Tracing Captain Hamon / Commandant Hamon…

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.