Vox Meditantis

Jeanne Baret (1740-1807) stands as a towering figure in the annals of scientific exploration—not merely for being the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, but for the extraordinary botanical knowledge and fieldwork expertise she brought to one of the most significant scientific expeditions of the 18th century. Her mastery of plants, from the medicinal herbs of rural France to the exotic specimens of Brazil, Madagascar, and the Pacific islands, revolutionised our understanding of global plant distribution and classification. Despite systematic erasure from historical records, her contributions to botanical science—including the discovery of Bougainvillea and collection of over 6,000 plant specimens—remain foundational to modern botany. In an age when women were barred from ships, universities, and scientific institutions, Jeanne’s story reveals how determination, scientific acumen, and sheer audacity could overcome the most entrenched barriers. Today, as we confront questions of gender equity in STEM fields and recognise the vital role of indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge, her legacy offers both inspiration and sobering lessons about whose contributions to science are remembered—and whose are deliberately forgotten.

Madame Baret, thank you for joining us today. You’ve been called “the first woman to circumnavigate the globe,” but I suspect that title barely scratches the surface of your achievements. You were, first and foremost, a botanist. Tell me about your earliest memories with plants.

Ah, but you see, that’s already where the story gets muddled. The gentlemen of history—they love their grand titles, don’t they? “First woman to circumnavigate the globe”—as if I set out to be some sort of curiosity. I was after plants, monsieur. Always plants.

I was born in La Comelle, a nothing village in Burgundy where we knew every herb within a day’s walk. My mother died when I was barely walking, but the old women—they taught me which leaves would ease a fever, which bark would stop a flux. They called us femmes herboristes—herb women. We were the ones who knew. Not the physicians with their Latin and their bloodletting, but us. We knew which plants would keep a child alive through winter.

This traditional knowledge—it was passed down orally, wasn’t it? How did you transition from that folk botanical tradition to what we might recognise as formal scientific methodology?

“Formal scientific methodology”—you make it sound so grand! Look, I could identify a plant by its scent in the dark, tell you its properties by the texture of its leaves, predict where it would grow by reading the soil. When I met Monsieur Commerson in the early 1760s, he was astonished by what I knew. Here was this learned physician, trained at Montpellier, and I—an illiterate peasant girl—was correcting his field identifications.

But here’s what your histories don’t tell you: we learned from each other. Yes, he taught me to read and write, to use his magnifying glass and understand his classification systems. But I taught him how to see. How to read a landscape for what it would yield. How to prepare specimens so they would last a sea voyage. Those wooden plant presses everyone talks about me hauling up mountains? I redesigned them. Made them lighter, more efficient.

So when the Bougainville expedition was being planned, Commerson’s request to bring you along—that was based on your scientific expertise, not merely personal attachment?

Personal attachment. Always they reduce it to that, don’t they? Yes, Philibert and I were lovers—I won’t dissemble about it. But that man was no fool. He was the king’s botanist, chosen for the most important scientific expedition France had ever mounted. You think he’d risk that appointment to smuggle aboard some lovesick peasant girl?

He needed me because I could do things he couldn’t. Climb trees for specimens—properly, safely, without damaging the plants. Identify medicinal properties by taste and smell—essential when you’re exploring unknown territories. Prepare specimens under impossible conditions—in rain, in heat, on a pitching ship. He was brilliant at classification and description, but fieldwork? That was my domain.

The disguise was necessary, yes, but it was a professional necessity. French naval law forbade women on ships—not out of concern for our delicate sensibilities, but because we were seen as disruptive to the natural order. Well, I disrupted it quite thoroughly, didn’t I?

Walking us through your methodology—when you encountered a new species, what was your process?

First, observation in its natural habitat. Where is it growing? What other plants surround it? What insects visit it? I would take careful notes—yes, by then I could write quite well—about flowering patterns, leaf arrangements, root systems.

Then the practical assessment: is it edible? Medicinal? Poisonous? This tells you more than books ever will. A bitter smell often means alkaloids—potentially medicinal, potentially dangerous. Sweet scents might indicate compounds useful for preservation or flavouring.

Only then would we collect specimens—and this is where my expertise was crucial. The standard method was to take a complete plant: roots, stem, leaves, flowers if present. But tropical plants? Many are enormous. I developed techniques for collecting representative samples that would preserve the essential characteristics while being practical for transport.

We’d press them immediately using my modified plant presses—lighter frames, better absorption papers. I learned to adjust the pressure and drying time based on plant moisture content and ambient humidity. Too little pressure, and they’d rot; too much, and you’d lose crucial structural details.

And you did this while maintaining your disguise as “Jean Baret”?

“Jean Baret”—as if changing a name could change what I was. The binding of my breasts was agony in the tropics. Loose clothing helped conceal my figure, but made fieldwork harder. I had to be twice as competent as any man just to avoid suspicion.

But here’s what amuses me: they wanted to believe I was male. It was easier for them. A male botanist’s assistant made sense in their world. A woman who could outperform their ship’s doctor in plant identification? Impossible.

The Tahitians saw through it immediately, of course. They looked at how I moved, how I interacted with plants—they knew. Europeans see what they expect to see. Indigenous peoples see what is.

Tell me about the Bougainvillea discovery. How did that happen?

Ah, now that’s a story worth telling. We were in Rio de Janeiro, and Philibert was laid up with his leg ulcer—a persistent, festering thing that plagued him throughout the voyage. I was doing solo collecting expeditions into the forest.

I came across these climbing vines with the most extraordinary bracts—brilliant magenta, purple, orange. Beautiful, yes, but what caught my attention was the structure. The bracts were protecting tiny, inconspicuous flowers, and the way they grew suggested interesting ecological relationships.

I collected several specimens, noting their habitat preferences—they loved full sun but tolerated some shade, preferred well-drained soil, seemed to have complex relationships with certain bird species for pollination. When I brought them back to the ship, Philibert was fascinated by the botanical structure. He classified them, described them formally—and named them after our captain.

How did it feel to see your discovery credited to others?

Expected. What was I expecting, honestly? Recognition? A place in the Academy of Sciences?

Here’s what galls me: it wasn’t just the Bougainvillea. Over 6,000 plant specimens we collected on that voyage. I did the majority of the fieldwork, especially after Philibert’s health declined. I developed preservation techniques that meant those specimens arrived in France in better condition than anyone expected. I identified dozens of species with medicinal properties that could have transformed French colonial medicine.

But the published accounts? “Monsieur Commerson’s botanical collections.” His name on everything. As if plants collected themselves and walked onto our ship.

When your identity was revealed in the Pacific, how did the dynamics change?

Practically? Not much. I continued working because they needed me to. Bougainville was no fool—he’d invested too much in the expedition’s scientific goals to lose his most capable field botanist over naval regulations.

But the pretence was over, and that brought its own challenges. Some of the crew became… aggressive. They saw me as available now, you understand. There were incidents. Let’s just say I had to make it clear I was not defenceless.

The officers mostly treated me with professional respect—by then, my competence was undeniable. But I was always aware I existed at their sufferance. One word from Bougainville, and I could have been put ashore at any port.

You remained in Mauritius when the expedition returned to France. Why?

Several reasons, all practical. First, Philibert was too ill to travel further—staying made sense professionally. Second, Pierre Poivre, the island’s administrator, wanted botanists to experiment with agricultural plants that might benefit French colonial interests. Good work, good pay.

But honestly? I was tired of performing femininity for French society’s benefit. In Mauritius, I was useful. I could own property—those two houses in Port Louis I bought in 1770. I could run a business—that liquor license wasn’t charity, it was entrepreneurship. I could practice botany without constantly justifying my existence.

You eventually returned to France and married. How did you reconcile your extraordinary earlier life with more conventional expectations?

Jean Dubernat was a good man—a former soldier who’d sailed with us from Mauritius. He knew exactly who I was and what I’d accomplished. There was no pretence between us.

But returning to France? That was difficult. The stories about me had grown quite wild in my absence. Some portrayed me as a romantic heroine, others as a scandalous woman. Few recognised me as a scientist. The specimens I’d helped collect were displayed in the King’s Garden, but my role in gathering them? Erased.

I tried to maintain botanical connections, corresponding with naturalists, sharing my observations about plant cultivation in different climates. But without institutional support, without recognition, it was like shouting into the wind.

Looking back, how do you view the relationship between your traditional “herb woman” knowledge and the formal botanical science of the expedition?

They were never separate, monsieur. That’s what the learned gentlemen never understood. My traditional knowledge wasn’t “folk wisdom” to be dismissed—it was empirical science, passed down through generations of careful observation.

When I could identify a plant’s medicinal properties by smell, I was applying biochemical knowledge that wouldn’t be formally understood for another century. When I knew which soils would support which species, I was practicing what you’d now call ecological science. When I modified collection techniques for tropical conditions, I was solving problems that academic botanists had never encountered.

The formal classification systems, the Latin names, the published descriptions—those were important tools. But they were tools applied to knowledge that women like me had been accumulating for centuries. Science isn’t just what happens in laboratories and universities. It’s also what happens in gardens and forests, in the hands of people who work with plants every day.

What would you want people to understand about your contributions to botany?

That I was not an anomaly. There were women throughout Europe and in every colony with profound botanical knowledge. We kept gardens, we prepared medicines, we understood plant relationships in ways that informed all of agriculture and medicine. But because our work happened outside formal institutions, because we were women, because many of us were poor—our contributions were rendered invisible.

My circumnavigation was remarkable not because I was uniquely gifted, but because circumstances allowed me to apply my knowledge in an unprecedented context. How many other women with similar expertise never got that chance?

And the knowledge itself—I want people to understand that plants don’t respect artificial boundaries between “traditional” and “scientific” knowledge. A specimen collected by peasant hands is as valid as one collected by a university-trained botanist. The plant doesn’t care about the collector’s credentials.

How do you think your story connects to challenges facing women in science today?

You tell me—has it truly changed? I read that women now attend universities, even become professors. Remarkable progress. But I also read that they still struggle for recognition, still have their contributions overshadowed by male colleagues, still face questions about their competence that men never encounter.

The methods have changed, perhaps. Instead of barring women from ships, you question whether they’re suited for fieldwork. Instead of denying them education, you create environments where they struggle to advance. The mechanisms of exclusion evolve, but the exclusion itself persists.

What gives me hope is that knowledge has its own power. Truth, carefully observed and documented, eventually surfaces. It took centuries, but botanists now acknowledge my contributions to that expedition. Species have been named after me—belatedly, but genuinely.

Any advice for young women entering scientific fields today?

From someone who spent eight years disguised as a man? Perhaps I’m not the ideal counsellor.

But seriously—trust your observations. Don’t let anyone convince you that your way of seeing is less valid than theirs. Document everything meticulously—because when they try to erase your contributions, and they will, you’ll have evidence.

Most importantly, remember that science is about understanding the natural world. It’s not about prestige or recognition—though those are nice when they come. It’s about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. If you can do that, if you can add even one small piece to our understanding of how life works, then you’ve accomplished something meaningful.

And learn to climb trees properly. You never know when it will come in handy.

One final question—if you could see one thing change about how botanical exploration is conducted today, what would it be?

Recognition of indigenous knowledge. Every place we visited—Brazil, Tahiti, Madagascar, the Pacific islands—the local people understood their plants in ways that dwarfed our European knowledge. They knew medicinal uses, ecological relationships, cultivation techniques that had been developed over generations.

But we collected their plants and claimed to have “discovered” them. We took their knowledge and published it under our names. We treated their expertise as quaint folklore while elevating our fragments of understanding to “science.”

If botanical exploration today could begin with genuine partnership—learning from people who actually live with these plants, crediting their knowledge, sharing the benefits of any discoveries—that would be a revolution worth achieving.

The plants belong to the world, not to whoever first presses them between pieces of paper and gives them Latin names. It’s past time we acted like it.

Letters and emails

Following our interview with Jeanne Baret, we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from readers around the world who want to delve deeper into her extraordinary story. We’ve selected five particularly thoughtful letters and emails from our growing community—voices spanning from marine biology labs in Scotland to conservation projects in New Zealand—who want to ask her more about her life, her work, and what she might say to those walking in her footsteps today.

Ursula McKay, 34, Marine Biologist, Edinburgh, Scotland:
Madame Baret, as someone who’s spent years on research vessels where I’m often the only woman aboard, I’m curious about the psychological toll of your disguise. Did you ever have moments where you forgot who you were supposed to be, or conversely, where maintaining ‘Jean’ felt safer than being Jeanne? How did you preserve your sense of self through such an extended performance?

Ah, Mademoiselle McKay—you ask the question that cuts to the bone, don’t you? Eight years. Eight years of binding my breasts each morning until I could barely draw breath, of deepening my voice, of walking differently, sitting differently, even relieving myself differently. You become quite skilled at such performances when your life depends on it.

There were indeed moments when the boundaries blurred dangerously. I remember once in the Strait of Magellan—we’d been collecting in brutal cold for hours, and I was exhausted, hypothermic. Back on ship, one of the sailors made some jest, and I laughed—really laughed, as Jeanne would laugh. The sound was too light, too musical. I caught myself, coughed roughly to cover it, but I saw suspicion flicker across faces. That night I practiced masculine laughter until my throat was raw.

But you ask something more profound—about preserving my sense of self. The truth is, there were times when being Jean felt like a refuge. Jean could speak boldly to officers, could climb rigging without scandal, could focus entirely on the work without worrying about unwanted advances or questions about my propriety. There’s a peculiar freedom in male privilege, even borrowed privilege.

Yet the cost… I lost pieces of myself in that disguise. The way I moved naturally, the gestures that were mine, even the way I thought about my own body. I trained myself to see my curves as problems to be solved rather than part of who I was. It took years after the voyage to reclaim those aspects of myself.

What preserved me, ultimately, was the plants. When I was alone with specimens, pressing leaves or making notes, the disguise fell away. Plants don’t care about your sex—they respond to competence, to gentle handling, to understanding. In those moments, I was simply a botanist doing work that mattered. That core identity—that’s what I held onto when everything else felt like performance.

You’re fortunate, mademoiselle, to work in an age when you can be openly what you are. Treasure that, even when the challenges feel overwhelming.

Ian Tate, 45, Pharmaceutical Research Director, Vancouver, Canada:
Your traditional knowledge of medicinal plants fascinates me, particularly given how many modern drugs derive from compounds you might have encountered. If you could return to one location from your voyage with today’s analytical chemistry tools, where would you go and what plants would you want to investigate further? Do you think the pace of modern drug discovery has lost something by moving away from field-based botanical knowledge?

Monsieur Tate, now there’s a question that sets my mind racing! You speak of analytical chemistry—imagine having tools that could identify plant compounds without having to rely on taste and smell alone. Though I must say, those traditional methods served me rather well.

Without hesitation, I would return to Madagascar. That island was like nowhere else we visited—a botanical laboratory isolated for millions of years, where plants had evolved in extraordinary ways. We were there barely a month, hardly enough time to scratch the surface, and I was constantly frustrated by what we had to leave behind.

There was one plant in particular—a climbing vine with thick, waxy leaves that the Malagasy people used to treat what we’d call consumption, what you now term tuberculosis. They would prepare a decoction from the inner bark, and I witnessed remarkable recoveries. The taste was intensely bitter, suggesting powerful alkaloids, but beyond that, I could only speculate. With your modern tools, we might understand exactly which compounds were responsible, perhaps develop treatments that could save millions of lives.

But here’s what troubles me about your question, monsieur—this phrase “moving away from field-based botanical knowledge.” Has modern pharmaceutical research truly done this? Because if so, you’ve made a catastrophic error.

You cannot understand a plant’s medicinal properties by studying it in isolation from its natural environment. The soil chemistry, the climate, the other plants it grows alongside, the insects that visit it—all of these influence the compounds a plant produces. A specimen grown in a laboratory greenhouse may bear little chemical resemblance to the same species thriving in its native habitat.

Furthermore, indigenous peoples who’ve used these plants for generations understand not just what they do, but when to harvest them for maximum potency, how to prepare them properly, what combinations work synergistically. This knowledge cannot be replicated by simply analysing isolated compounds in a laboratory.

I remember in Brazil, watching indigenous healers prepare what they called “cat’s claw”—a climbing vine with remarkable properties. They harvested only certain sections of the vine, only at particular times of year, and always in combination with specific other plants. The preparation method was precise, passed down through generations of careful observation. Your modern researchers might identify the active compounds, but without that traditional knowledge, they’d never achieve the same therapeutic effects.

Here’s what I suspect has happened in your pharmaceutical industry: you’ve become seduced by the idea that you can improve upon nature through chemistry. Extract the “active” compound, modify it, synthesise it, patent it. But plants are not machines with single active ingredients—they’re complex chemical factories producing hundreds of compounds that work in concert.

The most effective medicines I encountered during my travels were rarely single plants used alone. They were carefully balanced combinations, prepared according to traditional methods that optimised bioavailability and minimised side effects. Indigenous healers understood drug interactions and personalised medicine centuries before your industry invented those terms.

If I could advise your modern pharmaceutical research, I’d say this: send your chemists back to the field. Partner with traditional healers as equals, not as sources of “leads” to be exploited. Study plants in their natural habitats, understand their ecological relationships. Most importantly, approach traditional knowledge with humility rather than arrogance.

You have remarkable tools now—I won’t deny that. But tools are only as effective as the wisdom that guides their use. The herb women of my youth, the traditional healers I met across the world—they possessed that wisdom. Your industry would benefit enormously from remembering that plants were humanity’s first medicines, and indigenous peoples our first pharmaceutical researchers.

The question isn’t whether you should return to field-based botanical knowledge, monsieur. The question is how quickly you can rebuild the bridges your industry burned when it decided that laboratories were more valuable than forests, and patents more important than traditional wisdom.

Laura Cameron, 28, Conservation Botanist, Melbourne, Australia:
Reading about your plant collection methods, I’m struck by how sustainable they seem compared to some historical botanical expeditions that stripped entire populations. Was this intentional conservation ethic on your part, or practical necessity? Given today’s biodiversity crisis and the ethics around biopiracy, how do you think botanical exploration should be conducted in the 21st century?

Ah, Mademoiselle Cameron—you’ve observed something that even many of my contemporaries missed. Yes, my collection methods were deliberate, though born more from practicality and respect than what you’d call formal conservation ethics.

You must understand, I learned plant gathering from the herb women of Burgundy, and we never took more than we needed. Take the whole plant, and there’s no plant next season—simple wisdom that kept our communities fed and healed for generations. When I encountered new species on distant shores, I applied the same principle. Take specimens for study, yes, but leave the population intact.

But there was more to it than tradition. I was working under constraints that university-trained botanists rarely faced. Every specimen had to justify its space aboard ship, its weight in our limited storage. This forced me to be selective, to choose the most representative samples rather than hoarding everything I could reach. Waste wasn’t an option.

More importantly, I was often collecting alone or with minimal assistance. Strip a population, and you might eliminate your only source if you needed to return for additional samples. I learned to map where I’d found things, to cultivate relationships with local people who could guide me back to productive sites. Sustainability wasn’t altruism—it was survival.

As for how botanical exploration should be conducted today—this cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with how my own expedition is remembered. We took plants from Brazil, from Tahiti, from Madagascar, and claimed to have “discovered” them. But the indigenous peoples had been using those plants for medicine, food, materials for centuries. Their knowledge made our collecting possible, yet we gave them no credit, no benefit from whatever commercial value those plants might later have.

If I were designing ethical botanical research today? First, nothing gets collected without the informed consent and partnership of local communities. Second, any benefits—whether scientific recognition, pharmaceutical profits, or agricultural applications—must be shared with the people whose lands and knowledge made the discovery possible. Third, local botanists must be trained and equipped as equal partners, not just as guides and labourers.

You work with conservation, mademoiselle—you understand that plants exist within complex ecosystems. Ethical collecting today must consider not just individual species, but entire ecological relationships. Take a plant without understanding its pollinators, its soil requirements, its place in the food web, and you’ve learned nothing useful anyway.

The colonial model of botanical exploration—take what you want, name it after yourself, profit from it exclusively—that system created the biodiversity crisis you’re now trying to solve. True progress would mean listening to people like your Māori colleagues, learning from knowledge systems that sustained biodiversity for millennia, and sharing both the work and the benefits of botanical research.

It’s taken two and a half centuries for anyone to ask these questions about my expedition. Better late than never, I suppose.

Donald Coffey, 67, Retired History Teacher, Boston, USA:
Madame Baret, you lived through the Age of Enlightenment when reason and scientific method were supposedly transforming society, yet you faced such systematic exclusion. Do you think the Enlightenment’s promises of progress and equality were fundamentally flawed, or simply incomplete? What would you say to those who argue that social progress naturally follows scientific advancement?

Monsieur Coffey, you ask whether the Enlightenment’s promises were flawed or incomplete, as if there’s meaningful distinction between the two. A promise that excludes half of humanity from its very conception is fundamentally flawed, wouldn’t you say?

I lived through the height of your “Age of Reason,” surrounded by men who proclaimed the triumph of rational thought whilst simultaneously insisting that women lacked the capacity for scientific reasoning. Voltaire wrote eloquently about natural rights while owning shares in slave trading companies. Diderot compiled his great Encyclopédie celebrating human knowledge whilst systematically excluding women’s contributions to that very knowledge.

The Enlightenment wasn’t incomplete—it was selectively applied. Reason and scientific method were powerful tools, certainly, but they were wielded by a very particular class of men for their own benefit. When those same tools might have challenged their authority—by demonstrating, for instance, that women could excel at botanical science—suddenly reason became less important than tradition, less valuable than social order.

You speak of scientific advancement leading to social progress, but I’ve seen the opposite proved repeatedly. The same expedition that advanced botanical knowledge also reinforced colonial dominance. The same scientific methods that revealed the complexity of plant life were used to justify the supposed simplicity of indigenous peoples. Knowledge, monsieur, is not inherently progressive—it’s how that knowledge is used, and by whom, that determines its moral value.

Consider my own case: I demonstrated conclusively that women could excel at scientific fieldwork, could contribute meaningfully to botanical research, could endure the physical and intellectual demands of global exploration. Did this scientific evidence lead to social progress for women? Did it open university doors or expedition berths for my sisters? Of course not. Instead, my contributions were erased, my achievements attributed to men, my very existence treated as an amusing anomaly.

The Enlightenment’s fundamental error was believing that reason alone could overcome prejudice. But prejudice isn’t simply ignorance—it’s willful ignorance, supported by material interests and social structures. No amount of rational argument will convince a man to abandon privileges that benefit him, especially when those privileges are reinforced by institutions, laws, and cultural assumptions.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat across centuries now. Your American revolution proclaimed that all men are created equal whilst maintaining slavery and denying women basic rights. Your industrial revolution celebrated human progress whilst poisoning rivers and enslaving children in factories. Your modern democracies champion equality whilst perpetuating systematic disadvantages for women, minorities, and the poor.

The problem isn’t that social progress fails to follow scientific advancement—it’s that the same people who control scientific institutions also control social and political institutions, and they use all of these tools to maintain their dominance.

That said, I don’t despair entirely. Knowledge, once discovered, has a way of spreading despite efforts to contain it. The botanical specimens I collected, the techniques I developed, the observations I recorded—they contributed to human understanding regardless of whether my name appeared in the official records. Truth has its own momentum.

But real progress requires more than individual enlightenment—it requires systemic change. It requires recognising that excluded voices might have valuable perspectives, that traditional knowledge might rival academic learning, that progress measured only by the advancement of privileged classes isn’t progress at all.

Your Enlightenment promised to replace superstition with reason, tradition with progress, ignorance with knowledge. Noble goals, certainly. But it failed to recognise that reason can be used to rationalise oppression, that progress can exclude entire populations, and that those in power often prefer useful ignorance to inconvenient truth.

The real enlightenment, monsieur, will come when we stop asking whether social progress follows scientific advancement, and start asking whose progress we’re measuring, and who gets to define advancement in the first place.

Amelia Fuller, 42, Ethnobotanist and Indigenous Rights Advocate, Auckland, New Zealand:
Your comments about indigenous plant knowledge really resonate with my work documenting Māori botanical traditions. You witnessed firsthand how European ‘discovery’ erased existing knowledge systems. If you could design a model for ethical botanical research today—one that genuinely centres indigenous expertise rather than extracting it—what would that look like? How do we move beyond the colonial patterns that shaped your own expedition?

Mademoiselle Fuller, you’ve touched upon what may be the greatest tragedy of our entire expedition—and I say this knowing full well the personal costs I bore. The systematic theft of indigenous knowledge, dressed up as European “discovery,” was a crime that continues to this day.

In every place we landed, the local people knew their plants intimately. In Rio, indigenous guides could identify dozens of medicinal species within an hour’s walk. In Tahiti, the islanders had sophisticated understanding of plant breeding—their breadfruit varieties, their cultivation techniques were the result of centuries of careful observation and experimentation. In Madagascar, traditional healers possessed pharmaceutical knowledge that would have revolutionised European medicine.

But did we listen? Did we learn? Did we credit them? We took their plants, we took their knowledge, and we published it under our names as if we’d conjured it from thin air. Philibert was better than most—at least he acknowledged local guides in his private notes—but the official expedition records? Pure colonial fantasy.

Your question about designing ethical research today—this requires admitting that the entire European model of botanical “exploration” was flawed from the start. You cannot “discover” a plant that people have been using for generations. You can only learn about it from them.

If I were designing botanical research today, here’s how it would work: Indigenous botanists and traditional knowledge holders would lead their own research programmes, with European or other outside researchers serving as junior partners and technical assistants. The research questions would be determined by the communities whose lands are being studied—what do they want to understand better? What problems are they trying to solve?

Any publications would list indigenous experts as primary authors. Any patents or commercial applications would provide direct financial benefits to the originating communities, in perpetuity. And most critically, the research would be conducted in indigenous languages, using indigenous classification systems as the starting point, with Western scientific terminology serving as translation rather than replacement.

But here’s what truly needs changing—the entire epistemological framework. European botany assumes that knowledge moves in one direction: from the educated observer to the passive plant. Indigenous knowledge systems understand that humans and plants exist in relationship—plants teach us, we respond, they adapt, we learn again. This isn’t primitive thinking; it’s sophisticated ecological science that accounts for complexity Western botany is only beginning to acknowledge.

Your Māori colleagues understand this, yes? That plants have agency, that knowledge emerges from relationship rather than extraction? That’s the foundation any ethical botanical research must build upon.

I spent eight years disguised as a man to practice botany, but indigenous women in every place we visited were practicing sophisticated botanical science openly, without disguise, and being dismissed as ignorant by men who couldn’t identify the plants growing under their own feet. The real revolution wouldn’t be allowing more women into European botanical institutions—it would be recognising that those institutions were never the only places where botanical science was happening.

The model you’re asking for already exists, mademoiselle. It’s been practiced by indigenous peoples for millennia. We just need to stop calling it folklore and start calling it what it is: science.

Reflection

Sitting across from Jeanne Baret—even in this imagined conversation—one cannot help but feel the weight of historical injustice and the power of individual determination. Here was a woman whose botanical expertise was essential to one of the 18th century’s most important scientific expeditions, yet who has been remembered primarily as a curiosity—the woman who dressed as a man. Her story forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about whose knowledge we value, whose contributions we remember, and how institutional barriers continue to shape scientific practice today.

Baret’s combination of traditional ecological knowledge and formal scientific methodology prefigures many of the most important developments in modern botany—from the recognition of indigenous plant wisdom to the integration of field ecology with laboratory science. Her frustrations with erasure and misattribution echo in contemporary accounts from women scientists who still struggle for recognition in male-dominated fields.

Perhaps most importantly, her story reminds us that scientific progress has never been the exclusive domain of formally trained, institutionally sanctioned researchers. The herb women of 18th-century France, the indigenous plant experts of Brazil and Madagascar, the countless unnamed individuals who have studied and understood the natural world—they too have been scientists, even when history failed to recognise them as such. In reclaiming Jeanne Baret’s story, we reclaim a broader, more inclusive understanding of what science is and who gets to practice it.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind — and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way — whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher — please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion — even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

Editorial Note: This interview is a dramatised reconstruction based on extensive historical research into the life and achievements of Jeanne Baret (1740-1807). While grounded in documented facts about her botanical expertise, her role in the Bougainville expedition, and the social constraints she faced, the specific dialogue and responses represent an imaginative interpretation of how she might have reflected on her experiences and their modern relevance. Readers interested in the historical Jeanne Baret are encouraged to consult scholarly sources including Glynis Ridley’s The Discovery of Jeanne Baret and academic papers documenting her contributions to 18th-century botanical science.

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