On this day in 1811, Louis Antoine de Bougainville died at 82, forty-two years after he brought two ships home from the other side of the world. The French circumnavigation of 1766 to 1769 ran roughly two and a half years: the frigate Boudeuse and, behind her, the storeship Étoile, which is the vessel I would want to read the manifest for. Frigates carry guns and reputations. Storeships carry the biscuit, the water casks and the spare canvas, and without one the other gets about four months out.
Aboard the Étoile was the naturalist Philibert Commerson and his assistant, listed as Jean Baret. In fact Jeanne Baret, who kept her own counsel through the Atlantic, round the Strait of Magellan and across the Pacific until the crew worked it out in Tahiti. She hauled plant presses ashore in the heat and the wet, and she became the first woman known to have sailed round the globe. Also aboard: the astronomer Pierre-Antoine Véron, doing the longitudes that made the voyage worth anything on a chart.
Bougainville got an island and a flowering vine named after him. Commerson collected the vine; the assistant carried the boxes. Both true at once, which is usually how expeditions work.
The portrait below has him with a quill, which is fair. He wrote the voyage up, and the writing is why we can still count the people in it.
Inés, both were full-rigged three-masters, but the Boudeuse was a frigate built to sail and the Étoile a storeship built to carry — so the frigate spent two and a half years shortening sail to wait for her. Storeships always do that, and every squadron that ever left a storeship behind regretted it inside a season.
Inés, the writing did more work than the guns: his Voyage autour du monde appeared in 1771 and sold briskly enough that Diderot answered it with a Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, arguing about Tahiti from an armchair in Paris. A generation of readers got their Pacific secondhand, from a book, which is my line of trade and not a bad way to travel.