The Voynich Manuscript’s Bee Secrets page, revisited…

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I’ve just bee(n) reading Gene Kritsky’s “The Quest for the Perfect Hive”, which, though it covers many different sides of apiculture, ultimately focuses on the evolution of hive technology. This, of course, brought me back to thinking about the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘Bee Secrets’ page that I discussed briefly in The Curse of the Voynich.

Back then, I’d wondered whether the page (one of the panels on the reverse side of the nine-rosette page) might have been an enciphered version of Filarete’s book of secrets relating to bees (along with water, machines, agriculture, etc). And so I had discussed the drawings on this page with the tippitty top bee expert Dr Eva Crane (who I’m sad to say died in 2007): she pointed out that the hives apparently depicted there were conical skeps. This is a type of hive thought to have originated in Germany and which beekeepers south of the Alps almost never used (they instead used horizontal log hives).

The Four Skeps

In the top left ‘skep’, the beekeeper might possibly be smoking the bees out of a hole in the top:

In the top right ‘skep’, we see a stylised bird (not sure what this represents) and bees going in or out of the bottom (this is one of those Voynich drawings where we seem to have an original layer and an obscuring layer on top, others like this are in Q13):

The bottom left skep is oddly stylised and apparently multi-stage, and it’s not clear what the beekeeper is doing (perhaps smoking the bees out?). The dots in the body, however, appear to be where the honey / honeycomb would be, so perhaps some kind of honey extraction mechanism is what is intended here:

Finally, the bottom right skep has the mysterious bird again, and again the inner (dotted) honeycomb seems to be exposed:

What Does It All Mean?

Oddly, Dr Crane’s observation hints that this single page might offer us a microcosm of the secret history of the Voynich Manuscript: a German bee-keeping technique, perhaps with a mechanical innovation added by the author, all concealed in plain sight, and being re-presented for an Italian audience. And this doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with Filarete (whose personal motto was the industrious bee) for it to be true.

What I learned from Gene Kritsky’s book (pp. 160 ff.) was that accounts of bee-keeping often included “bee calendars”, that told bee-keepers what to do in different months, zodiacal signs, or seasons. And I’m now wondering whether that accounts for the way the writing on this page appears in four directions, i.e. the four seasons of bee-keeping:

In terms of a block paradigm match, therefore, I currently believe the source material for this page will turn out to be an early (1380-1450) account of conical skeps written in Italian (or possibly Latin), derived from Northern European sources (probably German, possibly Swiss), and with four paragraphs corresponding to the four seasons of bee-keeping.

Roswell and Sheridan Cavitt…

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Quick digression: I went into several second hand bookshops a couple of weekends ago, and while I found a few nice historical books to keep me occupied, what struck me was the complete lack of the usual breathless UFO books. In the olden days (i.e. five years ago), these used to fill the shelves, so why are they now so few and far between? Might conspiracy theorists have moved on from UFOs to (who knows?) vaccine, woke, Brexit, Russian political funding, MAGA, Trump, Jewish space lasers, American democracy, doomscrolling? Is Roswell too distant a memory for anyone but me to give a stuff about?

Anyway… one of the big ‘traditional’ focuses of UFO conspiracy theorists is Major Jesse Marcel. It was he who famously went to Mac Brazel’s ranch in Corona NM (near Roswell) where pieces of strange metal foil and curious beam fragments (some with odd writing on) were found. Plenty of books and documentaries have been made featuring Marcel, mainly because he combined a credible straight-down-the-line military career with his firm belief that what crashed near Roswell was, ummm, extra-terrestrial.

Yet another very similar military man went to Brazel’s ranch that day: Counter Intelligence officer Captain Sheridan Cavitt. Relatively little UFOlogical ink has been spilt on Cavitt, perhaps because he combined a credible straight-down-the-line military career with his firm belief that what crashed near Roswell was… ummm, just a balloon. Which would, of course, make for far less juicy books and tabloid headlines.

Still, it’s time to take a look at Sheridan Cavitt, the other well-known military Roswell responder…

Captain Sheridan Cavitt

Perhaps the best place to start is Nick Redfern’s two-part article on Sheridan Cavitt: here’s part one, and here’s part two. The most ‘horse’s mouth’ thing Cavitt said about Roswell was in a May 24, 1994 interview with Colonel Richard L. Weaver, USAF:

“There were no, as I understand, checkpoints or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage) we went out there and we found it. It was a small amount of, as I recall, bamboo sticks, reflective sort of material that would, well at first glance, you would probably think it was aluminum foil, something of that type. And we gathered up some of it.”

As to how large that debris field was, Cavitt asserted that it was “Maybe as long as this room is wide.” And he was sure (he said) that it was “a weather balloon”.

UFO researcher Kevin Randle interviewed Cavitt in 1990: Cavitt told Randle that because in 1947 he was working for the CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps), any report he made would have gone to Washington (there’s a persistent rumour Cavitt wrote a report that has since disappeared). As far as the Roswell incident goes, Randle was sure Cavitt was lying (which he was), and Cavitt was pretty sure Marcel was lying (he probably was). At the same time, Randle pointed out that “Cavitt doesn’t even agree with Cavitt“, so we have to exercise caution when trying to make sense of all this.

But there was in fact a third Army early responder, Bill Rickett. And according to Rickett’s later testimony, it was Rickett and Cavitt who got to Brazel’s ranch first, with Rickett coming back later with Marcel. And that kind of broadly squares with Cavitt saying that he took the stuff he collected from the site with Rickett back to the base at Roswell and handed it to Marcel; and that he thought Marcel claiming that he’d gone to the site first with Cavitt was wrong, and had caused Cavitt a load of problems.

So… what did happen?

On balance, I think that the actual first Roswell responders were probably Sheridan Cavitt and Bill Rickett; and that Jesse Marcel, having been handed debris from the site by Cavitt back at the base, had then gone to the site with Bill Rickett a little later that day. Generally, even though Cavitt wasn’t a particularly reliable witness, I’m a little more comfortable with parts (though, again, not all) of Rickett’s account.

Does that mean that I think Jesse Marcel embiggened his role up in the whole affair, and should really have been recorded as third or fourth or fifth responder? Yes, probably. Really, my guess is that Marcel had told his family stories for several decades about what happened that day, and in the end wasn’t really comfortable untangling that whole knot if that meant reducing his heroic role in the story.

At the same time, Marcel was sure what had been in the field wasn’t a weather balloon, even if Cavitt was: yet if the debris resembled aluminium foil and bamboo, it can’t have had anything to do with Project Mogul, as Cavitt and others later (incorrectly) claimed. I believe they all tried to frame what they saw in terms of what they knew: but what they saw it wasn’t anything that they knew. By which I mean to imply not that it was some kind of ‘alien technology’ (because I’m sure it wasn’t): but rather non-Army technology sufficiently advanced to confuse the heck out of them both (while still not being magic).

Finally, on the matter of the mysterious “bodies” at the other site close to Roswell, Cavitt kept resolutely schtum: but that’s definitely a topic for another day (i.e. not today).

PS: here’s a nice video of Project Mogul balloons being launched, courtesy of the Black Vault. Might one of these have come down on Mac Brazel’s ranch? I really don’t think so, sorry.

Auguste Toussaint: Les Petites Affiches, Jean Baptiste Castaing, haches d’abordage…

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A few weeks ago, I decided to try to dig up any papers or books online by renowned Mauritian archivist/researcher Auguste Toussaint that I hadn’t previously read. One of these was his 1977 article “Le Corsaire Bordelais Jacques-Francois Perroud“, which appeared on pp. 99-124 of Revue Historique de Bordeaux et du Departement du Gironde, #26.

Les Petites Affiches

Toussaint, as you’d expect, provides a detailed (yet brisk) account of Perroud’s corsairing career. One detail stopped me in my tracks: when trying to track down how much the sale of Perroud’s prizes yielded at auction, Toussaint searched the Outre-Mer section of the Archives nationale (p. 109) in vain, even though he had found an announcement of the auction dated 9th August 1802 in the journal Les Petites Affiches de l’isle de France.

Now, I’d heard of this journal but thought that all physical copies of it had been lost. But from Toussaint’s account it would appear that I was wrong. So I now have an open task to try to find copies of Le Petites Affiches, because this would appear to be the kind of rich (if not almost random) history I love to grind through hunting for pearls.

Jean Baptiste Castaing

Another thing Toussaint mentioned (pp. 113-114) that I didn’t previously know was the fate of Perroud’s 36-cannon frigate the Bellone. Perroud was taken ill in Port-Louis, and so passed command of the Bellone to his second-in-command Jean Baptiste Castaing. The Bellone then cast off for the Bay of Bengal on the 15th April 1806, capturing the Lady William Bentinck (landed in Mauritius 30th June 1806) followed by the Orient and the Sir Lawrence Pearson (both landed in Mauritius 15th August 1806). However, on 12th July 1806 the Bellone was captured off the east coast of Ceylon by H.M.S. Powerful (74 cannons) from Admiral Pellew’s fleet: Pellew subsequently bought the Bellone at auction, refitted it and took into the British fleet.

The interesting part? So far I have found no subsequent trace of Jean Baptiste Castaing anywhere. If it turns out he was wounded and died in that battle, might he possibly have been the corsair captain mentioned in the BN3 letter? I don’t know, but it’s a good question. For reference, the BN3 letter says:

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.

Toussaint further mentions (p.116) that, after uber-corsair Robert Surcouf left the Indian Ocean (following a “querelle memorable avec Decaen“), no corsair cruises left Mauritius in 1809 at all, and the two that left Mauritius in 1810 were both captured.

Haches d’abordage

Finally: a few years ago I was able to compile a list of 50 of the 53 French seamen given haches d’abordage by Napoleon, but struggled to find the final three. (I discussed this topic here and here.)

Toussaint mentions (p.111) that Perroud was awarded the hache d’abordage (as mentioned in my list), but then goes on to say that the only two other recipients he knew of who were corsairs in the Indian Ocean were the famous brothers Robert Surcouf and Nicolas Surcouf. So it seems my list was missing these two, bringing it up to 52 out of the 53.

As an aside, Toussaint finishes that section off by noting that the rough-and-ready Breton corsair Jean-Marie Dutertre (who also had a memorable [but separate] quarrel with Robert Surcouf) was recommended by Governor Decaen for the Croix de Chevalier on 22 February 1808; but Decres – despite Dutertre’s phenomenal success as a corsair – turned him down. All of which sounds a lot like class prejudice to me, but perhaps subtle French naval historians will have a better explanation. Ho hum.

Bryce Beasley, alchemical herbals, and Voynich Herbal A…

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I first asked the question of whether there might be a mapping between the alchemical herbal manuscript tradition and the Voynich Manuscript in a 2019 post, having not long previously put up a post trying to link to scans of alchemical herbals. The fact that the Voynich Manuscript’s Herbal A pages originally (as far as we can tell) contained 97 plants and also that the (yes, very badly named) alchemical herbals list of plants has 98 plants is a coincidence I pointed out that is somewhat suspicious (but far from conclusive).

Always useful here is Philip Neal’s page on alchemical herbals. And more recently, Marco Ponzi published the Latin text of the alchemical herbals (compiled from various individual herbal manuscripts, because of various textual inconsistencies and lacunae). Minta Collins’ Medieval Herbals: The Illustrated Traditions is always good to have handy (though more to do with herbals than alchemical herbals).

And even though the book where this all really started was Vera Segre Rutz’s (2000) Il giardino magico degli alchimisti, I’d also now happily add Bryce Beasley’s 2024 thesis “Fantastic Herbals and Where to Find Them: Contextualizing and expanding the Alchemical Herbal tradition” to the list of resources I’d strongly recommend everyone interested read, particularly because it is downloadable online, and in English rather than Italian.

Beasley vs Segre Rutz

The first thing to note is that Beasley builds solidly on Segre Rutz: and while he is critical of various aspects of Segre Rutz’s foundational work (e.g. he argues that the suggested link to alchemy [e.g. via lunaria and herba folio] was inherently weak, whatever Aldrovandi thought; and he isn’t at all convinced by Segre Rutz’s use of hermeticism as a framework), his thesis is a complementary text rather than a replacement. Whereas Segre Rutz characterises the alchemical herbal tradition as having seven direct manuscripts and seventeen indirect manuscipts, Beasley extends this to 38 (though this is still far short of Toresella’s claimed 70). Note that (according to Beasley p.14, footnote 30) Segre Rutz seemed unaware of Toresella’s 1996 article on alchemical herbals.

Beasley, more generally, sees the alchemical herbal plants as falling into Jerry Stannard’s (1977) “magiferous” plants category, halfway between “magical” (fantastical) and “mundane” (real-world). For me, I suspect that Stannard’s three pigeonholes may be a little too neat, and that a lot of medieval manuscript copying was often done without any critical appreciation of the subject of the text (e.g. whether it made sense or had been miscopied), rather than a purely imaginary / fantastical plant.

Beasley’s list of 14 new manuscripts that would need to be added to the stemma codicum:

As an aside, Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly remember Ms. Chig. F.VII.158 from Alexandra Marracini’s work.

What next?

As is so often the case, even though Beasley’s thesis collects together a lot of useful information and makes it accessible, he doesn’t attempt to build up the tree of manuscripts and their (often hard to pin down) relationships. Hence, there as yet is no definitive (or even semi-definitive) ‘map’ of which herbal begat which other herbal etc: all we have is Segre Rutz’s tree for the seven direct tradition manuscripts (Beasley, p.40):

Here (as per Segre Rutz, p. XC):

  • P1 = MS Lat: 17848
  • P2 = MS Lat: 17844
  • A = MS Aldini 211
  • C = MS Canon. Misc. 408
  • F = MS 18
  • R = MS 106
  • ms. 362 = Vicenza MS 362
  • x, y, z = (missing manuscripts)

Beasley does point (p.66) to evidence that MS LJS 46 is “likely a descendant of” MS 106. Similarly, he does suggest that München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Ms. Cod. It. 149 may be “similar to Ms. Pal. Lat. 1078 and other manuscripts from the indirect sub-tradition” (p.60).

There are also lots of other nice details: for example, on Lucca MS 196 fol. 106r, a “left flower has a small note of a “bi” which likely is a note telling the painter to leave the flowers white or bianca in Italian”. (p.58)

What specifically set me thinking today was Beasley’s note on the Natural History Museum herbal (Mss. Her.) on p.56 that discusses the order of the alchemical plants, which I knew about but hadn’t really thought about for a few years:

The beginning 16 herbs perfectly copy the order of manuscripts Ms. 18, Ms. 106, Ms. Lat. 17848 and Ms. Aldini 211 and with a couple of exceptions Ms. Canon. Misc. 408, Ms. 17844 and Ms. 362.

And so my thought for the day is this: has anyone tried to form candidate mappings between pairs of Voynich Manuscript herbals pages (i.e. on the two sides of a folio) with pairs of adjacent numbered images in the alchemical herbal tradition? That is, it has always been easy to speculate about a single-page connection between (say) the snakes / worms in the roots of the plants on Voynich Manuscript f49r and alchemical herbal plant 74 (herba forus, which also has snakes / worms in some manuscripts): but it’s hard to go beyond mere speculation with any confidence. So my point is that in this example we should perhaps also be thinking about f49v (on the rear side of the same folio as f49r) and alchemical herbal plant 75 (the next one along) to see if there’s a connection there too.

So, let’s have a quick look. Voynich Manuscript f49v looks like this:

Alchemical herbal plant 75 is herba capalarices, which (in the manuscript used by Marco Ponzi) looks like this:

In this case there’s no obvious match, sure: but it would only take a single unexpected pair of images to be matched for us to smash through this wall. Well worth a further look? Yes, definitely. Definitely!

Commandant vs Capitaine vs Lieutenant de vaisseau…

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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.

The Tamarin Bay Cipher Mystery, revisited…

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While flicking through Robert Charroux’s (1962) “Tresors du monde : enterres, emmures, engloutis” a few days ago, I noticed that his version of the Tamarin Bay ciphertext was slightly different to the one given by Alix d’Unienville that I previously discussed:

13 800 onces or-argent
Ici se trouve une courtisane
Je vous laisse monsieur deviner
sans vous demander de part

Though very similar, the number given by Charroux here is a thousand times smaller than the one d’Unienville gives; and his final word is “part” rather than “l’argent“. So perhaps these are two different people’s transcriptions?

On the off-chance, I also searched Gallica for various phrases in the quatrain, but found nothing: so it seems that this ciphertext hasn’t appeared anywhere else. Why is there no interest in this mystery?

Dorabella Cipher update…

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You may not have known that 2024 saw a flurry of Dorabella-related activity. For example, here’s a picture of the blue plaque that was unveiled in Dora Penny’s honour in June 2024:

The Wolverhampton Society Dora Penny Intrepid Cyclist, Singer and Musician The Inspiration for Variation 10 of Elgar's Enigma Variations 'Dorabella' Lived Here 1895-1914 Supported by Wolverhampton Music School

Dan Bartlett (more about him below) also went to Mount Noddy Cemetery in East Grinstead to have a look at Dora Mary Powell (nee Penny)’s grave, which is Grave Section 5C No. 301.

And so we move briskly forward to 2024’s decryption attempts. Firstly, there’s Dan Bartlett’s claimed decryption, which you can see on YouTube or via his book on Amazon (£8.99, or £3.49 for the Kindle version). In my opinion, any Dorabella decryption that includes the word ‘DORABELLA’ in the plaintext is just plain wrong: in p.11 of Dora Penny’s book, she describes how Edward Elgar only started using the word ‘DORABELLA’ to refer to her in September 1898, yet the ciphertext is dated 1897. Perhaps others will find interest in Bartlett’s decryption methods or approach, but it’s not for me.

Another active decryption effort has come from Ian Menkins, who has been kind enough to include me in his email chains discussing it since April 2024. Ian believes that the Dorabella Cipher is simply enciphered music, and has gone to great lengths to try to demonstrate how he thinks this works. From my perspective, there is a strong case to be made that Elgar’s 1886 ‘Liszt Fragment‘ ciphertext (which was written apparently as a commentary to a discussion of Liszt in a programme) appears to be directly music-related, though whether these are enciphered musical notes or enciphered text (or indeed a combination of both) remains far from clear. The Dorabella Cipher remains yet further away from clarity (in my opinion), despite Ian’s efforts, but here’s an MP3 of how he thinks it should sound:

More generally, one thing I’ve been meaning to do is to go to the Royal College of Music and read Dora Penny’s diaries for 1897 (it’s part of the Dora M. Powell bequest). There are also papers there relating to Claud Powell (her son) which might be interesting.

  • 5571/1 Dora M Powell: Miscellaneous papers, etc relating to the theme of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
  • 5571/2 Dora M Powell: Letters & correspondence
  • 5571/4 Dora M Powell: Draft articles, talks and notes
  • 5571/5 Dora M Powell: Papers and correspondence relating to “Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation”
  • 5571/6 Dora M Powell: Programmes and advertisements
  • 5571/7 Dora M Powell: notes, printed and draft articles (not by Dora M Powell)
  • 5571/8 Dora M Powell: Photographs & watercolours relating to Elgar. Held by RCM Museum
  • 5571/10 Dora M Powell: Elgar reference book
  • 5571/11 Dora M Powell: Address book (with reviews pasted in)
  • 5571/12 Dora M Powell: Elgar memorial concert (3/6/34) material
  • 8753 Dora Powell (‘Dorabella’): Pocket diaries, 1896-1913. From the estate of her son Claud Powell, October 2005.
  • 8754 Claud Powell: Correspondence, lectures, papers, etc, relating to his mother Dora Powell (‘Dorabella’) and Elgar. From the estate of Claud Powell, October 2005.
  • 14088 Dora M. Powell: Letter to George Dyson. 30.1.1950. Enclosed in Dyson’s own copy the vocal score of ‘Quo Vadis” (see C190 on library catalogue)

Commandant Hamon and a slave ship Apollon…?

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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).

    Perhaps Commandant Hamon was a surgeon?

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    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.

    Tracing Captain Hamon / Commandant Hamon…

    by ⋅ 2 Comments

    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.