"This Unalterable Friendship"
American Merchants in the French Indian Ocean Islands during the Age of Revolutions: An Overview in Maps
France is America's oldest ally. But diplomacy between the two countries was not always conducted in their capitals. One of the earliest treaties between the two nations was signed in Port-Louis, Mauritius, an island port city in the western Indian Ocean. By the late 1700s, the French colonies of the Mascarenes (Réunion and Isle de France, now Mauritius) had become the site of some of the most significant exchanges in the early history of Franco-American relations, ranging from business connections to social networks and political partnerships.
The Mascarene Islands are a volcanic archipelago, located in the western Indian Ocean, 880 km (approximately 550 miles) from the eastern coast of Madagascar.
They consist of two main islands: Mauritius (formerly Isle de France) and Réunion Island (or Bourbon). In the eighteenth century, both were French colonies relying on enslaved labor to produce cash crops. While the former remains a French possession, the latter passed under British control (1810-1968) and is today the Independent Republic of Mauritius.
Port Louis, capital of Mauritius, by the 1780s, had become the administrative center of all French possessions in the Indian Ocean. With its natural harbor, it was France's largest naval and commercial port east of the Cape of Good Hope—a stopover point and entrepôt for people and goods passing between Asia and the Atlantic basin.
This is 21st-century satellite imagery superimposed on a 1777 watercolor tax map from the French period. At that point, the city had about 15,000 permanent residents. Today, the population is over 150,000.
Why was this far-flung island port such an important draw for Yankee captains?
Graphic: Volume of U.S. Ships Calling at Port-Louis by Place of Origin (1786-1810)
Fresh from their break with the UK, merchants in the nascent US looked to the Mascarenes as a way to bypass British sources of tea and other goods. The US became the most important country of origin of foreign ships calling at Port Louis after Madagascar. In 1794, the US established a consulate in Port-Louis. America’s emissary was received by the Colonial Assembly of Mauritius in a ceremony hall bedecked in the flags of the and in the ensuing years, fully half of the total value of French imports carried to the United States came from the Mascarenes. Most of it consisted of captured merchandise from British Indiamen. Planters and traders from the two regions formed business connections: Mascarene immigrants settled in the US and Americans in Port-Louis.
Merchants and planters from the Mascarenes participated in the economic and social life of America’s cities, attending Mass in Catholic parishes; building and consolidating business networks; finding work as French tutors; even enrolling their children at local schools. Charles Desbassayns, a royalist planter from Bourbon and brother-in-law of a prominent French minister, lived in Boston between 1797 and 1802. Nicolas LeMarchand, of similar background, lived for a time in Baltimore. Records from Port-Louis indicate the presence of American merchant captains in the city, as well as sailors of African descent.
U.S. shipping also opened up an important back-channel of communications between the Indian and Atlantic oceans. It was an American ship that informed officials on the Mascarenes of France's 1794 decree abolishing slavery empire-wide, thus facilitating the prevention of its application by local colonial officials. Americans were involved in slave trading between Madagascar and the Mascarenes at the very moment that the governments of both France and the nascent United States were abolishing the practice. American merchants and their French planter allies thus defied their respective governments in order to serve each other's interests, and the ramifications were devastating for the nearly 100,000 people held in illegal bondage.
Detail from “Etat des Batimens entrés dans la dite Rade [St Denis] 1 to 30 June 1806, ANOM C3-25, piece 111, demonstrating American involvement in trade between Madagascar and the Mascarenes, including in enslaved captives.
2024 marks 230 years of U.S. consular presence in the Mascarene Islands
Until its capture by the British in 1810, Mauritius (or Isle de France, as it was known) was home to the most important French port in the Indian Ocean. Port-Louis served as the main navy base and administrative center for all French trading posts and enclaves scattered around East Africa and Asia. Reforms to the East Indies company system transformed it into an entrepôt for Asian merchandise east of the Cape of Good Hope in the 1780s. Fresh from their definitive break with the United Kingdom, merchants in the nascent United States looked to the Mascarenes as a means of bypassing British sources of tea and other goods. After lobbying by American merchant interests, the French Naval Ministry opened Port-Louis to foreign vessels, and the floodgates were opened. The U.S. became the single most important country of origin of foreign ships calling at Port Louis. Between 1795 and 1798, the total value of French imports carried to the U.S. on American ships rose to ten million dollars; fully half came from the Mascarenes. America’s official diplomatic presence in the Mascarene Islands began during France’s Revolution when, in 1794, the U.S. established a consulate in Port-Louis.
This map, based on the memoirs of Jean-Baptiste Tabardin, a mixed-race sailor aboard French- and British privateering vessels in the 1790s, shows some of the major ports visited by American merchants on the routes to Asia.
U.S.-Mascarene exchanges played a crucial but overlooked role in the global politics of empire, slavery, and emancipation during the Age of Revolution.
Mapping the Coup of 1796: Mauritius Slaveholders Revolt
American Reactions
In 1796, Baco and Burnel, the civil commissioners sent from Paris to abolish slavery in the Mascarenes, were deported through a combination of preparations made by members of the Colonial Assembly, the tacit approval of local military officers, and a mob of young planters who descended on the city from the countryside. The first US consul in Port-Louis, William McCarty, had been appointed by President George Washington two years earlier.
Translated Copy: Letter of the US Consul to the Colonial Assembly of Isle de France, 24 June 1796. Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France. D/XXV/130
Shorty after the coup against the French Republic's commissioners, McCarty, joined by a slew of American merchants, penned a letter of congratulations to the Colonial Assembly. For the Americans, their actions had been nothing short of a revolution. They had preserved both their own, and Americans' "interests" by ensuring the maintenance of slavery.
On the 6th of Messidor, Year 4 [24th June 1796],
The Americans congratulate you on the fortunate event that brings peace to all minds and puts the reins of government back into the hands of those under whom this island has flourished, presenting a contrast worthy of envy compared to the desolation and horrors that have spread throughout the European colonies in the American Isles.
It is for the cause of humanity that we rejoice in seeing a system overturned that was leading us all towards general ruin. Our feelings towards you are fraternal; we are united not only by our shared interests, but also by an affection that has been cultivated through the friendly relations that have happily existed between us. It was with sorrow that we feared the interruption of this mutual harmony due to the unprovoked insult to the American nation by one of the Commissioners [Baco or Burnel had ordered the boarding of an American vessel en route to the islands], which can only be the result of a corrupt and treacherous heart.
The event brought about by your firmness and courage dispels our fears, and we see with confidence the rebirth of this unalterable friendship that we ardently desire.
The Americans, who find anything concerning the French nation , admire these islands and the analogy between their internal situation and their local position, on these two bold mountains rising amidst an immense ocean.
The peaceful planter cultivates their fields while the thunder vainly roars above their heads and the waves break at their feet. It is equally gratifying for us to give you this just praise knowing that, among you, the hand of compassionate gentleness is lightening the burdens of servitude.
The movements of emancipation spreading across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds in this period were variously described, then as in contemporary scholarship, in metaphors evoking stormy weather. The "Common Wind" of Julius Scott's word-of-mouth network of Black emancipation in the Atlantic basin; for Sujit Sivasandarum, similarly, the subaltern people of the Indian Ocean felt "waves across the southern sea." These were the storms swirling around the planters of the Mascarenes, and they are related to what the letter-writers called the "desolation and horrors that have spread in the European colonies in the American Isles." Most saliently--and the case whose repercussions would have been the most familiar to merchants based in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York... was the ongoing Haitian Revolution.
Bibliography
Fichter, James R. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Hooper, Jane. Yankees in the Indian Ocean: American Commerce and Whaling, 1786–1860. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2022.
Le Forestier, François. Le Forestier’s Relation: Autobiography and Voyages of François Le Forestier (1749-1819), a Refugee from Mauritius and a Teacher in New England; a Recently Discovered Manuscript. Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1904.
Toussaint, Auguste. Early American Trade with Mauritius. Port Louis, Mauritius: Esclapon, 1954.
