I thought I ought to briefly post on something which I worked out recently. In BN3 (the third Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang document, though almost certainly not written by him), the writer mentions both a “Commandant Hamon” (who was currently supporting him in his ill health) and a former “Capitaine” (from whom he had got the treasure letters BN1 and BN2).

Here’s all we know about this dying captain, via Robert Charroux’s version (on my interlinear page):

Avec eux nous avons fait de jolies prises, mais à notre dernier combat sur les côtes d'Indoustan, avec une grosse frégate anglaise, le capitaine a été blessé et à son lit de mort m’a confié ses secrets et des papiers pour retrouver des trésors considérables enfouis  dans la mer des Indes et en me demandant de m'en servir pour armer des corsaires contre l’Anglais; il s'est assuré auparavant si j’étais franc-maçon.

My freewheeling translation:

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.

So… what’s the difference between a Capitaine and a Commandant?

I may still have this wrong (it’s a pretty subtle thing), but I now think that a “commandant” is someone who is “in command” of a ship of any ship, whereas in the French Navy a “capitaine” was either:

• a “capitaine du vaisseau” (captain of a vessel), i.e. the formal (typically very senior) captain of a large “ship of the line”; or
• a “capitaine du frégate” (captain of a frigate), i.e. the formal (typically fairly senior) captain of a frigate or large ship (possibly a corvette)

So, capitaine is about rank, while commandant denoted someone who had been given command of a ship. For example, in a corsairing context, if you were a lower rank officer who had been given command of a prize ship, you would be its commandant but not its captain.

For the 1800-1810 period, the French Navy only ever sent a tiny number of ships of the line in the Indian Ocean. In fact, the only one I’ve found so far was the 74-gun Marengo which was the French flagship in the Indian Ocean from 1803-1806, taking part in the Battle of Pulo Aura in 1804, etc. For commandant, the Marengo had both Contre-Admiral Charles-Alexandre Léon Durand Linois and Capitaine Joseph-Marie Vrignaud, neither of whom seem to have suffered any injury in the Indian Ocean. Which all leads to my general doubt that the BN3 writer was referring to a capitaine du vaisseau in charge of a ship of the line.

Putting all this together, I believe that what we see in BN3 appears to tell us that its writer was referring to a ranked captain (rather than a capitaine du vaisseau), and very probably on a French corsair frigate, or perhaps a corvette. But… it’s hard to be sure. All the same, now you know.

In my efforts to work out exactly who the Commandant Hamon in the BN3 letter was, I found two recent issues of Outre-Mers filled to the gunwales with Eric Saugera’s somewhat epic archival research into French slaving ships during the tumultuous period 1794-1814.

Saugera has a good-sized section on Captaine Emmanuel-Hypolite le Joliff and his ship the Navigateur. Specifically, he says of Desvaux and Hamon that the first was “le second capitaine“, while the second “devant être un officier de l’État-major“. However, this notion that Hamon was an officer in the General Staff of the military seems (and I might be wrong) to be a presumption on Saugera’s part. So, while I initially got super-excited about this as a new lead on Hamon, I’ve kind of settled down a bit since.

Perhaps more interesting is that in Saugera’s section on l’Ile de France slave ships, he talks specifically about the Apollon. This was a 200-tonne three-master (30 men) that arrived from Brest in 1797 (Cap. Raoul?), going from there to Mozambique on 16 Jun 1802 (Cap. Moignot, maître d’équipage François Roguit). The name appears twice in Toussaint’s Route des Iles, firstly on p.295 for 1797:

…and p.265 for 16 Jun 1802:

This slaver Apollon would seem to be a different ship to the one (Cap. Louis le Vaillant) that was captured by HMS Leopard in 1798, which I once posted the crew list for. In fact, it seems likely to me that this Louis le Vaillant 1798 Apollon (which the famous corsair Jean-Francois Hodoul had received in May 1797 fitted up for privateering) was in fact the same 7 Jan 1797 Apollon with Cap. Raoul listed by Toussaint.

But was this 1802 slaver Apollon the one mentioned in the BN3 letter?

Dans ma vie aventureuse et avant de m’embarquer à bord de l’Apollon, j’ai fait partie du dernier corsaire de ces grand corsaires qui ont fait tant de mal à l’Espagne et à notre ennemie l’Anglais.

Even though the BN3 letter writer is talking about his “adventurous life”, note that he is talking about “before” embarking on the Apollon. So perhaps he flipped (as did Emmanuel-Hypolite le Jollif) from privateer ships to slave ships? But, in all fairness, without crew lists to hand, it’s hard to be 100% sure.

Regardless, this slaver Apollon appears to fit the BN3 timeline fairly well, so I wouldn’t bet against it right now. So… maybe/perhaps/maybe we’re starting to make some progress here (fingers crossed).

A while back, I noted that H. C. M. Austen mentioned (“Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean”, p.79) a ship’s surgeon called Hamon from 1796. This was on a pilot brig which the famous corsair Robert Surcouf had captured and renamed the Cartier on 28 Jan 1796: while Surcouf and the rest of his (small) crew had boarded the Diana, the ship’s Malouin surgeon (Hamon) and cook had stayed behind, shooting across at the Diana to help convince them that Surcouf’s Cartier had a much larger crew.

This story was most famously recounted in Charles Cunat’s often breathless “Histoire de Robert Surcouf, Capitaine de Corsaire” (p.52), though modern historians such as Alain Romain prefer to rely on Captain Tapson’s account of the same attack that appeared in the Calcutta Gazette.

Even though Surcouf was extraordinarily successfully, his ways of going about things drew sharp criticism (e.g. from Decaen) and his substantial corsairing prizes were initially withheld from him. However, after appeals to authorities in France, this was reversed: but part of this involved a letter being sent by many of the French crew recounting what happened. This letter dated 15 Vend. Ann. IV appears in Cunat (p.43), and includes a list of signatories: R. Surcouf, H. Hamon, Bourgoin, J. Croize, etc. So it seems almost certain that the ship’s surgeon’s first name began with H (e.g. Henri, Henri-Marie, etc), which is helpful.

But the reason I’m flagging this is that my last post briefly mentioned Emmanuel Hypolite le Joliff, captain of the slaver ship the Navigateur, which ferried slaves from Mozambique to Ile de France. I had a feeling I’d seen this name before but couldn’t think where: but it was on Capitaine le Joliff’s Navigateur that Robert Surcouf was famously the Lieutenant from 27 Aug 1792 to 17 Mar 1794.

Toussaint’s Les Freres Surcouf mentions two specific slave runs from Surcouf’s time on the Navigateur (though there were doubtless many others after that, including the one with the 1803 mutiny where two slaves owned by Messers Desveaux and Hamon were lost, presumed jumped overboard):

• 10 May 1793 -> Mozambique, returned 25 Sep 1793 with 362 slaves
• 10 Dec 1793 -> Mozambique, returned 04 Mar 1794 with 360 slaves

It would therefore surely not be a surprise if the Commandant Hamon mentioned in the BN3 letter was also the same H. Hamon who had served under Robert Surcouf in 1796. This might well explain his kindly ministrations to the letter-writer: “[…] je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami.” Though I’d need persuading about ship’s surgeons’ bedside manners: “Anyone lost any limbs? Hands? Feet? Eyes? No-one? OK, jolly good, if you need me, I’ll be dining with the Captain“.

Incidentally, a search of Gallica threw up a reference in “La medecine et les medicins a Saint-Malo, 1500-1820” by Dr H. Hervot (p. 219) to “Hamon, chirurgien navigant de Saint-Ideuc” in the proceedings of a St-Malo medical society dated 24 Oct 1791. Given that we know from Cunat that the Hamon on the Cartier was a ship’s surgeon from Saint-Malo (the famous “Corsair City”, and Surcouf’s and le Joliff’s home town), this could very easily be the same person.

Where Next?

I suspect Hamon’s full name will appear in one or more Mauritian crew lists from this time (though none of the ones I have here), and possibly also in records in the Saint-Malo archives and/or in Gallica. I’ve also looked in various other Surcouf-themed books but without any luck. But even so, I think it’s starting to feel as though these different research threads may well be converging on a single person.

The third letter of the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang set mentions the writer’s close relationship with a certain Commandant Hamon:

• “[…] je suis malade depuis la prise de Tamatave, malgré les soins de mon commandant et ami.”
• “Quand je serai mort, le commandant Hamon te fera remettre le peu que je possède et que j’ai économisé dans ma vie aventureuse de marin.”
• “Le commandant te remettra les écrits des trésors, […]”

But who was this Commandant Hamon? Given that this letter seems to have been written not long after the Fall of Tamatave (20th May 1811), and that the letter writer was a seaman (“marin”), I think it seems likely that “commandant” here means a sea captain rather than an army captain or politician. So this is what I went a-looking for…

Auguste Toussaint’s “Route Des Iles”

One excellent source for Mauritian maritime history is Mauritian archivist Auguste Toussaint’s (1967) book “La Route Des Iles: Contribution a l’Histoire Maritime Des Mascareignes“. Usefully, you can borrow this online from the Internet Archive, which is a terrific help.

Searching this for “Hamon” yields two hits:

• Expédition, 25 Jul 1804, Cap. Hamon, French, goëlette, from Mozambique (possibly armed in Port Louis?)
• p.265: 05 Nov 1803. Two slaves belonging to Messieurs Desveaux and Hamon went missing after a mutiny on board the Navigator (the source says that they probably threw themselves into the sea), Captain Emmanuel le Joliff, returning from Mozambique.

Mozambique was the centre of the (thankfully by 1804 somewhat dwindling) slave trade in the South Western corner of the Indian Ocean, so it would seem fairly likely that this Hamon was a slave trader operating between Mozambique and Mauritius.

Note that a ship called the Expédition (also French, also coming for Mozambique, but marked up as a brick rather than a goëlette), Captain Bazin, arrived in Mauritius on 05 Jun 1805. There was also an Expédition (again French, again a goëlette), Captain Lesteine (?), that arrived in Mauritius from Bengal on 01 Aug 1801. These three similarly-named ships may or may not have been the same. Additionally, we can see Bazin listed as captain on numerous ships around the Indian Ocean from 1781 onwards, some of which were from St Malo.

However, this is as far as (the normally very reliable) Toussaint seems to take us on our journey here.

Slave Voyage Database

There’s also an interesting slave voyage database, that is generally more useful for West African slave journeys (my understanding is that Mozambique slavers tended to sell slaves via country ships travelling across the Indian Ocean, and often via middlemen in Mauritius).

This lists two separate slave ship captains from around this period with the surname “Hamon”:

• Hamon, Guillaume-Denis (active 1753-1755), Saint Philippe, Senegambia, Nantes
• Hamon, Jean Marie (1817), Elysée (a) Eliza, Saint-Louis, Nantes

Unfortunately, the first seems too early, while the second had not yet been certified for long-distance sailing prior to April 1820 (and, at only 38 years old, also seems too young):

So it doesn’t seem that we’re having much luck here.

National Archives

The National Archives have prize papers relating to a Charles Hamon, captain of “La Fanny” (no, I’m not making it up). On 16 Dec 1808, the corsair La Fanny (16 guns, crew of 80) was captured close to Noirmoutier by HMS Naiad and HMS Narcissus. (The prize papers are here, but have not yet been digitised.)

Some of the documents in NA (e.g. this) assert that this Captain Hamon had previously been captain of the frigate La Venus, but this is plainly false, confusing Hamon with Hamelin. This is presumably what H. C. M. Austen was referring to, but the fact that the Naiad and Narcissus captured Charles Hamon’s corsair La Fanny seems to have been correct.

The problem here is that this particular Hamon was presumably then escorted onwards to a prison (such as the new one nearby in Plymouth), where he presumably spent the rest of the war. Which would (I guess) argue against him then popping up in Mauritius in 1811, alas.

Where to look next?

Well… to be honest, I don’t rightly know. There are plenty of name hits for “Hamon” in the Memoire des Hommes (473 to be precise), but the date range there only really goes up to 1788 or so. This means that most of the seamen listed there seem to be too old to be still active in Mauritius circa 1811, but even so this meagre Venn diagram intersection still leaves a few possible candidates:

• Charles Marie Hamon (from Port-Louis or Lorient)
• Francois Hamon (from Saint-Malo)
• Germain Hamon (from Lorient)
• Joseph Hamon (from Pont-l’Abbé)
• Pierre Hamon (from Lorient, who “déserté à l’île de France le 20/04/1788”)

Am I confident that this will help? No, not really. But I thought I ought to mention that I’d looked under this particular rock, in case it helps anyone else attempting the same thing. For now I’m out of ideas.