Bougainville's Voyage Round the World (1766-1769)

Bougainville’s voyage round the world (1766–1769) was the first French naval expedition to circumnavigate the globe. Commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville with the frigate La Boudeuse and the storeship L’Étoile, it crossed the Pacific, visited Tahiti and returned to France in March 1769. Bougainville’s bestselling account fed the Enlightenment’s image of the “noble savage”, while the botanist’s assistant Jeanne Barret became the first woman known to have sailed round the world.

Background: France after the Seven Years’ War

France emerged from the Seven Years’ War in 1763 having lost Canada and much of its overseas empire to Britain. French ministers looked for ways to restore prestige, find new trade routes and keep pace with British expeditions into the Pacific.

Bougainville, born in Paris in 1729, was an unusual choice of leader. He had trained as a lawyer and mathematician, written a treatise on integral calculus and served as an aide to the Marquis de Montcalm in Canada. After the war he founded a French settlement in the Falkland Islands (the Malouines) at his own expense in 1764.

Spain objected to the colony, and France agreed to hand it over. Bougainville’s voyage began with that task and then continued westwards across the Pacific, returning to France by the Indian Ocean.

The ships and the crew

Bougainville sailed from Nantes on 15 November 1766 in La Boudeuse, a frigate of 26 guns, but storms forced him into Brest for repairs, and he left again in early December. The storeship L’Étoile followed separately with supplies. Together the two ships carried roughly 330 men.

The expedition included scientists: the naturalist Philibert Commerson, the astronomer Pierre-Antoine Véron and the engineer and cartographer Charles Routier de Romainville. Commerson’s servant, registered as “Jean Baret”, was in fact a woman, Jeanne Barret.

The voyage

Bougainville formally handed the Falklands colony to Spain at Port Louis in April 1767. He met the Étoile at Rio de Janeiro, where Commerson collected the plant later named bougainvillea, then sailed south. The ships spent around seven weeks working through the Strait of Magellan in December 1767 and January 1768.

In the Pacific, Bougainville passed through the Tuamotu archipelago and reached Tahiti in April 1768, anchoring off Hitiaa on the east coast for about ten days. The British ship Dolphin under Samuel Wallis had visited the island the year before, but Bougainville was unaware of this.

From Tahiti he sailed west through the islands he called the Navigators (Samoa) and the Great Cyclades (Vanuatu). In June 1768, approaching the Great Barrier Reef, he turned north without sighting the Australian mainland, just short of the coast that James Cook would chart two years later. He then passed through the Solomon Islands, where Bougainville Island still bears his name, and New Ireland.

Running short of food, the ships reached the Moluccas and then Batavia (Jakarta) in September 1768. At Isle de France (Mauritius), Commerson and Barret left the expedition to study the island’s natural history. The Boudeuse reached Saint-Malo on 16 March 1769, followed by the Étoile in April. Only a handful of men, commonly put at seven, had died.

Tahiti and the image of paradise

Bougainville’s description of Tahiti, which he named Nouvelle-Cythère after the Greek island of the goddess of love, became one of the most famous passages in eighteenth-century travel writing. He portrayed a fertile, beautiful island whose people seemed to live in ease and freedom.

His picture was partial. He stayed only briefly, did not speak Tahitian and misread a complex, hierarchical society with chiefs, priests, warfare and strict rules. Several Tahitians were killed by members of his crew, and Bougainville had soldiers punished for it.

A Tahitian man, Ahutoru, chose to sail with Bougainville to France, where he spent about a year in Paris and became a celebrity. He died of smallpox in 1771 on the voyage home, off Madagascar.

The philosopher Denis Diderot, editor of the Encyclopédie, responded with his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, written in 1772 and published in 1796. It used an imagined Tahiti to criticise European morals, religion and colonialism.

Jeanne Barret

Jeanne Barret was born in Burgundy in 1740 into a poor family. She became Commerson’s housekeeper and partner and, because women were not permitted on French naval ships, joined the expedition disguised as his male servant. She worked as a skilled assistant, collecting and preparing plant specimens.

Accounts differ on when and how she was exposed. Bougainville’s published narrative says her sex was revealed at Tahiti, while other journals describe earlier suspicion and an assault on her in New Ireland. Historians treat the details with caution.

After Commerson died in Mauritius in 1773, Barret married a French soldier and returned to France around 1775, completing her circumnavigation. The French state later granted her a pension in recognition of her work. A plant genus, Solanum baretiae, was named in her honour in 2012.

Science, navigation and health

The expedition’s scientific aims were real but limited by its pace. Commerson gathered thousands of plant and animal specimens, many of which reached the natural history collections in Paris after his death. Véron made astronomical observations to fix longitudes, using the lunar-distance method, which compared the Moon’s position with the stars, because reliable marine chronometers were not yet available to the French navy.

These observations allowed Bougainville to correct the positions of several Pacific islands on European charts and showed that the Pacific was wider than many maps suggested. The expedition did not, however, map coastlines in the detail later achieved by British surveyors.

The low death toll owed something to luck and something to good management. Bougainville took on fresh food wherever he could, kept his men active and cut rations rather than risk running out entirely. Even so, scurvy appeared during the long passage from Vanuatu to the Moluccas, when supplies ran so low that rations were spoiled and scarce, and the stop at Batavia came just in time.

Key people and legacy

Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) later fought in the American War of Independence, commanding ships at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781. He survived the French Revolution and was made a senator and count by Napoleon.

His Voyage autour du monde (1771) was translated into English in 1772 and widely read. Together with the British voyages of Wallis and Cook, it helped spark European fascination with the South Pacific, and its account of Tahiti shaped art, literature and philosophy for generations. The expedition’s scientific results were modest compared with Cook’s first voyage, but its low death toll and literary influence were remarkable.

Timeline

• 1766, 15 November: La Boudeuse sails from Nantes.
• 1767, April: Bougainville hands over the Falklands colony to Spain.
• 1767, June–July: The Boudeuse and Étoile meet at Rio de Janeiro.
• 1767, December – 1768, January: The ships pass through the Strait of Magellan.
• 1768, April: The expedition stays about ten days at Tahiti.
• 1768, June: Bougainville turns away from the Great Barrier Reef.
• 1768, September: The ships reach Batavia.
• 1769, 16 March: La Boudeuse arrives at Saint-Malo.

Why it matters

Bougainville’s voyage brought France into the age of Pacific exploration and produced one of the most influential travel books of the Enlightenment. Its idealised Tahiti shaped European thinking about nature and society, and Jeanne Barret’s journey remains a landmark in the history of women at sea.