In 1774 a 26-year-old French peasant woman named Jeanne Baret became, against all odds, the first woman to have circumnavigated the globe. In contrast to the fanfare that greeted the crew of the ship she first set out on, however, Baret’s accomplishment went virtually unrecognized.
If Baret’s achievement was remarkable, the circumstances surrounding it were nothing short of extraordinary. To get around a strict law that forbad women from naval vessels, Baret disguised herself as a man, going undetected until her ship landed in Tahiti 18 months later. There, the natives immediately recognized what over 300 of her fellow crewmembers had failed to: that Baret was a woman. Read more…