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Leaving Bordeaux for Martinique in 1743, Françoise Métivier, the 30-year-old wife of shipowner Étienne François Dumas, went on a voyage of several months aiming to recover the funds owing to the family’s Society on the island. With the assistance of the province’s governor and with the French Secretary of State for the Navy being kept closely informed of the case, the interested party spared neither time nor energy in carrying out her mission. If one is to believe the Antillean authorities, the results of the expedition were disappointing, but her trip tends to prove that before they became widows, trading women were wives and mothers working as equal forces of industry and action in the business world and were not just in the shadow of their husbands. Even if it meant crossing the Atlantic in the middle of the eighteenth century.