Captured ships: St Philippe (master Jean Meur otherwise John Muir), La Reine de France...

Captured ships: St Philippe (master Jean Meur otherwise John Muir), La Reine de France (master Pierre Lasserre), La Toison d'Or (master Jean Dufourcq), L'Union of Bordeaux (master Élie Fardie), and Le Vigilant (master Robert Godefroy).

History: five French merchant ships proceeding in company from Bordeaux to Saint Domingue and Martinique, taken in fight on 11 and 12 April 1745 off Cape Finisterre, by the privateers Shoreham (Robert Milligen commanding), Lowestoft (Charles Fielding commanding), and Townshend (Nicholas Lewis commanding), and brought into Lisbon.

Documents (in French unless specified):- mail in transit. Except for a few that were missed, those letters identified on the envelope as being consigned to the St Philippe, La Reine de France and L'Union were removed in 1955 and placed in HCA 32 with the court records and ships papers of these ships. It is not now possible to determine which letters in this piece were carried in which of the five ships, although there may be further internal evidence within the letters.

The mail comprises approximately 275 personal and business letters (in French) ffor onward delivery from Bordeaux and other parts of France to Saint Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Grenada and other islands in the West Indies, including:-

• 'Nouvelles Historiques pour le siècle courant', February 1745 (no. 1. Note: there is another copy of this in HCA 30/237);
• covering letter to Pierre Lasserre, master of La Reine de France, concerning the distribution of some enclosures (now separated from the letter) to each ship of the convoy (no. 2);
• letter (in Spanish) to Don Estevan de Manos at Havana (no. 41);
• letter to a ship's surgeon (no. 44);
• letter to a lieutenant commanding a frigate (no. 45);
• letter concerning Francis Brown, Irish merchant at Nantes, sending slaves in Le Triumphant to be sold in Martinique and Guadeloupe (no. 46);
• letter from Étienne Rigaud and several other members of the Rigaud family to Monsieur Rigaud at his shop in Saint-Domingue (no. 195);
• letter addressed to Monsieur Gachet, capitaine de corsaire, Saint-Domingue (no. 218);
• letters dated too early to have been in the mail, perhaps belonging to persons on board one of the ships (nos. 343 and 344);
• five letters and an empty envelope from Paris and Nantes via Nantes to Frenchmen in Juda [Ouidah or Whydah, Benin, West Africa] relating to the Nantes-West Africa slave trade (nos. 345 to 350); these most likely came from the St Charles de Nantes (see HCA 32/103/17), bound from Nantes to Guinea, captured by the Shoreham and Lowestoff on 6 April 1745, and used to transport many of the prisoners from the five Bordeaux ships to Lisbon.

See HCA 30/237, HCA 30/238, HCA 30/240, and HCA 30/241/1 for more papers and mail; and HCA 32/147/10, HCA 32/148/4, HCA 32/155/15, HCA 32/156/5 and HCA 32/156/13 for more letters and the main collection of ship's papers and court process etc

Topics

Trade and commerce

Caribbean

Europe and Russia

Piracy and privateering

Slavery

Ireland

Armed Forces (General Administration)

Africa