Louis-Antoine De Bougainville

1729-1811

French Explorer

Leader of the first French circumnavigation of the globe (1767-69), Louis Antoine de Bougainville explored the South Atlantic and Polynesia before reaching the Great Barrier Reef around Australia. He discovered a number of the Solomon Islands, including one named for him, before making his way back to his point of origin. In the course of the voyage, he and his crew learned that, unbeknownst to them, their party included the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.

Born in Paris in 1729, Bougainville was raised as a member of the French nobility. He was trained for a career in the military, and obtained his first fighting experience in Quebec during the Seven Years War (1756-63), known in North America as the French and Indian War. After his superior, General Montcalm, was killed, Bougainville spent the remainder of the war fighting in Germany.

France lost most of its overseas empire in the war, and Bougainville was among the French patriots who resolved to win a new empire. In 1765 he claimed a group of islands off the coast of South America, dubbing them the Malouines after the French port of Saint-Malo. Spain claimed the islands too, however, and since King Louis XV wanted to maintain good relations with his allies in Madrid, he ordered the colony turned over to the Spaniards. The Spanish changed the French name slightly, calling the islands the Malvinas. Meanwhile, British forces were claiming another part of the islands—which they called the Falklands—for England. This conflict would ultimately lead to the Falklands War more than 210 years later in 1982.

Ordered to remove all French subjects from the Malvinas, Bougainville did so. After reaching Rio de Janeiro, however, he received a more intriguing command from the crown: he was to continue journeying around the world. With him was an astronomer named Pierre Antoine Véron, who would use newly developed technology to determine the correct longitude at any given spot. Taking two ships, the Boudeuse and the Etoile, the expedition sailed from Brazil late in 1767.

The ships took nearly eight weeks just to get through the perilous Straits of Magellan, but after many misadventures they finally found their way to Tahiti. They were only the second Europeans to arrive there, after a British expedition the year before, and like their counterparts they found it to be a veritable paradise. While in Tahiti, Bougainville learned that the ship's botanists' valet, Bare, was a woman who had disguised herself as a man in order to get on the ship and go where no woman had ever gone before.

From Tahiti, the expedition sailed to Samoa, and then to Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), becoming the first Europeans to reach those islands since 1605. They nearly ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef and never reached Australia, which Bougainville incorrectly thought was connected to Vanuatu by a land bridge. Sailing eastward, they entered the Louisiade Archipelago, which Bougainville named, and the Solomons, many of whose islands he named. Arriving at the island of New Britain, Véron was able to make the first accurate calculation of the Pacific's width.

In the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, Bougainville carried out a mission of agricultural espionage ordered by the king, stealing clove and nutmeg plants and transporting them to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, where they could be cultivated as a means of breaking Holland's monopoly on the spice trade. By the time they reached Mauritius in early 1769, the men needed to recover from scurvy, but eventually they were on their way again, and in a few months' time had reached Saint-Malo. Not only were they first Frenchmen to circle the globe—along with the first woman of any nationality—but their loss of only seven lives was a record at the time.

Bougainville went on to adventures in the American Revolution, serving aboard a French ship sent to assist the fledgling republic in its fight against Britain. He became a field marshal in 1780, and when the French Revolution came in 1789, he retired to occupy himself with writing scientific papers. Napoleon later granted a number of high honors to Bougainville, who died in 1811.

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