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Du Petit-Thouars Aristide Aubert
(1760—1798)
Aristide-Aubert Dupetit-Thouars was born in 1760 at Chateau de Boumois, on the right bank of the Loire seven kilometers northwest of Saumur. He entered the French Navy in 1778, participated in the battle of Ouessant and the taking of Saint-Louis-du-Senegal, and served in the Caribbean with Admiral de Guichen in his three battles against Admiral Rodney (1780).
In the middle of Dupetit-Thouars's naval career, his life took an unexpected turn. The great French explorer La Perouse had crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean (1785-88), and had sent his journals to France from Botany Bay, on the eastern coast of what is now Australia. He then set out once more, never to be heard from again. In January 1791, the French Societe D'Histoire Naturelle asked the National Assembly to organize an expedition to search for him. Aristide Dupetit-Thouars was among those who began organizing expeditions to search for the lost explorer (possibly because he had served with La Perouse during the War of American Independence). Dupetit-Thouars has been characterized by an historian as "a romantic, burning to distinguish himself in some great enterprise and willing to make real sacrifices to finance his expedition." Dupetit-Thouars launched an appeal for funds for the voyage; he sold the greater part of his personal property, and persuaded the Assembly to vote him a grant of 10,000 livres. When all this proved to be insufficient, he mortgaged his future, obtaining two years' of his navy pay in advance.
He departed France in command of the Diligent on 22 August 1792 intending to enter the Pacific by rounding Cape Horn. Near Cape Verde he rescued forty marooned Portuguese sailors, but, during the Atlantic crossing, his overcrowded and ill-provisioned ship was infected by an epidemic. By the time Diligent put in for medical assistance at Fernando de Noronha, several hundred miles off the coast of Brazil, nearly a third of his crew had died, and the remainder were suffering from fever. The governor of the island, flatly refusing to believe Dupetit-Thouars' claims, seized the ship and its crew, and sent them to Pernambuco on the Brazilian coast, and eventually to Lisbon, where Dupetit-Thouars and his crew were imprisoned.
When Dupetit-Thouars was released in August 1793, he set out for Philadelphia. There he joined with other emigres from France, as well as French refugees from Santo Domingo, that were setting out to found a French settlement in northeastern Pennsylvania, as part of an enterprise promoted by the financier Robert Morris. In early 1798, Dupetit-Thouars left Pennsylvania and returned to France to serve once again as a French naval officer, this time in Napoleon's Navy. Dupetit-Thouars, at the battle of the Nile (Aboukir) on 1 August 1798, was a Capitaine de Vaisseau in command of the 80-gun ship-of-the-line Tonnant ("Thunderer"). During the battle, Tonnant captured one British ship and destroyed another; but, in the end, Tonnant was dismasted and Dupetit-Thouars, who was badly wounded, refused to surrender. He had the French flag nailed to the mast, and, at his death, his body (as he had requested) was thrown overboard to avoid being taken by the British. Commemorating his heroic death, there is at Boumois a spirited statue of a defiant Aristide Dupetit-Thouars.
Grenada Grenadines, 2005, Aristide-Aubert Dupetit-Thouars
