more on hodoul

http://cause.curtin.edu.au/curtin/centre/ioc/revjunex.htm
http://www.curtin.edu.au/curtin/centre/ioc/iore296.htm

JEAN FRANCOIS HODOUL - CORSAIR OF THE SEYCHELLES

by

Shaun and Patricia Mitchell

To the European countries of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, the Indian Ocean was a little known and unimportant expanse,
except that it was part of the highway to the Orient for those nations,
especially the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, whose trading vessels
sailed these largely uncharted waters. The absence of any strong
maritime power in the area, the rich pickings of treasure ships, and the
lesser but easier prey of the smaller vessels owned by Arabs and
Indians, no doubt coupled with natural beauty of the sunny Indian Ocean
islands, was a lure for a collection of European pirates from many
nations, who were attracted to be area, owing allegiance only to each
other and to pirate state that was formed in Madagascar.

As the importance of the trade with the Orient grew, European maritime
nations sought to establish their own settlements on the trade routes to
supply and protect their merchantmen. Dutch settlement in the Mascarenes
failed, and the French, originally settled in Madagascar, moved to these
islands when their Port Dauphine settlement was razed by the Malagache.
Major French maritime settlements were firmly established at Ile Bourbon
(Reunion) and Ile de France (Mauritius), and from there settlers moved
to the Seychelles. The Ile de France quickly became the major French
settlement in the Indian Ocean.

The establishment of a major European maritime power in the southwest
Indian Ocean meant an end to the freebooting pirates who had treated the
area as their own. One by one the pirates retired, or were captured and
executed. Mounting the gallows, one of the most notorious, La Buze, is
said to have thrown a detailed but coded treasure map to the spectators,
inviting whoever could decode it to claim his treasure. This now almost
priceless treasure, including booty captured with a Portuguese Bishop
from Goa, is believed to be still buried on a rocky point at Bel Ombre,
on the island of Mahe in the Seychelles.

With the French Navy severely weakened by the excesses of the French
Revolution in 1789, the scene was set for another page in France’s naval
history. At sea, their navy was no longer a match for their rival,
Britain, and French fleets were drubbed in succeeding engagements. But a
new French naval force was in the making with the granting by the
government of lettres de marque to civilian merchantmen, permitting them
to arm their own fighting ships and set out to capture whatever ‘enemy’
prizes they could, with the resulting shared according to a set formula
by the country, the owners and the crew. These corsairs were, then
different to the earlier pirates as they were essentially an extension
of the government’s own fleet, although not a part of the naval service.
The concept was not new, and was in fact adopted also in Britain and in
the Americas, but the French corsairs were probably better known and
generally better organised.

Operating out of St Malo on the western French coast, corsair
depredation seriously affected British and other European vessels
indulging in local commerce.Although the St Malo corsairs were perhaps
better known, being closer to what was seen as the centre of maritime
communications, in fact in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the French corsairs in the Indian Ocean, operating mainly
from Mauritius, did far more damage to British shipping, and
considerably exceeded the exploits of their Malo cousins in both the
number of vessels captured and the value of the prizes taken. A very
lucrative trade was established in Mauritius selling, particularly to
American merchants, both the captured vessels and their cargo.

Corsair activities in the Indian Ocean can be divided into those before
the 1802 Treaty of Amiens, and those after that date and until the
British captured the Mascarenes in 1810. In the first period, one of the
most notable of the French corsairs was Jean Francois Hodoul, although
his subsequent notoriety as a corsair was diminished by his decision to
settle ashore after the Treaty of Amiens, in that period when the
reputations of so many corsair captains were made.

Jean Francois Hodoul, unlike most of his contemporaries, was not a
Malouin. He came, in fact, from the small fishing port of La Ciotat in
the Bouches du Rhone, Provence. Nor were his immediate forebears sea
men. His father, Raymond Hodoul was the local pork butcher, with a shop
on Rue Lingue (now Rue des Poilus), near the church and about 200 metres
from the sea wall. His mother was Genevieve Cauvin, whose father
apparently operated the baker’s shop just around the corner. Today, in
La Ciotat, the bakery is no more. On the site of the Cauvin mill,
several blocks away, is a small apartment, possibly in some of the
original buildings, but the Hodoul boulangerie is still a boulangerie,
upmarket and now run by the Femel family who are were aware that a
boulangerie had existed on that site for centuries, but knew nothing of
its very early owners.

Jean Francois Hodoul was born at La Ciotat in 1765. Very little is known
of his early days, except that he is believed to have gone to sea as a
young boy, and possibly to have studies with a local maritime
institution, from which he received his certificate of captaincy.

On 27th August 1789, the young Hodoul arrived in Mauritius aboard Le
Scipion under Captain Merie. Here, like most of his contemporaries, he
participated in the slave trade, transporting slaves from Madagascar and
the East African coast to the plantations in Mauritius. He was able to
buy his own vessel, the Olivette (perhaps named for the young
Mauritienne who would shortly be his wife) and he was at Seychelles when
a British squadron under Captain Newcome entered the main harbour of
Mahe on 16th May 1794 and, for the first time, took possession of the
French island for the British crown. Newcome treated the colonists
fairly, but took the Olivette as a prize. Notwithstanding this loss,
Hodoul married the sixteen year old Marie Corantine Olivette Jorre de St
Jorre, Mauritian-born daughter of a local planter, three weeks later, on
8th June 1794.

In 1796, Hodoul was serving as an ensign under Legard on the corsair
Enterprise out of Mauritius, although he shortly moved to the corsair
Pichegrue under Captain Perraud. It is on record that he was involved in
a French raid on the British factory at Vizagapatnam the east coast of
India, and in fact sailed the British prize Castor from there back to
Mauritius. By 1 May 1797, Hodoul had his own command, the corsair
Apollon (ten cannon and six howitzers of twelve) which had arrived from
Brest in January and had been armed as a corsair by Charles Pitot of
Mauritius. On this day he left Port Louis from the Malabar coast, where,
a week later, he captured the three masted Eliza under Captain Brown,
and three days later, on 17th May, a small British vessel the Endroussi.
Three days later in the roads of Coringa he seized the Macroy, whose
cargo included a strong box full of pearls. After a brief hiatus, on
15th September 1797 he captured the Bader Bux, bound from Moka in Yemen
to Surat on the coast of Gujarat, with a full cargo including 3732 gold
ecus, a quantity of piastres, 296 gold sequins and a quantity of pearls.
Heading homeward towards Mauritius, on 30th October 1797, Hodoul
captured the Laurel under Captain Fuggo, and with his own crew depleted
by the need to man his prizes, he was forced to put the vessel’s
recalcitrant crew in leg irons. Ten days later, he took the Trayalle at
06.15 hrs and the Harrington later in that day. Austen, in A Naval
History of Mauritius, records the total prize money from the voyage as
703,479,803 francs, but this amount, many times larger than the total
prize money of any other corsair crew, must be held in question.

Back in Port Louis on the Ile de France, (Mauritius), the Apollon, in
which Hodoul probably held a half-share, was sold to the corsair Le
Vaillant and was captured by HMS Leopard northeast of Mombasa on 10th
November 1798. Its crew was held captive on Anjuan for several months.
Toussaint, noted historian of the Indian Ocean, maintains that Hodoul
sailed as mate under Le Vaillant on this fateful trip, but it appears
more certain that Hodoul stayed ashore in the Seychelles with his young
wife, Marie Corantine Olivette, who presented him with their first son,
Raymond, on 20th June 1799.

In late 1799 or early 1800 Hodoul took command of L’Uni, which had
already had two successful corsair cruises under Lememe. She was
described as ‘..a small frigate, armed with 18-pounders and
9-pounders..’ and ‘..a very fast sailor, (having) much the appearance of
a London-built ship, painted with yellow sides and white mouldings’.
Hodoul either owned her outright, or held a major share in ownership.

On 15th May 1800 Hodoul departed Port Louis in L’Uni, and two weeks
later, near St Anne, off the coast of Mahe, Seychelles, he fell in with
and captured the British Henriette under Captain White. On 11th July he
took the Helen under Captain Stewart, finding on board a sum of 80,000
piastres. Three weeks later he took the Friendship, and this his luck
ran out. Immediately after taking this prize, Hodoul turned to attack
and capture a vessel which he mistook to be a large Indiaman, but it was
in fact the Royal Naval frigate HMS Arrogant under Captain Osborne.
After a brief engagement, and to the delight of the captured British
crew on Friendship, Hodoul struck, and the L’Uni was taken to Madras as
a British prize. Jean Francois Hodoul was taken as a prisoner to Fort
William, Calcutta, where he was held until the Treaty of Amiens in 1802,
when he was able to return to his wife and young family in Seychelles.
His days as a corsair were now over, although it does seem that he at
least entertained the idea of a return to this lucrative profession, as
he applied on 23rd June 1803 to the Ordonnateur-General at Port Louis to
have qualification as a maritime captain confirmed. This would not have
been necessary for his continuing to command his own local vessels, but
would have been essential should he have sought a further lettre de
marque. Jean Francois Hodoul did not return to France, preferring to
settle in Seychelles, where he quickly became a prominent plantation
owner and a merchant, running, and initially captaining, a number of
island trading vessels, attempting to start a fishing industry on
Aldabra, and establishing marine installations both in Seychelles and
Mauritius. He was also busy siring and raising a large family. In 1802,
he built a fine home, “Les Mamelles”, south of the capital Victoria
(where it still stands, at Cascade, now renovated by one of his many
descendants, Desire Cauvin, and owned by the Michel family). He lived
for a while on Silhouette Island, then settled at Ma Constance, just
north of Victoria, and opposite the island of St Anne, near which he had
captured the British corsair Henriette. His home at Ma Constance no
longer stands, having been torn down in this generation, but its site is
still marked by a giant banyan tree just off the road north of Victoria.
Nearby are supposedly traces of a sluice used to tumble the coffee beans
from his experimental crop high in the hills, to the packing shed near
the house. On 1st June 1819, one of Hodoul’s vessels, the Six Soeurs,
captained by his eldest son Raymond, caught fire en route between
Seychelles and Mauritius, and burned to the water level with a large
loss of life. Of about sixty five people aboard the Six Soeurs when it
left Victoria, thirty eight escaped in the only boat, and of these
several died before the open boat reached Seychelles nine days later,
and several more in the next two weeks.

Hodoul remained a prominent and highly respected member of the
Seychelles community until his death in 1835. In 1829 he entertained the
former British naval officer James Holman at Ma Constance, and in his
subsequent book A Voyage Around the World Holman describes Hodoul as
‘one of the oldest and most wealthy, as well as one of the most
respectable inhabitants of the place’.

History has been kind to him, but it appears that this kindness is well
deserved. Slave trader? Yes, but as a ship’s captain in an age and an
environment where his activities were generally considered as
acceptable. Slave owner? Yes, but by reputation he was a kind and
thoughtful person who treated all his slaves well, and was well loved by
them. Cold-blooded corsair captain? Again by reputation, no. The story
is told of a British merchant captured in a British ship off India, who
was known to have his gold hidden on board. He showed Hodoul a number of
affidavits from Frenchmen in trouble recording the help that the
merchant had given them, and Hodoul told his crew that this kindness
should be returned, proposing to release the merchant and all his
gold.This, we are told, was agreed ‘with loud acclamation’. Family
history has it that on 10th January 1835 Jean Francois Hadoul left his
home on horseback to inspect the plantation, and the horse returned with
an empty saddle. His body was found after a search, apparently the
victim of a heart attack three months short of his 70th birthday. He was
buried at Bell Air cemetery, off Bel Air Road, Victoria, and twenty-one
years later his one-time child-bride Marie Corantine Olivette was buried
alongside, where they rest today in the peace and quiet of the overgrown
and ramshackle cemetery. Hadal’s epitaph - ‘il fut juste’ - translated
as “he was upright’, appears to be, from all other accounts, an accurate
description of the man who has gone down in maritime history as ‘The
Corsair of the Seychelles’.