12 Women explorers
Women are rarely mentioned in histories of Australian and Pacific exploration. The absence of women is itself worth examining, as it raises questions about the way exploration is gendered. The exclusion of women from both sea and land exploration in the Pacific and Australia was the result of structural factors, of expectations surrounding exploration, and of the cultural significance of exploration in European societies. Adventurous European, Pasifika, and Aboriginal women who succeeded in joining expeditions make it clear that women were actively excluded rather than incapable of participation, as do the women who participated in the exploration of other parts of the world. The exploration of the southern continent of Antarctica has been undertaken more recently, and the place of women in that process raises interesting questions about the ways in which exploration frequently remains a masculine enterprise.
When the Pacific was a Spanish Lake, women were at times present on Spanish ships. The early Spanish expeditions were conducted by men alone, but as the Spanish began to seek to establish new colonies in the Pacific women became part of that process. Doña Isabel is notorious as a powerful figure on Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira’s second voyage to the Pacific in 1595-6; she was the wife and heir of the captain. As the Dutch began to intrude on the western edge of the Australian continent, their ambitions for European communities in their trading centres meant that women sailed on the vessels of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The voyages of the VOC were not strictly voyages of exploration, instead carrying trade goods between Europe and the VOC’s base in Batavia. The 1629 shipwreck of the ship Batavia on the western coast of the Australian continent provides a glimpse of the people onboard the Dutch ships skirting the continent; in the aftermath of that disaster a group of mutineers terrorised other survivors, among them women and children.
The expectation that women would form part of European enterprises in the Pacific shifted as exploration became formalised. This process began in the late eighteenth century, and Cook’s Endeavour voyage was an early example of the new style of European voyages taking place within the Pacific. At this time, Pacific exploration became the preserve of European navies, and in this period there were no formal roles for women aboard naval vessels. As a result, women were excluded from exploration.
Despite the structural exclusion of women from Pacific exploration, some women managed to travel on European vessels in the Pacific. French naval vessels carried the best-known examples of European women who made their way to the Pacific. Jeanne Baret managed to board Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s 1766-9 circumnavigation as the assistant and valet of the expedition’s naturalist Philibert Commerson. She began the voyage posing as a man, and was unmasked only after it was too late for Bougainville