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!

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! 🙂