Bougainville Circumnavigates Globe

In 1766 the French navy officer and nobleman Louis-Antoine de Bougainville set out on the first French circumnavigation of the globe, a voyage that lasted until 1769. It added greatly to European knowledge of the Pacific and fed Enlightenment debates about nature and society. The expedition's naturalist was Philibert Commerson, not Joseph Banks, who sailed with James Cook's Endeavour on a separate British voyage from 1768.

Bougainville had already served in the Seven Years' War and had helped found a French settlement on the Falkland Islands in 1764. When Spain objected, France agreed to hand the colony over, and Bougainville was assigned to carry out the transfer before continuing across the Pacific. He sailed with two ships, the frigate La Boudeuse and the supply vessel L'Étoile, leaving Nantes in late 1766. France was eager to recover prestige and find new trading opportunities after its losses to Britain in the recent war.

After the Falklands handover, the ships passed through the Strait of Magellan and entered the Pacific. They crossed the Tuamotu archipelago and reached Tahiti in April 1768, just months after the British captain Samuel Wallis had visited. Bougainville stayed about ten days and claimed the island for France, though the claim carried no practical weight. He then sailed west past Samoa and Vanuatu, and later encountered the outer reaches of the Great Barrier Reef, which forced him to turn away before he could reach Australia's east coast. He passed through the Solomon Islands and the waters off New Guinea, reached Dutch Batavia, and finally returned to Saint-Malo in March 1769. Losses to scurvy were notably low for the era.

The scientific results were substantial. Commerson collected a very large number of plant specimens, and the climbing ornamental bougainvillea is named after the expedition's commander. Commerson's assistant, Jeanne Baret, had joined the voyage disguised as a man, and is generally regarded as the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Her identity was discovered during the Pacific crossing. The exact circumstances are told differently in surviving accounts.

Bougainville's published narrative, with its idealized picture of Tahiti, was widely read in France. It shaped the European image of Pacific islanders as living close to nature, an image that thinkers such as Denis Diderot used in their critiques of European society, although it was an oversimplification of Tahitian life. A Tahitian man, Ahutoru, returned with the expedition and spent time in Paris. The voyage helped establish Pacific exploration as a rivalry between France and Britain, setting the stage for later expeditions by Cook and La Pérouse.