing deceiving leaves or clothing is named for that heroic woman who changed into manly clothes and with the mind of a woman, traversed the whole globe, a thirst for knowledge as her cause, daring to cross land and sea with us unaware. She so often followed in my footsteps and those of the illustrious Prince Nassau crossing with agility the highest mountains of the Strait of Magellan and the deepest forests of the southern islands. Equal to the armed hunter Diana and the sage and severe Minerva, she evaded ambush by wild animals and humans, not without risk to her life and virtue, unharmed and sound, inspired by some divine power.

Fierce, athletic, determined, intelligent and honourable. Could any woman ask for a better epithet to be left for her in the scientific literature? Could any collector, collaborator or partner ask for a more sincere acknowledgement?

Commerson concluded his dedication with these words to his companion:

She will be the first woman to have made the complete turn of the terrestrial globe, having travelled more than fifteen thousand leagues. We are indebted to her heroism for so many plants never before harvested, all the industrious drying, so many collections of insects and shells, that it would be prejudicial for me, as for that of any naturalist, not to render her the deepest homage in dedicating this flower to her.