Odette du Puigaudeau (1894–1991)

Odette Loyen du Puigaudeau was born in Saint-Nazaire, a town in the west of France. Her parents Ferdinand Loyen du Puigaudeau, a cousin of the writer Alphonse de Chateaubriant, and Henriette Van den Broucke were both painters and descendants of seafarers. She grew up at the manoir de Kervaudu, a late 15th-century manor house in Brittany. She received her early education at home from her parents. In 1920, she went to Paris to study oceanography at the Sorbonne in hopes of working at the marine laboratory in Tunisia. When this plan did not work out, she held various jobs, first at the Collège de France, then as a stylist for designer Jeanne Lanvin, and as a journalist for the magazine L'Intransigeant and finally as an ethnologist.
In 1929, she became one of the first women onboard ship with Breton tuna fishermen.
She later described the remarkable life in the Breton islands of the interwar period in her book Grandeur des îles (Grandeur of the Islands, 1946).
Denied participation in an expedition to Greenland because she was a woman, she went on to make a lengthy crossing of the Western Sahara Desert in 1934 with her companion, painter Marion Sénones, conducting archaeological, botanical and ethnographic research along the way. With little money, minimal luggage, and no official commission, the pair navigated their way between nomadic tribes and French colonials, making friends throughout the journey. This experience led to her best-known book, Pieds nus à travers la Mauritanie (Barefoot Through Mauritania, 1936).
In 1961, she settled in Rabat, Morocco, and hosted cultural programs on the radio before becoming head of the prehistory department at the Museum of Antiquities. During her career, she wrote eight books and numerous articles, most of them on various of Western Sahara nomadic life, such as the salt caravans, date markets, and prehistoric rock drawings.