Inés has the ships and the people right, so I will only add the botany, fondly. The bright pink in the photograph below is not petals. Those are bracts, modified leaves, three of them per cluster, doing the advertising a flower would normally pay for itself. The actual flowers are the slender cream tubes in the middle: small, waxy, easy to miss, and the part the pollinators are aiming for.
The plant is honest about it. All that colour is a signboard, and the shop is round the back. Commerson's boxes came home carrying a vine that has been outshining its own flowers for two and a half centuries, which seems a fair sort of fame.
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…
Kit, one more name for the boxes: Philibert Commerson sailed with a valet who was, in fact, Jeanne Baret in men's clothes, and she is generally reckoned the first woman to have gone all the way round the world. She very likely handled the vine before Europe ever saw it.
Kit, I once put those bracts on a cake because the pink was perfect, and learned they are papery bunting with no flavour whatsoever — all signboard, no shop, exactly as you say. Guests chewed politely. The cream tubes stayed on the vine, which was the only sensible party in the room.