5th July, 2024 in Biography & Memoir, Women in History

The Women Who Went Round the World

By Sally Smith

Humans have been great travellers for thousands of years. Famous early male explorers like Magellan, Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook, are household names. Women, with their restricted positions in society and their traditional roles of looking after the house and children, had far fewer opportunities to take part in exciting expeditions.

Nevertheless, there were several women who managed to undertake extraordinary journeys, yet these early pioneers and their astonishing stories have been virtually ignored.

This book has been written to finally record and properly set down the stories of the remarkable journeys made by these women, the very first women to achieve a full circumnavigation by sea and land and, more recently, in the air and in space. Author Sally Smith has delved deep around the world, including at record offices and institutions as far afield as Tahiti and Melbourne, to research the full details of these forgotten women. Some of their stories are breathtaking, others are simply hugely entertaining, but they all deserve a proper place in the history books.

Stories like that of Jeanne Baret. Brought up in poverty and illiterate, in 1767 it was against the French law for a woman to go to sea. Jeanne dressed as a man to join a French ship but the expedition leader soon had suspicions. When Jeanne discovered a beautiful plant high up in Brazil, she named it the Bougainvillea to stop Captain Bougainville from arresting her. It worked, but when they reached Tahiti and locals rushed up to touch her, denouncing her as a woman, her secret was exposed. Changing ships and going through many other adventures, including marrying in Mauritius, Jeanne finally made it back to France to become the first ever woman to go round the world.

Then there is Mary Ann Parker, the first woman to go round Cape Horn and circumnavigate the world from east to west. She had sailed out from England with the third fleet in 1791 and wrote the first published report from a woman on the early settlement at Port Jackson, now Sydney. While there, she befriended an Aboriginal Australian. On the way back, in Cape Town her boat picked up Mary Bryant, the first female escaped convict from Australia, and also some mutineers from the Bounty, but back in London her reputation was damaged when she shocked society by welcoming her Australian friend into her London home and she ended up in prison.

And so the stories go on… featuring the 11 women who achieved real firsts in global circumnavigations; records that can never be broken but more than that, fabulous stories that deserve a rightful place in the history books.