Jean Bernard Bossu

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Jean Bernard Bossu (born September 29, 1720 in Baigneux-les-Juifs , died 1792 in Montbard ) was a captain in the French navy, adventurer and explorer. He traveled several times to New France , where he explored the regions along the Mississippi .

life and work

Bossu came from a family of doctors but pursued a military career himself. In 1744 he distinguished himself at the siege of Chateau-Queyras and was promoted to lieutenant for it. He later became a captain in the French naval forces.

Bossu was a member of a military expedition that was ordered to reinforce New Orleans in 1750. The fleet left France on December 26th and reached Cap François in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in mid-February . After a brief stay, she traveled to New Orleans on March 8, where she arrived in early April. In the following years he explored the Mississippi as far as Illinois and the lower reaches of the Arkansas . He was made a member of their tribe by the Quapaws with whom he lived for a while. In 1757 he returned to France and was ordered back to New Orleans that same year. There the governor Louis Billouart sent him to Fort Toulouse des Alibamons on the eastern border of the French colony Louisiana and in 1759 to Fort Tombecbe . In January 1763 Bossu returned to France. He was later detained in France for six weeks for criticizing the governor for handing over command to a less experienced officer instead of him when he was posted to Fort Toulouse.

In 1770 Bossu traveled for the third and last time to Louisiana, which was no longer part of the French colonial empire due to the French and Indian War, and visited the Quapaw there.

In 1771 he returned to France from his last trip to the New World and then settled in Burgundy . He lived for a while in Auxerre and later with a nephew in Aisey-sur-Seine and finally died in Montbard in 1792 .

For his first two trips, Bossu wrote detailed reports in the form of letters, which he published years later after his return to France in 1768. He published the impressions of his third trip in 1777. Bossu proves to be an attentive observer, and his descriptions of New Orleans, the French colony and the Indian tribes living on it are an important contemporary source for historians and ethnologists.

Works

Original publications

  • Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes Occidentales (1768)
  • Nouveaux voyage dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1777)

Later edited editions and translations

  • Philippe Jacquin (Ed.): Nouveaux Voyages en Louisiane 1751–1768 . Aubier Montaigne, Paris, 1994.
  • Seymour Feiler: Jean Bernard Bossu's Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751-1762 . University of Oklahoma Press, 1962
  • Samuel Dickinson: New Travels in North America by Jean-Bernard Bossu, 1770–1771 . Northwestern State University, 1982.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Sonia Toudji: Jean Bernard Bossu (1720–1792) . The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, April 9, 2010 (accessed December 29, 2009)
  2. ^ Susan Castillo: Bossu, Jean Bernard . In: Bill Marshall (Ed.): France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History: a Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia, Volume 2 . ABC-CLIO, 2005, ISBN 9781851094110 , p. 172 ( excerpt (Google) )
personal data
SURNAME Bossu, Jean Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French captain and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1720
PLACE OF BIRTH Baigneux-les-Juifs
DATE OF DEATH 1792
Place of death Montbard