Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

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!

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! 🙂

A pirate is a thief on a ship, a privateer is a pirate licensed to steal from other countries’ ships, while a corsair is a French or Muslim privateer. (Oh, and a buccaneer was a hunter from Hispaniola who had turned pirate or privateer, but that’s another story.)

For the story behind the La Buse / Le Butin pirate cipher, it’s important to understand that while La Buse (Olivier Levasseur) was a pirate through and through, Le Butin (Bernardin Nageon de L’estang) seems to have been a nationalistic pirate who then turned official privateer before finally becoming a sailor in Napoleon’s Indian Ocean fleet (such as it was), where he died.

Specifically, Le Butin’s will (as described in Part 1) says “In my adventurous life before embarking on the Apollon, I was one of those pirates corsairs who did so much harm to our enemies Spain and England.”

At first, this didn’t mean much to me: but while reading “Forgotten Eden” (1968) by Athol Thomas, fragments of the larger story began to emerge. It turns out that the 16-gun Apollon (built in 1796) had been one of the most famous corsair ships in the Indian Ocean, because during a six month period in 1797 she captured over 700 million francs’ worth of treasure. Her illustrious captain was Jean François Hodoul whose grave at the Bel Air cemetery in the Seychelles’ Mahé Island sports (according to Thomas, though I haven’t been able to verify this) a carving of the Apollon.

The Apollon then passed from Hodoul to one of the other “Kings of the Corsairs”, Louis La Vaillant: there’s a line drawing of her from 1798:-

However, the Apollon’s shimmering career was then abruptly terminated by Captain Thomas Surridge on H.M.S. Leopard on 24th October 1798 (according to the London Gazette): the prize papers taken from the Apollon are HCA 49/13-5 at The National Archives in Kew (though these are marked as “1799”, perhaps the date they were archived).

By far the best account of the Apollon’s end I’ve found so far is from the extremely well-researched and well-informed Henri Maurel:-

A son retour à Port Louis, L’Apollon, dont Hodoul aurait possédé la moitié des parts, fut vendu au corsaire Le vaillant, qui en assura le commandement. L’Apollon appareilla pour une campagne le 22 Août 1798, captura une riche prise portugaise, puis fut lui-même arraisonné par le HMS Leopard, le 10 Novembre 1798, à environ 500 miles au NE de Mombasa, près de l’équateur et Longitude 45° 30′. Son équipage fut emmené à Anjouan, aux îles Comores, mais purent, plus tard, retourner à Maurice. Il est improbable qu’ Hodoul ait été parmi eux, en dépit de l’affirmation de Toussaint, comme officier en second. [xxii]

Si l’on considère la date de naissance du premier enfant de Hodoul, Raymond, le 20/06/1799, et “en comptant sur les doigts”, on arrive à la conclusion que son enfant avait été conçu en septembre 1798. Hodoul n’était donc pas à Bord de L’Apollon lors du départ de ce navire de Port Louis. Cet argument est conforté par deux éléments irréfutables: Un exemplaire du rôle d’équipage de L’Apollon retrouvé au Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], indique que le navire avait relâché dans cette île, certainement pour “faire le plein” de volontaires. La mention marginale en face du nom de Hodoul indique “à Prendre aux Seychelles”. L’Apollon n’ira point le chercher, car dans ses mémoires, le matelot Tabardin [xxiv], écrit ” … nous partons et nous voilà voguant sur les flots. Nous passâmes à Bourbon pour y prendre des volontaires, et continuant notre voyage, la première terre que nous vîmes fut la baie de Lagoa, ensuite celle de St Augustin; Puis nous dirigeâmes notre route vers Mozambique pour y établir notre croisière.” Hodoul échappa donc à cette fâcheuse aventure.

[xxii] Auguste Toussaint: Dictionnaire de Biographies Mauricienne.
[xxiii] Liasse L408
[xxiv] Mémoires de Tabardin, manuscrit, Carnegie Hall Curepipe Ile Maurice

My typical free’n’easy translation of Maurel’s text runs like this:-

On her return to Port Louis, the Apollon (which Hodoul had owned half the shares of) was sold to the corsair Louis La Vaillant, who also became her captain. The Apollon embarked on a new campaign on August 22nd 1798, captured a rich Portuguese ship, but was herself then taken by H.M.S. Leopard on November 10th 1798 about 500 miles NE of Mombasa near the equator, at Longitude 45° 30′. Her crew was brought to Anjouan in the Comoros Islands, but may later have returned to Mauritius. Despite the assertion to the contrary of Toussaint, the second officer, it is unlikely that Hodoul was among them. [xxii]

This is because if we count backwards ‘on our fingers’ from Hodoul’s first child Raymond’s date of birth (20th June 1799), we arrive at the conclusion that he was conceived in September 1798. Hence Hodoul was not on board at the start of the Apollon’s journey in Port Louis. This argument is strengthened by two irrefutable facts: (1) a copy of the crew list of Apollon found in the Archives Départementales de la Réunion [xxiii], which indicates that the vessel put in on the island, almost certainly to “fill up” its complement of volunteer seamen; and (2) the marginal note in front of Hodoul’s name indicates that he was “Taken to the Seychelles”. Apollon didn’t go looking for him at all because, as the sailor Tabardin [xxiv] wrote in his memoirs, “… we departed and straightaway we were sailing on the waves. We went to Bourbon [i.e. Reunion] to take on volunteers; and, continuing our journey, the first land we saw was Delagoa Bay, then on to St. Augustine’s Bay [in Madagascar]. After that we proceeded on our way towards Mozambique to get our cruise properly underway.” Hodoul thus escaped this unfortunate adventure.

Personally, this leaves me with little doubt that it was indeed the famous corsair ship Apollon that Le Butin served on: but under which captain – Hodoul or La Vaillant? I’m reasonably sure that it will turn out to be Le Vaillant, which is probably why Le Butin’s corsair career came to an end there: but perhaps a definite answer will be found in the crew list on Réunion, or in the prize papers at The National Archives.

Next step is to find enough time & money to get down there to see for myself (Réunion would be nice, sure, but I’ll probably have to settle for the bus fare to Kew & back, oh well!)… 🙂