Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc

Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc , actually Pierre Belain, Sieur d'Esnambuc (* March 1585 in Allouville ; † December 1636 in St. Kitts ), was a French adventurer, privateer and trader who became the first French in 1635 with Saint-Pierre Colony founded on the Caribbean island of Martinique .

Origin and early years

Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc was the third child of Nicolas Blain, lord of Quenouville and Esnambuc, and his wife Peronne. He was baptized on March 9, 1585 in the Saint Quentin Church in Allouville-Bellefosse ( Normandy ). He had an older brother, Francis de Quenouville, and two sisters, Adrienne and Catherine. The family was heavily indebted by the wars of the 16th century and was therefore forced in 1599 to sell the Esnambuc estate, the inheritance of Pierre, for 1950 livre . As a nobleman without a land, he saw his future at sea and became a privateer in the Caribbean. On February 24, 1603, he was one of the 20 men who set sail from Le Havre in the small sailing ship Le Petit Argus (45 tons) for the Caribbean, where the piracy and trade in contraband with Spanish colonists and Indians flourished and promised wealth. Seventeen years later, on January 21, 1620, Belain was declared captain of the marquise (80 tons), with a letter of misery for the "coast of Guinea and Brazil and other places" and a crew of 60 men. Belain had borrowed 400 livres at 50% interest to pay half the cost of arming his crew; obviously his business was profitable.

St. Kitts

In 1625 he was companion and sub-commander of the Norman corsair Urbain du Roissey, Sieur de Chardonville. The two were ambushing Spanish galleons in the Caribbean. Belain sailed with the Brigantine Espérance from Dieppe Bay on St. Kitts to the area south of Cuba . There he attacked a Spanish galleon weighing 400 tons and with 35 cannons, although he himself only had four guns and a 35-man crew. The three-hour battle ended without a winner, but Belain had to find a safe anchorage to repair the damage suffered. He sailed to the roadstead from Basseterre to St. Kitts (then St. Christopher), where a small English plantation colony had existed since 1624 , but where a small number of French settlers, some of them former privateers, had planted tobacco and him on the idea of ​​getting into the business of colonization themselves . Belain sailed back to France with a load of tobacco and won the support of Cardinal Richelieu for his plan to establish French colonies in St. Kitts, Barbados and the islands of the Caribbean not yet taken over by “Christian powers”. On October 31, 1626, Richelieu granted the Compagnie des seigneurs de Saint Christophe, founded for this purpose by Belain and Urbain du Roissey, the necessary privilege and became one of the partners in the company himself.

With this backing, Belain d'Esnambuc and Urbain du Roissey recruited 532 potential colonists who wanted to escape poverty, unemployment and religious persecution, and on February 22, 1627 they sailed with the four ships Victoire , Trois Rois , Cardinale and Catholique from Le Havre and Port -Louis to St. Kitts. A third of the emigrants died of scurvy and dysentery on the way . When the ships finally arrived in St. Kitts, it turned out that the European settlers, led by the English captain Thomas Warner , had recently killed almost the entire native Kalinago population of the island. Fearing reprisals from neighboring islands, Warner allowed the French to settle at both ends of St. Kitts, in Capisterre in the north and Basseterre in the south. The island was divided and Belain became governor of the first French colony in the Caribbean. However, the newcomers were in such bad shape that around a hundred of them died exhausted within the first month of their arrival and the rest were further decimated by hunger and disease. The Compagnie de Saint Christophe was just waiting for the company's first profits and left its colonists without support. Belain d'Esnambuc was forced to sell tobacco to passing ships in order to make some money. Thomas Warner, on the other hand, was soon able to land 400 new English colonists in good health and with supplies and equipment, and these also spread to the French parts of the island. In 1629 a French squadron was supposed to enforce the partition treaty, but taking advantage of the differences of opinion between the French and the English, the Spaniards unceremoniously occupied and plundered the island. Belain d'Esnambuc and the few surviving French settlers fled to the neighboring islands of St. Martin and St. Barth , but returned after the Spaniards withdrew.

Martinique

In the following ten years, Belain turned his energies to assert the French part of St. Kitts against the English and to establish further colonies on neighboring islands without receiving any significant support from the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe. Colonists were recruited mainly in Normandy , around Dieppe , Honfleur and Le Havre , but only Tortuga could be taken in 1629. Finally, Belain traveled to France to personally complain to Richelieu about the lack of help, while Roissey withdrew entirely from the company. On February 12, 1635, the Compagnie de Saint Christophe was converted into the Compagnie des îles d'Amérique at the suggestion of Belain and the order of Richelieu . Its business purpose was the establishment of settlements on the Caribbean islands not yet occupied by European powers and the conversion of the "savages" to the Roman Catholic religion.

Already on June 28, 1635, two close collaborators of Belain, Charles Liènard de l'Olive and Jean du Plessis d'Ossonville, landed on Guadeloupe with 550 new settlers recruited in France . Belain himself sailed south in July 1635 with his nephew Jacques Dyel du Parquet and 150 recruited settlers, reached Martinique in early September , and founded Saint-Pierre and Fort Royal there . Saint-Pierre became France's first permanent colony in the Caribbean. In November Belain sailed from Martinique to the neighboring island of Dominica to the north , where he built a small fort and left settlers under the command of Philippe Levayer de la Vallée. However, this settlement soon had to be abandoned in view of the aggressive hostility of the indigenous Kalinago. In January 1636, Belain d'Esnambuc returned to St. Kitts.

death

For health reasons, Belain asked for permission to leave the Caribbean, but this was not granted because he was considered indispensable there. He died on St. Kitts in December 1636. His nephew Jacques Dyel du Parquet (1606-1658) succeeded him as governor of the French settlements in the Caribbean, but stayed in Martinique and did not deal with the other islands.

In 1664, the French Finance and Navy Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert liquidated the Compagnie des Îles d'Amérique and their possessions became colonies of the French crown.

literature

• Théodore Baude: D'Esnambuc; ou, Lente réparation d'un injuste oubli. Impr. Du gouvernement, Fort-de-France, 1942
• René Dreux-Brézé: L'Épopée des Antilles: vie de Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, gentilhomme normand (1585-1636) , Librairie de l'Arc, Paris, 1937.
• Auguste Joyau: Belain d'Esnambuc. Bellenand, Paris, 1950.
• René Maran: Les Pionniers de l'empire. Albin Michel, Paris, 1943–1955.
• Pierre Margry: Origines transatlantiques. Belain d'Esnambuc et les Normands aux Antilles, d'après des documents nouvellement retrouvés , A. Faure, Paris, 1863 (reproduction, British Library, April 2010)
• Christoph Rella: In the beginning there was the fort. Dissertation, University of Vienna, Vienna, 2008, pp. 170–171, 178–181 (PDF; 7.6 MB)

Web links

• Kurzbiografie (English)
• Short biography (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rella, p. 179