Category Archives: Le Butin Papers

It’s no secret that there is little of substance about “La Buse” (the pirate captain Olivier Levasseur) on the web. Errrm… or anywhere else, to be brutally honest.

One of the few good places is photographer Yannick Benaben’s website, where he has posted up a set of pages called Sur les Traces du Trésor de La Buse Entre Histoire et Légendes Insulaires. This is a mixed bag of “La Buse”-related threads, some of them genuinely historical (which is good), but also a lot of fairly empty cryptogram-based speculation too (which is… not quite so good).

Regardless, I’m happy to recommend his set of “Sur les Traces…” pages as a genuinely useful resource covering the Indian Ocean phase of La Buse’s piratical life (as long you don’t inhale the cipher speculations part of it too deeply).

“Les Diamants de Goa”

However – and this is where it gets confusing – Yannick has also published an online story called Les Diamants de Goa. This has a (fictional) underwater archaeologist called “Francesca Verrazone” working at a (fictional) French underwater archaeological institute in Marseille, albeit one that sounds a great deal like (the very real) Marseille underwater archaeological institute DRASSM, which is indeed one of the first (real) places you’d go if you were looking for an underwater site in French (or formerly-French) territorial waters.

Yannick’s story has his (fictional) Verrazone arrange a (fictional) conference to air her (fictional) theory about the Nossa Senhora do Cabo, the (real) treasure-filled ship that La Buse captured. He then has a whole load of (fictional) marine archaeologists go and look for it: and so it all proceeds.

But though he seems to have enjoyed this writing (I suspect he had the film rights at least half in mind), the piece has ended up unfinished, stranded precariously on the water’s edge of his website. And people (particularly those who rely heavily on Google Translate, I expect) find links to his story high up in their La Buse search results and conclude it must be just as true as the “Sur Les Traces…” pages, when it’s in fact no more than a frippery.

As a result, you have to be very careful as to which “tree” of pages you’re looking at (i.e. the “Sur Les Traces…” set or the “Les Diamants de Goa” set), because while the former is largely factual (though laced with cipher speculation), the latter is simply made up – a bit of cipher-themed fun.

This difficulty becomes most apparent when Benaben’s (fictional) narrative deals with the captured treasure ship…

The ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara’

There are plenty of things we can say for certain about this (very real) ship. The Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara (or ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo’ for short):
* was built in Amsterdam in 1710 and called the ‘Zeelandia’ or ‘Gelderland’;
* was a two-deck 2nd rate ship of the line with 72 guns;
* was bought by Portugal in 1717 and renamed ‘Nossa Senhora do Cabo e São Pedro de Alcântara’;
* entered service in August 1717;
* having survived a terrible storm, was captured in port by Olivier Levasseur (“La Buse”) in 1721;
* subsequently disappeared without a trace (presumed sunk).

(Note that because people writing about La Buse tend to be French, the ship’s Portuguese name tends to get Frenchified into “La Vierge du Cap”.)

In Yannick’s story, however, he has his (fictional) marine archaeologist refer to the (real) “Grande Panorama de Lisboa” (a huge set of tiles depicting Lisbon around 1700):

He has Verrazone (fictionally) assert that a (real) ship (genuinely) drawn near the front of the tiles is the Nossa Senhora do Cabo:

As you have probably already worked out from the above, this cannot actually be the Nossa Senhora do Cabo: the tiles were drawn before 1703 (because that was when the artist died), while that ship was not built until 1710, and did not arrive in Lisbon until 1717. Also, while the ship depicted does have two decks, it only seems to have ~44 cannon (rather than 72): the real Nossa Senhora do Cabo was a substantially bigger beast.

(Perhaps someone else will be able to find out what this ship depicted actually was, because there wasn’t anything on the 3decks website that seemed to match: doubtless a plucky Portuguese historian has already trawled through many more fleet descriptions to do precisely this.)

The First Cryptogram

My current understanding is that the first “La Buse” / “Le Butin” cryptogram – the one that Charles de la Roncière wrote about in his 1934 book “Le Flibustier Mysterieux” (and how I’ve tried to get a copy of that book, but without success) – has not been sighted since 1934.

(And for what it’s worth, I still fail to see how this has anything to do with La Buse.)

However, following an exchange of comments on Klaus Schmeh’s recent page on La Buse, I received what seemed to be a low resolution version of a photo of the real first cryptogram (“crypto_musee_2004”). Looking at the EXIF data attached, it was (c) Yannick Benaben and dated 2004:07:18 13:10:30.

When I then trawled through the Wayback Machine, the only place that this appeared on Yannick’s site was at the bottom of the ‘Préambule’ section of his (fictional) “Les Diamants de Goa” web pages. It therefore seems – unless someone can prove otherwise – highly likely to me that Yannick mocked this up for the purposes of his “Les Diamants de Goa” story sometime before 1st Sep 2009.

The Second Cryptogram

Going forward a little in (Wayback Machine) time to 16th October 2011, we find that Yannick has replaced the (presumed mocked-up) image of the first cryptogram with an image of the second “La Buse” cryptogram, the one which Emmanuel Mezino wrote an entire book about (but which I don’t believe is genuine).

As far as I know, this would have been the first public sighting of this second cryptogram.

Now here’s the curious thing. If we look closely at the ship on the second cryptogram identified as “La Perle” (of which Manu very kindly sent me a close-up copy), we see something rather odd:

What is arguably far too coincidental is that the back of “La Perle” is almost exactly the same as the back of the ship drawn on the Grande Panorama:

My Conclusion

I didn’t believe that the second cryptogram was real before, and now I really don’t believe it all. To be precise, it seems extremely likely to me not only that Yannick Benaben mocked up the image of the first cryptogram, but also that he was the person who created the whole second cryptogram. He had the means, opportunity, and – crucially – the motive to do it.

…unless anyone knows better?

Emmanuel Mezino, having misinterpreted my critique (of his book) as in some way overcritical, has left some comments on Cipher Mysteries challenging me to disprove his La Buse theory. Constructing a disproof is often quite hard, but I think that in this case it’s possible if I focus solely on his speculative cryptology (rather than his speculative history, speculative cartography, speculative numerology, etc).

First, I’ll need to summarize Manu’s complicated-sounding reasoning. He argues…
* …that the 17-line copy of the cryptogram (as decrypted by Charles de la Roncière and popularized by Robert Charroux) is a fake, while the 22-line copy of the cryptogram (as revealed for the first time in Manu’s book) is real;
* …that the pigpen cipher key inferred by de la Roncière is only the basis of the cryptogram’s cipher system;
* …that there is an extra first level that involves swapping between dotted and undotted pigpen shapes;
* …that there is an extra second level that involves a Caesar-like +4 substitution shift (i.e. replacing a letter with a letter four steps on within the alphabet) for certain characters;
* …that there is an extra third level that involves treating the two halves of the pigpen alphabet key as if it is some kind of virtual chess board, and then using knight’s moves to make letter substitutions within the alphabet (but again, only for certain letters);
* …that even with this pigpen cipher basis plus these three additional confounding steps, he still can’t make sense of the first 17 lines of the ciphertext, but that the final five lines (of the recently revealed 22-line copy) can be read very clearly;
* …and hence that the only things he draws from the cryptogram are (a) the number 22 (which is important to him, because it is the same number as the number of mysterious stone markings he claims to have found scattered around the North-East part of Réunion, (b) the word “ECU” (which he claims links with the constellation known as the Ecu of Sobieski), and (c) a steganographic star map of the same constellation hidden in plain sight within the cryptogram, formed by linking up all the letter “A”s (in their pigpen form).

Additionally: whereas the original 17-line cryptogram has no connection to La Buse at all beyond mere hearsay, the new 22-line cryptogram has “LA BUSE” clearly added to it (written in the same pigpen cipher), along with a picture of a ship marked “La Vierge du Cap”, a picture of a man being hanged (presumably Olivier Levasseur himself), five additional lines of cipher including the date 1730 (i.e. the year of La Buse’s execution) written in words, and lots of other wonderfully detailed historical pirate-looking stuff all around it.

What is wrong with this reasoning?

For me, there’s a difficult paradox that underlies all of the above: that even though Manu concludes that the original 17-line cipher is uncrackable and unknowable (even with his claimed three stage extra confoundment of a pigpen cipher, he only claims to decrypt a single word “DIFFUS” from the whole of line 17), he simultaneously is content to accept that the new lines 18 to 22 are perfectly readable and reliable.

17: UUNDIFFURQECIEEFURTETLESL
= …DIFFUS…………….
18: UNBONVERREDANSLHOSTELDELEVEQUEDANT
= UN BON VERRE DANS L’HOSTEL DE L’EVEQUE DAN[S]

Were these two lines really made in the same way and at the same time?

For me, the answer is a flat no. If line 18 to 22 were written at the same time as lines 1 to 17, then the same subsequent process – whether of conscious confoundment (as Manu thinks) or of accumulated historical accident (as I suspect) – would have happened to both blocks of text. As such, we would not be in a situation where we can read line 18 but have not the faintest clue about its neighbouring line 17.

Really, from what I can currently see of these two ciphertexts (Manu’s book only includes his transcription of lines 18-22, but not a clear image of these new lines in the ciphertext), I cannot honestly accept that lines 17 and 18 were originally written down at the same time. That is, the final 5-line block looks to my eyes like it was added as an entirely separate (and possibly much later) constructional layer.

It’s therefore an open (and extremely interesting) question whether this second cryptogram is a genuinely old artefact (i.e. a copy of an earlier document that has been extended, though not with sufficient art to make that extension appear seamless) or a modern fake. From my perspective, I don’t think there’s yet quite enough information to make that call: but I hope someone takes it on as a challenge in the future. That, for me, is the central core of the book that I’d have written (but which Manu plainly didn’t, apparently for reasons of “respect”).

All in all, then, Manu’s notion that 22 (the number of lines of the second cryptogram) is somehow important now seems impossible to justify, whether or not you place any trust in numerological arguments (and I personally have never seen one that turned out to be true or useful). And so his subsequent claim that this necessarily links with the 22 stone incisions he found now seems almost certainly wrong.

Given the uncertainty in the confoundment of lines 1 to 17, I also have no confidence at all that all the instances of the letter “A” were letters “A” in the original ciphertext: I also have no confidence that the cryptogram as it has come to us (in either variant) has precisely the same layout as the one that was originally enciphered. As a result, I have no real confidence that Manu’s suggested A-based star map is a reliable guide to anything.

Finally, I also have no confidence that the word “ECU” apparently in the ciphertext was in the original. Manu’s claimed explanation of the 17-line ciphertext as some kind of triply-confounded pigpen (based on what? Has anyone ever made one even remotely like this? I don’t think so) is completely speculative and unhelpful, in that it doesn’t seem to explain a single word. I cannot see that the presence of “ECU” in a string of unreadable French can be a reliable starting point to build an argument about steganographic star maps.

Last year, I was contacted by a young French guy called Emmanuel Mezino: he was writing a book about the famous “La Buse” cryptogram and treasure, and asked if my publishing house Compelling Press might publish it. From my experience with “The Curse of the Voynich”, I told him that if he structured it in two distinct halves – the front half summarizing facts and historical research (giving sources), and the second half comprising his inferences and speculation – then yes, I would be very interested.

My rationale for this was simple: even if readers happen to disagree with every single aspect of the reasoning (which, let’s face it, is often the default position with cipher mysteries), the book would still stand a good chance of being hugely interesting, entertaining, and useful in its own right – the story of La Buse is fascinating and intriguing, and I have found few properly historical accounts that do justice to any phase of the pirate’s life.

However well-intentioned that was, it was perhaps too tightly-fitting an editorial straitjacket for a young writer to want to wear; and so Emmanuel ended up editing and publishing his book himself, giving it a romantic-looking cover:-

For its title, Mezino used the phrase allegedly called out by Olivier Levasseur (‘La Buse’) en route to the gallows, as he (so the story goes) threw a piece of paper containing his cryptogram to the crowd – “Mon Trésor à qui saura le prendre” (i.e. “My [fabulous] treasure [will go] to he who will take it”). Buying it will cost you rather less than the bejewelled gold cross of Goa: 18,00 euros (plus postage) for a physical copy, or (perhaps more likely if you happen to live outside France) 11,99 euros for the ebook.

Without much doubt, I think the best bit about the book is that it includes some close-up photographs of parts of a new cipher document – what could very possibly be a second copy of La Buse’s cryptogram. It’s not a perfect scoop (a low resolution colour version of this was included on page 8 of Liz Englert’s (2013) treasure-hunting omnishambles book “My Adventures of the Famous La Buse Treasure“), but the quality of the scans Mezino includes is on the whole extremely good.

Having said that, armchair treasure hunters will be perhaps less than fully impressed that Mezino somehow fails to include a close-up of the lines of cipher that only appear in this second version of the cryptogram, settling on giving merely his interpretation of what those extra letters say (which may or may not be correct).

Another less than satisfactory section was Mezino’s imaginative rendition of the “La Buse” legend, which for all its liveliness was plainly derived from a variety of unreliable sources (apparently including his interpretation of the drawings around the second cryptogram). Though this wasn’t as bad as Pauline B. Innis’ (1973) “Gold in the Blue Ridge” (a teeth-grindingly dreadful imaginative historical reconstruction of the Beale Papers story, which I wearily read recently), I’m not planning to return to either any time soon.

And it should be no surprise that, for all Mezino’s claims that he has (by collecting together an assortment of markings on rocks scattered across the northern half of Réunion; interpreting them as a star map written on land; reconciling that with sacred-geometry-style details overlaid on the cryptogram itself; and then back-linking everything to the astronomer Hevelius) logically deduced the only possible answer to the cryptogram… I’m more than just a bit skeptical. In fact, I don’t think there’s even a single detail in his reasoning that I’d ‘fess to agreeing with.

But as you’d expect, Mezino brooks no disagreement with his Grand Plan: and as writer and editor, that’s ultimately his right. You buy his book or you don’t, and you agree with him or you don’t. It’s all fine.

For me, though, his account is all a bit of a missed opportunity: pictures aside, he’s included all the stuff I’d have left out, and omitted all the stuff I’d have put in. There’s no critical appraisal of the second cryptogram as a source document (or even, dare I say it, as a possible modern forgery made to impress treasure hunters), nor any critical appraisal of La Buse’s own history and the quality of the sources.

Nor is there any kind of critical assessment of La Buse’s earlier life in the Caribbean, nor Le Butin’s trustworthiness as the (alleged) source for the first cryptogram, nor a critical assessment of Charles de la Roncière’s (1934) “Le Flibustier Mysterieux”, which first brought the cryptogram to the world’s attention.

Many Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless link all this with my recent grouchy post about The Voynich Manuscript for Dummies, where I moaned about how people tend to fixate on the mythology of cipher mysteries, and seem to have no time for looking at the basic historical dimensions of the claimed evidence – transparency, reliability, agenda, bla bla bla. Well, yes: and it would be hard to deny that Emmanuel’s book has ended up somewhat hollow in this respect, which is a big shame.

But even so, I do appreciate that writing an evidence-centred cipher mystery book that manages to keep a properly analytical cutting edge but without destroying the underlying mystique is a really tough writing brief – perhaps almost impossible for a writer’s first book. Ultimately, though, perhaps Mezino’s book will – for all its many shortcomings – prove to be a useful first step in the right direction. Hopefully: and yet from where I’m standing, we’ve got a very long way to go on that road just yet…

There’s a nice-looking 2010 documentary on the pirate/corsair Olivier Levasseur (“La Buse”) being screened on French TV that I unfortunately might just have missed. It’s an episode of the series “Patrimoine et énigmes du monde marin” on TV5, filmed by Hervé Jouon, with a 52-minute running time.

There also seems to be a 13-minute version of it on YouTube (also a 2010 film by Hervé Jouon for Grand Angle Productions). But this seems to be a heavily cut-down edit of the whole show, perhaps for a different series or documentary strand entirely.

Can any of my French readers tell me if I can pay to see the full-length TV5 episode streamed online anywhere?

Even so, the YouTube version covers the cryptogram side of the story fairly well, and even manages to include action shots in an Réunion archive of a French historian reading Levasseur’s execution instructions. (Which worked for me, but perhaps I’m a bit too easily pleased by that kind of stuff).

All the same… if you like an occasional bit of French language but all the above sounds just a tad too heavyweight for you, then I possibly have the perfect answer: a 5-minute Flash-style animated retelling of La Buse’s story, courtesy of Cap Canal!

Unfortunately, while the production team managed to hire good artists and decent voice talent, I found the history side of the episode rather lacking in accuracy. All the same, it’s a bit of real-life-pirate-themed fun for kids, and maybe that’s the whole point. [But you can’t really blame me too much for wanting people to get the basic history right, right? 🙂 ]

Jumping ship from the French archives, might the British archives now help us find out what happened with the Le Butin / La Buse pirate cipher mystery?

To recap, what I’m trying to narrow down is the “large British frigate” mentioned by Le Butin: “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“.

I’ve decided to start by looking at the date range [summer 1795 to summer 1796] – partly because I think we’d have heard about it if it had happened on Admiral de Sercey’s watch (he started in summer 1796), but partly because I have a reasonable candidate who seems to have disappeared without a trace between November 1795 and late Spring 1796.

Hence what I’ll be doing is working out what “large British frigate”s were operating in the Indian Ocean around 1795-1796 (which is when I currently suspect Le Butin’s ship was hit by fire from a large British ship on the coast of Hindoustan). From H.C.M.Austen’s “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” and a multitude of other sources, I’ve pieced together a partial list of British ships operating in that arena at that time: though I believe I’ve probably got all the biggest ships (mainly because the British Navy never had that many ships sailing there), there may well have be others… but perhaps those will emerge as we tackle the primary sources.

Even though there may well be Admiralty reports to check as well, for now the first thing to do is to call up the relevant ship’s logs and see what they say. Note that “ADM 51” is the captain’s log section of the National Archives, while “ADM/L” is the lieutenant’s log section of the National Maritime Museum, and captain’s logs typically summarized the lieutenant’s logs (but adding details about changes to the ship’s inventory etc)…

Oh, it’s also very important to note here the difference in the 18th century between a “ship-of-the-line” and a “frigate”. Essentially, a ship-of-the-line has two decks of cannons (so that a set of ships can be arranged in an end-to-end “line of battle” so as to fire a multi-ship super-wide broadside at any enemy unfortunate to be in front of the cannons), while a frigate has only one row of cannons (though occasionally with others on the forecastle and the quarterdeck). Both ships-of-the-line and frigates were normally square-rigged on all three masts, so I believe you’d only be able to tell them apart when you were close enough to see how many rows of cannons a given ship had.

Technically, the British Admiralty only ever counted a ship as a frigate if it had at least 28 guns, while (confusingly) some “fifth-rate” 44-gun ships of this period had two decks of cannons but were still described as frigates. Personally, I have my doubts that Le Butin would have shared the Admiralty’s precise classification nuances. All the same, I suspect that his description of the ship as a “large English frigate” may be enough to narrow down our search, i.e. I suspect we’re looking for a big ship with a single deck of guns (probably more than 28 guns, but probably no more than 44 guns).

With these constraints in mind (and all the details that follow below), I think we can eliminate Suffolk and Centurion (both ships-of-the-line) and very possibly Diomede (a two-decker frigate) and Resistance (probably a two-decker frigate too, though it’s hard to be sure), as well as Carysfort (too small to be called “large”), Hobart (a sloop rather than a frigate) and Virginie (arrived in the Indian Ocean too late for our date range).

This broadly leaves us Sibylle, Oiseau, Heroine and Fox, with my best guess of the four being the massive 44-gun single-deck Sybille (simply because the others were all 32-gun frigates). Yet I don’t have any record of where the Sybille was between 1794 (when it was captured) and 1798 (when it was in the Philippines), so it is entirely possible that it wasn’t in the Indian Ocean or Indian Ocean at all during the period I’m focusing on. Fortunately, the Lieutenant’s Log should tell us exactly where it was and when. Bring on the primary evidence! 🙂

* * * * * * *

HMS Suffolk (74-gun third rate ship-of-the-line)
168ft long, 46ft wide, 1616 tons. Launched 1765, broken up 1803.
01 February 1795 – 21 September 1795 — ADM 51/1108
14 September 1796 – 30 September 1797 — ADM 51/1202
13 September 1795 – 13 September 1796 — ADM 51/1187
1794-1802 — ADM/L/S/497

HMS Centurion (50-gun fourth-rate ship-of-the-line)
146ft long, 40ft wide, 1044 tons. Launched 1774, sank 1824.
05 December 1795 – 23 March 1797 — ADM 51/1198
22 June 1797 – 23 January 1800 — ADM 51/4425
1793-1800 — ADM/L/C/92

HMS Diomede (44-gun Roebuck-class two-decker fifth-rate “frigate”)
140ft long, 38ft wide, 887 tons. Launched 1781, sank 2nd August 1795.
07 May 1794 – 06 May 1795 — ADM 51/1120
25 May 1795 – 03 August 1795 — ADM 51/4437
1793-1795 — ADM/L/D/125

HMS Resistance (44-gun fifth-rate frigate) [was this also a two-decker Roebuck-class “frigate”?]
140ft long, 38ft wide, 963 tons. Launched in 1782 and blown up in 1798.
28 June 1795 – 30 June 1796 — ADM 51/1194

HMS Sybille (44-gun single-deck frigate, with extra guns on the forecastle and querterdeck)
152ft long, 39ft wide, 700 tonnes. Launched 1792 as “La Sybille”, captured by HMS Romney in 1794, disposed of in 1833.
10 March 1795 – 30 April 1798 — ADM 51/1222
1795-1803 — ADM/L/S/616

HMS Oiseau (formerly La Cléopatre) (32-gun single-deck frigate)
145ft long, 37ft wide, tonnage not listed. Launched 1781, captured 1783, broken up in 1816.
01 January 1795 – 17 February 1796 — ADM 51/1115
03 May 1796 – 30 November 1796 — ADM 51/1183
1780-1781 — ADM/L/L/285

HMS Heroine (32-gun fifth-rate frigate)
Launched in 1783, sold in 1806.
04 March 1797 – 20 August 1798 — ADM 51/4457
01 February 1796 – 02 March 1797 — ADM 51/1193
1794-1802 — ADM/L/H/145

HMS Fox (32-gun fifth-rate frigate)
Launched in 1780, sold in 1816.
14 January 1793 – 11 January 1794 — ADM 51/371
15 January 1794 – 14 November 1794 — ADM 51/1146
01 January 1793 – 31 December 1795 — ADM 51/1107
15 November 1795 – 14 November 1796 — ADM 51/1180
15 November 1796 – 14 November 1797 — ADM 51/1211
15 November 1797 – 17 June 1798 — ADM 51/1257
1794-1801 — ADM L/F/216

HMS Carysfort (28-gun sixth-rate frigate)
118ft long, 33ft wide, 586 tons. Launched in 176, sold in 1813.
18 March 1795 – 31 March 1796 — ADM 51/1176
01 April 1796 – 02 March 1797 — ADM 51/1219
1795-1799 — ADM/L/C/64

HMS Hobart (formerly the French corsair ship La Revanche) (18-gun sloop)
Captured October 1794, sold 1803.
12 September 1795 – 27 March 1797 — ADM 51/1211
1795-1800 — ADM/L/H/159

HMS Virginie (44-gun French single-deck frigate)
Captured April 1796 off Ireland.
30 August 1796 – 29 August 1797 — ADM 51/1180
30 August 1797 – 10 August 1798 — ADM 51/1267
11 August 1798 – 14 September 1798 — ADM 51/1294
14 September 1798 – 13 September 1799 — ADM 51/1299

Who was the mysterious French sea captain who Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de L’estang) got his pirate cipher from?

Le Butin claimed that this captain was mortally wounded in a naval battle with “a large British frigate on the shores of Hindoustan”, and on his deathbed – and having confirmed that Le Butin was a Freemason – he passed Le Butin his pirate treasure secrets, now widely presumed to be La Buse’s pigpen cryptogram.

All in all, taking this at face gives us a pretty specific historical puzzle to solve – we know where it happened (off the coast of Hindustan, so not too far from the ports of Surat, Diu, and Daman), broadly who did it (a large English frigate), and broadly when it happened (sometime in the 1790s). But can we be more specific?

Trying a little too hard for a quick answer, I drew up a list of Indian Ocean French corsairs who died during that period (perhaps surprisingly, many of them seemed to live to a tidy old age – crime may not pay, but state-licensed crime apparently does). For example, the French corsair Claude Deschiens de Kerulvay died on 11th September 1796 on his ship the Modeste having been wounded in a sea-battle with two well-armed English whalers the previous day… but that was off the coast of Mozambique. So, no real match there, it would seem. And the same proved to be the case with just about all the others.

I also previously dug up a mention of a sea battle of the coast of Hindustan that happened on 9th February 1796, where three French warships sailing under false flags engaged with the coastguard ship Real Fidelissima just off Diu. But that was a small Portuguese ship, guarding a Portuguese port in India… once again, “close, but no cigar”.

Even so, I worked out that two of the three French warships that attacked Diu were almost certainly the Cybèle (under Captain Renaud) and the Prudente (under Captain Tréhouart). The third ship might have been the brig Coureur (under Lieutenant Garaud), the corvette Pélagie (under Lieutenant Latour-Cassanhiol) which had joined Renaud’s division in 1795, the Jean-Bart (formerly the Rosalie, under Captain Loyseau), or even Deschiens de Kerulvay’s Modeste. Incidentally, the Modeste was laid up in May 1796, which would be broadly consistent with its having been the ship that the Portuguese coastguard and fort cannons damaged in the action off Diu… but that’s a bit thin as inferences go.

I think we can be a little more specific about the timing, though. Specifically, it seems very unlikely to me that it would have been after the summer of 1796, when the truly formidable Admiral de Sercey (who is commemorated on the Arc de Triomphe!) took control of the French Mauritius fleet. And given that the number of attacks by French corsairs on the British East India ships ballooned after 1793, the date range we’re interested in is probably from late 1793 to July 1796. That’s a reasonably good start… but not quite good enough. And so it was there that my train ran out of steam.

But then a copy of H.C.M. Austen’s (1934) “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” arrived through the post (the Cipher Mysteries budget only stretched to the 2003 paperback 2nd edition, but even that was hard enough to find). Having this lovely old slab to hand allowed me to cross-reference everything I’d found so far with Austen’s detailed accounts of the various Indian Ocean naval actions [even if some parts of it have clearly been superseded by modern research].

Even though I’m only half-way through it (it’s a big old thing, really it is), I’m now pretty sure that Le Butin’s dying captain will turn out to be none other than Jean-Marie Renaud, head of the French Navy’s Indian Station.

Renaud’s main claim to naval fame came from the action of 22nd October 1794, when he proposed a way to break the British blockade of Mauritius’ Port Louis. The Cybèle and the Prudente were badly damaged in the sea fight (and Renaud himself was wounded, though not fatally), but Renaud’s plan worked, and the blockade was lifted… for a few weeks, anyway.

Austen continues (p.64)…

Early in 1795, as soon as the two frigates had been repaired, Renaud took them out as naval corsairs. On 30th June, in the Straits of Sunda, they captured the Sea Nymph; on 8th July, in the mouth of the Palimban River, a Dutch and many other ships, one of which, the Acheines of 400 tons, was ransomed by the Nabob of Arcot for 120,000 francs.

…before finishing with a sentence that is both mysterious and unsatisfying…

No historian has as yet been able to trace the ultimate fate of Renaud.

The the Wikipedia page on Renaud asserts that (and:-
* “capitaine de vaisseau Renaud” was in Guyane in 1799 [BB4 139. CAMPAGNES. 1799. VOLUME 10]
* “capitaine Renaud”, captaining the Frigate Syrène in 1801 as per this quote from Guerin’s “Histoire maritime de France” (p.211) [note that “Cayenne” was the French colony in Guyana]:-

“La corvette le Berceau remplaçait, dans la station de Cayenne, la frégate la Syrène, capitaine Renaud, qui, après un beau combat contre deux frégates anglaises, était allée déposer dans cette colonie le commissaire Victor Hugues, et elle avait en levé, le 10 juillet 1800, une bonne partie d’un convoi anglo-por tugais, amariné une corvette et mis en fuite un brig d’escorte, lorsque ayant conduit à bon port ses prises évaluées à plus de quatre millions, elle fut rencontrée par la frégate le Boston, de 32 canons, avec laquelle il lui fallut soutenir trois combats successifs à portée de pistolet.“

I also found one further possible Renaud reference listed in the French Marine archives:
* “cdt. Renaud, enseigne de vaisseau” was commanding a ship called the Unité full of prisoners between Toulon and Mahon in 1801 [BB4 156. CAMPAGNES. 1801. VOLUME 6]

But no, I don’t believe that any of these references are to the same M. Renaud who sailed the Indian Ocean. For a start, I don’t believe that Renaud ever returned to France – the hero of the 1794 naval action would surely have merited some kind of official response, whether a pension or an honour. And for another, I simply don’t believe that he would have gone completely silent for 3-4 years at what was essentially the peak of his career.

No, the French marine archives of the period are sufficiently detailed and complete that any move by a well-thought-of figure would have been carefully noted (particularly by the enthusiastically bureaucratic Admiral de Sercey, whose letters fill the French Marine archives), but honestly, there’s nowt t’see there. OK, you may say that “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”: but here we do have plenty of evidence in the archives, all saying nothing about what Renaud was doing. To me, that’s arguably as close to “evidence of absence” as you’re likely to get.

I’d agree that a man about whose family, birth (place and date) and death (place and date) we currently know nothing is always going to be an easy lapel to pin a mystery medal on. But if I’ve got him figured out right, what’s the next step, hmmm?

Well… so far, I’ve played most of this from the French archival side: but now it’s time to (you’re way ahead of me) jump ship over to the British archives.

Hence my plan (such as it is) is to try to work out what large British frigates were anywhere near the Hindustan coast between 9th February 1796 (when Diu was attacked) and late March 1796 (when Captain Galloway of the American ship Restoration said “the Prudente, the Cybèle and a corvette returned to Port Louis … without any prizes.“). It’s a pretty tight window.

Really, the list of possible British ships who were in the exact place at the exact time must surely be quite short (no more than three or four?), so finding those out should be relatively straightforward. The carrot on the stick is that the papers of many British ships of this period are still accessible, along with contemporary Admiralty reports etc: so once those ship names are in hand, I believe it should be possible to go straight to the primary evidence and see what it tells us. There may be quite an unexpected story to be found there, you never know… 🙂

PS: there may possibly be more to see in BB4 86. CAMPAGNES. 1795. VOLUME 23 in the French Marine archives, as I’ve only seen the item summary: “Frégate la Prudente (croisière autour de Sumatra ; Saint-Denis-de-la-Réunion), cdt. Renaud, capitaine de vaisseau à titre temporaire. 2 frim. an IV” (i.e. cruising around Sumatra, 23rd November 1795). Even so, I suspect that’s where Renaud goes off the French radar and possibly onto the British radar… hopefully we shall see!