La Buse’s / Le Butin’s Pirate Cipher (part 4)…

As we saw in Part 1, Bernardin Nageon de L’estang (“Le Butin”) said in the note added to his will that he had been in a French corsair ship when the captain was mortally wounded:

We made many splendid captures from them, but at our last battle with a large British frigate on the shores of Hindustan, the captain was wounded and on his deathbed confided to me his secrets and his papers to retrieve considerable treasure buried in the Indian Ocean; and, having first made sure that I was a Freemason, asked me to use it to arm privateers against the English.

To my historical eyes, the problem with this part of his story is that, as a rule, French corsairs were many times more interested in capturing treasure-laden English merchant ships coming from the East Indies than in engaging with English frigates off the coast of Hindustan (far from the main Booty Route). In fact, I would estimate that during the period 1790 to 1800, there would have been less than five (and, indeed, quite possibly zero) naval actions involving French corsairs off the coast of Hindustan.

All the same, our starting point here ought to be to take Le Butin’s account at face value, and we only need to find one such action to make it substantially more plausible: and in fact, the fewer the actions we find, arguably the more likely we are to have identified the ship that Le Butin was on. But where on earth might we find primary evidence of an inconclusive sea battle in that place & at that time?

Step forward our white knight of the day – Roger Houghton who, according to his Guardian user profile, “spent a couple of years as a Purser’s Clerk on Union-Castle ships then joined the Hong Kong police for a tour and finally became a private investigator for thirty years“. His admirable website A Peoples’ History 1793 – 1844 from the newspapers contains a frankly unbelievable amount of primary evidence culled from old newspapers all over the world.

For our purposes, his France in Asia chapter contains hundreds of extracts from those editions of the Bombay Courier held in the British Library (though with several sizeable gaps, e.g. the whole of 1797), many of which relay news items culled from Mauritian newspapers brought to India on neutral ships. And it was there that the following article leapt out at me:-

Sat 12th March 1796 [date of the report]

The French have attacked the small Portuguese enclave of Diu, north of Bombay. On 9th February 1796 three warships under British colours were seen. Capt Josef de Souza of the Portuguese frigate Real Fidelesima supposed them to be Admiral Elphinstone’s squadron returning from the Cape.

He was anchored 2 miles off Diu fort and was preparing to honour the inbound ships in the required way when he received a broadside. The three ships then raised the tricolor and fired a second broadside. De Souza cut his cables and ran in under the fort. The three ships then exchanged fire with the frigate and the fort for about 4 hours when, with dusk approaching, the French left. One of their ships had to be towed away. Afterwards about 500 shot (from 9- 12- and 18-pounders) were collected from the beach where they had rebounded from the stone walls of the fort.

The Real Fidelesima then sailed to Goa with the Diu Governor Caetano de Souza and the colonial supervisor Antonio Baptiste de Cunha as passengers.

According to the 3decks website, the Portuguese ship (actually the “Real Fidelissima”) was a 24-gun corvette built in 1777 in Damao (a Portuguese enclave not far from Diu). Later, the ship was loaned to the British but ended up wrecked in 1817 near Perim Island in the Gulf of Aden (there’s correspondence on this in the archives). Similarly, a Portuguese site records her as having 28 artillery pieces (22 twelve-pounders and 6 six-pounders) and 200 men on board, used mainly as a coastguard ship and for protecting convoys out of India. Here’s what she looks like:-

All of which seems strongly consistent with the news report. So… might we have found our mysterious naval action? Might the captain on the towed-away French ship have been (as per Le Butin’s letter) mortally wounded?

Though this is certainly possible, we’re still a long way from being able to tell the whole story. The next challenge would be to try to find primary evidence from February-March 1796 as to what was going on – a set of three ships sailing under false flags would have been a suspicious sight. At that date, moreover, a crippled French corsair ship near Diu would have to be towed a very long way to find a friendly port – perhaps even the Seychelles. What is nice here is that we have a very specific date range to look for, which might strongly limit the amount of searching we need to do to find this ship & captain.

As far as Diu itself goes, one very useful secondary source is a paper “Diu, the commercial activity in a small harbour in Gujarat (1680-1800) : the Portuguese documents” (in English) by Luis Frederico Dias Antunes, published in the book SOURCES EUROPÉENNES SUR LE GUJARAT, because this refers directly to a good number of archival sources for what was happening there during the period we’re interested in. The most relevant archive he summarizes would seem to be the Filmoteca Ultramarina Portuguesa in Lisbon, whose Manuscript #12 covers the period 1791-1797. All the same, there is (as he notes) relatively little relating to Diu in the archives, so the chances are high that this will not yield the results we hope for.

In summary… to my eyes, the supposed link between Le Butin’s pirate cipher and La Buse’s (legendary) pirate cipher looks ever weaker. All the while that Le Butin’s letters largely seem to be checking out (even if the historical records on this are generally quite thin), the less need his story has of La Buse (who, after all, was hanged some 70 years earlier). But even so, there is plenty of room for manoeuvre on these volatile tides, and pirates have always proved difficult to pin down! We shall, with a spot of luck, see! 🙂