An Officer Of The Blue

Edward Duyker

• Publisher: Miegunyah Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780522845655
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522866957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

French explorer Marion Dufresne was the man who reached Tasmania before the English. His expedition was the first to encounter the Tasmanian Aborigines and was a precursor of the great voyages of La Prouse, d'Entrecasteaux, Baudin and d'Urville.
To Australian and New Zealand readers this elegant biography will be, as Frank Horner writes, 'a reminder, or a revelation of the international context in which the English explorations of their homelands took place'. The eighteenth-century conflict between Britain and France is mirrored in Marion Dufresne's life.
The parallels with Cook are striking. Like his English contemporary, Marion was a brilliant mariner who proved his skills in merchant shipping before joining his nation's Royal Navy. Like Cook he was involved in scientific efforts to observe the Transit of Venus and sought the Southland in uncharted waters. Finally, he too died tragically at the hands of Polynesians.

1 Malouin

A place of very great Strength and traffique, there being the most, the fairest and biggest shipping, that I thinck are any other port of Fraunce.

Peter Maundy on Saint Malo, 1625

The explorer Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne was born in Saint Malo, Brittany, the son of a wealthy shipowner and merchant Julien Marion Dufresne (1681–1739) and his wife Marie Séraphique Le Fer de la Lande. Although he was christened ‘Marc-Joseph’ on 22 May 17241 and always signed ‘Marc’ in church documents, he was often referred to as ‘Macé’, probably in honour of his maternal grandfather: Macé Le Fer sieur de la Lande (1640–1710).2

Saint Malo is a proud town. A fortress-port, it stands on a granite islet on the right bank of the Rance estuary where the spring tides can be more than thirteen metres. And what the sea does not envelop, the mist that rolls along the Breton coast can swallow in seconds. It is a port which nurtured sailors who could deal with the unexpected and the unknown. By the 13th century the mariners and merchants of Saint Malo had already made a major entrepôt of their town. In the 15th century, when Brittany was still an independent Duchy, the Malouins had established trading connections not only along the coast of France from Normandy to the Pays Basque, but also with Spain, Portugal, England, Scotland, Ireland and the Low Countries. It was trade supported and expanded by merchants in the inland towns of Lower Normandy and Upper Brittany—members of whose families came and settled behind Saint Malo’s granite walls.3

In the next two centuries, Saint Malo would establish links with Africa and the Americas; and her merchants and shipowners would grow even wealthier. Dubuisson-Aubenay gave us some idea of their prosperity when he painted a sumptuous portrait of the Malouin table in his Itinéraire de Bretagne (1636). He wrote that ‘the Malouins live splendidly and deliriously; fish is cheap and oysters cost nothing there; [and] water-fowl is at a very good price. There are French wines which come by the river Seine and the coast of Normandy. Most particularly, they drink the wine of Gascony and Spain, red and white’4 In 1665, Louis XIV’s Chief Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) observed: ‘Houses and considerable property are today owned by the bourgeoisie of Saint Malo. They have bought them from gentlemen who have been obliged to sell owing to financial difficulty. They even purchase estates in the heart of Brittany and they have money in abundance.’5

Among those whose prosperity was intimately linked to the rise of Saint Malo were the weavers and merchants of Vitré. (The admiralty registers of Saint Malo contain hundreds of letters addressed to Vitré.) In many instances they became Malouin themselves. Not far from Vitré is the village of Saint Jean-sur-Vilaine. On the outskirts of the village are two parcels of land: La Fontaine and Le Fresne. The ‘s’ is silent in ‘Fresne’ (from Latin fraxinus, an ash tree) and thus it appears as La Frêne on modern maps. In the late 16th century La Fontaine was the property of one Sebastien Marion. Sebastien and his wife Jeanne Croizé had three sons. Mathurin, who died in 1676, inherited La Fontaine from his father. His brother Gilles became a gentleman-landholder at nearby La Bretoisière.6 The youngest of the brothers, Jean, established himself a few hundred metres uphill from La Fontaine at Le Fresne. Among the cluster of oaks which spring from the surrounding wheat-fields, there are still a few ancient buildings which date from the time of Jean Marion ‘Sieur’ du Fresne.7 They are dark, airless cottages of split stone with sagging wooden lintels. If any grander structures once stood beside them, they have long since disappeared. There is no folk memory of the Marions at La Frêne or La Fontaine.8 But, like the small farm of La Pérouse (near Albi in south-west France) which gave a young sailor named Galaup an expanded and now immortal patronym,9 Fresne has been immortalized by its association with a family which, by the early 18th century, had tenuous connections with the land.

Jean Marion married in June 1619. He and his wife Jeanne Collet had two sons that we know of. The eldest, Jean, died in his twenty-eighth year, but André (1633–1693) considerably expanded his family’s fortunes and prestige when, in August 1673, in the chapel of the Recollets Convent, he married a member of the powerful Magon family.10

Then merchant shipowners, in the generations to come the Magons would contribute to France’s list of illustrious admirals and statesmen. Chateaubriand, himself a Malouin, mentioned them in his Mémoires d’outre-tombe. According to several Malouin historians, Hélène Séraphique Magon de la Ville Poulet’s dowry was a fabulous six hundred thousand livres!11 Her father Jean (1619–1699) was a nobleman and a conseiller and secrétaire du roi. It seems likely that André Marion du Fresne was already influential within the mercantile community rooted in the Vitré-Saint Malo nexus when he met his future wife. Like the Marion family, the Magons had had connections with the region around Vitré, having settled there from Spain about 1300 before moving to Saint Malo in the 16th century.12

Two years after his marriage to Hélène, André Marion du Fresne built a magnificent house in the style of the Malouin shipowners in Saint Malo’s rue Saint François. André and Hélène had seven children. Two died as infants. Two entered the religious life. Their fourth child, Julien, who inherited the family home, was the explorer’s father.

Julien married in 1715 and he and his wife Marie-Séraphique had eight children. Marc was the youngest of the brood. He did not know either of his grandfathers or his maternal grandmother. They were all dead before his birth. His paternal grandmother, from the house of Magon de la Ville Poulet, died in the Benedictine convent at Dol when Marc was just nine months old.13 Her family home, ‘Ville Poulet’ an elegant country house in malouinère style, still stands near Saint Coulomb on the road to Paramé.14

Although the future explorer may have known the rural tranquillity of ‘Ville Poulet’, he most probably grew up in the Hôtel Marion Dufresne among the crowded bustling streets intra muros. The building was destroyed during the Second World War (along with 80 per cent of the old walled city), but it is possible to offer some description of its plan and decoration. A pre-war postcard reveals that the main entrance was a stone-arched doorway with five beautifully carved wooden panels.15 The historian Etienne Dupont, who mistakenly suggested that the Compagnie des Indes, the French East India Company, had its offices in the Hôtel Marion Dufresne, described it in the 1930s as having ‘a wonderful doorway, an exceedingly elegant staircase, and a magnificent hall with superb wood carving’.16

From other documents, we know that the house had a ground floor divided into two panelled apartments over cellars and then another three storeys and attic rooms. On entering the main sculptured oak doorway on rue Saint François, one faced an impressive staircase with a handrail and balustrade also of carved oak. As one climbed the stairs, each storey was illuminated by a large window overlooking the rue Saint François. There was a southern courtyard containing a well and an annex that served as stables opening into the rue des Vieux Remparts. The kitchen also opened on to the interior courtyard and the street.17 The house’s grand salon contained a monumental chimney. Just over the hearth were the carved arms of the house of Marion: a palm between two hatched crosses. Next to them were the arms of the Magon family: a crowned lion beneath a chevron and two stars. Well above, a bold oaken eagle stood sentinel over a central circular panel. Rich carved wooden friezes of acanthus and oak leaves, and of fruit and flowers, decorated the exposed joists and the panels of both the walls and ceiling. On some panels the artist had woven serpents in bas relief. It was restrained baroque splendour which harked from the maritime decorative tradition, but spoke of wealth, power, and the aspiration of a bourgeois family for the prestige of the landed nobility.

Although the Hôtel Marion Dufresne was destroyed in 1944, the historian can write with conviction about the magnificence of its sculptured panels, because they can still be seen. Sometime after 1931, the internal joinery of the ‘grand salon’ was sold to an American buyer who removed it and exhibited it at the New York World Fair. After the Second World War it was purchased by Jansens—the Paris-based antique dealers—and returned to the city of Saint Malo. There the carved oak was installed in the Mayor’s chambers after some changes to the Hôtel de Ville’s fenestration. It is ironic that the initial despoilment of the Marion family home was the cause of its partial preservation!

Marc grew up metres from the sea. The gulls can still drown out conversation within the walls. From the ramparts, as a child, he must have scoured the horizons for sight of his father’s ships. Not much is known of Julien’s career at sea, but he seems to have been an exceptional mariner who was highly respected by his peers. According to a fellow Malouin, Bernard de la Harpe, Julien was ‘a sensible intelligent officer, and a man of veracity; consequently not liable to be deceived or capable of deceiving any person’.18 During the War of the Spanish Succession, the Malouin corsairs were spectacularly successful preying on British shipping. More than 600 prizes were taken between 1702 and 1712!19 Julien commanded the Marie Magdeleine, a corsair of 230 tons, 26 cannons and a crew of 170.20 In the latter part of the conflict, however, France’s opponents increased patrolling of the Channel and the losses experienced by the shipowners of Saint Malo became unacceptable. Despite daring raids such as that led by Duguay-Trouin, which held Rio de Janeiro to ransom in 1711, the Malouin shipowners looked elsewhere for profit. They took the bold decision to establish a direct maritime trade with Spain’s colonies on the Pacific coast of South America. The French, like the English and the Dutch, had traded in Spanish contraband from their bases in the Caribbean since the mid-17th century. Spain attempted to maintain her trading monopoly, but it became increasingly difficult to exclude the French when a grandson of Louis XIV acceded to the Spanish throne.

One of the brave Malouin sailors who pioneered this highly lucrative South Sea trade was Julien Marion Dufresne. On 5 September 1711 he departed Saint Malo in the 350 ton Marquis de Vibray which was owned by François Le Fer sieur de Beauvais.21 (Le Fer was a relative of Julien’s future wife and also one of the shipowners who equipped Duguay-Trouin’s bold raid on Rio.) It was a forty thousand kilometres voyage full of perils via furious Cape Horn. But the long dangerous haul to the Peruvian port of Callao, and back, brought rich rewards. (Between 1703 and 1718 almost two hundred million livres of silver made its way to France on ships like the Marquis de Vibray.)22 It took Julien twenty-seven months to sail to Peru. He remained there over five months and set sail for France on 15 May 1714—returning to Saint Malo via Valparaiso and Conception on 10 June 1715.23

Marion’s home province of Brittany and the corsair hunting grounds in the English Channel

Julien married five weeks after his return. It seems likely that his great adventure inspired all but one of his surviving sons to make a career of the sea. In the three years prior to Marc’s birth, Julien commanded the Notre Dame du Rosaire and then the Phénix (in which he sailed to Cadiz).24 The first of his father’s ships that Marc would come to know was the Françoise. She was small—between 130 and 150 tons—and, unlike the corsairs which required large numbers of men to board and overcome enemy prizes, she had a crew of only 38 men. Of these, eleven would die in the course of a sinister voyage which took the Françoise to the coast of west Africa to buy 348 slaves and then across the Atlantic to Martinique to sell them to labour hungry planters. From the Caribbean she returned, no doubt laden with sugar and rum, via Nantes to Saint Malo on 25 April 1731. It took only 15 months for Julien to reap yet another rich reward. He had not sailed with the Françoise for he was now wealthy enough to employ others to command his vessel...

Table of contents

• An Officer of the Blue
• Foreword
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Malouin
• 2 The Making of a Sailor
• 3 O’er the water to Charlie
• 4 Invincible and Vanquished
• 5 Peace!
• 6 The Sword Once More Unsheathed
• 7 An Officer of the Blue
• 8 Science and the Company
• 9 La Route des Isles
• 10 The Lure of the South Land
• 11 Van Diemen’s Land
• 12 New Zealand
• 13 Te Kuri Maté Marion
• 14 Epilogue
• Glossary
• Appendix I Chronology
• Appendix II Marion Genealogy
• Appendix III Magon–Marion Kinship
• Appendix IV Charles Méryon’s Death of Marion Dufresne
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index