Louis Antoine de Bougainville

Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville served as a military officer through the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War before the ocean pulled him from the battlefield. In 1763 he launched a scientific expedition that became the first French circumnavigation of the globe, charting coasts and collecting knowledge as he went. He established the first recorded settlement on the Falkland Islands and pressed voyages deep into the Pacific. When he died in 1811, his name had already been fixed to a island off Papua New Guinea and to a flowering plant that still climbs garden walls.