Louis Guillouet d'Orvilliers

Louis Guillouet d'Orvilliers

Louis Guillouet, comte d'Orvilliers (* 1710 in Moulins , Allier ; † 1792 ibid.) Was a French admiral.

Life

D'Orvilliers spent most of his childhood in Cayenne , the capital of the French colony of French Guiana , where his father was governor. In 1723, when he was fifteen, he became a member of the colony's infantry regiment and was very quickly promoted to lieutenant . In 1728 he was transferred to the Navy. In 1756, when he already had the captain's license, he commanded one of the ships that were sent to Menorca under the direction of Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière . He was later involved in acts of war near Santo Domingo and the Antilles and was promoted to Vice-Admiral in 1764 .

In 1777 France began the American colonies in their quest to support independence from Great Britain. D'Orvilliers was appointed Lieutenant General in the Navy and was supposed to intercept the British Navy in the Atlantic Ocean. His greatest success was a sea battle on July 27, 1778 off the coast of Brittany ( first sea battle at Ouessant ) when he managed to stop the attack of a British squadron under Admiral Augustus Keppel . In the following year, however, he failed to take the British port cities of Portsmouth and Plymouth . Although this was largely due to the weather and a wave of sickness among seafarers, he was criticized for it. He then resigned his command. After the death of his wife, he first lived in Paris. He later returned to his native Moulins, where he died in 1792.

Descendants

Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys , one of the most notorious captains of the French sailing ship era , is one of his descendants . De Chaumareys completed part of his education under his older relative and made a career not least because of the relationship with him. After the French Revolution , however, he never commanded a ship again until the new Bourbon government commissioned him in 1816 to lead a ship formation from Rochefort to Saint Louis . Due to the incompetence of the captain, the frigate Méduse was stranded , with 157 passengers and crew members having to rescue themselves on a makeshift raft . Chaumareys allowed this unmanageable raft, insufficiently supplied with water and food, to be left to its fate, resulting in the deaths of 140 of the passengers.

Web links

• Virtual American Biographies (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jonathan Miles: The wreck of the Medusa. Grove Press, New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-8021-4392-1 , p. 24 (English).