A few days ago, I was wondering here whether I could dig up more about the mini-fleet that La Bourdonnais rustled together to go to the rescue of Dupleix’s land forces in India. And once again, as has been the case so many times already, it was H.C.M.Austen’s exemplary “Sea Fights and Corsairs of the Indian Ocean” (1934) that initially sailed to my rescue.

Austen (p.6) lists La Bourdonnais’ five ships as follows (though note that some of the figures differ from what appears on pp.70-71 in La Bourdonnais’ memoirs, as published by his famous chess-playing grandson):
* Insulaire, 24 guns, 350 men, Captain de la Baume [30 guns]
* Bourbon, 42 guns, 350 men, Captain Sellé [44 guns]
* Neptune, 34 guns, 350 men, Captain de la Porte-Barré [40 guns]
* Renommée, 30 guns, 230 men, Captain de la Gatinais [26 guns]
* Elizabeth, “a small vessel from Surat” [a “petit sloop” of 18 guns]

According to this source (pp.185-186), the famous sinking of the Saint-Géran on 17th August 1744 had so rattled people that hardly anybody wanted to join La Bourdonnais’ fleet. And so, to man his ships quickly, he devised a scheme whereby he would rent slaves for 18 livres per month, with the idea of paying their owner 200 livres if that slave happened to die. People were still umming, ahhing, and grouching about this arrangement when a big slaver ship arrived at the island in the nick of time: at which point La Bourdonnais negotiated to buy many of its noirs at 200 dollars each. And so in May 1745 his conjured-up-ex-nihilo fleet was, against all odds, armed, manned and ready to set sail.

La Bourdonnais initially kept the Bourbon back but sent the other ships to Sainte Marie Island, Madagascar, with the plan of sailing his mini-fleet to Madras on 1st August 1745. However, he received orders at the very last (on 28th July 1745) that he should await a fleet of four ships from France that would arrive by the end of August.

What then scuppered La Bourdonnais’ plans was that these four other ships did not arrive from France until January 1746, when they… (Austen, p.7)

“[…] were in a mutinous, ill-found, and ill-provisioned state. By this time La Bourdonnais’ naval artisans in l’Ile de France had been decimated by an epidemic following a severe drought; the harvest had been ravaged by locusts; a vessel dispatched to India for rice had returned without executing its commission; and the St Géran, with a large store of money, stores and provisions from Europe, had been wrecked near Ile d’Ambre.”

Austen then takes details of the engagement from “Collection historique, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre terminée par la paix d’Aix-la-Chapelle en 1748” (1758), which is available online via Google Play: but probably doesn’t concern us for the moment.

But there currently seems to be no obvious trace in the archives of the enrollment details and the crew lists for La Bourdonnais’ fleet.

La Bourdonnais: Trial and Exoneration

After La Bourdonnais had saved Dupleix’s hide by taking Madras, he fell foul both of accusations made by Dupleix of malfeasance and of a change in the complex political tide: recalled to France, La Bourdonnais was imprisoned in the Bastille while a number of accounts of what had happened were brought together by judges. He was eventually exonerated, but the struggle to clear his name ruined him: he died not long after.

One of these court accounts was subsequently published as “Mémoire pour le sieur de La Gatinais, capitaine de vaisseau dans les Indes (impliqué dans le procès criminel intenté au sieur de La Bourdonnais sur la dénonciation de Dupleix)” (1751), which is digitized in Gallica.

La Gatinais confirms many details of the accounts given above, including the fact that his ship (the Renommée) was crewed entirely by Maures: he claims he was given captaincy of that particular ship because he was the only captain who understood their patois, if only weakly (p.2). La Bourdonnais also told him that the cannons on the Renommée were too feeble to take an active part in the planned siege

He also mentions a “Sieur Najon”, one of four officers of the Compagne des Indes who (he said) submitted false or misleading accounts of La Bourdonnais’ conduct for the trial (the other three were Morin, Bouvet, Foucault, p.7). And I suspect you already know which particular Nageon family we are talking about…

Le Sieur Najon

It wasn’t only Gatinais who had a low opinion of this Sieur Najon: “Mémoire pour le sieur de La Bourdonnais: avec les pièces justificatives” (1751) heavy-handedly poured scorn on the testimony of “Le Sieur Najon, Officier des Troupes”:

Le sieur Najon Officier des Troupes, qui en a été chassé, & qui pendant le tems qu’il a servi a été si universellement méprisé, que tous les Officiers ont refusé de faire le service avec lui, dépose qu’après le coup de vent du 13 Octobre, le Sieur de la Bourdonna fït travailler pour sauver les Effets qu’il avoit, dit-il, fait charger dans le Vaisseau Hollandois. Voilà une insigne imposture.

1°. Le sieur Najon est le seul qui dépose de ce fait, & dès-là sa déposition ne fait aucune foi. Si un fait aussi public que celui-là étoit vrai, ne seroit-il pas attesté par une foule de Témoins? Comment pourroit-on concevoir que le sieur Najon fût le seul qui en eût eu connoissance ? Cette singularité ne caractérise-t-elle pas la méchanceté du Témon?

2°. II est impossible que le sieur Najon eût aucune connoissance de ce fait puisqu’il n’étoit plus à Madraz lors du coup de vent du 13 Octobre, &que dès le premier jour du même mois d’Octobre il étoit parti sur le Lys pour Pondichery (a) [le 5 du même mois le sieur de la Bourdonnais écrivoit au sieur Dupleix [..] ] , comme toute l’Escadre le scait. Il n’a donc pû tout au plus deposer que d’un oui-dire, & cependant il parle comme Témoin de visu, Peut-on desirer une prevue plus precise de la fausseté de sa deposition?

3°. Ce même Sieur Najon est d’ailleurs convaincu d’avoir depose faux, dans un article particulier de sa deposition, où il a soutenu que la sieur de la Gatinais étoit arrivé à l’Isle de France dans une Prise Angloise, quoiqu’il soit de notoriété publique, comme sieur Bouvet l’a attesté, qu le sieur de la Gatinais arriva dans la Renommée. Personne n’ignore qu’on n’ajoute aucune foi à la deposition d’un Témoin, qui se trouve fausse en un point. La fausseté d’une partie influe sur tout le reste.

4°. Le sieur Najon est démenti par tous les autres Témoins sure le fait du Vaisseau Hollandois. En effet le siieur de Barville a affluré, soit dans sa deposition, soit à la confrontation, qu’il alloit journellement le long de la côté, & qu’il n’a jamais vû travailler au Vaisseau Hollandois, ni entendu dire qu’on y eût travaillé. Il depose aussi, qu’il a demeuré avec le Subre-cargue de ce même Vaisseau Hollandois, qui s’étoit sauvé du naufrage, & que ce Subre-cargue lui avoit assure quon n’avoit embarqué dans le Vaisseau Hollandois, que les meubles du Capitaine & quelques vivres.

Whatever the historical rights and wrongs of La Bourdonnais’ dispute with Dupleix (and I suspect that the full answer will turn out to be far more complex than the reductionist “La Bourdonnais = Good, Dupleix = Bad” formula that tends to get wheeled out), I am reasonably sure that the (apparently unlikeable) person being denounced here was “Bernardin Nageon officier des vaisseaux de la Compagnie”, as he was described at his death in 1750.

“Hutin” or “Butin”?

The epithet “Le Butin” seems to have settled onto (the pirate) Bernardin Nageon’s shoulders over time, but it’s far from clear to me where it originated. Paul Fleuriau-Chateau did offer a dissenting opinion: he instead suspected that Bernardin Nageon’s nickname might well have been “Le Hutin”, ‘the quarreller‘ (p.53), but didn’t know for sure.

I now wonder whether the roots of this epithet might have actually lain in accounts of La Bourdonnais’ trial, such as the section of his memoirs I excerpted above, where “le sieur Najon” is described as “universellement méprisé” (universally despised). Certainly I don’t believe we have any secondary material about (the pirate) Bernardin Nageon beyond the internal evidence within BN1 and BN2, so it’s a bit vague where the name came from otherwise.

…unless anyone knows better?

Having considered André Nageon de l’Estang in Part 1 and his son André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang in Part 2, and Jean-Marie-Justin Nageon de l’Estang (and his possible father) in Part 3, we now move on to Part 4 and André Bernardin’s son, André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang.

As before, we start with his timeline (once again courtesy of Jean Claude Duchemin):

André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang

1745 (1st October): André Ambroise born in Port Louis.
1766 (14th January): marries Perrine Clerjean in Port Louis (she dies on 18th July of the same year)
1768 (13th June): marries Mathurine Louise Françoise Pitel in Grand Port.
1770: birth of a daughter, Marie Jeanne (she dies on 26th october 1779)
1774 (3rd July): birth of a son, Jean Philippe (he dies on 28th September 1779)
1779 (9th February): birth of a daughter, Marguerite Appoline Pélagie
1780 (30th June): birth of a son, Jean Joseph
1786 (7th November): it is announced that André Ambroise owes £10,229 to Thomas Etienne Bolgerd of Port Louis.
1788: birth of a daughter, Françoise Clémentine
1790: moves with his family to Seychelles, as Garde Magasin du Roi (‘Royal Storekeeper’)
1791 (26th December): birth of a son, Etienne Olivier
1798 (3rd February): André Ambroise dies in Mahé, Seychelles.

Incidentally, the tomb of Thomas Etienne Bolgerd (1748–1818), a local bigwig who at one time had 500 slaves, is still visible in Souillac’s Marine Cemetery, though how long that can last before the sea destroys it is a matter for only sad speculation:

(Photograph courtesy of Yann Arthus-Bertrand.)

André Ambroise Nageon in the Seychelles

There are far more mentions of André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang that relate to his time in the Seychelles than to his time in Mauritius. In April 1790, the Intendant de l’Ile de France appointed him Garde Magasin du Roi, and so he travelled with his family over to the Seychelles with Jean-Joseph Conan, “a surgeon for the royal establishment” and “their common brother-in-law” (according to Deryck Scarr’s very readable “Seychelles since 1770”, pp.11-12), Jean-Francois-Marie Jorre de St Jorre.

On the 19th June 1790 (Scarr, p.14), the heads of ten of the twelve families on the Seychelles “constituted an assembly”, and elected André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang president. He then read out a letter from the Ile de France inviting the Seychelles to join as a colony (which nobody agreed with), before immediately resigning.

When in 1794 Captain Newcome (briefly) took control of the Seychelles, André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang was one of the signatories to Article 7 of the capitulation document (found on Henri Maurel’s site here):

Article 7 :

La dite capitulation fait de bonne foi sera garantie par la signature du Commodore Newcome et signée par le commandant militaire et Agent Civil et par trois citoyens habitants des Seychelles représentant le corps des citoyens des Iles Mahé ou Seychelles et Praslin.

* Agreed.

Fait à Mahé, Iles Seychelles, le 17 mai 1794.

* Done on board H.B.M. ship Orpheus, in the roads of Mahé or Seychelles, the 17th May 1794.

Signed Jn Bte Quéau Quinssy                   Henry Newcome
[Pierre] Hangard
[André] Nageon de l’Etang
[Captain H.] Cornier Bellevaut

But sadly, this seems to be as much as there is to be found about André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang.

Was André Ambroise Nageon the pirate ‘Bernardin Nageon’?

If the two men were the same person, and if the French Republican Calendar dating evidence is also to be trusted, then we can reject the “20 floréal an VIII” (10th May 1800, after André Ambroise’s death) version from the letters in favour of the “20 floréal an III” (9th May 1795) version.

But I have to point out that, as of that particular date, André Ambroise had two sons and two daughters all very much alive: and so the notion that he gave his fabulous treasure and his half-lot of land back in Grand Port in Ile de France to a nephew (probably in France) does immediately seem somewhat shaky.

Moreover, as of 9th May 1795, Seychelles was a neutral country (the families having failed to agree to be a colony of Ile de France in 1790, and having capitulated to Captain Newcome in 1794), so there seems to be no obvious reason why André Ambroise would have been “about to enrol to defend my Country” at all. After all, he had gone native with his family: he was the head of a small number of Seychellois families. Who would he even enrol with, and to do what?

All in all, I think that once you have mentally separated out the ‘Pirate’ of BN1 and BN2 from the ‘Missing Corsair’ of BN3, the only thing that even faintly suggests that André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang and Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang might have been the same person is the presence of a French Republican Calendar date in the letters: and given that that is something I’m far from certain was a part of the original document, André Ambroise seems not to be our man.

I’d be happy to consider any evidence that seems to suggest otherwise, but if there is any such thing, I haven’t seen it so far.

It turns out that we can develop the hypothesis that André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was in fact Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang very much further than at first seems possible.

For a start, if the two men were indeed one and the same person, I think we can (putting all the pieces together) significantly narrow the range of possible historical dates during which the Will (BN1) and letter (BN2) were written.

Because André Bernardin’s second son André Ambroise was born on 1st October 1745, and his first son Jean Bernardin died on the 16th February 1745 (at the age of only seven months), his (probable) enlistment to La Bourdonnais’ fleet in April/May 1745 would have been at a time when he had no male heir of his own. (His wife may well not have yet realized that she was pregnant with their second child.)

As a result, it seems perfectly conceivable that he would in that context leave his precious pirate treasure cache and half-lot of land in Grand Port to a male relative. But who was Bernardin’s ‘neveu’ (nephew) Jean-Marie-Justin Nageon de l’Estang?

Jean-Marie-Justin Nageon de l’Estang

The Mauritian records tell us that André Bernardin had only one sibling: his sister Jeanne Marie Nageon de l’Estang. She arrived on Ile de France with their parents in 15th July 1738, and was married in 2nd July 1742 to François De la Cour Pradel. However, there is absolutely no genuine BMD data from the Mauritian archives supporting the much-repeated notion that either she or André Bernardin had a son “Jean-Marie-Justin”.

Yet I suspect that if you read the BN2 letter (addressed to ‘Mon cher Justin’) more closely, it not only doesn’t appear to have been addressed to a tiny child, but also doesn’t appear to have been written to someone living on Mauritius at all:

“Par nos amis influents, fais-toi envoyer dans la mer des Indes et rends-toi à l’île de France à l’endroit indiqué par mon testament.”

This surely only makes sense if it was written to someone far away – someone quite probably in France, I would venture to suggest. And in the context of André Nageon de l’Estang (Senior)’s long-standing connections to the Compagnie des Indes, the “amis influents” could surely only have been senior members of the French East India Company.

But could this (still hypothetical) Jean-Marie-Justin have been remotely old enough to be classed as an “officier de la réserve” in 1745? Given that Jeanne Marie was born on 26th November 1726 (it’s on the bottom left of p.264 in GG4 here), and even if she had a child at (say) thirteen, that child would only have been four or five years old by 1745… too young to be Jean-Marie-Justin, I think.

Hence I have to say that trying to reconstruct a missing Nageon de l’Estang genealogy via Jeanne Marie Nageon doesn’t quite work.

The Missing Brother

Yet there is another alternative that threads an acceptable route through our twisty maze of historical constraints.

The gap between André Bernardin (born 1716) and Jeanne Marie (1726) is quite wide: certainly wide enough for the Nageons to have had other children in the gap. If an otherwise-unknown brother had been born (say) around 1718, and had himself fathered a child at a young age, that child might well have been in some kind of Lorient naval academy by 1745, perhaps being fast-tracked towards the life of an officer, courtesy of the Nageon family’s “influential friends”.

So who was the missing brother? Actually, I strongly believe we already saw him mentioned three times in the page on André Nageon de l’Estang:

Danaé (1728-1730)NAGEON, 3 passagers, embarquée à l’armement, débarquée à Pondichéry le 05/07/1729, D[emois]elle, avec ses enfants, Louis et Jeanne Marie.

Badine (1730-1732) NAGEON, 4 passagers, embarqué à Pondichéry, débarqué à ?, passager pour la France, avec son épouse, son fils et sa fille.

Reine (1732-1733) NAGEON, 4 passagers, embarqué à l’île Bourbon le ?, débarqué à Lorient, sr, avec sa femme et 2 enfants, passager pour la France.

If this is as I suspect it is, this missing brother was Louis Nageon de l’Estang, named here for the first time. Further, I suspect that Louis had died by 1746, because that was when André Bernardin named one of his sons “Louis Noël Nageon de l’Estang”, I suspect in his brother’s memory (the son died in 1756).

If this all fits together the way it seems (and I really don’t have any more proof than the Danaé’s 1729 passenger list), the relevant section of the Nageon de l’Estang family tree looked like this:

Alas, this is exactly as far as I have been able to reach with the evidence currently available to me. However, perhaps other people will be able to clamber onto my shoulders and use other archival resources to develop this (sketchy, but not entirely hypothetical) narrative yet further.

For example, it might well be possible to determine from the Archives Municipales de Lorient if Lorient had any kind of naval academy for training young officers circa 1745: and if so, what records relating to those institutions are still extant. Similarly, it might well be that André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang himself – the paterfamilias of the family – might have some personal records in the sprawling historical treasure trove that is the archives of the French Compagnie des Indes.

Or… what do you think?

I’m looking at three 18th century Nageon de l’Estang men in the Indian Ocean, all called André. Having looked at André Nageon de l’Estang in Part 1, I’m now moving briskly on (in this Part 2) to his son André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang.

André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang

~1716: born (see further below why I think this date is correct)
17th February 1738: marries Mathurine Metayer (1714-1765).
1744: birth of son (Jean Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang) born – dies in 1745
1st October 1745: birth of son (André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang) born in Port Louis.
1746: birth of son (Louis Noël Nageon de l’Estang) born – dies in 1756
20th October 1750: dies in Port Louis.

Duchemin quotes as his source for André Bernardin’s death the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer:

ANOM, Ile de France, Port louis, année 1750, page 19 :
“Le 21ème jour du mois d’octobre 1750 … sépulture de Bernardin Nageon officier des vaisseaux de la Compagnie, décédé ledit jour et an …”

…and no further trace of André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang appears beyond this date, which seems fairly conclusive, all in all.

Source: Jean Claude DUCHEMIN

Even though we don’t have a date of birth for André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang, the excellent Mémoires des Hommes has some maritime records dating between 1735 and 1741, which I think we can identify him in:

* Duc de Bourbon (1735-1736) Bernard NAGEON, Paris, 2e pilote, ?, remplacement à l’île de France le 26/12/1735, débarqué au désarmement, vient de la Légère.

* Gloire (1737-1737) André Bernardin NAGEON, 21, Paris, 3e pilote, £24, a fait la campagne, non classé

* Amphitrite (1738-1739) André Bernardin NAGEON DE L’ESTANG, 23, Valogne, 3e pilote, £28, embarqué à l’armement, renversé sur le Duc d’Anjou le 01/02/1739, resté à l’île de France le 20/07/1739.

* Comte de Toulouse (1739-1742) Bernardin NAGEON, Paris, officier marinier, £28, remplacement à l’île de France le 26/03/1741, débarqué à l’île de France le 31/07/1741.

If this is indeed him (and I’m fairly sure that it is), André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was 21 years old in 1737 and 23 years old in 1739, so would seem to have been born in (or very close to) 1716.

So… Was André Bernardin The Pirate ‘Bernardin’?

Given that the Mauritian pirate treasure mystery has always been linked to a ‘Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’, people have often suggested that the pirate ‘must surely have been’ André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang.

From my perspective, the good news as far as this suggestion is concerned is that if we can eliminate BN3 (because it was written by a different corsair entirely) and both BN4 and BN5 (because they are so abbreviated and cryptic that nobody can yet make any genuine sense of them), all we have to work with is the scanty evidence in BN1 and BN2. This quickly eliminates the vast majority of problematic references, because they are almost all in BN3.

However, other problems do still remain. For example, one variant of the Will refers to Bernardin’s nephew Jean-Marius-Justin as an “officier de la République” (which would point to a post-1792 date): yet another refers to him as an “officier de la réserve”. We don’t yet know enough to tell which one of these is correct.

Perhaps more straightforwardly, given that the French Republican Calendar was only used from 1793 to 1805 and the documents have some dates quoted for BN1 (“l’an III de la République”) and BN2 (“20 floréal an VIII” and “20 floréal an III”), it would seem to be a straightforward thing to eliminate any pre-1794 date.

However, I’m not so sure: the date given for the third document BN3 (“20 Floréal de l’An IX”) seems to be incorrect, insofar as I think we can date BN3 as having been written after the Fall of Tamatave in May 1811, several years after the French Republican Calendar had stopped being used. As a result, I’m highly suspicious of all the dates given for BN1, BN2, and BN3.

It could very well be, for example, that at least one of the dates was attached to the papers when they were copied, rather than when they were originally written. As far as the French Republican Calendar date evidence goes, then, I think the jury should still be out.

Still, there is one more problem in the papers that remains to be considered. BN1 begins “I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed”: but was there any such enlistment on Mauritius during André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s relatively short adulthood?

The War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748)

From 1721 to 1767, Ile de France (Mauritius) was governed by the Compagnie des Indes, most famously under the governorship of Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais during 1735-1746.

But when hostilities broke out between France and Great Britain, thanks to the War of Austrian Succession (1740-1748), I am sure that enlistment must have taken place on Mauritius. Hence my tentative conclusion is that if ‘Bernardin Nageon’ was André Bernardin Nageon, then the phrase “I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland” probably refers to enlistment to fight against Great Britain in the War of Austrian Succession.

Without much doubt, the most famous Indian Ocean engagement of this war was when La Bourdonnais took a small fleet from Ile de France in 1746 and captured the British stronghold of Madras. Perhaps the enlistment for La Bourdonnais’ fleet was what ‘Bernardin Nageon’ was referring to in his Will and letter, who can tell?

Though there is much more history yet to be dug up (hopefully by my documentary!), it currently seems most likely to me that the archival material surrounding La Bourdonnais’ expedition to Madras might well prove a productive place to be looking for further details of André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang…

To try to resolve the issue of who Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang actually was, we should take a closer look at the Nageon de l’Estang family members who were in the Indian Ocean at the same time.

And the good news (from an historian’s point of view) is that we have a good genealogical resource to work with: Jean Claude Duchemin’s numerous webpages on Geneanet include not only archival references but also transcriptions of the text itself, giving us confidence that these are genuine.

The three Nageon men I’ll be posting about were all called André:
* André Nageon de l’Estang (~1676-1766) in Part 1;
* his son André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang (d.1750) in Part 2; and in turn
* André Bernardin’s son André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang (1745-1798) in Part 3.

André Nageon de l’Estang

André Nageon de l’Estang was very much the pater familias of the Nageon de l’Estang family in the Indian Ocean.

~1676: André Nageon de l’Estang born
before 1727: married Marie Marguerite Belhoste de Vieuville (Belot)
~1716: has a son, André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang
1726: has a daughter, Jeanne Marie Nageon de l’Estang
1743: Marie Marguerite dies
1st February 1766: André Nageon de l’Estang dies in Lorient (in Brittany)

Source: Jean Claude DUCHEMIN

He worked for many years for the French Compagnie des Indes. We can follow his trail as he went from Lorient to Pondicherry in 1727; his wife and children (Louis and Jeanne Marie) following out in 1729; before then returning to Lorient via Bourbon in 1732 or 1733:

Lys (1727-1728) André NAGEON, sergent, £18, embarqué à Lorient, débarqué à Pondichéry le 30/09/1727

Danaé (1728-1730)NAGEON, 3 passagers, embarquée à l’armement, débarquée à Pondichéry le 05/07/1729, D[emois]elle, avec ses enfants, Louis et Jeanne Marie.

Badine (1730-1732) NAGEON, 4 passagers, embarqué à Pondichéry, débarqué à ?, passager pour la France, avec son épouse, son fils et sa fille.

Reine (1732-1733) NAGEON, 4 passagers, embarqué à l’île Bourbon le ?, débarqué à Lorient, sr, avec sa femme et 2 enfants, passager pour la France.

The curious thing about this is that the son that went with them was named as “Louis”: this was either André Bernardin (and who they must therefore have called “Louis”), or a different son who possibly died young (with André Bernardin, who by then was 12 or 13 years old, perhaps already working on the ships). At this stage, we don’t have enough evidence to call this either way: so let’s leave this as an open question.

Duchemin then moves André’s timeline forward to 1737, quoting from Mémoire des Hommes:

– 15 septembre 1737 : Présentation au Roy du sieur Nageon de l’Etang, enseigne pour la garde des isles de France et de Bourbon
– Brevet de sous lieutenant pour le sieur Nageon de l’Etang : Sa Majesté ayant agréé le sr Nageon de l’Etang qui lui a été présenté par le directeur de la Compagnie des Indes pour servir en qualité de sous lieutenant d’une compagnie d’Infanterie entretenue? pour la Garde des isles de France et de Bourbon, Elle mande au Gouverneur Général des isles de le recevoir et faire reconnaitre en ladite qualité. Fait à Versailles le premier janvier mil sept cent quarante, signâe : Louis
– 15 janvier 1741 : Présentation au Roy du sieur Nageon de l’Etang comme enseigne pour servir à la garde du fort de Gorée et autres lieux dans l’Afrique appartenant à la Compagnie des Indes.

i.e. (my free translation)

Warrant for sublieutenant for Mr Nageon de l’Etang: Her Majesty has approved Nageon de l’Etang, who was presented to him by the director of the East India Company, to serve as Deputy Lieutenant of an infantry company retained for guarding the Ile de France and the Ile de Bourbon. She passed control of this to the Governor General of the Isles of receiving and recognizing that said quality. Done at Versailles on January 1 1740, signed Louis.

Duchemin then quotes from “Les défricheurs de l’Île de France: essai de biographie : contribution à l’étude de l’établissement de l’Île Maurice par la Compagnie des Indes, 1722-1767” (1992) by Octave Béchet:

Nommé à l’Ile de France à la requête de la Reine, bien qu’il eût près de 60 ans. Il avait auparavant servi à l’Ile Bourbon. Sa femme et sa fille l’accompagnèrent. En 1739 il demanda a rentrer en France et de laisser sa femme et sa fille dans l’Ile. La Compagnie des Indes approuva son retour. En 1742, il était Lieutenant major à Gorée, Sénégal.

i.e. (my free translation)

Nominated for the Ile de France at the Queen’s request, despite his being nearly 60 years old. He had previously served on Ile Bourbon. His wife and daughter accompanied him there. In 1739 he asked to return to France and for his wife and daughter to remain on Ile de France. The [French] East India Company approved his return. In 1742 he was made Lieutenant Major at Gorée, Senegal.

As per Béchet’s account, we can see him leaving France for l’île Bourbon in July 1738 with his wife and daughter on the Compagnie des Indes vessel Apollon, before returning on his own back to Lorient in 1740:

Apollon (1738-1739) NAGEON DE L’ÉTANG, officier de troupe passager, embarqué à l’armement, débarqué à l’île de France le 15/07/1738, passager pour l’île Bourbon avec sa femme et sa fille, à la table.

Triton (1739-1740) NAGEON, officier des troupes passager, embarqué à Port-Louis île de France le 07/01/1740, débarqué au désarmement à Lorient le 01/06/1740 — à la table aux frais de la Compagnie.

We can also see his travels between Lorient, Senegal and Brazil in 1741-1745/7 on various Compagnie des Indes ships:

Prince de Conti (1741-1741) NAGEON D’ESTANG, enseigne de troupe passager, embarqué à Lorient, débarqué au Sénégal le 19/04/1741, à la table

Gloire (1741-1741) NAGEON DE LETANG, enseigne de troupe passager, embarqué au Sénégal le 29/04/1741, débarqué à Gorée le 04/05/1741, à la table.

Apollon (1743-1743) NAGEON DE L’ETANG, enseigne de troupe passager, embarqué au Sénégal le 12/06/1743, débarqué au désarmement, Mr, passager pour la France

Lys (1745-1747) André NAJEON DE L’ÉTANG, officier de troupe, £45, “a fait la campagne de Lorient au Brésil”.

Finally: was this last entry a snapshot of André going between Mauritius and Madagascar on the Triton, or was it his son André Bernardin? It seems he was working in the Atlantic for the Compagnie des Indes at this time, so it seems to me more likely to have been his son:

Triton (1743-1745) NAGEON, officier de vaisseau passager, embarqué à l’île de France le ?, débarqué le 29/11/1744, à la table du capitaine embarqué pour Madagascar.

The Mysterious Pilot?

Given that André’s son André Bernardin died in 1750, I ought to point out that there are two Memoires des Hommes entries that don’t quite fit the basic timeline:

* Paix (1754-1755) André NAGEON, Île de France, pilotin, £15, remplacement à l’île Maurice le 01/02/1755, débarqué à l’île Bourbon le 04/04/1755 ?, embarqué sur la Renommée le 16/04/1755.

* Condé (1756-1759) André NAGEON, Île de France, pilotin, £12, embarqué à l’armement, débarqué à l’île de France le 30/12/1757.

Who was this mysterious [apprentice] pilot on the Paix and the Condé? Was it André Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s nine-year-old son André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang (really?)… or might it have been his father André Nageon de l’Estang (who was 80 or so years old)?

For what it’s worth, my suspicion is that this pilot was the young boy’s sprightly grandfather, keeping himself busy with a bit of pilotage. But for now, that’s just my speculation, make of it what you will!

Update: As Dario kindly points out in the comments below, given that ‘pilotin’ means ‘apprentice helmsman’, the answer would seem to be that this was in fact a very young André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang, about whom more in Part 3…

I’ve been busy behind the scenes, creating a press release for the Gold Beyond Your Dreams Mauritian Pirate Treasure Kickstarter proposal, ready to hand off to the Press Association before very long.

Back on Kickstarter, the project also now has its first (potential) “Executive Producer” backer slot filled, which I have to say was a very pleasant surprise indeed: I only hope I can get to Mauritius to increase its NPV yet further. 😉

Lined up next I have three posts on the Nageon de l’Estang family (including lots of unexpected and fascinating stuff); much more on the interlinear transcription of the papers; some surprises to do with the Missing Corsair; a bibliography; a reconstructed history of the Nageon de l’Estang papers; and plenty more besides.

It’s been a long (and trying) road to get this far already, but I really appreciate the support I’ve had from Cipher Mysteries readers: fingers crossed we’ll get to the end line with a good result.

The Pirate Treasure Crowdfunding Press Release

Pirate Treasure – can crowdfunding help to solve the great Mauritian mystery?

For more than two hundred years, the mystery surrounding ‘Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’ has confounded treasure hunters and historians alike. His papers claim to describe the location of “doubloons, gold in coins and ingots to the value of thirty million, and a copper box filled with diamonds” hidden beneath a cliff near a river in Mauritius.

Now a British historian blogger is using Kickstarter to try to crowdfund research into this long-standing historical mystery. Surbiton-based Nick Pelling is raising money to make a documentary about the papers – and by doing so, hopes to finally solve its many puzzles and tell its secret history.

Countless people – individuals, groups, and even clandestine private companies – have spent decades criss-crossing Mauritius in their search for Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure cache, each trying to track down the ‘pirate marks’ he described having carved into the rock: but with no success at all.

Historians are just as bemused, because there is no evidence that this ‘Bernardin’ ever existed, or that anything mentioned in the papers is even true. Yet definitive historical disproof (i.e. that these papers formed part of a hoax or deception) has been as elusive for historians as pirate treasure proof has been for the treasure hunters.

For Nick Pelling, the point of making this documentary is to take a bold step into the wide-open space between these two opposite positions. “After chipping patiently away at the edges for years“, he adds, “I find myself in the situation where a single dramatic – and very public – move can genuinely act as a catalyst to reveal the much larger story. And so I feel compelled to act, to put myself on the line to get to that bigger picture.”

He sees documentary not just as something that can ‘document’ what is already well known, but as an active research tool that can help reveal new truth. And so the kind of film he is aiming to make will be quite unlike typical mainstream historical documentaries, a genre he describes as having become “far too safe to be genuinely interesting“.

What will he uncover in Mauritius? He doesn’t yet know: but if anyone out there stands a fighting chance of finally bringing Nageon’s secret history to the surface, it is surely him.

A few days ago, I tried using Fiverr.com‘s translation marketplace to enfrenchify the 598 words of my Kickstarter documentary pitch video. The required 10USD will only barely get you a round of drinks in a London pub: and yet given that this seemed to be the going rate for this size of work, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to get me some sous-titres.

All of which is a great theory, but how did it work out in practice?

The Mechanism

Fiverr.com does make it remarkably easy to order a translation: the person I chose turned out (according to his/her blurb) to be a native French speaker living in Morocco, which is absolutely fine by me.

However, I have to say that I found it hard to believe any of the brief biogs the fiverr.com translators put to their names / aliases. There was an air of polished nonsense to all of them, as though peeling back the virtual curtain would reveal a community of Nigerian scammer kiddies feeding your text into Google Translate and laughing at your compliant gullibility.

Of course, I know that’s not actually true or even remotely likely: but that was very much how it felt to me overall. So even though fiverr.com is technically quite sweet, I think it still struggles to make its vendors look credible. Doubtless others will disagree, but… I’m jus’ sayin’, is all. 😐

The Problems

Putting the core translation issue (i.e. of whether or not it’s any good) aside, the biggest problem turned out to be ‘sense reversal’. By which I mean: for the pitifully small amount of money involved, these online translators simply can’t afford to spend time deeply parsing your text, so there is a good chance that they will misread a given sentence and, as a result, accidentally flip its sense into the opposite of what you intended. This occurred three or four times (though these were all fairly easy to pick up), and I fixed them up by hand.

And so I’ve ended up with manually-fixed French subtitles based largely on the translation I bought.

Of course, what you are supposed to do when you find things wrong like that is to send them back for review, i.e. for you to flag such issues so that the translator can fix these problems for you (as part of the price). But I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that, for the simple reason that the amount of money involved was just too small: I felt too bad, if that makes sense.

Other people might possibly get around this feeling of guilt by asking for revisions and then giving a 10USD tip at the end (I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how it tends to work in practice). The only thing I did actually ask for was a single sentence early on that the translator had obviously translated but had accidentally cut-and-pasted over when putting the text together to send back, which I didn’t think was too big a request.

I don’t know: for all the good things about fiverr.com, I think that it is also a strange kind of low-end marketplace that can’t possibly give you technically tight text at the kind of prices quoted, simply because people can’t read text for the prices quoted, let alone translate it. And so I suspect that any kind of non-straightforward or strongly-logically-structured text may well end up being somewhat butchered, not out of intent but simply out of necessarily scant attention.

Perhaps all I can reasonably conclude about Fiverr is: Caveat Emptorr. 😐

Those French Subtitles In Full

As to whether it was worth it or not, here’s the translation.

Salut, mon nom est Nick Pelling.
Je dirige Cipher Mysteries, un blog des recherches historiques.
Ce que je tiens à couvrir sont les mystères historiques, quoi que ce soit avec des preuves douteuses à partir du manuscrit de Voynich jusqu’aux cartes aux trésors des pirates.
Et depuis des années, j’essayais de comprendre l’histoire d’un pirate de l’océan Indien qui porte le nom Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang.
Il avait naufragé prétendument dans la côte Sud-Ouest de l’île Maurice, et il avait récupéré le trésor de son bateau ; il a repris un ruisseau par une falaise ; et puis il l’enterré dans une caverne souterraine qui avait été cachée par des pirates.
C’est une histoire incroyable, bien sûr, mais il faut être très prudent sur ce que vous croyez de ces mystères chiffrés.
D’une part, il n’y a aucune preuve que “Bernardin Nagéon de l’Estang” a jamais existé ; et ses lettres ?
Il n’y a encore aucune preuve que ce qui est mentionné dans ces lettres est vrai.
Tout ce que nous avons sont les différentes versions de ces lettres contradictoires qui confondent les uns des autres.
Pourtant, malgré ces problèmes profondément enracinés, ces documents ont aidé à alimenter une ruée vers l’or du pirate sur l’île Maurice.
Pendant des années – voire des décennies – les mauriciens arpentaient autour de l’île, avec impatience la recherche de tout signe de trésor des pirates, les marques secrètes de pirate – plus précisément les lettres « BN », les initiales du pirate – creusées dans les rochers qui pourraient les conduire à ce cache fabuleux trésor, à l’or au-delà de vos rêves.
En fait, ce qui s’est apparemment passé est qu’aucun de ces chasseurs de trésor ait trouvé des choses comme une boucle d’oreille en laiton du trésor de Nageon de l’Estang… mais la question se pose encore – est-il encore là-bas ?
Ou sinon, pourrions-nous être en mesure de découvrir son histoire secrète, pour savoir ce qui lui est arrivé ?
Depuis quelques années, je l’ai lu et relu tout ce que je pouvais trouver sur Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang: et je pense que je peux enfin comprendre la plupart de ce qui est arrivé.
Mais je cherche maintenant à soulever mes recherches au niveau suivant, et aller à l’île Maurice elle-même, pour parvenir finalement en profondeur ce mystère.
Mais j’ai besoin de l’aide de Kickstarter … J’ai besoin de votre aide pour le faire.
Votre soutien ouvrira beaucoup de portes qui sont restées fermées pour moi.
En discutant avec les historiens et les chasseurs de trésor, en regardant les archives et les musées, en foulant le sol que Nagéon de l’Estang prétend qu’il a sous enterré son Trésor, je pense que nous pouvons enfin aller au fond de ce mystère.
Mais il y a une touche Hi-Tech.
Si Nagéon de l’Estang a enterré son trésor dans une caverne qui a existé pour toujours, la science va surement nous aider à trouver quelque chose.
Ainsi, une partie du plan du projet est de prendre un GPR loué (radar à pénétration de sol) à l’île Maurice,
pour pénetrer ce sol, et voir si nous pouvons voir ce qui est là-dessous, voir s’il y a une grotte à trouver.
L’objectif ultime du projet est de ne pas trouver un trésor physique (même si ça va être génial), mais plutôt de faire des recherches historiques difficiles en plein air, à la caméra, complètement transparent.
Je ne sais pas ce que je vais trouver ; je ne sais pas quelle histoire sera racontée ; mais je sais que c’est un voyage que quelqu’un doit faire, et une histoire que quelqu’un doit raconter- et je pense que c’est le moment d’agir.
À la fin, nous devrions avoir un documentaire qui raconte l’histoire d’un rêve partagé de l’or d’un pirate qui a repris tout un pays.
Mais que sera-t-il en fait cette histoire, les secrets d’elle, je ne sais pas – mais je veux savoir, et avec votre aide, nous pouvons tous le trouver. Merci beaucoup !

“Capital” issue 132, 5th June 2013 has an article on page 15 entitled “Jean Giraud et ses Précieuses Pierres”, which discusses the death of Jean Giraud (who founded Mauritian company United Basalt in July 1953) on May 14th 2013 at the age of 94:

The article continues:

Grand chasseur devant l’éternel, il est aussi chercheur de trésors à ses heures. Persuadé comme beaucoup de passionnés de la catégorie, il est persuade que des pirates ont enfoui des trésors dans les îles de sud-ouest de l’océan Indien. Il decide de s’intéresser à celui du fameux Oliver Le Vasseur, dir La Buse, qu’il croit enfoui quelque part à Saint-Antoine et à celui de Nageon de l’Estang, qui, just avant d’être pendu aux Seychelles, a jeté à la foule des curieux un prétendu plan de trésor. En compagnie de son frère Lucien, de Philippe de Rosnay et de Raymond Chevreau, il va ainsi se dépenser sans compter dans la recherche de ces précieux butins qu’il ne trouvera jamais.
Mais on dit des chercheurs de trésors qu’ils ne vivent que de l’espoir d’en trouver un et que c’est uniquement cette quête, souvent vaine, qui les fait vivre…

My free translation of the above – and native French speakers, please step forward to correct me, because I might easily have gone completely wrong here – is as follows:

Ever the eternal opportunity hunter in business, in his spare time he was also a treasure hunter. He was, as are so many others of that particular ilk, firmly convinced that pirate treasure lies buried in the southwestern islands of the Indian Ocean. For many years, his focus was on Nageon de l’Estang (whose booty he believed was buried somewhere in Saint-Antoine) and on the well-known pirate Olivier Levasseur (AKA “La Buse”) who, just before being hanged in the Seychelles, allegedly threw a treasure map into the crowd. Now reunited with his brother Lucien and fellow treasure hunters Philippe de Rosnay and Raymond Chevreau, Girard is free to spend forever searching lavishly for the precious spoils he will never find.
But it has been said that treasure hunters live only for the search and that it is by their quest, often in vain, that they live…

Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will know that it was actually Olivier Levasseur who was hanged (and in Réunion rather than the Seychelles): but it was a surprise to me that Jean Giraud believed Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang buried his treasure in Saint-Antoine (in the North of Mauritius).

Regardless, if my translation is basically right and both Jean Giraud and his brother Lucien Giraud have now both passed away, it shows just how urgent it is to try to get to the bottom of this, before there’s nobody left to help tell the story.

Of course, the question some will doubtless be asking now is: who inherited the brothers’ collections of Nageoniana? From various fragments online, it seems that Jean Giraud left at least a son (Michel Giraud) and a grand-daughter (Marine – is she the famous Mauritian tennis player born 23rd April 1986 in Riviere Noire?): but that’s as much as I can reliably be sure about.

For what it’s worth, I found no obituary or note in Le Mauricien for either brother, nor any mention in ancestry.com: but perhaps other people’s searches for the same basic BDM data will prove both luckier and more productive than mine.

Researchers studying the Voynich Manuscript use what’s called an “interlinear transcription”: this interleaves different researchers’ interpretations of the (handwritten original) Voynich text, a line at a time. So, rather than having to constantly refer to, say, a contrast-enhanced image of the first line of the first page…

…you can instead refer to its interlinear transcription, which is much more convenient, and yet lets you see the differences of opinion that various researchers have about how to read that line:

<f1r .P1.1;H>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;C>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthorys.y.kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;F>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.*k*!res.y!kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;N>       fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cth!res.y,kor.sholdy!-
<f1r .P1.1;U>       fya!ys.ykal.ar.ytaiin.shol.shory.***!r*s.y.kor.sholdo*-

Anyway, given that I now have copies of (what might well be) all the printed versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, it struck me a few days ago that I should get round to putting them together into an interlinear transcription.

And there being no good reason not to, that’s exactly what I did. 🙂

The Interlinear Transcription

I’ve posted a page holding my Nageon de l’Estang interlinear transcription on the Cipher Foundation website.

The first few interlinear blocks of lines in BN1 (“Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang paper #1″) look like this:

FC: [l'an III de la République]

RC: Je pars m’enrôler et défendre la patrie. Comme je serai sans doute tué, je fais
FC: Je pars m'envoler et défendre la Patry,  comme je serai tué c'est sûre, je fais

RC: mon testament  et donne à mon neveu Jean Marius        Nageon de l'Estang,
FC: mon testament. Je donne à           Jean Marin  Justin Nageon de l'Estang,
LM:                Je donne à           Jean-Marius-Justin Najeon de l'Etang.

Here, [FC] stands for “Paul Fleuriau-Chateau”, a now-deceased Mauritian researcher from Rivière Noire, who included a transcription in his 2001 book “Aventuriers en mer”. The first line stands alone because the date Fleuriau-Chateau gave for BN1 does not appear in the other transcriptions at all. (In case you’re wondering, it’s a French Republican Calendar date equivalent to 1795).

The second set of interleaved lines appears both in Robert Charroux’s (“RC”) and in Fleuriau-Chateau’s (“FC”) copies, but not in any of the others: while the third set of lines appears in Charroux and in Fleuriau-Chateau, as well as in Loys Masson’s (“LM”) 1935 article.

Immediately you can see the kind of differences in play between the versions: but which are attempted corrections, which are miscopying, and which are insertions? What is original and what is make-believe? That is the $64,000 question (possibly even literally).

According to Le Clézio, circa 1901 his grandfather knew of numerous different copies of these papers floating around in what he called “grimoires” in Mauritius (p.105). So… might there be more versions out there?

Reading between the lines (so to speak), I think the answer is almost certainly yes: in fact, I suspect there may even be ten or more as-yet-unseen variants out there in private hands. However, only by bringing them all into the light and comparing them in a really analytical, scientific, open way do we stand any real chance of making sense of them as a whole.

Incidentally, my current interlinear transcription isn’t quite complete: the two photographs I took of page 56 of Paul Fleuriau-Chateau’s “Aventuriers en mer” turned out to be out of focus. So if anyone has access to a copy and/or can email me through a scan of p.56, that would be really helpful, thanks!

Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor?

Interestingly, I think that Robert Charroux’s omissions are quite telling, and this is something that hasn’t really been talked about before.

For a start, he mentions (but only includes the first couple of lines of) two further cryptic documents that I call “BN4” and “BN5” (which Fleuriau-Chateau and Le Clézio both include). His reason for not including them is that “Le teneur exacte de ces documents est le propriété du Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor“, ho-ho. But don’t worry, dear reader, he then assures you that “vous savez tout ce qu’il est permis de savoir sur les secrets de Nagéon de l’Estang“. You’re not on the list, you can’t come in.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that this also explains why Charroux left out the interesting section in BN2 from “au nord” to “testament” that says how to find the cave: because only a ‘true’ treasure hunter (i.e. a member of his club) could be trusted with such powerful knowledge.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It…

What can be done to move this research strand forward? For me, the answer is obvious: dig up more versions of these letters to add to the interlinear transcription.

I’m convinced that there simply must be photographs, scans, hand-copies, mentions, quotations, letters, newspaper articles and books (for example, in other languages) that I don’t know about out there and not just cut-and-pasted from Charroux (as seems to be the Internet norm). What can we find?

I’m similarly convinced that there must be archival documents on the Klondyke Company, and even on Le Club International des Chercheurs de Trésor, both of which tried so jealously to hold back Nageon de l’Estang’s secrets for themselves. And these documents must surely include multiple versions of the Nageon de l’Estang papers, right?

Finally, I’m also convinced that there are individuals out there who have collected their own versions of the letters: for his book, Paul Fleuriau-Chateau relied on Lucien Giraud and Jean Giraud. Is Lucien Giraud still alive?

For me, the big reason for trying to make a documentary is to find these people and just ask the right questions…

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my Kickstarter Mauritian pirate treasure documentary pitch is now live, and has already picked up its first few backers, all of them long-time Cipher Mysteries supporters (each in their own way) – thank you very much indeed for that, it’s undoubtedly true that the first few steps of a thousand mile journey are the hardest ones. 🙂

Anyway, given that the project plan is to structure the documentary into nine sections, what I’ll be doing here over the next four weeks is writing posts on those same sections – or rather, on what I currently know about them, as well as what I hope to find out about them in Mauritius. Though this won’t quite amount to a “Nageonopedia”, my hope is that it should be the most reliable (and realistic) collection of basic data on the Bernardin Nageéon de l’Estang historical mystery on the Internet or in print.

It may well turn out that better informed (or just plain cleverer) readers can answer one or two of the key research questions without my actually having to go to Mauritius to do so. Moreover, you clever people might also suggest even better research questions than the ones I set out to answer. I don’t mind, though, because these are all positive scenarios as far as I’m concerned, and the documentary would surely continue to develop and move forward in an ever-better direction as a result. 🙂

At the same time, I’m planning (over the next few days) to do some PR to propel the idea of the documentary into the wider cultural ether: so if anyone has any good suggestions for bloggers or journalists to contact about interviews, please let me know, I’m all ears! 🙂