At Granville, The Hugons The Story of a Corsair Family of Normandy Georges Védie Copyright © 2015, 2021, by Georges Védie Revised and updated 2023. Derived from chapter six of `Their Destiny in Natal - the Story of a Colonial Family of the Indian Ocean’ by the same author. All rights reserved. The contents of this paper or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal. Map and photo by the author Front cover: Church of Notre Dame at Granville georgesvedie@gmail.com The North Atlantic Ocean of the Hugons in the 18th Century The fishing grounds around Newfoundland were the source of the prosperity of the Hugon family for well over a century. The marine harvest was often taken by their ships to Cadiz and Mediterranean ports to trade for other goods before returning to Normandy. An early attempt at a colonial enterprise in Louisiana by a member of the family in the mid-18th century was unsuccessful. Other members of the family would subsequently try to make their fortune in the French colonies of Saint Domingue, Pondichéry in India, Mauritius and again in Louisiana, sometimes with more success. Genealogy of the family Hugon des Demaines Nicolas Hugon (?) | |________________________________________________________________________________________ | | Nicolas Hugon Carolin Hugon | Branch Du Canet/De la Cour | |___________________________________________________________________________ | | Blaise Hugon Guillaume Hugon ca 1597 - 1632 Branch de Hautmesnil M 1622 M 1611 Colette Le Mengnonnet Colette Le Pelley des Fontenelles ca 1603 - 1683 1593 - ? | | Gaud Trevelin Hugon Sieur du Puy 1623 - 1688 M 1644 Catherine Godefoy 1624 - 1711 |______________________________________________________________________________________________ | | | | | | Pierre Hugon Jean Hugon Jacques Hugon Nicolas Hugon* François Hugon* Gaud Yves Hugon* Sieur du Puy Sieur du Prey Sieur de Grand Jardin Sieur des Demaines Sieur de la Noë Sieur de Haute-Houle ca 1652 - 1701 1654 - 1703 1658 - 1691 1661 - 1737 1664 - 1733 ca 1668 - 1720 M 1689 Marie Jaslin ca 1670 - 1723 ________________________________________________________|_________________________________ | | | | | Jean Hugon* Joseph Hugon Gaud Hugon* Jeanne Marguerite Hugon Françoise Hugon Sieur des Demaines Sieur de Filbec Sieur des Demaines 1702 - 1780 1703 - 1793 1689 - 1727 1692 - 1761 1697 - 1762 M 1725 M 1730 M 1722 M 1722 Jean Quinette de la Hogue François Gosselin Françoise de la Pigannière Augustina Cortés de V. y Briant 1704 - 1779 1709 - 1742 1699 - 1780 ca 1696 - 1756 |____________________ |__________________________________________________________ | | | | | Nicolas François Hugon Joseph Hugon Nicolas Antoine Hugon Gaud Hugon Marie Jeanne Hugon Sieur des Demaines Lieutenant in Louisiana Sieur des Demaines Sieur de la Souquetière 1733 - 1769 1723 - 1813 1724 - 1793 1723 - 1786 1727 - 1755 M 1755 M 1743 M 1754 M 1753 François Robert Le Pigeon Marie-Anne Pitot Françoise Renée Daiherre Marie Renée Loiseau 1728 - 1794 1716 - 1805 1733 - 1777 1733 - 1816 |____________________ |_____________________ | | | | | | Prosper Joseph Hugon Robert Hugon Nicolas Joachim Hugon Jean François Hugon Jeanne M. Hugon Attorney General of Pondichéry Mauritius > 1792 Officer on ship Planter in Louisiana Carmelite Nun 1749 - 1804 1750 - 1812 1757 - >1776 1759 - 1812 1755 - > 1807 M 1790 M 1790 Marie Pétronille Sornay Sophie Justine Piau 1769 - 1864 ca 1774 - 1811 * Indicates corsair captains. Other Hugon corsair captains were: two grandsons of Pierre Hugon du Puy (FrançoisJoseph Hugon du Prey 1714-1768 and Jean-Baptiste Hugon 1725-1754); two members of the Hugon de Hautmesnil family (Jean Hugon de Hautmesnil 1661-1730 and Thomas Hugon de Hautmesnil 1706-1762) and three members of the Hugon du Canet family (Charles Hugon du Tertre ca 1660-1709, Nicolas Hugon du Canet 1677- ? and Denis Hugon du Tertre 1680-1739). Introduction À Paris, les Bourbons. À Saint-Malo, les Magons. Et à Granville, les Hugons Anonymous, 18th Century The European discovery of the New World at the end of the 15th century had a profound economic effect on the small coastal settlements of Brittany and Normandy as the rich fishing grounds off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes became an important destination for their fishing vessels. The two port towns of Granville and Saint-Malo, facing each other across the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, prospered from this trade and saw an increase in the number and size of their ships. In time Saint-Malo would gain further advantages by being allowed by the Crown to conduct commerce with the French colonies as well as being one of only five ports permitted to participate in the lucrative slave trade. Unable to obtain the same rights Granville would be obliged to focus on fishing and related trade which it would do with success until it too gained the right, rather belatedly, to colonial trade in 1763. When their normal activities were disrupted in times of war the owners of trading and fishing fleets were allowed, under royal licence, to use their ships to attack enemy civilian vessels in a form of condoned piracy. This corsair activity, well-known of Saint-Malo, was important to Granville and other French maritime settlements as well and from the end of the 17th century would offer an alternative means for fleet owners to make use of their ships and attain potential prosperity in wartime. This paper looks at the history of a specific family of Granville one of whose members, Nicolas Hugon des Demaines, was to enjoy great success as a corsair captain in the 1690s. The financial rewards of his success would allow his wider family to invest in fishing fleets and attain greater prosperity during the period of peace that followed in the early 18th century. It also examines his sons' and grandsons’ subsequent attempts at preserving the family's wealth and status through corsair undertakings and fishing and how their difficulties in doing so would compel them to seek opportunities further afield. 2 Louis Garneray. Paris. 1823. Granville from the sea. The church and town on the peninsular on the left and the faubourg and harbour on the right. Jean Magin (1670-1741). Gallica. Map of Granville in the early 18th century 3 Lebreton Granville in the 18th century from the faubourg. Ludwig Robock - gravure de Bouquet Granville 1860 from the interior facing west. The faubourg on the left by the harbour, the town and church on the peninsular to the right. 4 Duhamel du Monceau. Traité général des pesches. 2e partie, section 1 er, planche XIV. Typical cod-fishing vessels (morutiers) of the early to mid-18th century. The top engraving is an approximately 100-ton vessel which would have been used in dry cod fishing and would have had over 60 crewmen. In times of war, some of these ships could be adapted for corsair activities. 5 A contemporary photo of the rue Nôtre Dame in Granville. Unlike Saint-Malo, the town was not badly damaged by the bombardments of the Second World War and its streets don’t look very different from how they would have appeared to the Hugons in the 18th century. 6 Granville, the Hugon Family and Corsair Undertakings The town of Granville is built on a strategic elevated peninsular which juts out of the west coast of Normandy and overlooks a sheltered harbour to its south. The town does not have very old origins by European standards as it was established in 1439 by the English towards the end of their occupation of the area during the Hundred Years War when they built a fort on the site around which a small settlement began to grow. The English were expelled from Granville two years later by the French and in a bid to encourage its continued development the French king, Charles VII, subsequently granted a municipal charter to the emerging town in 1445 in which its bourgeois inhabitants were allowed various privileges such as the local franchise, exemption from the taille tax and the right to bear arms through a local militia. In order to join the ranks of this bourgeoisie a man was expected to have a certain level of income and to have resided in the town for several years.1 By the 17th century, Granville had some three to four thousand inhabitants who lived either in the walled town on the high peninsular overlooking the English Channel or in a somewhat separate settlement known as the Faubourg in the flats by the harbour. The town’s parish church, Notre Dame du Cap Lihou, located on a high point of the peninsular, was its most notable structure, being visible from some distance out at sea. The harbour was the shallow estuary of a small river known as Le Boscq which was accessible to ships only at high tide in an area known to this day for its large tidal range. The harbour was protected by a jetty built in about 1560 for which a fee was imposed on incoming ships to pay for its maintenance. The residents were almost all dependent on the sea for their livelihood, directly or indirectly, with the exploitation of maritime resources employing most of the inhabitants. The poorest individuals would fish from the shore by way of lines or nets, gather the oysters in the area’s extensive tidal flats which were exported as far as Paris, or crew on fishing vessels. Those with greater means would invest in fishing vessels, the smallest of which could still go quite far off-shore. At the top of this fishing hierarchy were the three dozen or so families which owned more substantial ships capable of distant travel and so were able to combine larger-scale fishing with trade. Other residents of Granville were dependent on these maritime activities through their artisanal and labour services to ship owners. The demand for men to crew ships was considerable and ship owners had to employ them not only from Granville but from the villages of the surrounding backcountry as well. Local and more distant cabotage was another maritime activity of the port. Apart from salted fish and oysters, local products such as grains, straw, wood for fuel, quarry stone and, in this important apple-producing area, cider and vinegar derived from it, could all find a market in the various ports of Normandy and Brittany as well as in Bordeaux, Bayonne and even as far as Danzig in Germany, the Low Countries and England. Later in the 17th century Mediterranean ports were added to these destinations as Granville’s salted fish found markets there. Amongst products being imported would have been textiles, rope, metal work, leather products, roof slates, tar, resins and wine. The owners of 7 Granville’s ships could be directly involved in such trades or merely transporting the products for other individuals as well as taking on the occasional passengers. Those not directly dependent on the sea catered for those who were, in their capacities as bakers, butchers, cobblers, tailors and other service providers. As throughout the country at this time, domestic service was also a source of employment as well. While some of the nearby villages provided crewmen to the fishing fleets, agriculture predominated in the backcountry and supplied Granville’s basic food and fuel requirements. The surname Hugon appears to have its origins in the south-central part of France and was not historically common in Normandy. It’s likely that an individual bearing this moniker arrived at Granville from another part of the country in the 16th century. Amongst the earliest known members of the family were the brothers Guillaume and Blaise (see Appendix IV : Genealogy of the Hugons of Granville). The surviving register of receipts and expenses for the maintenance of the jetty for 1619 indicates that the brothers were both involved in cabotage, each owning and mastering their own ship. That year Guillaume was noted as returning from Morlaix in Brittany four times, the 21 February, 21 March, 28 June and 13 December, while three returns from Morlaix were registered for Blaise, the 28 February, 19 July and 26 October, for which they were required to pay 15 sols (¾ livres) harbour fees with each docking. The ships are not named nor are any details given about them but the fees of 15 sols indicate the ships were conducting local shipping, with their destination always having been Morlaix. Ships coming from further afield paid more; from the Low Countries they paid three livres, from Bordeaux and Danzig six livres while those coming from the Maritime Provinces or its fishing banks had to pay 20 livres. Morlaix, near the tip of Brittany, would have been a popular port of destination, especially for smaller ships, as it conducted important trade and was a centre of textile manufacturing.2 Guillaume went on to found the Hautmesnil branch of the Hugons while Blaise died at a relatively young age leaving one surviving son, Gaud Trevelin Hugon.3 Nothing is known of the life of Gaud Trevelin but at his death in 1688, at the age of sixty-five, he was described in the parish register as the “sieur du Puy, bourgeois merchant of this town” and was buried in the church of Notre Dame, suggesting he had had a measure of success.4 He was able to leave his six surviving sons with the means and experience to continue in maritime affairs so that they would each possess shareholdings in ships and a sub-fief within a few years of his death. Four of these six sons would be the founders of a dynastic group of families which would come to be very dominant in Granville from the 1720s to the 1750s along with the two more distant collateral family branches; the Hugon du Canet/de la Cour and Hugon de Hautmesnil. As well as playing a major role in the fishing economy of Granville, the Hugon families would provide Granville with twelve corsair captains during France’s wars from the late 17th to the beginning of the 19th centuries; the Baillon family would be the next largest contributor with six such captains during this period.5 The bourgeois communities of this part of Normandy and in the neighbouring SaintMalo region of Brittany had a tradition of adding the names of seigniorial sub-fiefs, known in Granville as sieuries or in nearby Saint-Malo as Métairies nobles, to their surnames. Apart from giving them the prestige of a feudal name, however small the property, it allowed the different branches of families to be distinguished one from the other; the oldest son would inherit the father’s feudal property and name while younger sons would acquire sieuries of their own and take their names. This tradition generated a huge demand for such properties in the countryside surrounding these regional towns and local seigneurs tended 8 to cash in on this demand by creating considerable numbers of these sub-fiefs most of which were only a few hectares in extent.* This trend placed a heavier burden of taxation on local residents who had to pay larger portions of the taille payable by the seigneuries to the Crown due to the presence of exempt bourgeois and nobles holding sub-fiefs within them. This contentious situation would be mentioned in the cahiers de doléances of several of the communities in the region at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789.6 The six sons of Gaud Trevelin Hugon would become the sieurs† du Puy, de Grandjardin, du Prey, des Demaines, de la Noë and de Haute-Houle but the sieuries of Grand Jardin and du Prey would pass to nephews in the house of Hugon du Puy as their owners had no surviving children. The sieurie Le Puy was inherited by Gaud Trevelin’s oldest son, Pierre and would then pass to his eldest son, Gaud, while Pierre’s two younger sons would inherit Le Prey and Grandjardin from their uncles. Gaud Trevelin’s younger sons most likely acquired Les Demaines, La Noë and Haute-Houle by purchase. Some of these sub-fiefs had country houses to which the families could retreat from their dwellings in town (see Appendix I : The Sieuries of the Hugons des Demaines). In the vicinity of their rural properties, the Hugons may have placed their newborn infants into the care of local peasant families for the first couple of years, as was then common practice in northern France. Despite their relative wealth, the Hugons were a very `hands-on’ family. Starting as ship’s boys from about the age of twelve, they would be trained as mariners until they could take command of a ship of their own, often when they were barely out of their teens. The brothers, and in due course their sons, captained their own, each other’s and other peoples’ ships which gave them an intimate knowledge of the sea, the vessels they owned and of the fishing and trade they prospered from. In peacetime their ships were mostly involved in cod fishing, along with some trade, in the Maritime Provinces of Canada particularly the waters off Newfoundland and the French colony of l’Ile Royal (Cape Breton Island) and its capital of Louisbourg.7 By the end of the 17th century the Hugons, along with the other more prosperous families of Granville, had come to depend on the fishing resources of the New World whose exploration had started at the beginning of the previous century. The fish, which was dried and salted, would either be brought directly back to French ports by their smaller fishing vessels or taken by their larger ones to Mediterranean and Iberian ports such as Marseille and Cadiz where there was a great demand for it. From these ports, Mediterranean products such as wine, olive oil and dried fruit as well as fabrics and spices from the Levant would then be acquired and brought back and sold in, or through, Norman ports. The opportunities for the investment of capital were more limited than now. Of the three pillars of contemporary investment; property, shares and cash (earning interest in banks or bonds), only property was then readily available. The ownership of company shares was just emerging with trading companies such as the British and French East India companies attracting some investors while the lack of commercial banks meant that cash, which consisted of gold or silver, could only be placed with private individuals in the form of annuities best described as perpetual loans usually paying 5% or invested in similar loans to the Crown or municipalities. Only the borrower of a perpetual loan had discretion as to * † Usually in the form of a land holding known as a vavassorie in Normandy, which was a type of sub-fief. There was a limit on how many could be created. A title below that of seigneur, the latter being the owner of a seigneurie or fief possessing judicial functions while the sieur was the owner of a smaller sub-fief not having judicial functions. One could own either of these types of properties and their titles without being a member of the nobility. 9 when it might be paid back, the only way the lender could get back his capital was to sell the loan on to someone else, often at a discount. This open-ended arrangement avoided the appearance of usury, forbidden by the Catholic Church. The security of the loans depended on the assets and financial responsibility of the debtors and the subsequent heirs and carried some risk. These limitations in the field of investments made ships, maritime trade and fishing attractive alternative options. While the potential gains could be substantial, the high costs of ships and cargoes and the risk of their loss, either by natural events or piracy in an era with limited insurance, encouraged partnerships. In the case of Granville joint ownership was generally within extended families and with allied families as well, so that individuals might own shares in several ships and/or their cargoes, varying from a half share or more to as little as a 1/64th share. Such an investment strategy allowed for a spread of risk as well as reward and allowed people with smaller amounts of capital to invest. Insurance was available to ship owners. As with loans it was arranged privately, with individuals, through notaries. An individual wishing to make some money would guarantee the payout of a specific amount in the event of the loss of a ship and /or its cargo on a clearly defined journey in return for the immediate payment of a percentage of the amount insured, between four and nine per cent in peacetime. The investor would spread his risk by supplying guarantees to several ships and ideally limit the amounts guaranteed so as to be manageable in the event of losses. A ship, especially on a corsair undertaking, would therefore often have a number of shareholders and guarantors as it set off on its voyage, though it was up to the owners to decide to what extent they would insure their vessels and cargoes. Granville being quite a small town with limited investors, it was not unusual for ship owners to find guarantors in larger and more prosperous Saint-Malo.8 One hazard that must have been particularly dreaded by the crews of the Granville fishing fleets was that of being captured by North African Barbary pirates. Unlike capture by European enemy corsairs in wartime where the crew might face imprisonment for a time before being released, sometimes at a cost, the prisoners of the Barbary pirates were rarely seen again as they were sold into slavery in North Africa, becoming a valuable part of the seized cargo. This threat was one reason why fishing vessels were armed even in peacetime, particularly in the early decades of the 18th century. Although a particular problem in Mediterranean waters, ships sailing the North Atlantic were at risk as well, especially off the coasts of Morocco, Spain and Portugal. Barbary pirates sometimes went as far as conducting armed raids on land to gather captives for the slave trade, mostly in northern Mediterranean coastal regions but occasionally as far as Ireland and Iceland. Over the centuries hundreds of thousands of Europeans are believed to have been captured for this purpose.9 When ships disappeared at sea, it was never known whether they had done so due to natural catastrophes or to Barbary capture. Fortunately for the Granville community, the disappearance of their ships at sea seems to have been a rare occurrence. The frequent wars of this period affected maritime activities but also provided alternative opportunities. Shipowners were left in a difficult situation in wartime as their ships were often their main investments and an inability to trade or fish safely left them, and the men they employed, with no income and so tended to push them into the risks of corsair undertakings. From the reign of Louis XIV, the Crown began to make more use of licences known as letters of marque which granted ship owners the right to attack enemy merchant vessels in wartime. Two types of licences were issued; commissions of war and trade and commissions of war only. The former allowed a ship to continue its normal trade as best it could while allowing the seizure of enemy ships if a suitable occasion arose while 10 the latter only allowed the ship to pursue and seize enemy vessels. Up to the early 18th century commissions of war and trade were more popular but as that century progressed and maritime war became more hazardous to merchant shipping, fishing and trade became high-risk ventures and ship owners focused more exclusively on privateering or avoided sea-going ventures altogether. This licensed piracy was carefully regulated; captured vessels and their cargoes had to be brought into French or allied ports where they had to be verified as legitimate seizures by the admiralty or its consular representatives and then auctioned while the crew of seized ships were treated as prisoners of war. A portion of the proceeds of the auction was paid over to the Crown while the balance was split between the owner, or owners, of the corsair ship who received two-thirds of the proceeds and the crew who received one-third in regulated shares which varied according to their rank, the captain getting the largest share. If the captured ship could not be brought into a suitable port, there was the option of accepting an immediate or future ransom, in the latter case secured by holding one or two senior members of the enemy crew as hostage until the agreed amount was paid, an arrangement which could take some time and was not always respected. A substantial deposit of L15 000 had to be paid to the admiralty for the commission which could be forfeited if the regulations were not followed. Similar arrangements existed in England, Holland, and other maritime countries so that national merchant navies became part of the conduct of an early version of `total war.’ The almost constant state of war between England and France and their allies between 1688 and 1713 would be an important period of corsair undertakings by ship owners. Privateering was an expensive undertaking as the ships needed to be relatively large and well-armed and a larger number of crewmen than normal were required to aid seizures and cover potential casualties as well as to provide the crew for seized ships. Life on board would have been more difficult as the expanded crew were crowded into ships that were small by today’s standards and the supplies required to feed such numbers would have further crammed the ship. Provisions would have included salted meat and fish, cheese, biscuits (known as hardtack in Britain), fresh water, cider and wood for fuel as well as live chickens, sheep and perhaps a cow plus the feed they required. Extra guns and cannons, and the powder they used, would also have had to be provided for; the gunpowder having to be kept dry and treated with caution. Attacks on enemy vessels were conducted on the likelihood of success and smaller, less well-armed, ships were generally targeted to ensure only token resistance before they were boarded and seized. Occasionally larger prizes proved difficult to resist or the targeted ship’s captain would be motivated to fight back, especially if he owned an important share in the ship and/or its cargo, and the resulting combat could get very violent. The Hugon brothers’ kinsman Denis Hugon du Canet was permanently crippled in such combat in 1704 while three years later Hugon du Canet’s brother-in-law Captain François Lair and his ship, the Marquis de Thiange, became involved in a pitched battle which resulted in his having a hand blown off one arm by a cannonball and a short while later losing the other arm when hit again by another cannonball. Remarkably he was to survive the ordeal despite briefly becoming a prisoner of the English before escaping with some of his crewmen.10 Being a corsair captain was not only dangerous but could also be costly as capture entailed the loss of the ship and its cargo or paying a large ransom. Seizure of the ship and cargo would see the captain and crew end up imprisoned in Britain, Holland or even Ireland in variable conditions before being exchanged for English prisoners, usually months later. The naval ships of enemy countries were generally avoided as they were 11 usually larger, well-armed and contained no cargo, hence their being nick-named cannon ball merchants. Captured ships being taken back to French or allied ports could in turn be seized by enemy corsairs and the French crew sailing them imprisoned for ransom, a possibility which sometimes compelled the corsair ship to escort its capture, or captures, back to a suitable port rather than to continue its predatory journey. During the wars which pitted France against the English and Dutch between 1688 and 1713, the six sons of Gaud Trevelin Hugon were to pool their resources in order to invest in corsair ships. Three of the brothers would take to the seas as corsair captains though only Nicolas Hugon des Demaines would enjoy real success, to the benefit of his wider family. Nicolas Hugon des Demaines and his Sons Born in 1661 Nicolas Hugon des Demaines was the fourth son of Gaud Trevelin Hugon. In 1689 at the age of twenty-eight he married Marie Jaslin, the daughter of a bourgeois family of Granville, a month after his father died and a day after the marriage of his brother, Jacques Hugon de Grandjardin.11 Nicolas was identified in the parish register as the Sieur Du Domaine although the name was generally given as Des Demaines subsequently. Two years after his marriage Nicolas acquired his first commission of war and trade and began his career as one of Granville’s most significant corsair captains of this period.12 While in command of La Paix, a ship of 200 tons armed with 16 cannons and two pivot guns owned jointly by the Hugon brothers, Captain Hugon des Demaines captured at least 20 ships during the War of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697) sometimes teaming up with other French corsair ships to do so. In November 1691 he seized three English vessels: Le Capel of Plymouth, Le Jean of Jersey and Le Robert of London.13 Eight prizes are known for 1692. La Pomme Reinette captured off the coast of Spain, the Dutch ship La Levina bearing a cargo of wine seized near the Azores and La Marie of Jersey to the west of Brittany. Still off the coast of Brittany Le Cher Ami des Vaisseaux was captured in collaboration with three corsair ships from Saint-Malo; Le Grenedan, La Marguerite and Le Saint Joseph. Near the Scilly Islands L’Industrie of Plymouth and Le Thomas et Marie, both carrying cargoes of tobacco from Virginia, were seized in concert with Le Grenedan and La Marguerite.14 L’Anne of Flushing was captured and brought into the port of Audierne in Brittany and sold for a net sum of L1 574 payable to the shareholders after deductions and the third paid to the crew, suggesting it was a small ship with a less valuable cargo.15 Finally, that year saw Nicolas capture the Danish vessel La Fortune.16 The year 1693 saw the seizure of Le Jacques, L’Ester, La Chaloupe of Dartmouth, L’Espérance of Monlop (sic) and l’Elisabeth of Tapson (sic),* the last two with the assistance of Le Coatquen of Saint-Malo.17 The year 1694 doesn’t appear to have seen action though a fishing trip to the Maritimes may have taken place, 1695 saw the seizure of a small unidentified vessel from Jersey near Newfoundland and 1696 that of La Marie of Liverpool and La Perle.18 The last known seizure was La Confidance de l’Ami from * These are the ship and place names as they were given to the French admiralty translated, not always very accurately, from English, Dutch and Danish. 12 Boston, bearing a cargo of dried cod, in October 1697 off the Canadian Maritimes following a summer season of fishing there.19 The seizure of the Danish ship La Fortune in 1692 would pose a problem as Denmark was neutral in the conflict. As enemy vessels sometimes disguised themselves under the colours of neutral or friendly countries, it’s possible that Nicolas assumed this ship was flying false colours. In any event, the owner of La Fortune lodged a complaint with the French Admiralty which then requested the following of its representatives in Granville; The above-named Abensar, merchant of Copenhagen, proprietor of the vessel La Fortune, has complained that this ship came into contact with a corsair from Granville named Hugon, was plundered and that the crew of this corsair inflicted much violence on the sailors, regardless that the vessel was loaded with merchandise destined for the Kingdom and that the said Abensar was possessed of a passport from the King of Denmark. It is necessary that you send me the report due to you by the said Hugon upon his return, and that you take depositions from his crew regarding what occurred during this occasion and that you send them to me as well. Having heard nothing from their representatives in Granville the Admiralty followed up with a reminder on this matter a few months later; Gentlemen, I have not yet received the details due from you regarding a corsair from Granville commanding the frigate La Paix, named Hugon, accused of plundering a Danish vessel which he seized and caused the loss of, which I asked of you as they are necessary to judge if the complaint of the proprietor of this vessel is justified, please forward them to me forthwith…20 The Admiralty minutes do not indicate how the matter was concluded; it may never have been settled or may have led to Nicolas being compelled to compensate the proprietor of the vessel. The total amount raised by the sale of the prizes captured by La Paix is unknown but the average sale value of captured ships and their cargo was in the order of L15 000 in SaintMalo in 1704 of which the crew received a third and the owners two-thirds.21 This average would have given the nineteen captures (leaving out the Danish ship La Fortune) a total value of L190 000 payable to Nicolas, his brothers and possibly other shareholders of La Paix. As some of the captures were conducted with other corsair ships, who would have shared the cash raised on the sale of those prizes, this amount would have been reduced accordingly. As well as receiving his payout as a shareholder, Nicolas would have received his captain’s share from the seizures. Of the thirty-odd known corsair ships granted letters of marque in Granville during the War of the League of Augsburg only the ship Le Jeune Homme, owned mainly by the family Lévesque de Beaubriand and de la Souquetière, surpassed the tally obtained by La Paix, with up to thirty seizures while the ship Le Jean de Grace, also belonging to the Lévesque family, may have tied or somewhat surpassed La Paix.22 These ships and their seizures were under the command of various captains during this period, however, while all the seizures of La Paix were under the command of Nicolas Hugon who therefore holds the captain’s record on a single ship registered in Granville. Jean Lévesque de Beaubriand (1666-1706) recorded twenty-four seizures on two ships, fifteen on Le Jean de Grace and nine on the royal naval ship La Fortuné, during the war of 13 1688-1697 and would seize further prizes in the war of 1701-1713.23 With the fortune made during the two wars, the family Lévesque would seek greater trading opportunities by moving to Saint-Malo.24 Their property, La Souquetière, at Longueville, would eventually be acquired by the Hugons des Demaines. A short period of peace from 1697 ended in 1701 after which Nicolas would return to sea in wartime as a captain only one more time aboard the Marguerite de la Ferrière of 220 tons and 20 cannons in 1709 but this ship doesn’t appear to have seen action.25 The ship La Paix which had seen so many successes with Nicolas Hugon would be seized by two Dutch ships in December 1703 off the west coast of Brittany while under the command of Jacques Pigeon.26 A second ship with the same name was acquired and licenced with a commission of war and trade from 1705. This ship was captained by Olivier de Lalun from 1705 to 1707, by Nicolas’s brother Gaud Yves Hugon de HauteHoule in 1708 and by Jean Perrée in 1712, in April of which year it too was captured by the Dutch. With the war’s end a third ship named La Paix of 150 tons was commissioned and captained by Nicolas’s sons, Jean Hugon in 1715-1717 and Gaud Hugon in 1718, as well as by Pierre Lucas in 1720, though little is known of this ship and its voyages; the French consul at Cadiz noted on 16 October 1716 in his regular report to Paris that La Paix, commanded by Jean Hugon, had stopped at the port having come from Newfoundland and destined for Marseille.27 The ship is known to have been insured, amongst others no doubt, by Robert Surcouf de Maisonneuve in 1719, who guaranteed L500 in an agreement drawn up in Saint-Malo by his notaire, Charles Pitot de la Beaujardière.28 This vessel appears to have gone out of service under that name in 1722.29 With the death of his three older brothers between 1691 and 1703 Nicolas became more involved in the land side affairs of his extended family. During the period of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713), apart from the two ships bearing the name La Paix, Nicolas is known to have been a shareholder and owner of record (armateur) of the corsair ships l’Aventurier (ca 120 t) and La Françoise (160 t), the first of which was seized by the English in 1707 while under the command of Captain Charles Hugon du Tertre.30 During this time his younger brothers François Hugon de la Noë and Gaud Yves Hugon de HauteHoule as well as his son Jean Hugon continued as captains of corsair ships though with less success. In 1709, having captured and then lost an English ship, François Hugon de la Noë and his ship l’Amitié were captured by the Dutch corsair The Falcon after fierce resistance. He was forced to commit himself to a large ransom secured by the taking hostage of his second in command, Yves Baillon, and two other officers before being released, only to be captured again a few weeks later by an English warship, The Mosquito, which deprived him of his cargo of dried fish and a part of the ship’s supplies before being released in view of his existing ransom commitment. Two years later he would lose a large part of his cargo to an English corsair ship.31 With the substantial gains made during their partnership in the war from 1688 to 1697, the Hugon brothers and their heirs were able to invest in commercial fishing vessels of their own in the period of peace after 1713 (see Appendix II : Ships Belonging to the Hugon Families). By the 1720s and 30s, Nicolas was the owner or main owner of five known ships. La Françoise, built around 1713, was the largest at 160 tons with an upper and lower deck and a fore and aftcastle. It probably had three masts and was designed to carry up to 22 cannons though in peacetime there would have been less. This ship was crewed by about 85 men of all ranks and was usually captained by a member of one of the Hugon family branches. La Paix of 120 tons, built in Granville in 1722-23, was the third 14 successor of the ship that had helped to make the Des Demaines fortune in the 1690s. Its design was similar to that of La Françoise but it only carried a maximum of 18 cannons, was crewed by a more varying number of men ranging from 35 to 70 and was usually, but not always, captained by the Hugons. These two larger ships would have been involved in longer and more distant trips undertaking what was known as dry-cod or sedentary fishing. They would set off for the Canadian Maritimes between March and May, taking about a month to cross the Atlantic. Upon arriving they would find a sheltered bay in the coastal areas of Newfoundland allocated to the French in the treaty of peace of 1713 (the `French Shore’) and set up a camp, if they did not have one set up from previous years, and from there would fish the nearby waters in small boats bringing the catch onshore to be cleaned, dried and salted. Having finished their activities by late September they would usually set off for Cadiz or a Mediterranean port such as Marseille, taking about a month and a half to reach their destination.32 The city of Cadiz in Spain was an important port of call for the Hugons on these journeys and this association would continue for many years. The products exchanged in the Mediterranean for their fish would then be taken up to Le Havre or Honfleur rather than Granville due to their access to the Paris market before the ships went home in ballast about a year after their departure. Of the smaller ships owned by Nicolas Hugon des Demaines La Sirène of 80 tons was already old by the 1720s having been built in England in 1710 and may originally have been a prize of war. During the War of the Spanish Succession Nicolas appears to have been a minor shareholder of this ship but he became the owner subsequently. It also had upper and lower decks and early registers indicate it had fore and aftcastles but these had been removed by the 1730s.33 It was designed to carry up to 10 cannons, was usually crewed by 19 men though it sometimes had more and was probably a two-masted ship. It was headed by a variety of captains drawn from old maritime families of Granville and would be owned by the Des Demaines until the late 1730s. La Conception at 70 tons was similar to the Sirène but had no fore or aftcastles. Built in England in 1719, it was not designed to be armed and was usually crewed by 17 men including the captain; a position held for a number of years by Gilles Sébire from the village of Agon (Agon-Coutainville). This ship passed out of the family’s ownership in about 1733.34 These two smaller vessels would have been used for green cod or migratory fishing. They undertook journeys which usually began between February and March and lasted about six months, going only to the Grand Banks off the Canadian Maritimes and rarely making landfall. The fish, which were caught with lines and hooks, would be salted on board and once fully laden the ships would return straight to France but also tended to go to ports nearer the big markets of Paris and Rouen such as Le Havre, Dieppe and Honfleur before returning to Granville. The crews for the Hugon ships were drawn from the town and surrounding villages which made up the small region known as the Pays de Granville. In 1729 a third smaller ship was added to the Des Demaines fleet when Le Dauphin was built in Granville. A vessel of 70 tons, it had two decks and an aftcastle, could hold 12 cannons and was crewed by an unvarying 19 men, probably because any ship carrying twenty men or more had to take a surgeon on the journey. A different arrangement existed with this vessel in that the crew consistently came from the small seaside village of Blainville 26 km north of Granville. Benoist Chardot was captain of the ship for five years until his death at sea in 1734 after which he was replaced by Gilles Beuves who would continue annually in this role until the mid-1740s. Apart from the five ships belonging to Nicolas a sixth was purchased in 1724 by his son, Jean. Named Le Saint Charles, it was a 15 70-ton vessel similar to the Dauphin.35 Although the larger ships and their Mediterranean trade could be profitable, they faced a greater risk of attack by Barbary pirates and from the elements in their approximately year-long voyages. The smaller vessels, confined to the North Atlantic over the summer half of the year, would have provided a relatively safe and predictable income. As with the ships used for corsair ventures, the ownership of these ships was shared to some extent amongst different members of the family, and sometimes other investors. Nicolas Hugon des Demaines and Marie Jaslin had at least eleven children including twin girls born in 1700 who were to die within days of each other five years later. Ultimately five of their children, three sons, Jean, Joseph and Gaud and two daughters, Jeanne Marguerite and Françoise, survived to adulthood. As was customary their first-born son, Jean, shared the Des Demaines name with his father. Having become relatively wealthy Nicolas was able to arrange good marriages for most of his children including three into the nobility. Jeanne Marguerite Hugon married Jean Quinette, sieur de la Hogue and seigneur de Normagne in 1725. Quinette would become a significant ship owner and one of the wealthiest men in Granville by 1743 when he purchased the office of conseillersecrétaire du roi which would ennoble him as well as his descendants after twenty years of ownership. In 1730 Françoise Hugon married François Gosselin, a nobleman from Avranches who had been a guard of the king’s person at Versailles, a position more prestigious than that of musketeer as these guards were the elite personal bodyguards of the king in his palaces. Gosselin would die relatively young however leaving Françoise a widow with several children residing in Avranches. In 1722 Jean Hugon married Françoise Amable de La Pigannière daughter of Charles de la Pigannière, ecuyer, sieur de La Meunière and viscount of the bailiwick and county of Avranches.* Charles’s ancestors had originally borne the name Cudelou but, having acquired the sub-fief of La Pigannière by marriage, they dropped their surname and became known only by their feudal name, perhaps due to an unfortunate meaning that could be ascribed to their own name.36 The family had reached the ranks of the nobility of the gown in the mid-17th century and, with that background, Charles de la Pigannière was able to become a musketeer of the king at Versailles where he gained the patronage of the Noailles family. This connection was to provide him with some impressive witnesses at the signing of his marriage contract with Charlotte de Fruges in Paris in 1699 amongst which were: Anne-Jules, Duke of Noailles, Cardinal Louis Antoine de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris and Françoise d’Aubigné better known as Madame de Maintenon, the king’s morganatic wife.†37 None of this beau monde went so far as to attend the wedding at the parish church of Versailles however. The Hugons des Demaines would make use of these tenuous connections in the difficult years to come. Nicolas Hugon’s second son, Joseph Hugon, later sieur de Filbec, did not marry and his brother and nephews were eventually cited as his heirs. Unlike his brothers he doesn’t appear to have had much involvement with the sea and seems to have been more inclined to the administrative side of the family’s businesses, assisting his father in later years and becoming one of the three échevins (aldermen) of the town by 1745.38 * † The family derived this title by virtue of an office they owned, rather than in their own right. Her presence was probably due to her niece and heiress (she had no children) being married to the Duke of Noailles’ son. The king married her sometime after the queen’s death in 1683, though it was not acknowledged. 16 Jean and Gaud would have gone to sea at an early age, either with their father or with one of their kinsmen, as was customary. Gaud is known to have qualified as a captain and pilot at Saint-Malo on 23 April 1716 when he was only eighteen years old.39 By the time they were in their early twenties, they were given command of their father’s most important ships, though the men appointed as second in command were initially more experienced to compensate for the youth of the brothers. Jean Hugon served as a corsair captain on his father’s ships La Sirène in 1711 and La Françoise in 1713.40 The journey of 1711 proved a disaster with the ship experiencing bad storms, poor fishing and barely fending off an attack by two English ships only to finish being seized, plundered and ransomed for 9 000 guilders by the Dutch ship The Two Sisters off the north coast of Spain. The journey of 1713 appears not to have seen action. Jean continued to captain his father’s ships after the peace of 1713 mainly taking charge of the family’s largest vessel La Françoise. During the journey of 1718-19 the ship had its camp and fish processing facilities at l’Ile au Bois just off the south coast of Labrador. La Françoise was crewed by 90 men and had the use of 18 fishing boats while it was armed with an unusually high number of 24 cannons for peacetime due to a considerable problem with piracy in the North Atlantic at this time. The ship departed the area with a catch of 200 000 cod while La Paix, which was also based on the island that year under the command of his brother, Gaud, had a catch of 145 000 cod.41 Jean and his wife Françoise Amable would have their first son, Nicolas François, in 1723. The child’s grandfather, Nicolas Hugon des Demaines, was his godfather and his maternal grandmother, Charlotte de Fruges, his godmother. Another son, Joseph, was born the following year on the same day that his father left Granville as captain of La Françoise which was setting off on one of its long voyages. His uncle Joseph Hugon (de Filbec) would be his godfather. Two years later the couple had a short-lived daughter less than a year after which Jean died at sea, in April 1727, on board La Françoise as it was returning to Normandy from Marseille.42 Jean’s early death would have serious consequences for his two surviving sons, Nicolas François and Joseph, who were four and three years old at the time of their father’s death. In the short term their grandfather, Nicolas, probably became their guardian but he was of advanced age and by the time of his death ten years later the boys’ uncle, Joseph Hugon (de Filbec), would be their legal guardian. In the spring of 1720, at the age of 22, Gaud Hugon captained La Françoise with Clair François Hamel, who was only a year older, acting as his second. In a period of considerable piracy, the ship was well-armed with 16 cannons. After its summer fishing in Newfoundland, it headed for the Mediterranean with its cargo of dried and salted cod accompanied by the ship Le Bon commanded by Gaud’s cousin Gilles Hugon.* At the end of September, in Atlantic waters off southern Portugal, the two intercepted a Moroccan corsair ship from the city of Salé escorting two ships. The French consul of Cadiz recorded the following sworn statement made on 7 October 1720 describing what followed : The ships Le Bon Captain Gilles Hugon and La Françoise Captain Gaud Hugon, both from Granville, left together from Ile a Bois in the Grande Baye of Newfoundland. Being at 36 degrees latitude about 12 leagues off-shore from Cape Saint Mary they discovered, on the twenty-seventh past at the fifth hour * Gilles Hugon de la Valette (1692-1750), son of Gaud Yves Hugon de Haute-Houle. He would settle at Le Havre during the 1720s. 17 of the evening, three ships without being able to recognise who they were. The next day, twenty-eight, at daybreak the same ships (as far as they could judge) appeared to them, one at three-quarters of a league windward, and the other two at one league. The manoeuvres of these ships led them to believe that they were corsairs with two prizes. They immediately came about and pursued them. Having gained at three hours after noon, the first of these ships in range of their cannons, they remarked that the two others had approached and that one of these two appeared to them to be a Saletine galliot which came alongside the first ship whose crew threw themselves into the said galliot which then steered away. Captain Gaud Hugon being the nearest fired three cannon shots, and, leaving the task to his companion ship to seize this first ship, he pursued the galliot which joined the other above-said ship and followed them. That night-time, and calm having set in, the said captain was obliged to abandon them having recognised that it was a Saletine galliot with a small ship of English make of 80 tons approximately. Having then re-joined his companion ship he took possession of the other ship. They had found that ; there wasn’t a single man aboard, it was loaded with dried cod, all the hatchways were opened as well as the cabin, there were a few empty chests broken open, as well as six guns on the bridge. At his arrival here M. the consul had the hatchways affixed with seals and established a guard on board as per the regulations. The interpreter having examined the papers deposited in the chancery of the consulate, reported that according to a passport given in London the twenty-third of July seventeen hundred and nineteen, the ship and captain were English, that he had a customs certificate from the port of Salem in New England of the sixteenth July seventeen hundred twenty, stating that the ship contained a thousand quintaux (being 49 tons) of fish destined, according to the said certificate, for Lisbon. Additionally, a journal in which it appeared it had sailed from the port of Ipswich, in the said New England, the second of August. This journal continued up to the tenth of September leaving thereafter two blank pages.43 The ship was identified as a pinque (a small, flat-bottomed ship with a narrow stern found primarily in the Mediterranean Sea) named the Sea Nymph of approximately sixty tons whose unfortunate English crew had probably been taken on board the Saletine ship, destined for the slave markets of North Africa. The two captains Hugon and their prize reached Cadiz on 7 October. While the French were not at war with Britain at that time, they were in a permanent state of war with the Moroccan corsair city of Salé and on that basis Gaud and his cousin declared their prize as Moroccan to the French consul who would then be entitled to claim the Crown’s share of the sale of the ship and its cargo when it was auctioned in Cadiz. The British vice-consul intervened arguing that the ship had been in the corsair’s possession for less than 24 hours and was therefore still a British vessel which could not be claimed by the Hugons. The local Spanish governor tended to support the British vice-consul and a long process of appeals to Paris and Madrid began. A further debate then occurred between the French and the Spanish over who had jurisdiction over the matter. Gilles Hugon and Le Bon having already sailed Gaud decided to stay in Cadiz to press the Hugons’ claim while sending La Françoise and its cargo on its way, though this plan 18 was in turn complicated when the French consul decided to exercise a Crown prerogative and called on Gaud to take 12 stranded French mariners back to France on his ship. To avoid the extra expense and the complication of having twelve unknown men on La Françoise Gaud gave Clair Hamel the order to set sail without them while he quickly departed for Madrid to make representation on the Salé prize at the Spanish Court. An irate French consul was left to complain to his superiors in Paris about Gaud’s actions regarding the stranded mariners while having to support him concerning his claim to the British vessel. Upon his return from Madrid Gaud initially argued that his ship had not had sufficient provisions to take on extra men, a valid excuse that could not be verified as the ship was already at sea and then claimed that La Françoise had in fact waited for the stranded men but that they had not boarded the ship by the time it was due to depart.44 Gaud would remain in Cadiz for more than two years other than a brief visit to France during which time he attended Gilles Hugon’s wedding at Le Havre on 31 January 1722, the only Hugon to do so other than Gilles’ brother Pierre. His decision to stay so long in Spain may not have been solely to await a verdict on his prize but also due to an interest of a romantic nature, for in June 1722, he married Augustina Cortez de Valdegamas y Briant who shortly after fell pregnant which delayed his final departure from Cadiz until after the birth of his first son, Nicolas Antoine, in that port city in 1723. His father may have had mixed feelings about this development at a time when marriages were carefully arranged but Augustina’s family presumably suited Nicolas’s ambitions for his son as she was described in a later French nobiliary publication as originating “from the illustrious house of Cortes de Carmona.”45 In time one of Augustina’s grandsons in Saint Domingue, Jean François, would take her name and call himself Hugon des Demaines Cortez.46 A ruling was made in Madrid in March 1721 regarding Gaud’s appeal which recognised the local governor’s right to decide on the validity of his claim on the Sea Nymph on the basis that it was peacetime and that Captain Hugon had not had a commission of war, nor one of war and trade, issued by the French Crown. Although repeated requests were made to have the Spanish governor of Cadiz come to a ruling on the matter during 1721, a decision was not forthcoming and the outcome of the claim on the Salé prize remains unclear but later in 1723 Gaud returned to France with his Spanish wife and infant son.47 A story was told that on their arrival at Granville a woman amongst several at the docks was heard to say “…how ugly she is! There was no need to find her so far away.” Understanding little French Augustina asked her husband what had been said. “They said, my dear friend, that your appearance is excellent,” at which point the new Mme Hugon waved benevolently to the women. “Ah, but she seems very amiable,” said one of them, “he did well to choose such a good little woman.”48 Gaud’s mother, Marie Jaslin, died in October of that year and it’s unclear whether she had the opportunity to meet her exotic new daughter-in-law and grandson prior to her death. Augustina would attract much attention in the small town where they would have several children.49 In 1724 Gaud would captain La Paix, in 1726 La Conception and in 1730 La Françoise accompanied on that year-long peacetime journey by his seven-year-old son Nicolas Antoine. By the beginning of the 1730s Nicolas Hugon des Demaines was in his seventies and his sons, Joseph and Gaud, assumed greater responsibilities in the management of the family’s affairs, although Nicolas remained active enough to still be serving as an échevin of Granville when he died on 27 August 1737 at the age of seventy-six and was laid to rest in the town’s parish church. His success, along with that of some of his brothers and cousins, had placed the Hugons amongst the top dozen families of Granville by this period, 19 along with the families Lévesque, Le Pelley, Ganne, Baillon, Dry, Fraslin, Leboucher, de Lalun, Lemengnonnet and Lucas. The Sons and Grandsons of Nicolas Hugon des Demaines The details of the inheritances of Nicolas’s heirs may never be known as a fire in 1913 destroyed some of the notarial records of Granville prior to 1832 while those in the archives of La Manche went with the bombardments of Saint-Lô in 1944. Surviving records suggest Jeans’ two sons received in trust their fathers’ third share of their grandfather’s estate with the balance going to their two uncles while their two aunts, Jeanne Marguerite and Françoise, appear to have received their inheritances in advance at the time of their marriages, in the form of dowries.50 The estates of Nicolas’s sons Joseph and Gaud itemised after their deaths in the early 1760s suggest their father’s main assets had been his ships, presumably a house in Granville, a few other property holdings including Les Demaines, some perpetual loans (as creditor) and cash. In view of the value of the estates of Joseph and Gaud Hugon, it’s likely that Nicolas’s estate had been worth in excess of L60 000, a considerable amount for the resident of a small town but not a great fortune. The house in Granville was perhaps sold to raise cash for distribution to the heirs while at least L5 000 of the capital inherited by Jean’s two sons and their uncle Joseph was placed with their uncle by marriage and brother-in-law, Jean Quinette, by way of perpetual loans paying them five per cent. Of Nicolas Hugon’s ships, several were sold in the years immediately prior to and after his death including La Françoise, La Sirène and La Conception, while Gaud Hugon became the main shareholder of La Paix. Le Dauphin is known to have passed predominantly to Joseph, who also became the Sieur de Filbec from about this time when he purchased this estate in the village of Saint-Planchers. During the early 1740s, Joseph is known to have also owned a quarter share in the ships Le Saint Esprit (120 tons), La Geneviève (80 tons) and Le Juste (100 tons) the last two having his brother-in-law Jean Quinette as the main shareholder.51 Gaud Hugon had invested in a ship known as Le Phoenix in 1733. A vessel of 80 tons built in Saint-Malo in 1721 it had two decks and fore and aftcastles. He would captain this ship when it went on a fishing journey to the Maritimes in 1733 but nothing further is known of its fate, it doesn’t appear in the yearly manifests for Granville thereafter and was presumably sold when it concluded its journey at Honfleur in December 1733.52 In 1738 Gaud had another ship of a similar size, Le Saint Gaud, built in Granville and he would arrange for his son, Nicolas Antoine, to go on this ship as a volunteer on its fishing trip to the Maritimes in 1741 at the age of eighteen and his younger son, Gaud Hugon, on a similar trip when he was sixteen in 1743.53 Sometime around 1740, Gaud would also purchase a small estate, that of La Souquetière, in the seigneurie and village of Longueville. The Capitation tax rolls of 1740 and 1741, based on assessments of the years before (1739 and 1740), provide an insight into the Hugon’s financial position in Granville shortly after the death of Nicolas Hugon des Demaines. The Capitation was a provisional tax introduced in 1695 to offset the increasing debts incurred by the Crown in the conduct of its wars and to a lesser extent the costs of constructing the Palace of Versailles. Unlike the main Crown tax, the Taille, this tax was meant to be payable by all three of the Estates of 20 France; the church, the noblesse and the rest. The church, noblesse and many towns, including Granville, had become exempt from the taille over the centuries to the extent that the burden of this tax fell mainly on the poorer rural population and the new tax was meant to spread the burden more equally amongst the three estates. The Capitation became a permanent tax in 1705 and the first two estates and an elite group of officeholders soon managed to pressure the Crown to come to special arrangements regarding its payment. The normal rate of the Capitation was approximately 1/11th of income payable by heads of households. The church was able to negotiate a `donation’ in its place while the noblesse and judicial officers of the Crown were granted a substantially lower rate of as little as 1/90th of income. Only the very poorest, essentially vagrants, were exempt from the minimum one livre payable. A household for tax purposes consisted of a man over the age of twenty-five, his wife if he was married, children and sometimes other dependants such as an unmarried sister or an elderly parent. A widow could, and often did, head a household but unmarried women were usually included in the households of their parents or a relative. An added small charge was made for each full-time servant employed by households of which few employed more than one. (See Appendix III : Tax Rolls of Granville 1740 for the year 1739, for the complete Capitation tax rolls). The combined Capitation tax rolls for the judicial officers of the Crown and the third estate for 1740 indicate there were 602 households in Granville. The tax roll for the noblesse doesn’t appear to have survived but that order had very few members in Granville; in the roll of 1769, there were only six households belonging to the noblesse with five of these paying between 5 livres 4 sols and 19 livres 10 sols and one household, the widow of François Denis Poisson de Jublains, paying 227 livres 10 sols.54 The amounts paid in 1740 by the 21 households of the officers of the Crown and the 581 of the third estate were as follows: 31 households paid 31 households paid 51 households paid 155 households paid 334 households paid 602 households L 25 or more L 15 to 24 ¾ L 10 to 14 ¾ L 4 to 9 ¾ L 1 to 3 ¾ The breakdown indicates the degree of poverty that most of the inhabitants lived in, with 55% paying under four livres while only 5% paid over 25 livres and another 5% paid 15 to 24¾ livres. The 9% of households paying 10 to 14¾ livres could be described as the lower middle class of Granville, some of which were the poorer relatives of the wealthier classes. The 26% paying between 4 and 9¾ livres would have been the better off working class and a considerable number of widows who tended to pay less tax. Of the 31 households paying over 25 livres four belonged to one or other branches of the Hugons, while of the 31 paying between 15 and 24 ¾ livres another four were Hugon households. The remaining four Hugon households paid less than 15 livres. Jean Baptiste Quinette de la Hogue paid a total of 41 livres 10 sols in 1740, the twelfth highest household contributor in Granville. The Capitation tax roll for the following year 1741 was very similar, with only the occasional adjustments to the amounts payable. Unlike the roll of 1740, it provided brief descriptions of the financial situation of some of the contributors. 21 The twelve Hugon households on the tax rolls represented the six branches of the extended family. These six branches (see Appendix IV : Genealogy of the Hugons of Granville) and the individuals who composed them during the years 1739 and 1740 are indicated below with their economic activities as stated in the 1741 roll and the amounts they had to pay for the capitation in the tax years 1740 and 1741. The four branches descended from Gaud Trevelin Hugon were : The Hugon de Haute-Houlle with one household headed by Pierre Hugon “trader and owner of one ship with other interested parties. Had losses this year” (1740). His brother, Gilles, was by then residing at Le Havre where he had married. He paid 32 livres 15 sols in 1740 and 30 livres the following year. The Hugon de la Noë with one household headed by Gaud Joseph which included his older brother, Nicolas. “The firstborn conducts no business, the younger who must pay 24 livres of this tax owns a small ship with other interested parties.” Another brother being a priest was not mentioned. Paid 35 livres in 1740 and 30 livres in 1741. The Hugon du Puy with three households. The widow of Gaud Hugon Sr du Puy (Suzanne Orange) and her minor son, Gaud Olivier. Her death was noted in 1741 while her son was described as “without commerce.” Paid 12 livres for both years. The widow of Pierre (François) Hugon Sr de Grandjardin (Suzanne Le Rossignol) “small-scale merchant” whose surviving two daughters were married and counted in their husbands' households. Paid 7 livres 10 sols in both years. Joseph Hugon Sr du Prey “trader and owner of two ships with other interested parties” paid 19 livres 10 sols in both years. This branch paid a total of 39 livres in capitation tax in 1740 and 1741. The Hugon des Demaines with three households. The widow of Jean Hugon (Françoise de la Pigannière) “who conducted neither commerce nor industry” and her minor sons paid 21 livres 15 sols in both years. Joseph Hugon de Filbec “trader with interests in ships” paid 27 livres both years. Gaud Hugon “trader who made losses this year” (1740) paid 30 livres in both years. This branch paid a total of 78 livres 15 sols in 1740 and 1741. The two more distant collateral branches were: The Hugon de Hautmesnil with three households. The widow of Jean Hugon (Marie Baillon) and unmarried child “without commerce of industry” paid 3 livres 5 sols in both years. Jean Hugon de Hautmesnil, “marine officer and interests” paid 21 livres 15 sols in 1740 and 19 livres the following year and Thomas Hugon brother of Jean Hugon de Hautmesnil “marine officer” paid 5 livres 5 sols in both years. This branch paid a total of 30 livres 5 sols in 1740 reduced to 27 livres 10 sols the following year. 22 The Hugon du Canet / de la Cour with one household, Gaud Hugon de la Cour, “owner of two ships with interested parties.” Paid 21 livres 15 sols in both years. With Nicolas’s first-born son, Jean, having predeceased him the name of Les Demaines should have passed to Jean’s elder son, Nicolas François, who was fourteen years old when his grandfather died, or failing that to Nicolas’s second-born, Joseph, but instead, it passed not only to Nicolas François but to Gaud, who would share the name with his nephew. The property bearing that name may have passed to Nicolas François, though this, along with its eventual fate, remains unknown.55 Together Gaud and Nicolas François would establish the two branches of the Des Demaines family which would both exist into the 19th century. Under the guardianship of their grandfather, and later their uncle Joseph Hugon de Filbec, Jean Hugon’s sons Nicolas François and Joseph would have received a good education for the time and may have served on ships from quite a young age though their future careers don’t suggest an interest in the sea. Somewhat unusually for the Hugons, Joseph then joined the French Marine Corps (Troupes de la Marine) as a cadet when he was just short of his seventeenth birthday and was sent to the Louisiana Territory in the French part of North America arriving at New Orleans on 8 May 1741.56 He would have at least one contact there, Louis Charles du Homméel, a maternal second cousin who had arrived in the colony the year before as an officer in the Troupes de la Marine.57 France had entered the race for colonies rather late and so failed to get the best territorial prizes which had been taken first by the Portuguese and Spanish and then by the English and Dutch. By 1713 the French had gained large but remote territories in North America stretching from l’Ile Royal (Cape Breton Island) at the mouth of the St Lawrence River through the Great Lakes region and down the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, around and inland from the important English coastal colonies which stretched from Newfoundland to Georgia. Collectively these vast French territories were known as Nouvelle France but only the area around Quebec had reached a limited degree of development and settlement. The French had, however, managed to gain more valuable lands in the Caribbean, the most important of which was Saint Domingue (later known as Haiti) and were also expanding aggressively in India. The Louisiana Territory, only secured by France towards the end of the 17th century, encompassed the entire Mississippi Valley. From 1712 this extensive region was administered by various companies such as the Compagnie du Mississippi and Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes which were granted charters by the Crown to run the territory for their profit. None of these companies, one of which was run by the notorious financier John Law, were successful. They encouraged settlement of the region either by misleading people as to what they would encounter there or by drawing from France’s prisons and orphanages as well as importing slaves from Africa. Although nearly 13 000 people had been sent to Louisiana up to 1731 only 6 000 remained by the end of that year, mostly in the lower part of the territory.58 Thereafter the Crown reluctantly took over the administration of the colony, from which time relatively few people settled there. The capital of Louisiana, New Orleans, was founded in 1718 and was equally slow to develop. The territory came under the overall governance of La Nouvelle France with its headquarters in Quebec but distance accentuated Louisiana’s separation from the northern heartland. It was jointly headed by a governor and ordonnateur (often known as the 23 intendant) who were assisted by a superior council consisting of an attorney general, a chief clerk and several councillors. Though this council was meant to be of an advisory nature and was supposed to act as a law court and register royal decrees, rather than make laws, distance from France and local interests saw it take on some legislative functions as well. The Louisiana Territory developed something of a bad reputation in France compared to its more prosperous Caribbean colonies. Attempts to control trade to France’s benefit had little success and smuggling between Louisiana and the colonies of other European powers came to dominate the local economy. The use of the colony as a dumping ground for unwanted people did little to help its reputation; the young officer Dumont de Montigny who was responsible for supervising the embarkation of 500 forçats or people being forced to migrate to Louisiana in 1719 pointed out that 300 were deserters and the rest were the unwanted, often wayward, offspring of modest to better off families.59 These last individuals would go following the serious persuasions of their families, failing which it could be arranged with a letter de cachet from the Crown. Joseph’s posting to Louisiana may suggest that there were some problems and that his uncles might have encouraged this event; the family was sufficiently well connected to have had him posted to a better destination should they have wished. It is equally possible that the initiative for this undertaking came from Joseph perhaps wanting to leave the confines of his home life; either way, he would experience a life that could not have been easy for a person of his age and background. The Crown’s marine troops were meant to act as a police as well as a defensive force but they were often the cause of problems; the governor of the territory pointed out in 1757, soon after the outbreak of war with England, that the king’s troops were the dodgiest types, many of which had deserted or given in to “drunken debauchery.”60 Mutinies amongst soldiers were common; three companies were involved in a revolt in 1745 in New Orleans which was suppressed and followed by executions and another serious incident occurred at Cat Island in 1758 in which the commander was killed. Joseph’s first posting as a cadet was in the Yazoo Country above Natchez, Mississippi, an area which had experienced a serious uprising in 1729 by local Native American tribes in which 200 French settlers and missionaries had been massacred. His detachment was sent in pursuit of fugitive groups still hiding in the area from that time and although they were not able to engage them, they were able to recover two cannons stolen during the rebellion. He then spent time in the Natchez area on patrols and doing convoy duties on riverboats. He was also sent to live amongst one of the Choctaw tribes to learn their language which he was able to do sufficiently well to be used as a translator and negotiator subsequently. From 1743 Joseph was under the orders of Governor de Vaudreuil and when war broke out the following year with Britain he raised and led a party of 25 Choctaws to reconnoitre the Chickasaw tribes who were in alliance with the English. For eighteen months Joseph and his detachment lived off the land in remote regions; he was at one point separated from his detachment for several days and was reduced to eating acorns. Upon his return to base, he was promoted to enseigne en second in June 1746 and sent by ship with a detachment to search for a vessel which had disappeared in the wild coastal waters west of the Mississippi River mouth. This expedition into the swamps and bayous of present-day east Texas was in a little-known region inhabited by the Atakapa who practised ritual cannibalism. Short of supplies and clean water the search proved unsuccessful and they returned to New Orleans.61 24 Joseph appears from then on to have been based in the New Orleans area and in November 1746 he purchased a plantation about 2½ km downriver from New Orleans on the other side of the Mississippi River.62 Still only twenty-two years old, he had not yet reached the age of majority which was twenty-five at the time. He acquired this property from Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville who had retired to France and was liquidating some of his assets in the colony through his nephew Gilles-Augustin Payen de Noyan who was acting as his agent. The property was purchased for L15 000 to be paid from his inheritance in France, a payment his uncle Joseph Hugon de Filbec appears to have been slow to agree to as the curator of his estate, while a further deposit may have been paid by Joseph in Louisiana to secure the purchase. Bienville had a reputation as a sharp businessman and smuggler and during his time as governor was said to have used the administrative services of the colony for his private interests to an excessive degree.63 He was twice recalled to France by the Secretary of State for the Navy and Colonies under suspicion of malfeasance but managed to be reinstated. His nephew de Noyan was equally astute and it is not difficult to guess who got the better part of the deal in the abovedescribed transaction. The acquisition of this property would be the beginning of financial problems for the family as Joseph began to invest further capital into the plantation. The plantation was what remained of a huge land grant that Bienville had acquired in 1719 and which had been sub-divided into eleven plantations by the 1730s one of which had been retained by the governor until it was sold to Joseph. The property, located in the present-day New Orleans suburb of Algiers,* was forty arpents wide along the Mississippi and about 160 arpents deep giving an area of about 6,400 arpents or 5,400 acres and had, in 1737, about 460 arpents cleared while a considerable amount of the back land consisted of swamps and marshlands. The property contained a house, described as old, a large brick and tiled barn that might have been used as a warehouse and two dovecotes covered with shingles and stocked with pigeons as well as quarters for slaves and other buildings also described as old. The purchase included livestock consisting of cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry.64 Presumably, it was typical of the plantations in the area which produced a considerable amount of indigo at the time as well as food supplies for New Orleans. From about the time of this purchase, Joseph’s health took a bad turn and he was granted leave to return to France when the war ended in 1748 which leave was extended for a total of two years. During Joseph’s years in Louisiana, his older brother Nicolas François had remained in Granville. He married Marie Anne Pitot at the port town of Saint-Malo on 11 June 1743 at the age of twenty, young for a man of his social class at that time while his wife was comparatively old at twenty-six. Marie Anne’s father, Charles Pitot, Sieur de la Beaujardière, was a royal and ecclesiastical notary (notaire) and investor born of an old and extensive gentry family long established in the area of Tinchebray about 50 km inland from Avranches. Charles Pitot had settled in Saint-Malo around 1700 and although his family did not have a Malouin background his children would marry into several of the old maritime families of the port town; Marie Anne Pitot’s sister, for example, married into the Surcouf family and Nicolas François’s sons would be cousins once removed of the corsair Robert Surcouf. The Hugons had conducted business with Charles Pitot and the Surcoufs since at least 1719 as indicated above and this marriage would strengthen these connections.65 At the time of his marriage, Nicolas François was described as a trader * Fronting the Mississippi, where the naval base is currently located. 25 residing at Granville. Attending the marriage at Saint-Malo were both his uncles, Joseph Hugon de Filbec and Gaud Hugon des Demaines, Marie Anne Pitot’s brother-in-law Robert Charles Surcouf and the various members of the Pitot family. Several financial problems arose from the late 1730s which were to affect and divide the family. In 1739 Gaud Hugon des Demaines had to deal with a serious issue regarding his ship La Paix which had set off in March for its annual fishing journey to the Maritimes but had returned a month later because the officers and crew had believed the vessel was taking on too much water, to the point of endangering the journey. Following inspections of the vessel by shipbuilders appointed by the admiralty court, Gaud Hugon was granted an order compelling the officers and crew to undertake the journey in terms of their contracts. Following the ruling the captain, Thomas Le Vicaire, dropped out on the supposed grounds of ill health and was replaced by Clair Duhamel prior to the ship’s departure in May. In a small town like Granville, this incident cannot have helped Gaud’s business and personal relationships with certain members of the community, even if the journey proved uneventful. On 24 April 1743, Le Saint Gaud and La Paix both left Granville for Saint-Malo where the ships were victualised by the supplier Thomas Le Crosnier at a total cost of L1 790. The Saint Gaud set off in May to fish off the Maritimes before returning to Granville at the end of the year while La Paix remained in Saint-Malo until early July (perhaps because of the above-mentioned wedding in June) before setting off on its transatlantic voyage.66 Amongst the officers listed on the manifest of La Paix was Gaud Hugon’s son, Nicolas Antoine Hugon, aged twenty with the rank of lieutenant and a Gaud Hugon, recorded as being a volunteer of eighteen, who was most likely Gaud Olivier Hugon du Puy born in Oct 1724.67 La Paix was doing the long run via the Mediterranean and was heading back to Granville when war broke out between France and Britain in March 1744. The War of the Austrian Succession ended a period of peace for France that had lasted since 1714 and which had allowed the country to make a good recovery from the wars and financial ruin of the last years of the reign of Louis XIV. The beginning of the conflict saw the seizure of a large number of French ships at sea including La Paix, under the command of Jacques Mulot (le Jeune), which was seized only days after the declaration of war by an English vessel after violent resistance.68 Apart from his son, Nicolas Antoine, becoming a prisoner of war, this event would prove a major setback for Gaud, who appears to have had considerable debts even before this loss. The captain is known to have been released in November and presumably, his crew, including Gaud’s son, were freed at the same time or soon thereafter. The loss of his largest ship would have represented a considerable loss not only of capital, even if insured, but of income as well, which would have aggravated his financial commitments including the substantial amount he owed Le Crosnier in SaintMalo for supplying the ship. Perhaps to improve his financial situation Gaud subsequently accepted two corsair commissions during the war; as captain of his cousin Gaud Hugon de la Noë’s ship Le Prudent of 300 tons in 1746 which doesn’t appear to have seen action and in 1748 as captain of Le Vigilant owned by his brother-in-law, Jean Quinette de la Hogue. On this voyage, Jean Quinette’s son Nicolas, aged twenty-two, served as a second captain. Le Vigilant, newly built in Granville was a substantial ship of 350 tons armed with 30 cannons and crewed by 298 men and, although he had partners in the venture, the vessel would have represented a substantial investment for Jean Quinette. As well as taking charge of these ships on two of their voyages, Gaud appears to have been one of the minor shareholders of Le Vigilant and perhaps Le Prudent. 26 The Vigilant under Captain Gaud Hugon set sail on Good Friday, 12 April 1748, and the next day seized the Portuguese brigantine The Saint Antoine of 70 tons which had sailed from Dublin destined for Bordeaux but had been seized by the British privateer ship The Duke of Cumberland and striped of its smaller valuables. The captured vessel, and its British crew, were assigned to one of the first mates of Le Vigilant, François Simon Dubreuil, and four men to take back to France.* On 14 April they captured an English brigantine The King George of 100 tons from Plymouth. Having taken on board three chests of goods containing saddles, textiles and hats, that ship was taken to France by Clément Le Loup and a six-man team. Two days later they seized the substantial English ship, The Resolution, of 400 tons and 18 cannons carrying wheat destined for Livorno, having had to fire fifty canon shots to persuade her to surrender.69 From this ship, they removed the captain’s chest and another one containing hats before sending it to France with Elie Moquet and his crew of fourteen men. Three of the best hats were eventually given to the senior-most officers; Nicolas Quinette, Julien Deshayes and Thomas Destouches. On 20 April they seized another English vessel of 230 tons named The George coming from Livorno with a cargo of marble, sulphur, wine, oil, cotton and other goods as well as several chests containing portraits and other paintings, bottles of wine and oil as well as two rolls of silk and a crated mirror, the last of which that ship’s captain claimed to be his property along with some of the oil and wine. These chests were transferred to Le Vigilant after which the ship was crewed for escort to France under the command of François Quesnel but the vessel was subsequently seized in turn by a British corsair ship. Good fortune continued and on 29 April a Dutch ship was seized named La Demoiselle Marguerite from Middleburg - Flushing in Holland under Captain Jacobus Sibert, which was returning from America. This ship, containing sugar, indigo, copper and other goods, was manned by Michel Dévaux and a thirteen-man crew after two small chests containing cash, one sac and a small chest containing documents and registers were removed to Le Vigilant with Captain Siebert declaring that one of the two cash bearing chests belonged to him and his officers. In terms of his contract Gaud, as captain of the corsair ship, was entitled to keep the personal possessions of a seized ship’s captain up to a certain value, in this case up to L1 500 of the cash that Captain Siebert’s chest contained. Le Vigilant escorted the Demoiselle Marguerite and its cargo, along with eighty-odd prisoners, to Morlaix which it reached on 3 May. Gaud submitted his report to the Admiralty and handed over the chest containing cash not belonging to Captain Siebert to the representative of Jean Quinette de la Hogue, the latter of whom would eventually acquire the Demoiselle Marguerite and add it to his fishing fleet. Gaud retained Captain Siebert’s chest of cash to secure his claim of L1 500 of its content when he returned to Granville.70 The Vigilant arrived at Granville on 11 May after which some rifles were off-loaded and smaller items, such as wigs, were distributed to various officers, while Gaud kept in his cabin the paintings from le George. The small chest seized aboard the Demoiselle Marguerite and retained by Gaud to secure his claim was taken to the admiralty to be inventoried and collected by Jean Quinette while Gaud had several parrots that had been in Captain Sibert’s cabin taken to his house or given to officers of Le Vigilant. A few days later Jean Quinette came aboard Le Vigilant under the impression that undeclared valuables had been taken by his brother-in-law and some of his officers and the two men had a * In view that Portugal was an ally of Britain and was neutral in this war, it was strange that it should have been seized by the British, other than it was headed for a French port. Legally the French could seize it as it was in British hands when they did. 27 confrontation which led to Gaud leaving the ship without being allowed to take his effects as described in a subsequent affidavit that he submitted to the admiralty : The supplicant had not believed himself obliged to deliver the small chest (containing the cash and delivered to the admiralty) directly to M. de la Hogue and the latter was vexed and had communicated to him his resentment aboard the corsair ship in terms the most vivid and most insulting ; he seized his own chest ; he even insistently had rifles seized from the ship The George which the supplicant had just had loaded onto another ship brought back and forbade the guardian of the corsair ship to let anything belonging to the supplicant from being removed but after such treatment he aspired not to continue the mission : M. de la Hogue, on his part preferred to find satisfaction with another captain resulting, by mutual accord, in the termination agreement of 24 May 1748.71 The termination agreement stated Captain Gaud Hugon was leaving due to illness and would therefore be entitled to his share of the five seizures while he was captain, as determined by the regulations and their contract. The two men were not subsequently able to come to an agreement and in February 1752 Gaud took his brother-in-law to the court of the admiralty in Granville to recover his share of the value of the goods he believed he was entitled to from the seizures made under his command including L1 500 of the cash in the disputed small chest from the Demoiselle Marguerite. In turn, Jean Quinette went so far as to accuse Gaud of stealing 76 000 florins from the same ship and made counter-claims for sums he stated were owed to him by his brother-in-law. The court found largely in favour of Gaud Hugon leading to appeals by Quinette over a number of years as far as the parlement of Normandy in Rouen where there was much debate as to the interpretation of the regulations, the contract between the two parties governing seized goods, what had actually been on board the Demoiselle Marguerite, what had belonged personally to its captain and, most critically, if cash on this ship had been stolen. Even Gaud’s action regarding the hats seized on The Resolution was contested by Jean Quinette. The appeals revealed that the first 1748 journey of Le Vigilant under Captain Gaud Hugon had made the investors a profit of fifty per cent while the subsequent second journey under the command of Julien Deshayes had lost money due to the ending of the war after one seizure, thereby reducing the total profit for the investors to twenty-five per cent.72 A subsequent affidavit from thirteen of the shareholders of Le Vigilant in 1753 informed the court that they did not support Quinette in the legal pursuit of his brother-in-law.73 The rulings were mostly in favour of Gaud while who ultimately got custody of Captain Siebert’s parrots is not stated in the available papers. Embittered with his in-laws, Quinette stopped paying the interest due on the perpetual loans he had with the Hugons, all of which must have complicated the relationship between his wife, Jeanne Marguerite Hugon, and her brothers Joseph and Gaud. The War of the Austrian Succession, which had severely curtailed fishing and trade activities, ended late in 1748 but the opportunity for recovery was short-lived as a simmering dispute in North America between Britain and France would see war break out again in 1754 in a conflict first known as the French and Indian War. This war then broadened into the general conflict known as the Seven Years’ War which once more saw 28 fishing and trade significantly reduced. In 1757 Jean Quinette invested heavily in a large corsair ship known as Le Granville of 539 tons armed with 36 cannons and a crew of 316 men. Weeks after being commissioned the ship would encounter the British frigate The Britannia and after a fierce battle the gunpowder in the ship’s hold would be ignited and the vessel and all but four of its crew would be blown to pieces, including Quinette’s firstborn son, Nicolas, who was the captain of the ship and Gilles Hugon de la Valette’s eldest son, Jean Guillaume, who was the first mate. Apart from the loss of his son, this event would be a major financial setback from which Quinette would not recover and he became not only unwilling but increasingly unable to resume the payments and backlog due on the perpetual loans to the Hugons, which would lead to new litigations destined to carry over to future generations and into the next century. Added to the seizure of La Paix in 1744 and the costly legal disputes with Quinette, the loss of interest on these perpetual loans had serious financial implications for the Hugons and by the early 1750s the remaining two Hugon des Demaines ships, Le Dauphin and Le Saint Gaud had been sold. Having reached their fifties, the Hugon brothers entered semiretirement. Gaud would live thereafter with his wife, Augustina, at La Souquetière, his country house in Longueville, not very peacefully as he was pursued by creditors, while his brother, Joseph, would live between Granville and his property at Filbec at SaintPlanchers. Jean Hugon’s two sons, Nicolas François and Joseph, continued to follow the divergent course of their lives. After their marriage at Saint-Malo Nicolas François and Marie Anne Pitot lived in Granville though, other than being described as a bourgeois of the town in various civil acts, what he did there remains obscure. In the first five years of their marriage, they had four daughters and then, on 19 March 1749, their first son, Prosper Joseph, followed the next year by the birth of a second, Robert. Joseph Hugon was home on leave from Louisiana at the time of Prosper’s birth and became godfather to his nephew while Robert’s godfather was Marie Anne’s brother-in-law Robert Charles Surcouf who was visiting Granville with his wife at the time of the child’s birth. Nicolas François and Marie Anne maintained close contact with Saint-Malo and the Surcouf family; they were guests at the wedding of one of Marie Anne’s Surcouf nieces to François Garnier de la Villegarnier at Saint-Malo in 1753. The purchase of the plantation in Louisiana by Joseph Hugon from the former governor Le Moyne de Bienville had left him with an initial debt of L15 000 which he had committed himself to pay from his grandfather’s inheritance. He had since invested further into the property with little success, in part by borrowing from his mother, Françoise de la Pigannière. Unable to pay his obligations out of what remained of his inheritance, he seems to have sorted this matter out with his uncle, Joseph Hugon de Filbec, in part by raising L5 000 from him by ceding his rights to L3 000 of perpetual debt owed to him by Jean Quinette as well as by entering into a perpetual loan agreement with him for L2 000.74 Joseph returned to Louisiana late in 1749 on the Aimable Jeanne which sailed from Bordeaux with a complement of 229 men, women and children being sent to live in Louisiana. Joseph, together with two other officers named Montberault and Verbois, were given responsibility for this group and the governor, Pierre de Vaudreuil, noted in a letter to the Secrétaire d’état de la Marine that the captain and these three officers had looked after them well and that only two fatalities had occurred during the voyage. 75 Upon his arrival, Joseph was given responsibility for training three hundred recruits which, despite the type of men being sent to the colony, he managed to do with some success leading to a 29 promotion to enseigne en pied, one rank below lieutenant, in October 1752. Repeated fevers disabled him for a couple of years but he subsequently resumed his duties and was involved in reconnaissance and trade missions with various Native-American tribes such as the Chitimacha, Houma, Appaloosa and Atakapa. A further promotion to lieutenant came in July 1759. During his years in the marines, Joseph was also responsible for his plantation for which he would either have had a tenant or a manager and if the latter was the case, he would certainly have owned slaves as these provided most of the labour on the plantations by this period. The plantation’s financial problems continued and in 1755 and 1760 he sold off two parcels each with seven arpents of river frontage to Jean Baptiste Destrehan which would have reduced his land holding by about a third.76 During the 1750s, Joseph became aware that his vision was failing and he requested and was granted permission to return to France in the hope of finding treatment. He set off on a small vessel in July 1761 during the Seven Years' War between France and England accompanied by his cousin Louis Charles du Homméel. Enjoying the privileges of the noblesse, but few resources, his cousin had been able to rise to the rank of captain and had married Catherine Chauvin de la Frenière in 1747. Born in Louisiana in 1731, she was heiress to a sugar estate in that colony where they had several children of which a boy and a girl survived. By 1761 the war was winding down and with the future of the Louisiana territory in doubt, Du Homméel was considering moving his family to France. They were given charge of Crown correspondence which they had to deliver to a Messire d’Aragory in Campeche, Mexico, where they then had to wait for two months before they could proceed to Havana. It seems that there the cousins parted company and Du Homméel returned to Louisiana while Joseph was obliged to wait for a further six weeks before catching another ship for France. Near Madeira, this ship was seized by the English frigate the Richmond and the passengers were released on that island after being robbed of their valuables. After a couple of months in Madeira Joseph managed to get passage on a Dutch ship heading for the Spanish Canary Islands near which that ship in turn was seized by an English privateer who initially took Joseph back to Madeira and then to the Canaries. From there, probably using his family name, he managed to get onto a French corsair ship to Cadiz in Spain, where he would have been able to get help from his aunt Augustina’s relatives and from where he returned to France. By the time he had finally managed to reach home a year had passed and he had become completely blind, requiring a servant to act as his “guide man.”77 Joseph’s cousin, Louis Charles du Homméel, was no more fortunate. He undertook a journey to France at the beginning of 1763 with his son and a considerable amount of cash only to see his ship captured and his valuables seized. He and his son were taken to England where he died in Plymouth, leaving his son to make his way to Normandy to join his paternal relatives.78 Not long after his return to France Joseph was released from the troupes de la marines and granted a small pension of 300 livres a year. On 26 October 1762 the Secretary of State for the Navy and Colonies wrote to inform Governor Kerlérec of Louisiana that Lieutenant Hugon would be retiring with a pension and bonus and indicated the king's approval of his conduct toward officers under him in the service.79 He settled in his mother’s home town of Avranches and from there eventually arranged to sell the property he held in Louisiana. He claimed to have spent L80 000 on this land over the years being his entire inheritance as well as that of his mother, Françoise de la Pigannière, and when he sold it in 1769 at a loss he accepted payment in speculative paper money which subsequently devalued further to a value of L26 000. Following the sale, he struggled to 30 get a bill of exchange which he required to bring this capital back to France and appealed to the Secretary of State for the Navy and Colonies for help. In the same letter was a request that he be considered for the Croix de Saint Louis, an appeal which was supported by his brother, Nicolas François, and some of their better-connected kinsmen. After some debate at the ministry on the issue of the time Joseph actively served as an officer, being sixteen years rather than the twenty that was normally required for the knighthood, the Crown made him a Chevalier de Saint Louis in 1772. L’Ordre Royal et Militaire de Saint Louis was an order of knighthood created by Louis XIV in 1693 to reward outstanding military service and was the highest order that could be awarded to non-nobles in the armed forces. It made the recipient a noble for life and if awarded to three generations the nobility became hereditary. It became highly prized and was eventually awarded mostly to nobles though after the Restoration in 1814, it was granted more frequently and more widely. To my knowledge, Joseph was the only Hugon descended from the six sons of Blaise Hugon du Puy to receive this order and this distinction was one of the few positive accomplishments in his life fraught with difficulty. A few years after he settled in Avranches Joseph was joined there by his cousin’s widow. Charles Louis du Homméel’s wife, Catherine Chauvin de la Frenière, had decided to leave Louisiana after the death of her husband and in view of the Louisiana Territory being ceded to Spain in terms of the peace of 1763. She sold her plantation and set off for France with her daughter but the purchaser subsequently failed to pay the purchase price and then died in bankruptcy leading to her losing the fortune she had brought into her marriage. It appears she became a near neighbour of Joseph in Avranches, their names follow each other in the capitation tax rolls of the noblesse of 1769 and 1779 in which they were imposed fairly modest amounts.80 Her son, Nicolas Louis du Homméel, would also become an army man with some success but would fall into debt and died of smallpox at a young age in about 1778 leaving his wife of three years in financial straits.81 Catherine Chauvin died in turn at Avranches in May 1781.82 The last reference to Joseph dates from 1780 when he requested an increase of his pension of 300 livres which, never much to begin with, had been diminished over the years by inflation. Aged fifty-six he was living in the rue de l’Auditoire located in the parish of Notre Dame des Champs at Avranches. He would die in that town in 1793. Had Joseph’s investment in Louisiana been successful his nephew, Prosper, might have settled there and his descendants would have become citizens of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. By the time of Joseph’s return to France in October 1761 his brother, Nicolas François, and his wife Marie Anne Pitot had been living in Saint-Malo for several years and their cousins, Nicolas Antoine, Gaud and Marie Jeanne, the sons and daughter of Gaud and Augustina, had also left Granville. Gaud’s sons had settled in the Loire estuary near Nantes in about 1752 and Marie Jeanne had moved to Avranches upon her marriage in 1755. While better opportunities would have played a part in drawing the grandchildren of Nicolas Hugon des Demaines to those areas, the poor state of relations between Gaud Hugon and some of the other leading families of Granville, including his unpaid debts with them, may have made life and the continued conduct of business difficult for his sons and nephews in that small town. At a Surcouf family wedding in Saint-Malo at the beginning of 1757, Nicolas François was described in the parish register as “Nicolas Hugon, sieur des Demaines, of independent means (vivant de ses rentes)… resident of Saint-Servan” a parish neighbouring Saint-Malo. He would have had good contacts in Saint-Malo through his 31 wife and his family’s past business dealings there. His father-in-law, Charles Pitot, apart from having a successful practice as a notaire, had invested well in shares of various ships and insurance agreements. By this time in his eighties, and his wife having died in 1751, Charles Pitot lived in the same building as his son-in-law, Robert Charles Surcouf, in the Grande Rue quarter of Saint-Malo.83 His only son, Charles Gabriel Alexis, Marie Anne’s brother, was a successful trader and investor, often in partnership with Robert Charles Surcouf both of whom were enjoying a period of prosperity by the 1750s. With these contacts Nicolas François would have been able to make what investments he could in ship shareholdings, the purchase and sale of cargo and insurance and loan agreements. SaintMalo was better suited to these activities as it had a larger and more prosperous population and all aspects of colonial trade, including that of slaves, were allowed by the Crown. When Robert Charles Surcouf died in 1756 at the age of fifty-four Nicolas François Hugon was one of the twelve members of the family council that was established to look after the affairs of those of his children who were still minors.84 Charles Pitot died in 1762 at the age of eighty-nine and his estate was dispersed between his son and four daughters.85 At about the same time as his departure from Granville Nicolas François’s mother, Françoise Amable de la Pigannière, returned to her home town of Avranches where she would reside for the rest of her life and where she was joined by her son, Joseph, upon his return from Louisiana.86 Gaud and Augustina’s first-born son, Nicolas Antoine, who had added Des Demaines to his name, had settled at Le Pellerin on the Loire River to the west of Nantes while his brother, Gaud, had moved to Batz - Le Pouliguen at the mouth of the Loire. Gaud, who had taken the name of La Souquetière, married Marie Renée Thérèse Loiseau in Batz in 1753, his father attended the wedding and signed the register. They had a son named Jean Gaud the following year, followed by a daughter, Jeanne Madeleine, shortly after which both Gaud and his infant son died, leaving his wife widowed at a young age with one daughter. Nicolas Antoine Hugon des Demaines married Françoise Renée Daiherre in the church of Saint-Nicolas at Nantes in 1754. He would be described as a trader at his marriage and in later entries in the parish registers as a ship’s captain and pilot. Gaud and Augustina’s only surviving daughter, Marie Jeanne Hugon, would marry François Robert Le Pigeon, sieur de Launay, at Longueville in 1755 and she would settle in her husband’s town of Avranches and then at Coutances from 1761 after Le Pigeon inherited the office of président de l’élection de Coutances from his maternal uncles Paul Bernard and AnneFrançois Brohon. He would subsequently become seigneur of Mesnil-Amand and MesnilVilleman, by purchase in 1779 although by then he had re-married as Marie Jeanne Hugon had died in 1769 at the age of thirty-five, leaving two surviving sons and a daughter. In 1761 Joseph Hugon de Filbec died at the age of sixty-nine while on a visit to Avranches and ten months later his brother, Gaud Hugon des Demaines, died at Longueville, aged sixty-five, his wife Augustina Cortez having predeceased him there a few years before. Gaud had been in poor health for some time, had had a surgeon visit him from Granville and had required a carer to attend to him as well as his domestic servant without forgoing on deliveries of wine, wigs and accessories made by a M. Mignon at a cost of L73 in the last months of his life.87 At the time of his death, Joseph Hugon de Filbec’s estate consisted of the property of Filbec valued at L9 000, Jean Quinette’s perpetual loan of L3 000, his nephew, Joseph Hugon’s perpetual loan of L2 000 and other perpetual loans totalling L5 500 all of which paid five per cent per annum, when they were honoured, as well as his personal effects 32 valued at L800. The Chartrier de la famille de Morel / Le Pigeon Family papers indicate there was also a building in Le Havre worth some L3 000 which appears to have belonged to him though there is some confusion about this in the papers and he may have co-owned it with other members of his family.88 Excluding the property at Le Havre, the total value of his estate was in the vicinity of L20 000. He owned creditors various amounts totalling some L4 500 leaving his estate worth approximately L15 500. Assuming he did own the building in Le Havre but bearing in mind some of his perpetual loans were in default he would have had an income of some L750 a year by the time of his death.89 Half of Joseph Hugon de Filbec’s estate passed to his two nephews, Nicolas François and Joseph Hugon, in equal shares and half to his brother Gaud. The three beneficiaries acquired proportionate shares in the property Filbec, Jean Quinette’s perpetual loan and, it seems, the building at Le Havre, or his share of it. Half of Joseph Hugon’s perpetual loan would have been written off and the other half passed to his brother, Nicolas François, while other perpetual loans were distributed equitably between the heirs. The settlement of the Hugon de Filbec estate had not been finalised before Gaud died. His estate would prove more complicated and take much longer to sort out. His assets consisted of the properties La Souquetière valued at L3 800, a pasture L600, a small house in the faubourg of Granville L420, a share of an unidentified property valued at L210 and the building at Le Havre L3 000.90 These assets were estimated by his brother-in-law, François Robert Le Pigeon, to have a net value of some L6 460 and an annual income of L323 after deduction of loans totalling L1 570 mortgaged on the properties and interest payments on those loans totalling L78½. Other assets included the proceeds from the sale of his furniture L1 367, amounts due to him from his previous shares in two ships; Le Prudent L228 and Le Don de Dieu L287, interest arrears from his share of Jean Quinette’s perpetual loan L1 146 (the capital value was excluded from the valuation of the estate) and his inherited share of an amount due from a previous farmer of Filbec L802 giving his estate a total value of about L10 000. Unfortunately for his heirs, Gaud also left considerable liabilities. He owed his cousin Gaud Joseph Hugon de la Noë L2 500, a Mme des Landelles L1 100, the unfortunate M. Crosnier of Saint-Malo L1 100 and others some L2 400 totalling L7 100, leaving a net estate value of about L3 000.91 By the time of his death, Gaud had three heirs; his elder son, Nicolas Antoine, the only daughter of his late second son, Jeanne Madeleine Hugon, who was then seven years old and under the tutelage of her mother, Marie Renée Loiseau, and his youngest daughter, Marie Jeanne Hugon - Le Pigeon, each of which would inherit a third of the estate. The amounts that Gaud owed his creditors would be disputed for years and involved his heirs in several litigations. They, and other members of the family, would also be compelled to pursue Jean Quinette in justice for the interest payments due on the perpetual loans made to him by the heirs of Nicolas Hugon des Demaines in 1738, which went as far as having Quinette’s furniture attached in 1772.92 François Robert Le Pigeon would become an executor of the estates of his late wife’s brothers and would in future years administer the properties in the Granville area for the Hugons living in distant parts. Despite supporting the revolution Le Pigeon would be denounced during the period of the Terror and guillotined in Paris on 21 July 1794 at the age of sixty-six, only seven days before the overthrow of Robespierre and the end of the mass executions. His older son would then take on the responsibility of looking after his Hugon cousins’ assets in the Granville area. The estates left by the two Hugon brothers were not large fortunes, even if one discounts their liabilities. It would probably be safe to assume that Joseph Hugon de 33 Filbec’s assets reflected roughly what he would have inherited from his father, Nicolas Hugon des Demaines, in 1737. Although he may have been able to increase his capital by trade and investments, he is also likely to have had some setbacks with the widespread loss of ships during the war of 1744-48 and may have been affected by the financial difficulties of his brother Gaud and perhaps his nephew, Joseph, in Louisiana; he appears to have been the family banker to some extent. His estimated revenues of L750 per annum at his death would have been a reasonable middle-class income at a time when a servant earned L60 a year plus accommodation, a labourer between L120 and L300, an artisan or clerk anything from L300 to L1,000 and a parish priest L300 basic, rising to L500 from mid-century.93 Gaud’s situation was more precarious by the time of his death, he would not have been able to maintain a middle-class lifestyle with an income of L325 and must have been dipping into his capital. The effects of the loss of La Paix, the loss of income from his brother-in-law Jean Quinette’s perpetual loan and, most likely, other poor investments had made itself felt. It would be reasonable to assume that Nicolas Hugon des Demaines three sons (or in Jean Hugon’s case, his two sons) probably inherited amounts close to, or somewhat more than, the gross value of Joseph Hugon de Filbec’s estate at his death, some L20,000 each, with the daughters having been paid out at the time of their marriages. As was common in the French bourgeoisie, a man’s fortune could be dispersed if the next generation proved too numerous, a situation which obliged the heirs to work, or marry well, to accumulate enough new capital to permit them to preserve the lifestyle of their parents. The difficulty of doing this is why primogeniture had become common regarding inheritances in Britain’s upper classes, as a way of preserving family fortunes. The man who had become the nemesis of the Hugons, Jean Quinette de la Hogue, would live until 1779 when he died at Granville at the age of seventy-five. His wife Jeanne Marguerite Hugon followed a year later aged seventy-eight. Her sister Françoise HugonGosselin, the last of the children of the corsair Nicolas Hugon des Demaines, would live until 1793. By the time of his death, Jean Quinette was in considerable financial difficulty. His assets and substantial debts, including the perpetual loans with his Hugon in-laws, would pass to his surviving son, Gaud Pierre, who would aggravate the situation by living beyond his means in Paris and end up being imprisoned for gambling debts at La Force prison in 1783.94 The Quinette financial decline would make the perpetual loan obligations virtually worthless and compel the Hugon heirs into repeated legal pursuits to compel payments of the annual interest, which was sporadically paid. In time the capital sums involved would have had to be written off as the debt would not have found a purchaser. Nicolas François lived in the Saint-Malo area with his wife, Marie Anne Pitot, until the 1790s, his name appears occasionally in the Saint-Servan and Saint-Malo parish registers recording his wife’s family baptisms and marriages at which his four daughters, who never married, occasionally acted as witnesses. They moved to his mother’s home town of Avranches perhaps following the death of his brother, Joseph, in 1793 whose sole heir Nicolas François would have been of whatever there was in the latter’s estate. Never having re-married their mother, Françoise de la Pigannière, had remained a widow for fifty-three years, mostly in Avranches, until her death in 1780, perhaps sharing a residence with her son, Joseph.95 The efforts Nicolas François made to promote his son’s career in India suggest that he may have been affected by the financial misfortunes of his brother and uncle; he may have been a partner in some of their enterprises and may, in any event, have felt obliged to help them financially. The Pitot and Surcouf families were also in a 34 period of financial decline during the 1770s and 80s and so would have been less useful as business contacts in Saint-Malo. The Descendants Disperse Nicolas François’ older son, Prosper, was sent to sea for a time upon entering his teens while there is a vague impression from his letters that his younger son, Robert, was less talented than his brother.96 In 1769, at the age of twenty, Prosper Hugon left France for the French colony of Pondichéry in India and from this time on Nicolas François would invest a considerable amount of time and effort in furthering his older son’s career in South Asia where it was hoped he would restore the family fortune. In a series of letters to the ministry, he would remind the Secretary of State for the Navy and Colonies in Paris of his family’s past glories and connections, of his brother’s service in Louisiana and would go so far as to include a transcription of the marriage contract of his maternal grandparents of 1699 with its illustrious witnesses, all in support of his son’s suitability for promotion in Pondichéry.97 Prosper Hugon entered service in the colony as a clerical employee of the French East India Company (known as the Compagnie des Indes orientales et de la Chine from 1769) which then administered the French territories in India.* He would become chief clerk (Greffier-en-chef) in 1776 which placed him in the executive of the Superior Council of Pondichéry. After driving out the French army in India in 1778 the British left the French civil administration of Pondichéry intact. By the beginning of 1781 the three more senior members of the executive, the governor, the ordonnateur and the attorney-general, had left India and Prosper Hugon took on the administration of Pondichéry until the war ended in 1783 and a military governor was appointed by the returning French. Two years later he was promoted to attorney-general when a new Superior Council was appointed by the French Crown. Having enjoyed a good salary and conducted trade on the side for some time and with some success he chose to retire in 1790 to settle at the Île de France (later known as Mauritius) where he had purchased a sugar and indigo plantation on a previous visit. Following his resignation, he decided to undertake a trade venture to the Far East before leaving India and purchased the ship Macao which he filled with cargo belonging to him and to other individuals headed by Simon Lagrenée de Mézières. The ship, renamed Le Saïgon, with Prosper as commander and a M. Desesmaisons as capitaine de route et de manoeuvres had an uneventful journey to Indo-China and conducted successful trade transactions there but then suffered several misfortunes on the return journey to Pondichéry, where it needed expensive repairs and some of the cargo was damaged. Prosper believed the repairs should in part be paid by the other owners of the cargo carried on the ship, which they refused to do leading him to take the matter before the Superior Council of Pondichéry, which ruled mostly in Prosper’s favour.98 Once the repairs were completed the ship and Prosper proceeded to Île de France on 6 Nov. 1790, having * After 1763 there were five French territorial enclaves in India; Pondichéry, Karikal, Yanaon, Chandernagore and Mahé plus a few small scattered extraterritorial properties (factoreries) scattered around India. The town of Pondichéry was the capital of this fragmented colony. 35 replaced Captain Desesmaisons with Alexandre Le Corre as well as taken on fifteen seamen headed by a Captain Pierre Tardivet, whose ship had been left in Malaysia and who were making their way back to Île de France. One of Captain Tardivet’s group was sixteen-year-old junior officer Robert Charles Surcouf who was at the beginning of a maritime career that would see him becoming France’s most famous corsair a decade later. The son of one of Prosper’s maternal first cousins, he would restore the Surcouf family’s fortune and good name as had, to a lesser extent, Prosper, who had provided for his parents and sisters and persuaded his brother, Robert, to join him in Mauritius.99 The Saïgon arrived in Port Louis on 10 Dec 1790 and the next day Prosper submitted an affidavit regarding the misfortunes of the ship in order to begin claims on those who had insured the vessel and its cargo.100 Six months after his arrival on the island he married Pétronille Sornay when he was forty-two and she twenty-one and they would go on to have six surviving children. Prosper died in September 1804 at his sugar estate in the Flacq District at the age of fifty-five while his parents, Nicolas François and Marie Anne, would outlive him in Avranches with their unmarried daughters until their deaths in 1813 and 1805 respectively.101 Nicolas Antoine’s life is rather obscure. Having been at sea from an early age as detailed above, he and his wife lived at Le Pellerin where he was described in the parish register as a trader and where resided Françoise Renée’s parents at a property called La Martinière. They had five children between 1755 and 1761, the last when Françoise Renée was twenty-seven.102 Soon after the death of his father, Gaud, at La Souquetière and the birth of his fifth child, Nicolas Antoine moved to Cadiz in Spain where he was stated in the Le Pigeon papers as having been a pilot captain. His small and problematic inheritance from his father may have driven him to seek work in Cadiz where he was born and where he most likely still had relatives through his mother. His subsequent years in Spain and the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Louisiana suggest he had a good knowledge of Spanish. His wife and children do not appear to have seen him again, though he corresponded with his younger son, Jean François, after the latter had moved to Saint Domingue.103 Prior to the outbreak of war between France and Britain in 1778, Nicolas Antoine went to New Orleans for a time before moving to Havana, Cuba. His son Jean François reported in a letter to his uncle Louis David Daiherre in Le Pellerin dated April 1782 that `I receive fairly often letters from my father; he is still in Havana and has pains in his legs, which prevents him from working.’104 Nicolas Antoine’s wife, Françoise Renée, died at Le Pellerin in September 1777 while he died in Havana in 1786. Nicolas Antoine’s first-born son, Nicolas Joachim, had gone to sea at a young age; he was described as a ship’s officer at the marriage of his uncle, Louis David Daiherre, at Le Pellerin in 1773 when he was sixteen. He appears to have caused his family some worries as Marie Renée Loiseau explained to Robert Le Pigeon in a letter to him dated 30 August 1776; Hugon is leaving in fifteen days. He is very young and I fear as you do that he will run off. I saw his mother who fears it as well, he told me he would write to you and that he was repentant of his foolishness.105 Of him nothing further is known, his name doesn’t appear in subsequent family correspondence to the extent that suggests he may have died young or had indeed `run off ’ and lost contact with his family.106 36 With Françoise Renée’s death at Le Pellerin and Nicolas Antoine’s permanent absence two of their other children, Jean François and Françoise Augustine, chose to join two maternal uncles in the region of Jérémie in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. One of these uncles, Joachim Pierre Daiherre, had established a successful coffee and indigo plantation and had married there but he and his wife had no children so Jean François came to assist him on his plantation and became a surrogate son to him. Both siblings would marry at Jérémie; Françoise Augustine to Jeanty Dupoux in 1784 and Jean François to Sophie Justine Piau in 1790. In 1792 their uncle, Joachim Pierre, died and they would inherit shares in his plantation of 400 carreaux (517 Hectares) and its 170 slaves as well as three buildings in Jérémie.107 By this time Jean François had also acquired a smaller plantation of 66 carreaux (85 hectares) by way of a large loan. Unfortunately for them, this windfall was a year after the commencement of the slave rebellion led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean François would lose all this after a desperate ten-year struggle to keep it, in one of the last areas to fall to the rebels in 1802 when he and his family joined other refugees in Louisiana and Françoise Augustine and her husband returned to France. Once again, a Hugon des Demaines lived by the Mississippi though this branch of the family would die out in the male line in 1833 with the death of Jean François’s unmarried only son. The only surviving child of Gaud Hugon de la Souquetière, Jeanne Madeleine, would be the focus of her mother’s attention following the death of her husband and infant son. To Marie Renée Loiseau’s dismay, her daughter decided to join a Carmelite order of nuns as a postulant at the age of sixteen. “I will not hide from you how much this has cost me, it is difficult for me to express…” she explained to François Robert Le Pigeon in 1776.108 Marie Renée Loiseau described Jeanne Madeleine’s background and character in a letter to her daughter’s supervisor in 1773 at the convent she had entered in Rennes: With a rare understanding and knowledge of religion, she was quick and comprehensive in her sentiments, resistance to her wishes upset her and the efforts that her virtue drove her to made her ill, she was not easy to raise as a child but with maturity she has been the pleasure and satisfaction of all who knew her. She did not hold back on describing her faults, however. She can be very moody, indifferent, little attentive … She does things with nonchalance and bad grace, she always has a look of disapprobation, presents herself poorly in her quarters, negligent in her appearance, lazy, little orderly of her belongings, she needs to be closely watched. Not very diligent, she nonetheless has finesse, memory, and perception. I think one needs, with her, much firmness vis a vis her main faults yet also gentleness so as to not push her into a stage where she may think, and perhaps take, extreme resolutions.109 Despite her mother’s reservations, Jeanne Madeleine would go on to live quite an eventful life under the name Sister Marie de Saint-Xavier. With the French Revolution members of the Catholic orders were required to take an oath of allegiance to the Republic which Jeanne Madeleine refused to do. Narrowly avoiding a death sentence, she was imprisoned for several months until her mother managed to have her released. With the subsequent dissolution of the convents and monasteries, many nuns and monks returned to 37 civilian life but Jeanne Madeleine remained in the order, in secret at first, and went to Paris where she became a valued assistant to Camille de Soyécourt (Camille de l'Enfant-Jésus 1757-1849) who headed the restoration of the Carmelite order in France after the revolution. In 1807 she was invited by the re-established Carmelite convent of Nantes to return as mother superior though her time in this role was hindered by repeated illness.110 Conclusion The inhabitants of Granville lived in a fairly remote part of France with limited agricultural and commercial activities such that the sea offered the best opportunities. The wealthier inhabitants speculated in fishing and maritime trade and invested their capital in the ships that made this possible while the poorer inhabitants depended on these ships and their activities for employment. The corsairs of Granville and other coastal towns of France have gained a glamorised, almost heroic, reputation but the reality was that shipowners and their captains were often driven to such undertakings by sheer necessity as wars made relatively safe and profitable peacetime fishing and trade difficult to impossible. They had little choice but to put their ships to Royal service as auxiliary instruments of war while the Crown in turn had to accept that in allowing this service it would be condoning a form of piracy. The risks for ship owners were considerable, every corsair ship’s successful capture was a ship owner’s loss. The Hugons of Granville were not wealthy individually and were only able to make their mark on the town in the late 17th and early 18th centuries by pooling their resources. As a large extended family their combined assets gave them the means to invest in ships, grow their capital and exert their influence on the local community. As the different branches of the family grew apart and their assets were divided down the generations so their relative wealth and influence diminished, compelling individual members to find their own paths to success. In view of Granville’s limitations and their modest inheritances, the departure of various members of the Hugons des Demaines family from the area wasn’t unusual, as they were driven further afield to places where they perceived there would be greater opportunities and more chances of success. With their maritime experience and knowledge of the world overseas the Hugons, like so many of the people of the coastal areas of Brittany and Normandy, would provide settlers for the colonies of France. Several of the grandchildren of Jean and Gaud Hugon the corsairs would look overseas for their future. Prosper Hugon in Pondichéry before retiring to his plantation in the colony of Île de France / Mauritius where he would be joined by his brother, Nicolas Robert, while Jean François Hugon and his sister, Françoise Augustine, would seek their fortune in France’s most important colony, Saint Domingue and later Louisiana. During the 19th century, Prosper’s children would have further success in Mauritius, by then a British possession, while those of Jean François Hugon and his sister, Françoise Augustine would have less success in the New World. Ultimately the Hugon des Demaines, like all the other Granville branches of the family, would die out in the male line, extinguished, one after the other, due to an excess of girls over boys, a lack of marriages or children and early deaths. 38 Notes 1 Rapport de Sicard, commissaire de la Marine, du 24 Juillet 1731. (Archives Nationales, Marines, C4, 159). Available on GeneaWiki. 2 Villand, Rémy. “L’Activité du Port de Granville en 1619.” Société d’archéologie et d’histoire de la Manche. Publications miltigraphiées. 1984. pp. 20, 53, 63-64, 67-68, and 71-72. 3 AD 50. Granville 1601-1646 (5 Mi 862) p.219. The register leaves out the exact date of Blaise Hugon’s death perhaps because it is a transcript of another register which was illegible or he died elsewhere, perhaps at sea. 4 http://manche.fr AD 50 Granville 1687-1691 (5 Mi 685) p.74. Death of Gaud Trevelin 05.12.1688. 5 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 18. 6 See; http://fr.geneawiki.com/index.php/Canton_de_Granville_(50)_-_cahiers_dol%C3%A9ances and https://fr.geneawiki.com/wiki/Canton_de_Br%C3%A9hal_(50)_-_cahiers_dol%C3%A9ances for transcripts of some of the Cahiers de doléances of the villages around Granville, e.g., Hudimesnil. 7 Confolent, Dominique. “La Pêche Morutière à Granville.” La Revue Maritime no 474. Déc. 2005. On line; and Candow, James E. & Corbin, Carol. “How Deep is the Ocean? Historical Essays on Canada’s Atlantic Fishery.” Cape Breton University Press. 1997. Esp. chapter four by JeanFrançois Brière. Engraving on p. 45. 8 Roman, Alain. “La Saga des Surcouf : Mythes et Réalités.” Tome 1 1645-1789. Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2006. pp. 106-109. 9 Davis, Robert C. “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800.” Palgrave Macmillan. London & New York. 2003. Davis believes the number of Europeans taken into slavery in the period 1530 to 1800 numbered over a million. 10 Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. p. 140-141. Where he quotes from the dossier Baubriand, Archives nationale, Marine C7 19. 11 Four and a half years later Nicolas’s brother François would marry Marie Jaslin’s sister, Roberde. 12 As described in La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de Granville.” Editions F.E.R.N. 1966. pp. 131-132. 13 Ibid and Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales de la Manche. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 192. 14 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales de la Manche. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 191. 15 Mémoire de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne. V. 17. 1936. p. 199. The gross sum was L2 022. The finalisation of the sale of the ship and cargo took more than two years and concluded in November 1694. 16 Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013 pp. 134-135 and Archives nationales. MAR/F/2/10 Ordres du roi et dépêches ministérielles. 1685-1782, fo. 401 and 516 for the vessel La Fortune. 17 La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de Granville.” Éditions F.E.R.N. 1966. pp. 131-132 and Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales de la Manche. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 192. 39 La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de Granville.” 2em Edition. Éditions F.E.R.N. 1966. p. 132 and Cahierre. Op. cit. p. 192. 19 Cahierre. Op. cit. p. 192. In a footnote Michel Aumont (op. cit. p. 135, no. 36) credits Nicolas with four seizures in 1691, four in 1692, three in 1693 and four in 1694. As prizes could be registered in any convenient port, different fields of research may yield different results and the captures may have occurred a year or more before the registration and sale of the ships and cargoes. I have used Cahierre, La Morandière, Aumont and the Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne as references for the captures of Nicolas Hugon. 20 Archives nationales. MAR/F/2/10 Ordres du roi et dépêches ministérielles. 1685-1782, fo 401 and 516. I was made aware of these documents in Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. pp. 134-135, 217. 21 Roman, Alain. “La Saga des Surcouf : Mythes et Réalités.” Tome 1. 1645-1789. Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2006. p. 69. It appears this figure is after the Crown’s share has been deducted. 22 The following numbers of captures are given for the three most successful corsair ships of Granville during the War of the League of Augsburg 1688-1697. Some of these captures were done in partnership with other corsair ships. Cahierre, A. op. cit. : Le Jeune Homme 28 ; le Jean de Grace 24 and La Paix 18. p 397. Aumont, M. op. cit. : Le Jeune Homme 25 captures and 5 ransom seizures on pp. 435 and 440 and 24 captures and 5 ransom seizures on p. 134 ; le Jean de Grace 20 captures on p. 435 with a breakdown of 12 and 8 captures under two different owners on p. 440 ; La Paix with 20 captures on pp. 435 and 440. 23 Cahierre, A. op. cit. pp. 280-285 where details are given on all the captures during the period 1690-1697. 24 Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. p. 138. 25 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 192 & 400. The principal owner (armateur) was Thomas Fraslin du Montcel. 26 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 334. 27 Archives nationales. AE/B/I/223. Correspondance des consuls de France à Cadix, 1717. 441 folios. Folio 80-83, report dated 21 March 1717. 28 Roman, Alain. “La Saga des Surcouf : Mythes et Réalités.” Tome 1 1645-1789. Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2006. p. 83. 29 The ship rolls for the 1730s indicate the fourth ship bearing the name La Paix was built in 1722. 30 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 201. 31 Ibid. p.187. 32 Candow, James E. & Corbin, Carol. “How Deep is the Ocean? Historical Essays on Canada’s Atlantic Fishery.” Cape Breton University Press. 1997. Esp. chapter four by Jean-François Brière. pp. 47-64. 33 In 1722 and 1733 it was described as being 120 tons, in 1724 100 tons and from 1725 80 tons. Alterations may have lightened it or there may have been a second ship with the same name. See See: http://www.migrations.fr. 34 See: http://www.migrations.fr Navires au départ de Granville 1722-1750. 18 40 35 Ibid. The ship appears to have been sold after his death. Literally wolfsarse. La Pigannière was in the parish of Ponts near Avranches. 37 Archives nationales de France. Minutes et répertoires du notaire Jean Carnot. MC/ET/XCI/529. Minutes janvier 1699 - février 1699. 17 janvier 1699. And : Letter from Nicolas François Hugon to the Secrétaire d’État de la Marine. Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 via http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ 38 As indicated in the parish register 04.05.1745 at the birth of his goddaughter and niece Marie Jeanne Marguerite Hugon. 39 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009.p. 188. 40 Ibid. p. 190. 41 La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de la pêche française de la morue dans l’Amérique septentrionale (des origines à 1789)” G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose. Paris. 1962. Vol 2. p. 1007. 42 BMD Granville. Département de La Manche en ligne. Françoise Jeanne Hugon was born 10.03.1726. She died 31.10.1727 and the entry indicates that her father was deceased. Anne Cahierre in “Le Dictionnaire des Corsaire Granvillais” p. 190. indicates he died at sea in April 1727. 43 Archives Nationales de France. Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance des consuls de France à Cadix. AE/B/I/225. Reg. 15. 1719-1720. Folio 298-299. 44 Ibid. AE/B/I/225. Reg. 15. 1719-1720. Folio 296-297. AE/B/I/226. Reg. 16. 1721. Folio 74-77. 45 Saint-Allais, M. de. “Nobiliaire universel de France ou recueil général des généalogies historiques.” Librairie Bachelin-Deflorenne. Paris. 1874. Vol 6. p. 121. from; http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k36867h.r=hugon+des+demaines . The family claimed descent from Cortez of Mexico fame. Nobiliaire publications are often not reliable sources of information as they tended to publish whatever information the listed families chose to provide. 46 Registration of marriage of Hugon-Piau at Jérémie, St Domingue: 26.04.1790. 47 Archives Nationales de France. Affaires Étrangères. Correspondance des consuls de France à Cadix. AE/B/I/226. Reg. 16. 1721. Folios 130, 226-227, 294-295. 48 Deschamps du Manoir. Mgr. ‘Notes pour servir à l’histoire de Granville’. Revue de l’Avranchin. Bulletin Trimestriel de la société d’archéologie d’Avranches et de Mortain. Tome X. Avranches. 1900. p. 103 of article pp. 88-121. The origins of this recount are not stated and the story may be apocryphal. 49 La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de Granville.” Éditions F.E.R.N. 1966. p. 21. 50 See comment in GeneaWiki, Granville, notaires ; https://fr.geneawiki.com/wiki/50218_-_Granville_-_notaires ; Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 Hugon, Marie Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780) & Hugon, greffier du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787) ; Cote : FR ANOM COL E 122 Desdemaines-Hugon, Prosper Joseph. Greffier-en-chef au Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787) ; Chartrier de la famille de Morel (en ligne). 1 Mi 419-4. Rouleau 4 : famille Le Pigeon de Boisval (1510-1909), articles 312 à 352, Le Pigeon de Boisval (famille). 51 Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. p. 222 and see those ships in: http://www.migrations.fr 52 http://www.migrations.fr Departed Granville 16 March 1733. 53 See those ships in : http://www.migrations.fr 36 41 54 Marie Françoise Le Marié (1737-1770) married François Denis Poisson des Ormeaux (ca1730 ca1766) at Granville in 1758. The family Poisson had made its fortune in the ironworks of Varenne at Champsecret in the far southern interior of Normandy at the beginning of the 18th century and had purchased the office of conseiller secretaire du roi to bring them into the noblesse. Poisson had settled in Granville a few years prior to his marriage. 55 It was not listed in the inventories of assets of Joseph Hugon de Filbec 1761 or Gaud Hugon des Demaines 1762 in the succession documents of the Chartrier de la famille de Morel. 56 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL). http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226. Hugon, Marie-Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780). Letter of 12.07.1761. 57 Whose mother, Marie Madeleine Durand wife of Pancrace du Homméel, was Joseph’s godmother. 58 Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Building the Devil’s Empire; French Colonial New Orleans” University of Chicago Press. Chicago & London. 2008. p. 7. 59 Ibid. p. 163. Quoting from “Mémoires historique sur la Louisiane” of Dumont de Montigny. 60 Ibid. p. 206. Quoting Louis Billouart de Kervasegan, Chevalier de Kerlerec. 61 From Joseph’s own account of his time in Louisiana as given to the ministry. Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL). http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 Hugon, Marie-Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780). 62 The Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Volume 17. John Dymond & Henry Plauché Dart (Ed.). 1934. pp. 195-196. 63 Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Building the Devil’s Empire; French Colonial New Orleans” University of Chicago Press. Chicago & London. 2008. p. 115. 64 US Army Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District. “Cultural Resources Survey of Four Construction Items Below New Orleans.” Cultural Resources Series. Report No. COELMN/PD91/02. Final Report Museum of Geoscience. Louisiana State University. Baton Rouge. March 1994. pp. 199-200. 65 As is evident in various documents in the Chartrier de la famille de Morel : 1 Mi 419-4. 66 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. p. 268/788. 1764. Claims from Crosnier on the estate Gaud Hugon des Demaines for work done on the ships La Paix and Le Saint Gaud.by a M. Crosnier in 1743 at St Malo. The transcript of the ship’s manifest for 1743 on http://www.migrations.fr states La Paix was a ship of 150 tons built in 1743 but the year given is likely a transcription error and the tonnages given on the manifests could vary over time. Anne Cahierre has the ship as having been in service from 1722 to its capture in 1744. 67 There were two Nicolas Hugons aged twenty at this time, Jean Hugon’s son, Nicolas François, and Gaud Hugon’s son, Nicolas Antoine. While it is not clear which is named in the ships manifests, Nicolas François can be eliminated by estimating the conception date of his two children born in Granville in 1744 and 1745 and more particularly his presence at his brother-inlaw’s wedding at Saint Servan, neighbouring Saint-Malo, in February 1744 when La Paix would have been at sea. 68 Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. p. 310. 69 Ibid. p. 189. 70 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. Online. Detailed report by Gaud Hugon. pp. 274-276/788. 42 71 Ibid. Affidavit. pp. 277-278/788. Ibid. p. 289-290/788 73 Ibid. p. 286/788. 74 The Louisiana Historical Quarterly, Volume 17. John Dymond & Henry Plauché Dart (Ed.). The Louisiana Historical Society. 1934. pp. 195-196 ; Various letters in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) : Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL) http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ . Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 Hugon, Marie Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780) & Hugon, greffier du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787) and Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. 75 Barron, B. “The Vaudreuil Papers: A calendar and Index of the personal and private papers of Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil Royal Governor of the French Province of Louisiana 1743-1753.” Polyanthos. 1975. p. 251. ; Rowland, Dunbar; Sanders, A.G.; Galloway, Patricia K. “Mississippi Provincial Archives: French Dominion, 1729-48.” Vol 4-5. LSU Press. 1984. 76 US Army Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District. “Cultural Resources Survey of Four Construction Items Below New Orleans.” Cultural Resources Series. Report No. COELMN/PD91/02. Final Report Museum of Geoscience. Louisiana State University. Baton Rouge. March 1994. p. 200. 77 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL). http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226. Hugon, Marie-Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780). Letter of 01.09.1769. Various copies describing his service in Louisiana and his remarkable return journey to France are in this file. 78 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Cote : FR ANOM COL E 114 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Delachaise, Jacques. Vue 16/127 and The Black Book No. 86 of Oct. Dec. 1763. View 21/160 see ; https://www.crt.state.la.us/dataprojects/museum/blackbook/Black_Book_86_1763__Oct-Dec.pdf 79 ANOM. B 114;179. (LC.). See; https://www.hnoc.org/surrey/full_notice.php?id_document=18430 80 Joseph paid 15 livres 12 sol and Catherine Chauvin 13 livres in capitation tax in 1769. 81 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Cote : FR ANOM COL E 114 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Delachaise, Jacques. Vue 17/127. 82 Parish register for Notre-Dame-des-Champs, Avranches 21.05.1781. 83 Roman, Alain. “La Saga des Surcouf : Mythes et Réalités.” Tome 1 1645-1789. Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2006. p. 147. 84 Ibid. p. 161. 85 Two daughters had pre-deceased him so their children would have been the heirs to their mothers’ inheritances. Marie Anne would have normally inherited one-fifth of Charles Pitot’s estate but a part of that may have been included in her dowry at her marriage. 86 She would be the godmother of François Joseph Fautrel at Avranches at his baptism on 4 Sept. 1757 and was described as financially dependent on her son Joseph Hugon in his application for a pension in 1769. In the death register for the parish of Notre-Dame-des-Champs 21.01.1780 she is identified as` Funeçon de la Piganière’. 87 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. No. 342. pp. 432,434/788. 88 Ibid. No. 343. p. 437/788. 89 Ibid. No. 342. pp. 351,428-430/788. 90 I have allocated the house to Gaud’s estate as Le Pigeon does in his summary (Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. No. 342. p. 429/788) though only a share of the house may have belonged to him. This house appears to have been in the family since Nicolas Hugon’s days. 72 43 91 Ibid. No. 339 p. 348/788. No. 342 pp. 428-431/788. I have rounded some sums so the totals don’t necessarily add up. The sums given for the estates in the Chartrier de la famille de Morel papers vary over time and are sometimes difficult to interpret, so errors are possible in my description of the situation of the estates. 92 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. No. 340 p. 385-400/788. 93 Sgard Jean. L'échelle des revenus. In : Dix-huitième Siècle, n°14, 1982. Au tournant des lumières : 1780-1820. pp. 425-433. 94 Sinsoilliez, Robert. “Histoire des Minquiers et des Écréhou.” Ancre de Marine Éditions. Saint Malo. 1995. p. 94. 95 Nicolas François, Marie Anne and their daughters moved around while they lived in Avranches. At the registration of his death in 1805 Nicolas François was stated to be residing at the rue de Lille, Marie Anne resided at the rue du Puis Hulin at her death in 1813, Amable Charlotte’s registration of death did not give a street address at her death in 1821, Céleste Félicité and Françoise Charlotte were living at the rue Saint Pierre at their deaths in 1827 and 1828 while Marie Jeanne Marguerite resided at the rue Pomme d’Or at her death in 1830. In the journal “Mémoires de la Société d'archéologie, littérature, sciences & arts des arrondissements d'Avranches et de Mortain.” of the Société d'archéologie, littérature, sciences & arts des arrondissements d'Avranches et de Mortain. Volume 15. Avranches. 1902. p. 147, it states Nicolas Hugon des Demaines and his daughter, Marie Jeanne Marguerite, lived at 93 rue de la Constitution at some undated period. All this suggests they rented accommodation. 96 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM). Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL). http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 Hugon, greffier du conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787). Letter of 02.02.1772. 97 Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) : Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL) : http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ : Hugon, greffier du Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787). Cote : FR ANOM COL E 122 Desdemaines-Hugon, Prosper Joseph. Greffier-en-chef par intérim au Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787). P. 24/35. Letter of 15.12.1773 and others. 98 Diagou, Gnanou. “Arrêts du conseil superieur de Pondichéry.” Tome V 1790-1794. Société de l’histoire de l’Inde Française. Pondichéry & Paris. 1937. pp. 75-77. and Toussaint, Auguste. “La Route des Iles : Contribution a l’histoire Maritime des Mascareignes.” École pratique des hautes études - VIe section. Centre de recherches historique. Ports - routes trafics. XXII. Paris. 1967. pp. 410-412. 99 The journey of the Saïgon and the presence of Prosper Hugon and Robert Surcouf on board the ship is well documented as indicated in the sources below. Curiously Robert Surcouf doesn’t mention Prosper in his brief journal entry of the voyage as quoted in Briant despite the family connection, though he does mention having interesting conversations with Captain Le Corre. Toussaint, Auguste. “La Route des Iles : Contribution a l’histoire Maritime des Mascareignes.” École pratique des hautes études - VIe section. Centre de recherches historique. Ports - routes trafics. XXII. Paris. 1967. p. 305, arrivals, 10 Dec. 1790. pp. 410-412. Roman, Alain. “Robert Surcouf et ses frères : la véritable vie du plus grand des corsaires.” Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2007. p. 70. Briant, Théophile. “Surcouf, le corsaire invincible.” Éditions Fernand Lanore. Paris. 2002. pp. 37-38. 100 Toussaint, Auguste. “La Route des Iles : Contribution a l’histoire Maritime des Mascareignes.” École pratique des hautes études - VIe section. Centre de recherches historique. Ports - routes trafics. XXII. Paris. 1967. pp. 410-412. 44 101 Pétronille and Prosper had five children at the time of his death and were expecting a sixth, born two months after his death. The conseil de famille set up to administer his estate during the minority of his children consisted of Pétronille Sornay-Hugon, her brother Alexandre Sornay, her brother-in-law Robert Hugon, Jean Baptiste Sauvaget spouse of Pétronille Vignol, Charles Pitot first cousin of Prosper, Edouard Pitot nephew of Charles Pitot and Louis du Peloux (de Saint-Romain) friend of the family & kinsman of the Vignol family. In Jan. 1806 the conseil indicated Prosper’s estate consisted mainly of two properties, Constance (of 625 arpents) being ‘un établissement considérable de sucrerie sis au quartier de Flacq que ledit sieur Hugon possédant en société avec le sieur Leguen dont il a acquis la moitié à un prix élevé encore dû par sa succession’ and another undeveloped property in two sections totalling 380 arpents in the district of La Savane. They decided to sell the La Savane property to pay off Leguen and other debts. Constance was sold in 1829 with the proceeds being split six ways after whatever debts were settled which meant Prosper’s heirs were not left individually well off. His youngest son, Thomas Hugon, would in time become a member of the executive council of the colony as Protector of Immigrants. 102 As evident in the parish register, although Françoise Renée lived there until her death in 1777. 103 Inventaire du chartrier de la famille de Morel. Vol. 1 & 2. Société d’archéologie de la Manche. 1985. p. 253-256. 104 Héry, Edouard. “Une famille nantaise à Saint-Domingue.” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de Nantes et de Loire-Atlantique.Année 1987. Tome 123. p. 143. 105 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. No. 342. p. 441/788. His older brother, Jean François, left after his mother’s death on 27.09.1777. He was godfather at the baptism of his cousin, Louise Jeanne Françoise Daiherre, at le Pellerin on 22.10.1776. 106 Héry, Edouard. “Une famille nantaise à Saint-Domingue.” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de Nantes et de Loire-Atlantique.Année 1987. Tome 123. pp. 139-158. 107 Deposit of a paper by M. Jean François Hugon Desdemaines. 1796 July 15. A Guide to the Jérémie Papers: http://www.library.ufl.edu/spec/manuscript/guides . One Carreau of Saint-Domingue = 1,2927 Hectares. 108 Chartrier de la famille de Morel. Famille Le Pigeon. No. 342. p. 441/788. 109 Ibid. No. 343. pp. 493-494/788. 110 Grégoire, Pierre Marie `Les religieuses nantaises durant le persécution révolutionnaire’. Nantes. 1920. p. 243. And Oudin, Paul. (Ed) ‘Chronique de l'ordre des Carmélites de la réforme de Sainte Thérèse depuis leur introduction en France’. Volume 3. 2eme série. Imprimerie Paul Oudin. Poitiers. 1888. pp. 216-217. 45 Sources and Bibliography Manuscript Sources Archives nationales de France : AE/B/I/225 Reg. 15. 1719-1720. AE/B/I/226 Reg. 16. 1721. (16 pages). MAR/F/2/10 Ordres du roi et dépêches ministérielles. 1685-1782. fo 401 & 516. Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) : Instruments des recherches en ligne (iREL) : http://anom.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr/nominatif/ : Cote : FR ANOM COL E 226 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Hugon, Marie Joseph, ancien lieutenant dans les troupes de la Louisiane (1724/1780). 43 vues. Cote : FR ANOM COL E 122 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Desdemaines-Hugon, Prosper Joseph. Greffier-en-chef au Conseil supérieur de Pondichéry (1773-1787). 35 vues. Cote : FR ANOM COL E 151 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Duhomméel, Charles, capitaine des troupes de la Louisiane. 12 vues. Cote : FR ANOM COL E 114 Secrétariat d’État à la Marine. Personnel colonial ancien. Delachaise, Jacques, garde magasin à la Nouvelle-Orléans, mort reliquataire envers le Roi et débiteur d'une partie du prix d'une habitation qu'il avait acquise de Catherine de La Frenière, laquelle l'avait apportée en dot à son mari Duhomméel Charles, capitaine des troupes de la Louisiane, réclamation présentée par Lopez de la Fare (Armande Louise Angélique) veuve du comte de Duhomeel (Louis Nicolas Marie), officier de dragons dans le régiment de Belzunce, écuyer commandant l'écurie du comte d'Artois, belle-fille et fils des précédents. 123 vues. Archives départementales du Calvados : C4556 Rôles de capitation des bourgeois et habitants. 1740, 1741, 1751, 1779. C4650 Rôles de capitation des officiers de judicature. 1740. C4619, C4621& C4627 Rôles de capitation de la noblesse. 1769, 1779 & 1789. 46 Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine : http://archives-en-ligne.ille-et-vilaine.fr/thot_internet/FrmSommaireFrame.asp THOT internet. Registres paroissiaux et état civil. Various BMD’s; Saint-Malo. Archives départementales de La Manche : https://www.archives-manche.fr Registres paroissiaux et état civil (en ligne). Chartrier de la famille de Morel (en ligne) : 1 Mi 419-4. Rouleau 4 : famille Le Pigeon de Boisval (1510-1909), articles 312 à 352, Le Pigeon de Boisval (famille). Available on-line. http://www.migrations.fr : Transcriptions. Navires au départ de Granville 1722-1750 aux Archives Historiques de la Défense à Cherbourg. Section Marine. No longer directly available online, try : https://web.archive.org/web/20211128091743/https:/migrations.fr/page%20d'accueil.htm 47 Bibliography Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. Bourde de la Rogerie, H. “La Guerre de Course sur les côtes de Cornouaille de 1690 à 1697.” Mémoires de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Bretagne. Publication trimestrielle. Tome XVII. Rennes. 1936. Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsairs Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. Candow, James E. & Corbin, Carol. “How Deep is the Ocean? Historical Essays on Canada’s Atlantic Fishery.” Cape Breton University Press. 1997. Esp. chapter four by Jean-François Brière. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Building the Devil’s Empire; French Colonial New Orleans.” University of Chicago Press. Chicago & London. 2008. Goldsmith, James Lowth. “Lordship in France.” Peter Lang Publishing Inc. New York. 2005. Héry, Edouard. “Une famille nantaise à Saint-Domingue.” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique et Historique de Nantes et de Loire-Atlantique. Année 1987. Tome 123. p. 139-158. La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de Granville.” 2em Edition. Éditions F.E.R.N. 1966. La Morandière, Charles de. “Histoire de la pêche française de la morue dans l’Amérique septentrionale (des origines à 1789)” G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose. Vol. 2. Paris. 1962. Mousnier, Roland. Translated by Brian Pierce. “The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy 1598-1789. Society and the State.” The University of Chicago Press. Chicago and London. In French 1974, translation in 1979. An important source of general information. Roman, Alain. “La Saga des Surcouf : Mythes et Réalités.” Tome 1 1645-1789. Éditions Cristel. Saint-Malo. 2006. US Army Corps of Engineers. New Orleans District. “Cultural Resources Survey of Four Construction Items Below New Orleans.” Cultural Resources Series. Report No. COELMN/PD91/02. Final Report Museum of Geoscience. Louisiana State University. Baton Rouge. March 1994. Villand, Rémy. “L’Activité du Port de Granville en 1619.” Société d’archéologie et d’histoire de la Manche. Publications multigraphiées. Fascicule 46. 1984. pp. 20, 53, 63-64, 67-68, and 71-72. Contains a transcription and analysis of the Compte et recettes et dépenses pour `l’œuvre, augmentation et entretien de la Chaussée et quays du havre de la ville de Grandville’ tenu par Guillaume Carbonnel en 1619. Du Chartrier du Château de la Chesnaye a Coudeville de la famille de Lalun. Villand, Rémy. Inventaire du chartrier de la famille de Morel : 1216-1943, tome 2 (articles 191-554 familles d'Auxais, du Mesnil-Vénéron, le Pigeon du Boisval, des Fontaines, Viel). 1985. 48 Appendix I The Sieuries of the Hugon des Demaines Land ownership in France, and in much of the rest of Europe, was very different in the 18th century from the freehold system which has become prevalent today. At the lowest level of administration, the country was divided up into tens of thousands of seigneuries (known as lordships of the manor in England) created in the early medieval period when regional semi-sovereign barons and counts raised armies of knights by allocating them lands in fief in return for military service. The seigneuries had judicial and taxation functions of varying degrees. In turn, these knights, known as seigneurs, could grant lands in sub-fief to men who would provide military or other services in return. These sub-fiefs were generally little more than small farms and had no judicial functions but their owners enjoyed some exemption from taxes and fees. Their owners were given the courtesy title of sieur as they were not regarded as seigneurs and their sub-fiefs were known as sieuries, métairies nobles or terres nobles. The seigneurs could also cede parcels of land in perpetual leasehold, known as censives, to individuals, initially mostly to peasant farmers, in return for a fixed rent and labour services (or a cash equivalent). The censives were the most common type of landholding. The seigneurs would retain some of the seigneurial lands for their own exploitation (the demesne) usually by employing a steward or leasing out those lands on short leases. Seigneuries, sieuries and censives could be bought and sold along with their rights and obligations. In the medieval period, the acquisition of a fief often brought the owner into the nobility but the royal ordonnance de Blois art. 258 of 1579 ended this. The bourgeois families of France often purchased enfeoffed properties and added their names to their surnames in the manner of the noblesse as with, for example, Hugon des Demaines, Hugon de Filbec and Hugon de La Souquetière. This was permitted by customary law and was popular as it gave an impression of noblesse due to the addition of the particule (de, du, des) to one’s name. In Normandy sub-fiefs were usually in the form of a manorial landholding known as a franche vavassorie. Some individuals took the name of a censive, if it had one, which was not recognised in law but was sometimes tolerated. The land holdings whose names the Hugons added to theirs are likely to have been subfiefs as these existed in large numbers and cost only somewhat more due to their exemption from some taxes and the status they provided. The sub-fiefs usually had at least one dwelling, sometimes large enough to be regarded as a manor house, which the owner might occupy or lease to a farmer, though smaller sub-fiefs could consist only of agricultural or woodland parcels. The boundaries of the sieuries delineated on the maps below are based on those indicated in the contemporary government cadastral maps and should be seen as approximate. In reality the parcels may have been more scattered; some parcels within the sub-fief might have been censives of the seigneurie while parcels beyond the indicated boundaries could have been part of the sieurie, as indicated with two parcels of Filbec. Individuals owning a sub-fief could also own censive land parcels within the seigneurie or in neighbouring ones and were subject to their obligations. The seigneuries were divided into countless place names which helped identify specific areas at a time before surveying and numerical cadastral labelling of land parcels. These could be the names of sub-fiefs or of physical areas such as valleys, hills, plains, woodlands or built-up areas (hamlets, and villages). The origins of these names were often lost to memory and were not always current, though the names would have been used on notarial title deeds. 49 Les Demaines Cadastre napoléonien. 1827. Le Domaine, Longueville Variations : Le Domaine, Les Domaines. Approximate area 1 ¾ hectares. The location of the sieurie whose name Nicolas Hugon assumed in about 1688 is not known, nor what happened to it after his death. At his wedding in 1689 Nicolas was described as the Sieur du Domaine but thereafter as des Demaines or sometimes des Domaines. There are several properties near Granville carrying the name in some form which could have been the one owned by the Hugons in the 18th century. The farm Le Domaine at the northern end of the commune (municipality) of Longueville above is a possible contender. The surveyor of the Cadastre napoléonien may have slightly misnamed the farm, the small road which passes the farm is today known as the Sentier des Domaines which may be closer to its old name. The buildings at Le Domaine indicated on the map no longer existed by the 1960s. On the map of La Souquetière in Longueville below is another agricultural area on the north-east side of La Souquetière called Le Domaine on the contemporary government cadastral map as outlined in green. Again, possibly a spelling error of Les Demaines and a contender together or separately from the one to the north. 50 Cadastre napoléonien. 1826. Le Domaine, Saint-Planchers Approximate areas; left 3 hectares, right 4 hectares. There are two agricultural areas known as Le Domaine in Saint Planchers according to the contemporary government cadastral map; the one above on the left is just north-east of Filbec and the one on the right is at the southern end of the present commune. These could have been separate entities or two parts of one property. Place names called Le Domaine at Equilly and at Champcervon and Les Demaines at Ver are also possibilities but they are rather far from Granville whereas most of the sieuries owned by the Granville families tended to be within easy reach of the town. Without notarial documents, this property may never be identified After Nicolas Hugon’s death, the name Des Demaines was used by both Jean Hugon’s first-born son, Nicolas François, who signed himself `N F Des Demaines Hugon’ at his wedding in Saint-Malo, as well as by his uncle, Gaud Hugon who signed `Hugon des Demaines’. Nicolas François would have been the usual heir of this sieurie and Gaud’s son, Nicolas Antoine, did not use the name at his brother’s wedding in 1753 nor at his own a year later but adopted it subsequently. If Les Demaines consisted of two separate sections they may each have inherited one, although the sub-division of sub-fiefs was restricted and discouraged. 51 La Souquetière Cadastre napoléonien. 1826. La Souquetière and Le Domaine, Longueville Variations : La Souctière, La Soucqtière Approximate areas; La Souquetière 3¾ hectares. Le Domaine outlined in green 5¼ hectares La Souquetière was acquired by Gaud Hugon des Demaines in the 1740s, probably for his second son, Gaud, who was using the name by the time of his marriage in 1753 at Batz near Nantes. Gaud and his wife Augustina reside at La Souquetière in the last years of their lives. The house still exists but is much altered. It was probably purchased from the Lévesque family headed by André Levesque de la Souquetière (1688-1772) who moved with his family to Saint-Malo in the early part of the 1700s or from a subsequent owner. The lands called Le Domaine on the contemporary government cadastral map are outlined in green. They may have been a part of the farm at the north end of Longueville or were a separate property. 52 Filbec Cadastre napoléonien. 1827. Saint-Planchers Variations : Philbec, Philbecq, Filbecq Area of approximately 6 hectares Joseph Hugon began to use the name of this property around the time of his father’s death in 1737 and it seems likely that he used a portion of his inheritance to buy the property. The property passed to his nephews and nieces in undivided ownership after his death and remained the property of at least some of their descendants as late as 1806. The house and its outbuildings appear today much as they must have in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some of the other buildings were probably built after 1800. Main Sources : https://www.cadastre.gouv.fr/scpc/accueil.do Le plan cadastral français. https://www.archives-manche.fr/f/communesdelamanche/mosaique/? Cadastre napoléonien. Chartrier de la famille de Morel : Archives de la Manche. 1 Mi 419-4 Rouleau 4 : famille Le Pigeon de Boisval (1510-1909), articles 312 à 352, Le Pigeon de Boisval (famille) 53 Appendix II Ships in Which the Hugon Families were Major Shareholders The Hugons, Sieurs des Demaines Ships which belonged to Nicolas Hugon (1661-1737) and later his sons Jean (1689-1727), Joseph (16921761) and Gaud (1697-1762). Nicolas’s brothers and later their children would have been shareholders in some of these ships, particularly those involved in corsair activities. In turn, Nicolas and his three sons were likely minor shareholders in ships not listed here. The registers of departures from Granville often gave varying tonnages for the same ships. The year of known fishing and/or corsair journeys and their ship’s captains are indicated. An asterisk (*) indicates a corsair licenced undertaking, not necessarily seeing action. Ship Description Years in operation, main owner(s) La Paix I 200 tons, up to 16 cannons. ca 1691 to its capture in 1703. Nicolas Hugon and his brothers, notably Jean Hugon du Prey. Captains : La Paix II Captains : La Paix III Captains : La Paix IV Captains : 1691-97* Nicolas Hugon des Demaines (1661-1737). 1702* François Hugon de la Noë (1664-1733). 1703* & its capture, Jacques Pigeon du Vage (1682-1728). 100-160 tons, up to 12 cannons. 1705 up to its capture in 1712. Nicolas Hugon. 1705* 1706*, & 1707* Olivier de Lalun (1648-1724). 1708* Gaud Yves Hugon de Haute-Houle (ca 1668-1720). 1712* & its capture, Jean Perrée du Hamel (1659-1739). 120-150 tons. 1715-1721. Fate unknown. Nicolas Hugon. 1715 Jean Hugon des Demaines (1689-1727). 1718 Gaud Hugon des Demaines (1697-1762). 1720-21 Joseph Hugon du Prey (1687-1749). Went to Ile Royal and then to Toulon rather than Marseille due to an outbreak of plague. Ended up in quarantine at the Iles Saint-Marcouf. Presumably then sold. 120-150 tons, 2 to 18 cannons. 1722-its seizure in 1744. ‘Sr Des Demaines Hugon.’ Nicolas and then Gaud Hugon. 1722 Nicolas Hugon, son of Pierre. 1724 Gaud Hugon, 27 years old, son of Nicolas. 1725 Nicolas Trotin, 38 years old, son of Jacques. 1727 Gaud Hugon, 29 years old, son of Nicolas, captain. 1728 & 1729 Gaud Hugon, 47, 48 years old, son of Pierre. Gaud Hugon des Demaines was a passenger in 1728 to join La Françoise in the Maritimes with several others. 1730 Joseph Sauvé, Granville, 25 years old, son of Pierre. 1731 Gaud Hugon, Granville, 49 years old, son of Pierre, captain. 1732 Jean Michel Alliot, St Malo, 28 years old. 1733 & 1734 Jean François Cousin, St Malo, 43, 44 years old. 1735 Thomas Le Vicaire, Granville, 36 years old. 1736 & 1737 Jean François Cousin, Granville, 41, 42 (sic) years old. 1738 Thomas Le Vicaire, Granville, 38 years old. 1739 Clair François Duhamel, 42 years old. 1741 Jacques Lorbehaye, Blainville, 29 years old. 1743-44* Jacques Mulot le Jeune, Granville, 37 years old. 54 L’Aventurier Captains : La Françoise Captains : La Sirène (Sirenne) Captains : La Conception Captains : Le Saint Charles Captains : 120-140 tons, 10 cannons. 1705-07 when seized by the English. 1705* François Hugon de la Noë (1664-1733). 1707* Charles Hugon du Tertre (1665-1709). 160 tons, up to 22 cannons. 1713- > 1730. ‘Des Demaines Hugon’. Nicolas Hugon. 1713* Jean Hugon des Demaines (1689-1727). 1718 Jean Hugon des Demaines (1689-1737). 1720 Gaud Hugon des Demaines (1697-1762). He remains in Cadiz until 1723. 1722 Nicolas Hugon des Demaines (1661-1737) (Dahierre p. 308). He would have been sixty-one, which seems unlikely. Could it have been his son Jean? Or he may have taken command because his son, Gaud, was in Spain. 1723 Jean Hugon des Demaines (1689-1727) (Dahierre p. 169) 1724 Jean Hugon des Demaines (1689-1727). 1728 Jean Hugon, 39 years old, son of Jean (?), captain. 1729 Gilles Hüe, 34 years old, son of Pierre, captain. 1730 Gaud Hugon, Granville, 32 years old. son of Nicolas. Nicolas Antoine, Granville, 7 years old, son of Gaud also on board. 80-120 tons, 10 cannons. Built 1710 in England. 1719-1731. ‘Sr Des Demaines Hugon’. Nicolas Hugon. 1719 - Unidentified - (Daiherre p. 169) 1722 François Le Gendre, 40 years old, son of Joseph. 1723 Pierre Vincent, 46 years old, son of Richard. 1724 Gabriel Billard, 36 years old, son of Guillaume, captain. 1725 Clément Née, 52 years old, son of Jean. 1726 & 1727 Luc Lucas, 26, 27 years old, son of Mathieu, captain. 1728 Thomas Pigeon, 32 years old, son of Jean, captain. 1729 François Le Marié, 48 years old, son of François, captain. 1730 Nicolas Fougeray, 49 years old, son of Henry, captain. 1731 Nicolas Hugon, 37 years old, no other details. 70 tons. Built 1719 in England. 1724-1734. Nicolas Hugon. 1724 Jean Hugon, Granville, 29 years old, son of Jean. 1725 Jean Hugon, Granville, 28 (sic) years old, son of Jean, captain. 1726 Gaud Hugon, Granville, 29 years old, son of Nicolas, captain. 1727 Olivier Graguenet, Granville, 44 years old, son of Julien, captain. 1728, 1729 & 1730 Gilles Sebire, Agon, 44, 45 & 47 (sic) years old, son of Pierre, captain. 1731 Jean Baptiste Le Huby, Agon, 50 years old. 1732 Jacques Basset, Agon, 33 years old. 1733 Nicolas Hugon, Granville, 40 years old. 1734 Charles Le Huby, Agon, 42 years old. 70 tons. ca 1724. Jean Hugon des Demaines (16891727). 1724 Gaud Julien Le Boucher, Granville, 35 years old, son of Louis, captain. 1725, 1726 & 1727 Jean-Baptiste Augier, Provence, 33, 33(sic) & 34 years old. 55 70 tons, 12 cannons. Le Dauphin Captains : 1730 Benoist Chardot, Blainville, 49 (sic) years old. 1731 Benoist Chardot, Blainville, 53 (sic) years old, son of Jacques, captain. 1732 to 1734 Benoist Chardot, Blainville, 56, 57 & 58 years old. 1735 to 1741 Gilles Beuves, Blainville, 39 to 45 years old. 1742 Gilles Beuves, Blainville, 47 (sic) years old. 1743 Gilles Beuves, Blainville, 44 (sic) years old. 1744 Gilles Beuves, Blainville, 47 (sic) years old. 80 tons. Le Phoenix Captains : Captains : Built in 1721 St Malo. > 1733. Gaud Hugon (1697-1762). 1733 Gaud Hugon, Granville, 35 years old. 80-100 tons. Le Saint Gaud ca 1729. `Des Demaines Hugon.’ Nicolas and then Gaud Hugon. Built in 1738. Sold to Jacques Tapin by 1749. Gaud Hugon des Demaines (1697-1762). 1738 to 1740 Julien Ganne, Granville, 48 to 50 years old. 1741 Jacques Mullot, Granville, 35 years old. 1742 & 1743 Robert Le Hoguais (ca 1715-1748), Granville, 31 & 31 (sic) years old. Gaud Hugon (de la Souquetière), son of Gaud Hugon des Demaines, is abord as a volunteer in 1743 aged 16. The Hugons, Sieurs du Puy, du Prey and de Grandjardin Jean Hugon du Prey (1654-1703). Joseph, Sieur du Prey (1687-1749) and his sons François Joseph, Sieur du Prey (1714-1768) and François Nicolas, Sieur de Grandjardin (1715-1787). Gaud Olivier du Puy (1724->1775). Ship and tonnage if known Years in operation, main owner, other information L’Auguste 100-120 tons. 1694-96 Jean Hugon du Prey (1659-1703). La Patience 120-130 tons. 1694-1704 Jean Hugon du Prey (1659-1703). Captured by the English. Le Joseph Marie 100 tons. Built Boston, England 1733. 1737-1744 when seized by the English. Joseph Hugon du Prey (1687-1749). Le Pierre André 95 tons. Built 1739 Granville. 1740-1744 Joseph du Prey Hugon. Le Joseph 200 tons. Built 1747 Granville. 1750 Vve Hugon du Prey, 1751-1752 François Joseph Hugon du Prey (1714-1768). Ship wreaked on the coast of Grande Baye 19 June 1752. Le Saint Louis 60 tons. Built 1743 Dieppe. 1753 `Du Prey Hugon le Jeune’ (François Nicolas Hugon de Grandjardin 1715-1787). 1754-1755 Hugon Grandjardin. Le Saint Jean 80 tons. 1750-1755 François Joseph Hugon du Prey. 56 La Minerve I 245 tons. Built 1753 Granville. 1754-1757 Le Prey Hugon. La Minervre II 220 tons. 1764-1768. Purchased at St Malo 1764. Le Zephir 80 tons. Built 1754 Carteret. Hugon Grandjardin. `Le Prey’. Ransomed by the English 1755 when crewed by 17 men and valued at L13 000. Le Marquis de Marigny 180 tons. Built 1757 Granville. 1757-1759 `Du Prey Hugon & Le Marié des Landelles’. Captured in the Channel by the Montague Captain Parker, Feb, 1759. La Françoise 1765-1775. `Hugon du Puy’. (Gaud Olivier Hugon 1724 - >1775. Sieur du Puy, navigator on the Saint-Nicolas 1752, mayor of Granville 1761-62). The Hugons, Sieurs de la Noë François (1664-1733) and his sons François (1696-1741), Nicolas, Sieur des Clozets (1702->1740) and Gaud Joseph (1710-1784). Ship and tonnage if known Years in operation, main owner, other information Le Saint Louis Built at an unknown date. `Mr De la Noë Hugon’. L’Amitié 150 tons. 1709-11 François Hugon de la Noë. Le François 80 tons. Built 1721 at St Malo. 1727-29, 1731-34, 1736-38 `Sr De la Noë Hugon’. Le Joseph 100 tons. 1723, 1725. `De la Noë Hugon’, 1724 `au Sr De la Roque Hugon’.(?) La Reine des Anges 150 tons. 1722, 1723, 1725, 1726,1728,1730. `De la Noë Hugon’. Le Saint Jean 80-90 tons. Built 1732 or 1737 at St Malo. 1739-53 Gaud Joseph Hugon de la Noë. Le Prudent 210-300 tons. Built in 1743 at Granville. 1743-46 `Hugon de la Noë’. Captain Gaud Hugon des Demaines, 48 years old, in Feb. 1746. Le Nicolas 100 tons. Built 1745 at Granville. 1749-53 `De la Noë Hugon’. Le Saint Gaud 150 tons. Built 1730 in England. 1750 `Hugon de la Noë’. Le Charles Joseph 90-100 tons. Built 1750 at Portbail. 1750-55 `Hugon de la Noë’. Le Saint Nicolas 200 tons (?). Built in 1744. 1751 `Hugon La Noë’. Belonged to René Perrée 1752. Le Marquis de Paulny 85 tons. Built 1754 at Granville. 1755 `Hugon de la Noë’. 57 The Hugons, Sieurs de Haute-Houle, de la Valette and de la Coquerie Gaud (Yves), Sieur de Haute-Houle (ca 1668-1720) and his sons Gilles, Sieur de la Valette (1692-1750) and Pierre, Sieur de la Coquerie (1695-1766) Ship and tonnage if known Years in operation, main owner, other information Le Bon 130-150 tons. 1722 `Hugon Frères’. 1724, 1728 `Gilles et Pierre Hugon frères’ Haute-Houle. L’Elizabeth 70 tons. Built 1722. 1723 `Hugon Frères’. 1725 to 1730 `Gilles et Pierre Hugon frères’ Haute-Houle. 1731-33 `Appartenant au Sieur de la Coquerie Hugon’ (Pierre Hugon de la Coquerie (1695-1766). La Marie Madeleine 50 tons. Built 1728 at Granville. 1733-43 Gilles Hugon de la Valette (1692-1750). `Gilles et Pierre Hugon frères’ Haute-Houle. La Louise 150 tons. Built 1742 by `Les Frères Hugon’. Belonged to (Pierre) `La Coquerie Hugon’ in 1742-44. 1749-1755, when seized the by English, `Gilles et Pierre Hugon frères’ Haute-Houle. Crew of 66 men and valued at L 36 000 when seized. La Jeune Thereze 80 tons. Built 1753 at Granville. 1753-55 De la Blanquerie Hugon (Gaud Hugon 1723-1784). `Gilles et Pierre Hugon frères’ Haute Houle. The Hugons, Sieurs de Hautmesnil Thomas, Sieur de Hautmesnil (1661-1730) and his sons Jean, Sieur de Hautmesnil (1695- ? ) and Thomas, Sieur de Hautmesnil (1706-1762). Ship and tonnage if known Years in operation, main owner, other information Le Thomas 1704 ship and crew seized. Thomas Hugon a prisoner in Genoa for three years. Le Jean 1720-28. Merchant transportation between St Malo and Granville. Le Saint Esprit 120 tons. Built 1739. Part owned by Thomas Hugon de Hautmesnil in partnership with Jacques Alexandre de la Forterie and others. L’Intrépide 260 tons. Built 1750 Granville. 1750-1764 Thomas Hugon de Hautmesnil. His son, Louis, 14 years old, aboard for the voyage of 1750. The ship was requisitioned in May 1756 at Marseille by the French navy to take part in the naval war at Minorca and returned to Granville in 1763. Le Pierre Marie 98 tons. Built 1753 Granville. 1753-1755 Thomas Hugon de Hautmesnil. His son, Pierre, 17 years old, aboard for the voyage of 1751 and again for those of 1753-55. 58 The Hugons, Sieurs du Canet - de la Cour Jean, Sieur de la Cour (ca 1657-1727) and his sons Jean (1694-1723) and Gaud, Sieur de la Cour (1695-1780). Ship and tonnage if known Years in operation, main owner, other information Le Guillaume 40 tons. Built 1720 at St Malo. 1733 Gaud de la Cour Hugon. Returned to Honfleur 1734. Le Jean 70-90 tonds. 1723 `De la Cour Hugon’. 1724 `Mr Gaude Hugon’. Captain ; `Gaude Hugon, 29 years old, son of Jean’. 1725, 1726 `Gaude Hugon La Cour’. 1727 `Gaud Hugon La Couraye’. Le Cezard 60-70 tons. Built 1728 at Granville. 1729-1744. `Sr La Cour Hugon’. 1730 captain ; Gaud Hugon, Granville, 34 years old, son of Jean. Departed from St Malo in 1736 and returned to Granville in 1737. La Marie Petite 30-60 tons. Built 1737 at Granville. 1739-1753. `Gaud La Cour Hugon’ in 1739. L’Alexandre 90-100 tons. Built 1737 at Granville. 1737-1750. `Gaud Hugon La Cour’ (16951780) in 1738. La Pucelle du Talard Built at an unknown date. 1755 `La Cour Hugon.’ Captured by the English. Crew of 19 men and valued at L19 000 when seized. Main sources : http://www.migrations.fr . Transcriptions from ; Navires au départ de Granville 1722-1750. Archives Historiques de la Défense à Cherbourg, section Marine. Rôles d'armement et désarmement des bateaux de pêche, commerce, plaisance, 18e-20e siècles (série P). MARINE B 3 526 Fol 221. De Monsieur de Fontette, intendant à Caen à Monseigneur, lettre du 1er décembre 1755. `État des navires pris par les anglais sur les bourgeois de Granville qui font le commerce de la morue, ils sont au nombre de 34 avec 1093 matelots et leur valeur monte suivant les régimes de la Chambre d’assurance à 773000 livres’. Cahierre, Anne. “Dictionnaire des Capitaines Corsaires Granvillais.” Conseil général de la Manche. Archives départementales. Saint-Lô. 2009. Aumont, Michel. “Les Corsaires de Granville : Une culture du risque maritime.” Presses universitaires de Rennes. Rennes. 2013. 59 Appendix III Tax Rolls of Granville 1740 for the assessment year 1739. Over the centuries many segments of French society had been exempt from paying the Crown’s most important tax known as the taille. The nobles, the clergy, some professions, and many towns such as Granville enjoyed such a privilege. As the Crown’s need for revenue increased during the 17th century it introduced a new tax, the capitation, payable by all heads of households including those exempt from the taille. The size of a household could vary from a single individual to a dozen or more. Assuming an average household size of five individuals (for example a husband and wife and three surviving children) the combined 602 households of the judicial officers of the Crown and the general tax rolls would suggest Granville had a population of somewhat over three thousand in 1739. Servants (described as valets) incurred an added tax on the household of one to three livres depending on income. Sailors (matelots) are listed separately. Their names were drawn from the registers of experience seamen kept by the ministry of the navy in case they required sailors for the navy. The twelve Hugon households and that of Jean Baptiste Quinette de la Hogue are highlighted. Rolle des bourgeois et habitants de Granville 1740 p. 1 Bourgeoisie de Granville Capitation 1740. Valet 1 Élection de Coutances Rolle des bourgeois et habitans de Granville avec les sommes qu’ils doivent payer pour leur capitation de l’année mil sept cent quarante en exécution de la déclaration du Roy du 12 mars 1701. # 1 Joseph Hugon fils de Nicolas négotiant ......................................................... 2 25 1 La Ve de Jean Hugon et enfants mineurs ..................................................... 1 20. .15 2 Le S. Hugon fils cadet du S. des Demaines .................................................. 30 25 Le S. Fontenelles le Pelley ........................................................................... 4 2 1 Le S. Plesville Le Pelley ayant épousé la veuve de Nicolas Alaterre ....................................................................................... 1 12 1 Le S. de Tilly Le Pelley ................................................................................. 10. .15 1 La Ve du S. Des Pres Dry .............................................................................. 25 20 1 Les Hiers du S. Malicorne Yset ........................................................................ 8. .10 La Ve de Pierre Jourdan des Manneries et ses enfants .................................. 1 15. . 5 60 p. 2 2 3 1 Les fils et Hiers de François Hugon de la Noë autre que François Hugon prêtre ................................................................... 32 35 Le S. de Gatigny ancien maire et son fils ...................................................... 5 60. .15 La Dlle Boissard veuve de Nas Le Peley .......................................................... 7. .10 La Ve de François Rossignol .......................................................................... 2 Jean Bte Le Pelley S. des Cerisiers ayant épousé la veuve de Philippe Le Viraix ............................................................ 25 20 Pierre Le Pelley de Basselande ......................................................................... 3. . 5 1 Pierre Le Graverend notaire ............................................................................ 1 12 2 La Veuve et enfants du S. de Loissellieres Quinette fils Gilles............................................................................................ 2 28. .10 2 Pierre Hugon S. de la Coquerie ayant épousé la veuve du S. Vager Pigeon ............................................................... 2 30. .15 1. La Ve et héritiers de Gilles de Longueville ................................................... 12 1 p. 3 La Veuve du S. Lucas cy devant lieut. de maire .............................................. 6. .10 1 Le S. Lucas des Aulnes .................................................................................... 1 12 Le S. Lucas Grandjardin ................................................................................... 10 1 1 2 12 10 Le fils et unique héritier de François Le Boucher notaire .............................................................................................................. 1 18. .10 Les Hiers du S. de la Coquardière chirurgien et ses enfants ....................................................................................................... 8 6 Gaud Hugon La Cour ...................................................................................... 1 20. .15 La Veuve de François de la Roque ................................................................... 4. . 5 Les Srs de Vaucelles ........................................................................................... 6. .10 3. Le S. de la Hogue Quinette ................................................................................ 38. .10 p. 4 Les héritiers de Pierre Le Caplain S. de la Chapelle .......................................... 6. .10 La Ve de Pierre Huë cordier................................................................................. 6. .10 Le fils ainé de Pierre Huë marié à la Mulotte ..................................................... 1 9. .15 Le fils cadet de Pierre Huë marié à la Rihoüette ................................................. 10. 15 61 Jean Binette fils et héritier de la De Binette sa mère cabaretière ........................................................................................... 1 7. .10 1 Jacques Coüarde officier navigant .................................................................... 18. .10 Pierre Pannier (?) navigant ................................................................................. 2 Le fils de Pierre de la Lande menuisier ................................................................ 2 Pierre Tacquet boulanger ..................................................................................... 3. . 5 1 1 La Dlle Pigeon Ve de Jean Le Breton constructeur .............................................. 12. 2 Jacques Couraye le jeune S. du Parc ................................................................. p. 5 35 38. La Dlle Le Roy Ve de Henry Fougeret ................................................................ 5. . 5. La Ve de Jean Hugon Hautmesnil et fils ............................................................. 3. . 5. 1 1 Jean Hugon Hautmesnil ..................................................................................... 20. 15. Le S. Hugon frère du d. Hautmesnil ................................................................... 5. 5. Nicolas Jugan matelot fils de Barnabé ................................................................. 2 François Jugan matelot ......................................................................................... 1 La veuve et fils de Jean Desdoüestils officier ...................................................... 8. .10. La veuve de Philippe Le Rebours ....................................................................... 4. . 5. Jean Beaufils fils Nicolas ..................................................................................... 3. . 5. p. 6 Jean Beaumont matelot fils Jean ........................................................................... 1 Estienne Allain matelot ......................................................................................... 1 Jean Carpentier fils de Germain ........................................................................... 2 Jean et Pierre Royer père et fils .......................................................................... 3. . 5. Nicolas Trottin ayant épousé la fille de Marie Olive .................................................................................................................. 2 Thomas Noblet .................................................................................................. 6. .10. La veuve de Pierre Salomon et son fils Chirurgien ........................................................................................................... 3. . 5. 1 La veuve de Philippe Cailloüet et fils 1 officier officier de marine .................................................................................. 15. . 5. 1 Le S. de la Durandière Louvel héritier du S. Du Vage Pigeon ........................................................................................... 10 5 62 p. 7 1 La Ve du S. des Landelles Le Marié .................................................................. 15 1. . 5. 1 Nicolas Alleaume Contrie .................................................................................. 15 1. . 5 La Ve Hauttehalle ............................................................................................... 2 1 La Ve et les fils de François Le Marié les Fontaines ........................................ 14 12 1 Le S. Louvel Coulombier .................................................................................. 10. .15. La Ve de Jacques Godefroy .............................................................................. 8. .10. Le nommé Aubert perruquier ............................................................................ 2 La veuve du nommé Billard.............................................................................. 2 2 François Le Virais capitaine ............................................................................ 3 40. .15. 2 Olivier Raciquot S. de la Cour .......................................................................... 30. 40 Le S. Leroy fils Jacques ..................................................................................... 9. .15. Nicolas Du Fresne .............................................................................................. 5. . 5. p. 8 Olive Guenne (?) Ve de Louis Le Boucher ......................................................... 2 Louise Le Pelletier Ve et héritiers de Nicolas Claude Le Roussel médecin ................................................................................ 5. . 5. Le S. Claude Nicolas Le Roussel (?) .................................................................. 4. . 5. Le jeune fils de Jean Raciquot charpentier .......................................................... 2 La Ve et les fils de jacques Jourdan .................................................................... 1 1 9. .15. 10. Olivier de Lalun fils Olivier ............................................................................... 18 Robert Le Hoguais matelot et son fils ............................................................... 3. . 5. Jean Corbet serrurier .......................................................................................... 5. . 5. Olivier Jourdan officier ..................................................................................... 10. .15. p. 9 Jullien Vallée matelot ......................................................................................... 2 2 50. Pierre Girard armateur ....................................................................................... 45 1 Le S. Gerard (?) fils .............................................................................................. 10. .15. La Ve et hiers de Toussaint Esnol (sic)................................................................. 2 Jean Poittevin matelot ....................................................................................... 2 63 1 Pierre Sauvé....................................................................................................... 18. 15 La Buhotte veuve de Jean Le Breton matelot et son gendre.......................................................................................... 2 Jean Sorel faiseur Dains (?)................................................................................ 2 Jean Le Rendu jeune frère de Jean .................................................................... 1 Le nommé Bidault mari de la Grande Anne ....................................................... 2 p. 10 2 2 La Ve de Michel Clément fils Jullien ................................................................ 30. .15 Jean L’Hostellier ayant épousé la veuve de Jean Leroy habitant ............................................................................................. 1 Gilette Alleaume Ve de Me Jean Follain avocat ................................................. 10. .15. La Ve de Charles Maillard matelot ..................................................................... 1 7. .10. 3. . 5. La Ve de Gaud Hugon S. du Puis ..................................................................... 12. 10 Olivier Larcher charpentier ................................................................................ 2 Nicolas Fougeret fils de Henry .......................................................................... 9. .15. Gilles Robert La Croix meunier ......................................................................... 6. .10. Pierre l’Évêque chirurgien ................................................................................. 5. . 5. La Veuve La Croix Girard marmoutier (sic) ...................................................... 1 p. 11 1 Nicolas Gaultier fils Jean .................................................................................... 10. .15. Thomas Le Mercere fils Robert cordonnier ........................................................ 7. .10. Jean Pigeon La Noë ........................................................................................... 2 La Ve de Jacques Fougeré Le Coudray................................................................ 6. .10. La Dlle Alaterre Ve de Nas Rossignol Parisy ....................................................... 7. .10 La Nommée Huë veuve de FrançoisTrotin ......................................................... 3. . 5. Le nommé La Lande Rihoüet ............................................................................. 5. . 5. La Ve et hiers de Jacques Louvel ........................................................................... 8. .10. 3 Les Srs des Portes Le Chevalier héritiers de la 5 De des Longprés ................................................................................................. 60. .15. 1 1 Olivier Daquenet ................................................................................................. 18. .10. 1 Le S. de la Forterie ............................................................................................ p. 12 15 18. 64 Julien Le Hoguais officier .................................................................................. 2 1 5. . 5. 2 Jacques de la Mare ............................................................................................. 30. .15. La Ve d’Olivier Grente Terreverte .................................................................... 5. . 5. La Nommée Le Moyen Ve Jean Le Ballais Calfat .................................................................................................................. 3. . 5. Jean David gendre de la Blanchette Tant en son nom que comme héritier de la Marinière ....................................... 8. .10. Pierre Helye Belleux .......................................................................................... 2 La Ve de Pierre Vincent Le Val officier ............................................................ 2 Pierre Aubin fils Nicolas habitant ayant épousé Marie Trotin ........................................................................................... 4. . 5. 1 La Ve et hiers de Gaud Augrain officier .............................................................. 20. .15. p. 13 2 Jean Piquet tailleur ............................................................................................ 3. . 5. Robert Angot cordonnier .................................................................................... 7. .10. 3 Jean Jeanne (Ganne) fils Olivier .......................................................................... 40. .15. Jacques Paris cabaretier ....................................................................................... 4. . 5. 2 François Racicot fils jean .................................................................................. 45. 40 Jean Hebert dit Hollande ..................................................................................... 1 Gabriel Allix ...................................................................................................... 2 Nicolas Allix ...................................................................................................... 2 Pierre Le Cerclet fils de La Propette..................................................................... 1 Le Sieur de la Vallée Marion chirurgien .............................................................................................................. 5. . 5. p. 14 Le S. des Hogues Fillastre marié à l’Ecaudée ....................................................... 7. .10. Nicolas Le Tanneur .............................................................................................. 2 Pierre Le Saulnier ................................................................................................ 2 Jean Eudes marié à Marie Giret .......................................................................... 2 Louis Dangie charpentier .................................................................................... 2 Le nommé Durefort perruquier ........................................................................... 2 La nommée Hulline Ve de Pierre Trotin .............................................................. 5. . 5. Pierre Le Redde fils de Pierre .............................................................................. 9. .15. 65 Jean Allain gendre de Barbe de la Lande ........................................................... 2 1 Philippe Brugere docteur en médecine ayant 1 épousé la fille et héritière de François Hynet...................................................... 15. . 5. 1 Jean Britel La Planche ........................................................................................ 12 1. p. 15 1 La veuve des Prairies Baillon ............................................................................. 12 1 La Dlle Louvel Ve du S. de la Turbotière, et le S. 23. son fils officier de milice ................................................................................... 20 La Ve de Jullien Clément .................................................................................. 9. .15. Le S. de Gournet médecin .................................................................................... 9. .15. La veuve de Nicolas Perrée Fontenelle................................................................. 6. .10. 1 1 Joseph Hugon S. du Pré ...................................................................................... 18. .10. La Ve de Pierre Hugon S. de Grandjardin ............................................................ 7. .10. Le S. du Closneuf Trotin ..................................................................................... 1 3. . 5. 1 Le S. de la Commune Baillon ............................................................................ 22. .15. p. 16 La Ve du S. de Bellefere Orange ...................................................................... 1 Jean Le Rede fils Pierre .................................................................................... 6. .10. 1 12 La Ve et enfants de Michel Garnier ................................................................... 3. . 5. Charles Le Comte cordonnier ............................................................................. 6. .10. Jacques Duval constructeur.................................................................................... 2 Jacques Allain charpentier ................................................................................... 3. . 5. La nommée Belliard Ve de François Bullot.......................................................... 2 Jean Beust et fils .................................................................................................. 2 1 18. La Ve et hiers de François Longeville chirurgien.................................................. 13 Jean Tellot fils de Robert...................................................................................... 1 p. 17 Jullien J-?-resse des Champs droguiste ............................................................... 6. .10. Pierre Le Lasquier dit des Champs perruquier..................................................... 5. . 5. Jean Le Marinier gendre de Laurengesse............................................................ 4. . 5. 66 1 La Ve et représentant Jacques Le Pelley S. des Jonquets .................................................................................................. La veuve du S. Luc Alleaume ............................................................................. 25. 23 3. . 5. 1 18. .10. 1 La Ve de François de la Rüe le Longchamps ................................................... 1 Le S. Girard chirurgien ...................................................................................... 11. .15. Jean Bte Pignon tonnelier.................................................................................... 2 Georges Pignon................................................................................................... 1 Le nommé Grimbosq forgeur ............................................................................. 2 p. 18 Gabriel Billard officier ....................................................................................... 10. .15. Jean Le Cerclé gendre du Rouxel ....................................................................... 2 Christophe Dumoulin ......................................................................................... 3. . 5. Jean Le Richomme ............................................................................................. 8. .10. Jean Robert Le Moine chirurgien ayant épousé la fille de la veuve du S. Macé ..................................................... 8. .10. La nommée Montfort veuve de Pierre Allix Chirurgien ........................................................................................................... 1 Philippe Julienne Dedot (?) de Coudeville.......................................................... 4. . 5. Jean Vincent gendre de la Bindaude ................................................................... 4. . 5. Olivier Giraud matelot ........................................................................................ 2 Michelle Cousin veuve de Jean Faillard ............................................................. 1 p. 19 La Ve de Guillaume Dufresne et Fils ................................................................... 6. .10. Pierre Maillard couvreur d’ardoise ...................................................................... 3. . 5. Pierre Couset calfat............................................................................................... 2 Olivier Le Balais ................................................................................................... 4. . 5. Pierre Coquet marié à la fille de Belhumeur ........................................................ 2 Pierre Le Timonnier marié à la Duval ................................................................. 9. .15. Marie Le Sage veuve de Guille Petit matelot ................................................................................................................. 3. . 5. Jean David gendre de la Bindaude ...................................................................... 2 Simon Tetrel ........................................................................................................ 3. . 5. François Asselin ................................................................................................... 3. . 5. p. 20 François Yvandes (?) menuisier ........................................................................... 4. . 5. 67 Pierre Oustil ......................................................................................................... 4. . 5. 1 1 Simon Le Cornu aubergiste et son gendre ......................................................... 20. .15. Louis Beufs marié à la Duc ................................................................................ 9. .15. La Fontaine Le Loup .......................................................................................... 6. .10. Robert Le Ferrier sal-?- ...................................................................................... 2 La nommée Le Sauvé veuve de Guille Roussel capitaine................................................................................................... 4. . 5. Guillaume Le Maitre gendre d’Issac Thomas ..................................................... 2 Marie Cailly Ve de Jean Le Cerclé fils de La Fauvette .......................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Thomas Le Tourneur gendre de Marie Guillon .................................................. 4. . 5. p. 21 La Ve et enfants de François Quesnel neveu du S. Dupart ............................................................................................... 2 Jean Geslin gendre de Philippe Le Rebours ...................................................... 7. .10. Pierre Le Roy mari de la veuve Rainfoy .............................................................. 2 La Ve du nommé Le Marquant gendre du S. de Fontenay ............................................................................................................. 4. . 5. Pierre Jardin ........................................................................................................ 6. .10. Jean Gaultier fils Gilles Basmesnil ....................................................................... 9. .15. François Hervieux tisserant ................................................................................. 2 La Ve et le fils de Bonaventure Le Coq ................................................................ 9. .15. Thomas Simon ayant épousé la veuve Jaslin ..................................................... 6. .10. Gilles Boüillon et fils charpentier........................................................................ 6. .10. p. 22 Jean Le Crosnier .................................................................................................. 6. .10. 1 1 La Dlle et ---?--- veuve de Jean Bte Rosny .......................................................... 12. 1 La Ve et enfants du S. Chesnu médecin ............................................................. 10. .15. 1 1 Jean Perrée S. du Hamel .................................................................................... 20. .15. La Ve de Nicolas Perrée .................................................................................... 3. . 5. La Ve de Michel Cailloüet ................................................................................. 2 La veuve et la fille cadette d’Olivier de la Lande officier ............................................................................................................... 3. . 5. La veuve Pierre Dry Grandclos........................................................................... 1 68 1 Thomas Couraye fils Jacques officier ............................................................... Thomas Drieu .................................................................................................... 20. 17 6. .10. p. 23 1 La Ve de Philippe Chenu officier ....................................................................... 10. .15. 1 Les héritiers de Jean Chesnu le Tetre ................................................................. 10. .15. Jacques Bazire menuisier ................................................................................... 2 5. . 5. La veuve et les fils de Jullien de Longueville 4 armateur ............................................................................................................... 50. .15. Pierre David Desjardins marinier…………………………..............……............ 5. . 5. 1 René Mahé .......................................................................................................... 2 La veuve et enfants de Louis Cambernon........................................................... 7. .10. 25. Michel Liron ...................................................................................................... 15 La veuve du S. Beliard........................................................................................ 4. . 5. Pierre Vadé maçon ............................................................................................. 2 La veuve d’André Foucher maçon ...................................................................... 6. .10. Jean Beaufils tisserant .................................................................................. 3. . 5. p. 24 1 1 Nicolas Ganne ..................................................................................................... 12. 1 1 Jullien Ganne le Puis .......................................................................................... 12. 1 1 Pierre Ganne Grandcour ..................................................................................... 12. 1 La Ve de Joseph Ganne Grandeporte ................................................................. 6. .10. Guillaume Gourdan charpentier..................................................................... 4. . 5. Nicolas Morel et sa belle sœur nommé 1 Larchere (?) cabaretier ........................................................................................ 12. Gilles Guerard habitant de l’Ile Royalle .............................................................. 9. .15. La V de Nicolas Chastel ....................................................................................... 2 p. 25 1 La veuve de Jean Baillon le Theil ....................................................................... 13 1. Nicolas Baillon Le Neubourg................................................................................ 6. .10. Le nommé Thuillet ayant épousé la veuve de Thomas de L’Isle matelot................................................................................ 5. . 5. Guillaume de L’Isle matelot.................................................................................. 2 69 La Ve de Jean de L’Isle matelot........................................................................... 2 La veuve et enfants de JeanFrançois Le Rossignol.............................................................................................................. 2 Jean Lefebvre habitant........................................................................................ 6. .10. Jacques Fremont menuisier ................................................................................. 2 François Dastin matelot ...................................................................................... 1 Le nommé Champion menuisier ......................................................................... 3. . 5. La Ve de Barthelemy Quesnel matelot ............................................................... 2 Nicolas Quesnel matelot ..................................................................................... 2 p. 26 Olivier Posnée fils Jean........................................................................................ 2 Thibault Guerard cabaretier................................................................................... 4. . 5. Jean Le Dinot faiseur dain-?- ............................................................................... 4. . 5. Pierre François Le Cesne matelot charpentier....................................................... 3. . 5. Le nommé Fontaine mari de Marie Omfroy.......................................................... 5. . 5. André de L’Isle gendre de la Caline..................................................................... 3. . 5. Pierre Le Troüit le Taillis .................................................................................... 2 Jean Esnouf gendre de Pierre Jean de Malherbe ................................................. 2 Fleury Ganne officier........................................................................................... 6. .10. Clair Hamel l’ainé officier ................................................................................ 9. .15. Melchiord Grifet du Giret................................................................................... 3. . 5. Jacques Danger mari de la Craïe.......................................................................... 2 p. 27 Le S. de Hauteville officier navigant ayant épousé la veuve de Julien Cotentin huissier.......................................................... 4. . 5. Le Nommé Le Marchand mari de la Villeneuve (?).............................................. 8. .10. Noel Beust huissier............................................................................................... 6. .10. Le nommé Hache calfat....................................................................................... 2 Barthelemy Huë capitaine.................................................................................... 9. .15. Guillaume Meinquier (?) charpentier..................................................................... 2 Jacque Harasse dit le rat ..................................................................................... 5. . 5. p. 28 Olivier Ganne fils Olivier matelot ....................................................................... 2 Jacques Esnouf....................................................................................................... 2 70 1 Jacques Teurtry capitaine...................................................................................... 10. .15. Jullien Le Buf charpentier calfat........................................................................... 2 Pierre Le Mignon dit Les Marais perruquier......................................................... 5. . 5. Le nommé Duclos perruquier................................................................................ 3. . 5. Jean Racicot constructeur...................................................................................... 8. .10. Guillaume Chapon................................................................................................. 3. . 5. François Racicot charpentier................................................................................ 6. .10. Nicolas et Jean Barré ayant épousé la veuve et la fille de Thomas Coquet...................................................................... 4. . 5. p. 29 Jean Posnée mari de la Bellefille........................................................................... 3. . 5. Claude Tivier tonnelier.......................................................................................... 2 Le nommé Hermange mari de la Carnette............................................................. 4. . 5. 9. Le S. Mullot le Jeune mari de Jeanne Ganne........................................................ 7 Estienne Dudoüït chiriurgien…………………………….............……….......... 5. . 5. 1. Jeanne Allain veuve de Vallée............................................................................. 12 La Ve d’Aubin Guerard de St Aubin des Preaux................................................. 4. . 5. La Ve de feu Beaumont maçon............................................................................. 2 Jullien Butor de Brehal.......................................................................................... 1 Nicolas Des Bois matelot...................................................................................... 2 p. 30 Pierre Le Bachelier matelot de St Planchais (sic)................................................ 1 Jean La Bigne marié à Gillette Le Duc................................................................. 3. . 5. 1 1 Jean Teurtrier de St Pierre Langer........................................................................ 15. . 5. François Le Roux fils Denis charpentier.............................................................. 2 Anne Briault......................................................................................................... 5. . 5. Le nommé Asselin chirurgien marié à Marguerite David............................................................................................... 5. . 5. Le nommé Cordon tonnelier gendre de Pignon.................................................... 2 Nicolas Gardin de Briqueville .............................................................................. 3. . 5. Le nommé Huë mari de la Duc.............................................................................. 3. . 5. Le S. de la Cour Le Breton ayant épousé la sœur de François Butot................................................................................... 8. .10. 71 p. 31 1 1. Le S. Le Magnonnet mari de la Ve Justice........................................................... 12 La veuve du nommé Chevalier ............................................................................ 4. . 5. Anne Le Tourneur dite Rude Épée........................................................................ 1 Marie Banquet veuve du S. Jengligot.................................................................... 6. .10. Henriette Tronchon ............................................................................................... 2 La veuve du S. Vaurechard Brohon ..................................................................... 2 La Ve et enfants de Jean Cotentin de St Planchais.............................................. 4. . 5. Le S. Victor Moynault major de la bourgeoisie.................................................... 6. .10. 1 1. Guillaume Minet................................................................................................... 12. 9. Le S. de Fonteny officier...................................................................................... 8 p. 32 Le S. de la Granderie Tulon................................................................................. 1 Le S. Pigeon Vaumoisson.................................................................................... 8. .10. Jean Hervel tailleur ............................................................................................. 2 La Ve et enfants de Jacques Daireaux perruquier ............................................... 1 Nicolas de L’Isle menuisier.................................................................................. 8. .10. La nommée Bernard veuve de Nicolas Binet menuisier..................................................................................................... 6. 10. Pierre Dubuisson menuisier ................................................................................ 5. . 5. Thomasse Herpin Ve de Pierre L’Écluse............................................................. 2 2 30. Le S. Eustache Le Pestour dit La Garenne ........................................................ 25 1 Pierre Racicot le jeune ........................................................................................ 10. .15. p. 33 La veuve et héritiers de Bernard cabaretier......................................................... 5. . 5. Gilles Daniel charpentier ..................................................................................... 2 Pierre Louvel charpentier...................................................................................... 2 Thomas Gournay matelot..................................................................................... 2 Le nommé Loche chirurgien hôte du S. La Hougue............................................................................................................. 6. .10. 1 Les hiers du S. Jourdan vivant avocat à Gavray.................................................. 10. . 5. 72 Le nommé La Houssay capitaine de navire ........................................................ 8. .10. La veuve du nommé Montfort mari de la Ruë Verte......................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Pierre Oger gendre de La Rondelle...................................................................... 9. 15. Jean Bougoure marié à Marie Barbier................................................................................................................... 2 p. 34 Jean Costard marié à Barbe Bindault ................................................................... 2 Jean Bougourd marié à Jeanne Louvel ................................................................ 2 Jacques Le Coq marié à Marguerite Piquet .......................................................... 1 Pierre Le Gros marié à La Cotarde ...................................................................... 2 Jen David marié à La Picotte............................................................................... 1 Le nommé Baudoüin marié à La Laurence......................................................... 2 Claude Duslin marié à La Belhumeur.................................................................. 2 Guillaume Cruchon marié à Marie Le Noble....................................................... 1 Jacques Baillon marié à Marie Durand................................................................. 2 Jacques Le Hericey marié à Marguerite Épron..................................................... 2 p. 35 Le S. de l’Epault ayant épousé la veuve de Charles Bonté dit St Rémy .................................................................................. 4. . 5. Jullien Guideloup marié à Françoise La Claverie................................................ 1 Jacques Geslin .................................................................................................... 2 Le nommé Daguenet le jeune marié à Marguerite Beuf ..................................................................................................................... 1 Le nommé Daguenet l’ainé marié à Marie Beuf ................................................ 1 Nicolas Le Desné marié à Perrette Le François ................................................. 2 Le nommé Deshayes marié à Catherine des Alleurs.......................................................................................................... 4. . 5. 1 Nicolas Louvel S. Duclos fils Nicolas .............................................................. 1 15. . 5. 1 Marguerite Le Magnonet veuve de François Le Guay S. de Neuville...................................................................................... 10. .15. Le S. Brugere chirurgien ................................................................................... 1 12. 1 p. 36 Le nommé Le Courtois aubergiste......................................................................... 4. . 5. 1 Le S. Fougeray gendre du S. de la Lande............................................................. 10. .15. 73 Paul Le Paumier fils Pierre................................................................................... 3. . 5. Le nommé D’Aneuzre (?) chirurgien.................................................................... 4. . 5. Le nommé Le Marinier gendre du maitre des Buttes............................................ 3. . 5. Jean Le Maitre gendre de La Buhotte................................................................... 3. . 5. Jean Le Doire tisserant.......................................................................................... 2 Pierre Allain gendre de De L’Isle.......................................................................... 3. . 5. Le nommé Le Comte Me d’école ......................................................................... 2 Le nommé Pannée gendre de Marie Gaultier........................................................ 2 p. 37 Le nommé Gibon chirurgien navigant.................................................................. 2 1 Le S. Charles Girard marmoutier.......................................................................... 10. .15. Guillaume Anguehard mari de Margte Lucas...................................................... 2 Joseph Requier (?) ayant épousé Margte Joly ...................................................... 2 Marguerite Aubin dite Margoton veuve de Pierre Allix...................................................................................................... 2 La Ve Lavallée Miclot......................................................................................... 6. 5. Le nommé Alliot gendre de Lavallée Miclot....................................................... 8. .10. Le nommé Loutil chirurgien navigant ayant épousé La Mulotte............................................................................................... 6. .10. Thomas Le Vicaire ayant épousé La Detouche (?)............................................. 5. .10. Le nommé Vicaire ayant épousé La Vincent....................................................... 2 p. 38 La veuve de Jullien Lairault Salleux (?) .............................................................. 2 Mathurin St. Lo.................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Madelaine Maurice veuve de Charles Duval S. des Blanchamps ............................................................................................. 6. .10. Marie Prieur veuve d’Antoine Le Masurier........................................................ 5. . 5. Marie Anne Denis veuve de Jean Bte Hequart.................................................... 4. . 5. Jean François Evremer (?).................................................................................. 3. . 5. Pierre Tessier fils Estienne.................................................................................. 2 Michel Hauduë..................................................................................................... 2 Thomas Charles Le Mazurier............................................................................. 15 Le S. Jacques Mulot l’ainé.................................................................................. 3. . 5. Le nommé Gauvin huissier................................................................................. 2 74 p. 39 Le Nommé Encoignard huissier........................................................................... 1 2 Le S. de la Rüe Grandpiece(?)............................................................................ 10. .15. Le S. de la Rüe d’Yquelon................................................................................... 6. .10. Jean Le Courtois................................................................................................... 4. . 5. Pierre Le Rondel couvreur.................................................................................... 2 La Ve La Motte.................................................................................................... 2 Le S. Fauvel navigant........................................................................................... 2 1 Le S. Le Cat perruquier........................................................................................ 2 Le S. Vallois marchand........................................................................................ 2 1 René Mellier........................................................................................................ 12 Jacqueline Pasturel et fils.................................................................................... 5. . 5. p. 40 2 Michel Le Danois armateur................................................................................ 45 4. Nouveaux Imposés Thomas Hamel Grandprey................................................................................... 8. .10. Pierre Hamel.......................................................................................... ............... 6. .10. S. Remilly le jeune.............................................................................................. 5. . 5. Le S. du Parc chirurgien...................................................................................... 4. . 5. Marie Duval veuve Longueville ...................................................................... 3. . 5. La Touche cordonnier........................................................................................... 2 Jacques Adam constructeur................................................................................... 9. .15. Le S. Tapin .......................................................................................................... 6. .10. La nommée Le Riche veuve Duval ...................................................................... 3. . 5. Le S. Despierrres Baillon..................................................................................... 3. . 5. Jean Feret............................................................................................................. 2 p. 41 Le S. de la Rüe Vaudroulin................................................................................... 6. .10. Jean Barré............................................................................................................ 6. .10. Thomas Barré...................................................................................................... 4. . 5. Le S. Paumier fils................................................................................................ 4. . 5. Le nommé Chevretel........................................................................................... 1 75 La Ve d’Estienne Ameline chez Corbet Caution................................................. 4. . 5. La Ve de Guillaume Bernard chez Lamare......................................................... 4. . 5. Catherine Boüïllie chez le S. Racicot................................................................... 4. . 5. Elizabeth Le Page chez Soret ............................................................................. 4. . 5. La Ve de Jean Bte Le Monnier chez Le Vicaire.................................................... 4. . 5. p. 42 Jeanne Le Lièvre chez Marguerite Née................................................................ 3. . 5. Maurice Boesnard.................................................................................................. 6. .10. François Boesnard fils........................................................................................... 6. .10. Veuves et autres qui ont fait leurs déclarations au greffe de la ville de Granville pour y joüïr des privilèges. 1 2 Le S. Des Noës Clément ....................................................................................... 25 Madelaine Prasnier veuve de Pierre Du Chesne ................................................ 5. . 5. Marie Lucas veuve de Jean Gondrin................................................................... 4. . 5. Catherine Yvelin veuve de Nicolas Simonne....................................................... 4. . 5 Jean Bte La Planche.............................................................................................. 3. . 5. Jeanne Goueslin veuve de Pierre Hinard............................................................. 3. . 5. Marie Bonté veuve de Barnabé Daniel................................................................................................................... 3 p. 43 Marie Le Royer veuve de Toussaint Donville................................................................................................................. 3. . 5. Marie Boivin veuve de Courvalet ......................................................................... 3. . 5. Olivier Le Maitre .................................................................................................. 3. . 5. Thomas Dubosq..................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Claude Deulin....................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Olivier Hamard.................................................................................................... 3. . 5. Marie Anne Foubert veuve.................................................................................. 2 Madelaine Blandin veuve..................................................................................... 2 Madelaine Le Patron veuve.................................................................................. 2 Anne Brunette de Vassy...................................................................................... 2 Gillette de la Lande veuve de Pantin................................................................... 2 p. 44 76 Jean Pignolet ..................................................................................................... 2 Françoise Hamelin veuve de Nicolas Herpin ...................................................... 2 Olivier Le Chevalier ............................................................................................ 2 Marie Clément veuve de Robert Chevalier......................................................... 1 Nouveaux Imposés en 1740 Nicolas Jaslin...................................................................................................... 2. François Burnouf des Planches........................................................................... 1. 1 Dlle Angélique Mutel Ve du S. de la Neuville Brohon ................................................................................................. 15. 1 Dlle Marguerite Bernard ve de Joseph Mariette................................................................................................................. 12. 1 Dlle Elisabeth Potier Ve de Robert Le Muet.................................................................................................................... 15. 1 Julienne Mesquin Ve de Nicolas Gautier Casmenil................................................................................................... 15. 1 Dlle Marie Louise Danican Ve de René Allain S. des Longchamps.......................................................................... 20. p. 45 Matelots classés imposés suivant l’état du S. du Halliar (?) commissaire de la Marine à Granville. All are taxed one livre. Jean Le Peley Denis Ganne Nicolas l’Épine Thomas Le Roux Jacques Champion Estienne Severie François Onfroy Jean Bastard Michel Chastel Gilles Bastard p. 47 François Esnol Pierre Vincent | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | p. 46 | | | | | p. 48 Georges Le Nourry Georges Castellier François Bonnemer Jean Duguet Jacques Castel Pierre Morel Gilles Vallée Luc Le Tourneur Odé Launey Pierre Herel Jean Gaslin Pierre Maillard 77 Pierre Le Blanc Jean d’Annery Jean Lanciseau Nicolas Duron Jean Pierre La Mort Olivier Chevalier Charles François Duron Pierre Allix p. 49 Joseph Le Buf Robert Crublet Olivier La Mort François Butot Jean Le Coupey Guillaume Foubert Michel Motey Jacques Royer Thomas Porel Jacques Longueville Nicolas Thomas p. 51 Philippe Hubert Louis Godefroy Philippe Bazire Jullien Le Clerc Nicolas Le Tourneur fils Nicolas Jean Gourdan Pierre Franquet Jean Mahier Jean Billard Jean Coquet Charles Gosse | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Jacques Rüe Jean Posnée père Jean Brière et fils Olivier David Pierre Boüïllon Jacques Le Comte Gaud Durand Jean François Le Goubey p. 50 Jacques Toupey Jullien Choux François Le Gentil Nicolas Guillard Jullien Roulland Louis Piquet Jean Longrais Louis Jean André Le Comte François Le Goubey fils Nicolas Jean Longueville p. 52 Jean Fichet Olivier Le Boucher Nicolas Le Rendu Claude Piquet Jean Choux Nicolas Toupet Guillaume Le Sage Guillaume Ruet Guillaume Cambernon Pierre Louvel Jean Farcy 78 p. 53 Pierre Pannier Jean Rouxel Michel Barville Pierre Bernard Michel Marais Pierre Pichard Jullien Barbet Jean Buhot Clément Quetier (?) Jean Pestel Jean Le Hericey p. 55 Antoine Le Guille Jean Mïllet François Droüet Estienne Gillet Estienne de Laistre Charles Des Champs Jean Bernard Jean Coupard Michel Hebert Pierre Foubert Estienne Pannier p. 57 Nicolas Coüïllard Jean Fillam François Fontaine Nicolas Fillam marié à Marie Du Chesné Robert Le Dentu Jean Coquet Guillaume Droüet | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | p. 54 Jean Videgot Jean Le Blanc Jean Daniel Olivier La Fosse Nicolas Bourey François Allain Pierre Roujée Thomas La Bigne Pierre Planquet Michel Helie Jacques Closet p. 56 Pierre Le Sage Pierre Blanchet Pierre Alexandre Gilles Rouzée Guillaume Dubosq Jean Yvon Jacques Pannier Michel Closet Pierre Malherbe Jean Malicorne Charles Bastial 79 Jacques Adam marié à Jacqueline Butot Jean Le Bled Pierre Louvel p. 58 Principal....... Valets............ 3484. .15 116. . ,, 3600. 15 Somme totalle trois mille six cents livres quinze sols Au payement de la quelle somme et les deux sols pour livres d’jcelle, ordonnés être levés par l’arrêt du conseil du dix huit aoust dernier, les dénommés au présent rolle seront contraints chacun en ce qui le concerne comme il est accoutumé pour les propres deniers et affaires de sa majesté Fait et arresté double par nous maitre des requêtes honoraire intendant de la généralité de Caen le quinze décembre mil sept cents trente neuf ./. De --?-- Rolle de la capitation des officiers de judication 1740 Officier de Judicature Capitation 1740 Élection de Coutances Rolle de la capitation des officiers de judication et de finance de l’élection de Coutances pour l’année 1740. (Extract) Vicomté de Grandville 2 La Veuve et héritier du sieur Piquelin lieutenant general................................................................. 50. 1 Jean Baptiste Le Blanc vicomte........................................... 20. Le sieur Follain substitut du procureur du Roy.................................................................................. 3. Avocats 1 Thomas Le Maitre ............................................................... 25. Jean Le Coupé .................................................................... 9. 1 Thomas et Claude héritiers Sr Jacques Allain.................................................................................. 14. 2 Michel Davy ayant épousé la veuve de Jean Le Netrel (?)................................................................ 30. 1 Jean François Pestel sieur de la Croix................................. 16. 80 Joseph Larcher..................................................................... 1 4. Louis de Preval Gallien....................................................... 12. Jean Richard Allain............................................................. 9. Huissiers Jacque de la Planche.............................................................. 6. Nicolas Daireaux................................................................... 3. Amirauté 3 Jean Adrien Le Sauvage Sr de Vaufevrier lieutenant général.............................................................. 60. 50. 1 Le sieur René Le Pigeon Pr du Roy................................... 25. 12. Huissiers Pancrace du Chesne huissier visiteur de l’amirauté......................................................................... 6. Police 1 Le sieur Gosselin exerçant par commission la charge de lieutenant général de police............................. 10. 1 Le sieur Charles Le Coq procureur du Roy......................... 20. 1 Le sieur Jean Jacques Caquerel de Perronne commissaire de police.......................................................... 12. Traittes 2. Le sieur Barthelemy François Yset président....................... 30. 2. 50 Le sieur de la Motte Pilon lieutenant.................................... 30. Rolle de la capitation des Nobles Unavailable for 1740, but the roll of 1769 for Granville had only six nobles paying the following : Le S. de Hacqueville .................................................................. 10 livres 8 sols.. La Ve est la fille de Thomas Hilaire de Péronne S. du Canel..... 19 livres ten sols. Jean du Péronne fils ainé............................................................. 6 livres ten sols. La Ve du S. Robert Eustache de Péronne................................... 5 livres four sols. Le S. Quinette de la Hogue......................................................... 13 livres. La Ve du S. François Denis Poisson de Jublains....................... 227 livres 10 sols. Appendix IV Genealogy of the Hugons of Granville The various branches of the extended Hugon family of Granville are believed to have descended from a common ancestor named Nicolas Hugon who would have lived in the first half of the 16th century and of whom nothing is known other than he appears to have had two surviving sons; Carolin and Nicolas. Carolin’s son Noël founded the Le Canet / La Cour Hugon branch while Nicolas had two sons, Blaise and Guillaume. Blaise’s only surviving son, Gaud Trevelin, would have six sons reach adulthood and so establish the Le Puy/Le Prey/ Grandjardin, Les Demaines, La Noë and Haute-Houle Hugon branches while Guillaume would start the branch destined to carry the name Hautmesnil. All these territorial names were added to the Hugon surname over the following generations. Individuals who died, or are assumed to have died, in infancy are generally not indicated on the genealogy other than some of those in the Hugon des Demaines branch, as the numbers would fill the pages. The date of death of some infants is unknown as they were sometimes given over to foster parents in the surrounding countryside with the foster mother standing in as wet nurse for the baby. There they would remain for their first two years or so until they returned to their parents while if they died in the village of their foster parents, their deaths would be recorded in that parish register. Even where individuals reach adulthood there are cases where the only information known of a person is a date of birth and a single subsequent mention in a contemporary document, such as a ship’s register of departures, indicating they survived at least to young adulthood before perhaps moving away and living, and ultimately dying, elsewhere in France. The elite families of Granville numbering only a few dozen, there was a limited pool of eligible partners at a time when marriages were usually arranged and were occasions to create links and alliances with other families. Marriages outside one’s class were rare; families gladly saw a member marry up but were less tolerant of one marrying a member of a lower class. Effectively this kept most marital alliances within the same socioeconomic group. The repeated appearance of the same surnames in the genealogy indicates how confined, almost inbred, this corsair community was. As a result of this many marriages were preceded by applications for dispensations of consanguinity as the church prohibited marriages between first, second and even third cousins but was prepared to allow exceptions regarding the last two while being more reluctant to allow marriages between first cousins, although such unions did occur such as with the Lerond/Le Redde marriage of 1787. In their application to the Bishop of Coutances for a dispensation in 1753 Gaud (Olivier) Hugon du Puy and Jeanne Françoise Marguerite Le Pelley, who were second cousins, explained …that in the last six years or thereabouts that they have been courting, they have come to have, the one for the other, such a close friendship that they have reciprocally promised to marry with the consent of their families. That since they are related by the third to the third degree of consanguinity, they cannot proceed without your authority, being poor in the custom of Rome and the suppliante (i.e. Jeanne Françoise) aged twenty-three being unable to find in the said town of Granville, where almost all the families are bound together one and all by consanguinity or marital alliances, a party with more propriety and character. The supplicants hope that these motives will persuade His Grace will accord them a dispensation.* As the genealogy indicates by the 1730s the different Hugon branches represented a considerable number of people but by the death of Admiral Hugon (de Hautmesnil) in 1862 the Hugon family had been reduced to the Des Demaines Branch, itself diminishing in numbers, and it appears there may now be no living male descendants of any of the branches of the family to carry on the name. The decline in the number of members of the family in the 18th century can be ascribed to several factors; the absence of husbands for long periods of time while at sea, the relatively late age that the men married at a time when lifespans were shorter, that some men never married and that some families had more daughters than sons. To these would be added the usual factors of the high death rate amongst infants as well as the occasional death of the mothers at or, more commonly, shortly after childbirth. Evidence of the last can be seen in the case of Etienne Hugon du Canet whose first two wives, Jacqueline Baillon and Catherine Tapin died shortly after giving birth while the Haute-Houle branch had three women who are known to have died soon after childbirth; Marie Cousin in 1697, Jeanne Marguerite Baillon in 1732 and Françoise Couraye in 1773. These women were probably victims of the dreaded puerperal fever which could follow childbirth at the time. Lifespans at the time were evidently shorter. If one survived early childhood there was a reasonable chance of surviving into one’s fifties or sixties but quite a few individuals died at a younger age while there were some who lived into their seventies, eighties and occasionally even into their nineties. The descendants of the Granville Hugons through various female lines have ended up distributed in various parts of the world in part due to the attractions of the French colonies in North America and the Indian Ocean in the 18th century which encouraged their ancestors to migrate. The seven pages can be printed and glued together to form a single extended document. * The church had a somewhat complicated way of determining consanguinity through generations. The reference to being poor in the custom of Rome indicated they did not have assets sufficient to provide them an independent income and so would be exempt from paying the most important fees for the dispensation. Source : Archives diocésaines - familysearch.org - v.45-47 (1752-1754) - vues 698. Date : 8/1/1753. Suppliants : Gaud HUGON et Jeanne Françoise LEPELLEY. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G99Q-C6BH?i=697&wc=M615X38%3A265724001&cc=1987636 Main Sources Archives de la Manche. Online site. Parish records. https://www.archives-manche.fr/e/ad50_etatcivil? Généanet. Online site. https://en.geneanet.org/fonds/individus/ Migrations.Fr Online site. Transcriptions. Navires au départ de Granville 1722-1750. http://www.migrations.fr failing which try http://www.migrations.fr/navires_depart_granville.htm