Marc Joseph Marion du Fresne
Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne , also spelled "Dufresne" ( May 22, 1724 in Saint-Malo – June 12, 1772 in New Zealand ), was a French naval officer and long-distance trader of the 18th century. He discovered several islands in the Indian Ocean for Europa.
biography
Du Fresne was born into a merchant family on May 22, 1724 in St. Malo in Brittany . At the age of eleven he joined the French East India Company (French: Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales) and served in the French Navy during the War of the Austrian Succession .
After the Battle of Culloden , he was commissioned to use his ship L'Heureux to bring Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), the pretender to the Scottish throne , who had been defeated and pursued by the English, to safety in France.
In 1748 du Fresne returned to the East India Company and commanded trade voyages in the Indian Ocean and to China. During the Seven Years' War he served mainly in coastal defense and on a blockade runner and achieved the rank of "capitaine de brûlot", a rank for commanders of a small, armed auxiliary ship. From 1761 he was drawn back to the Indian Ocean. He settled in Port Louis on the island of Mauritius and sailed to the Seychelles and India. After the decline of the East India Company, he ran into financial difficulties. In 1771 an opportunity arose to sail into the Pacific with two French ships, the Mascarin and the Marquis de Castries . The primary purpose of this voyage was to bring back to his homeland the Tahitian Ahu-toru whom Bougainville had brought to Paris in 1768 (he died of smallpox shortly after leaving Port Louis). The further task consisted in the search for the legendary southern continent ( Terra Australis ) and in opening up trade contacts and discovering unknown islands for France. On a far southerly course it went via Réunion , Madagascar and Cape Town with a short stopover in Tasmania to New Zealand . On this voyage you discovered the Marion Island and the Prince Edward Islands, which now belong to South Africa, and the Crozet Islands , which he named after his second in command , Jules Crozet . As it turned out, however, the Prince Edward Islands had already been sighted in 1663 by the Dutch navigator Barend Barendszoon Lam . However, because he had miscalculated the position, the islands remained untraceable until du Fresne's rediscovery.
On March 25, 1772, he sighted Mount Taranaki on New Zealand's North Island and named it "Pic Mascarin" after his ship, without knowing that James Cook had already named the mountain "Mount Egmont" on his first voyage to the South Seas.
On May 4, 1772, the ships anchored in the Bay of Islands to make urgent repairs. The following five weeks passed peacefully at first, contacts with the local Maori developed well and without problems, despite a few small thefts. On June 12, 1772, du Fresne went fishing. Upon returning to shore, the group was suddenly attacked by the Maori, killing and eating 16 officers and men, including du Fresne himself. Since the incident initially went unnoticed from the ship, the Maori were able to kill another nine French the following day. The reason for the sudden attack is not known, the Europeans may have injured a Tapu unknowingly. In revenge, the French burned down a Maori village, killing many of the residents. Crozet named the bay "Anse des Assassinats" (Murder Bay). The account of the events was largely responsible for the image of the "bloodthirsty, man-eating Maori" that lingered in Europe for a long time. Crozet led the ships back to Mauritius via the Philippines .
honors
Named after Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne:
- Mont Marion-Dufresne , highest mountain in the Crozet Islands
- Marion Island , an island of the Prince Edward Islands
- Marion Bay, a small town on the Yorke Peninsula not far from Adelaide in South Australia
- the Marion Dufresne , a former French research ship
- the Marion Dufresne , a French research ship
literature
- John Dunmore: Who's Who in Pacific Navigation , Honolulu 1991, pp. 86–88
- Edward Duyker: An Officer of the Blue: Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne, South Sea Explorer, 1724-1772, Melbourne 1994
itemizations
- ↑ Fitzroy Maclean of Drunconnel: Highlanders - A History of the Highland Clans , London 1995, p. 223
- ↑ John Dunmore, Who's Who in Pacific Navigation , Honolulu 1991, p. 87
- ↑ Robert Headland, Chronological list of Antarctic expeditions and related historical events , Cambridge 1989, p. 64
- ↑ Max Quanchi, John Robson: Discovery and Exploration of the Pacific Islands . The Scarecrow Press Lanham (MD) 2005, p. 107
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Marion du Fresne, Marc-Joseph |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French explorer |
| BIRTH DATE | May 22, 1724 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Saint Malo |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 12, 1772 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | New Zealand |