The Valet

In late December 1766, a peasant woman from Burgundy bound her chest in linen bandages, pulled on loose male clothing, and walked up the gangway of the storeship Étoile at Rochefort. French naval regulations forbade women aboard. She was introduced as Jean Baret, the naturalist Philibert Commerson's brand-new valet, supposedly a stranger met that morning.

The disguise held.

It held through the Atlantic, where she hauled plant presses through the Brazilian forest and plucked a screaming-magenta vine that Commerson promptly named after the captain. It held across Patagonia, where she carried the rifles, the food, and on bad days the botanist himself. When the captain finally summoned her about the rumors, she looked him in the eye and explained that she was a man who had been captured and castrated by the Turks. He believed her. The voyage continued.

Then in April 1768 the Étoile anchored off Tahiti. She stepped onto the sand. The Tahitians surrounded her at once and called out, the moment she set foot ashore, that she was a woman.

Sixteen months. One hundred and sixteen Frenchmen. Roughly forty-five seconds of Tahitian beach.