MANUSCRIT. - SEYCHELLES]. Mémoire pour MM. les Intéressés su - Lot 93

MANUSCRIT. - SEYCHELLES]. Mémoire pour MM. les Intéressés sur la Concession demandée à l'Isle Seychelles. S.l.n.d. [1770-1780]. Manuscript in-folio (316 x 195 mm), mitered, 16 pages, half marbled calf with small vellum corners, spine decorated in the grotesque style, red title page (Modern binding in the old taste). Manuscript from the second half of the 18th century, probably unpublished, detailing a project for a private company to exploit the archipelago. The early days of Seychelles colonization (1756-1789). Known as far back as the 9th century by Arab traders, the archipelago was officially discovered in the 1500s by Portuguese navigators, notably Vasco de Gama. In 1756, it became French thanks to a Royal Navy officer, Corneille Nicolas Morphey, who took possession of Mahé, the main island, immediately renamed Seychelle Island [sic] in honor of Moreau de Séchelles, Controller General of Finances under Louis XV. The tropical climate and geographical location of the Seychelles (close to Ile de France (Mauritius) and Bourbon (Reunion Island)) are major assets. The idea was to make it a stopover on the East India route, or even a trading post. The prospect of creating a prosperous colony and making considerable profits convinced a French shipowner named Brayer du Barré to embark on the adventure: with the permission of the State, he founded the very first colony there around 1770. The ups and downs of the Brayer du Barré experiment left an indelible mark on the history of the colonization of the Mahé Islands. [...] Settling on a desert island, where you have to bring everything, organize everything and build everything, is certainly no easy task. Especially if the purpose of the operation is to generate financial income [...]. It's all very well to go there for a while to get wood, coconuts and turtles [...]. But from there to taking root... (Buttoud, pp. 94-95). This highly ambitious undertaking was a failure. Three years later, the colony came to a standstill, but the foundations for the future colonization of the Seychelles had already been laid. The colonization of the archipelago was given a new impetus in 1787 with the establishment of a true land-use plan to rationalize the allocation of concessions (cf. Buttoud, p. 115). The Seychelles: a paradise for financiers. The manuscript is undated, but it was written before the French Revolution, at a time when the colonization of the Seychelles was just beginning. It may well relate to Brayer du Barré's enterprise, the first known private project to colonize the archipelago, but it could also refer to another, unknown project, perhaps a few years earlier, which was either unsuccessful or aborted. The project is particularly motivated by the lure of profit (as with Brayer du Barré). Once the concession had been obtained, the plan was to create a company with 15 shareholders and to divide the Seychelle island (Mahé island?) into as many parts (this information suggests that the island is still untouched by any concessions). The shareholders' activities were linked to trade and the slave trade (pp. 5-15). The memorandum in fact stipulates the acquisition by the aforementioned company of 2 ships on which would be embarked the 200 colonists who would be transported there on the first expedition, along with the food and tools needed for clearing and cultivation (this figure of 200 colonists is consistent with the population of the Seychelles before the Revolution, the island of Mahé numbering less than 160 people in 1785, and nearly 250 in 1789, including more than 200 slaves; see Buttoud, p. 131): one of the ships will then be shipped to the African coast with 200,000 # to process 400 blacks, and the other will go to India, to Pondicherry or Bengal, with 900,000 # to process goods for Europe. We learn that the colonists will obtain horses from Cape of Good Hope and donkeys from Muscat, that Madagascar will provide oxen of prodigious size and strength, and that the colony will become very prosperous in a short time and will bring together the most precious products of the two Indies: cotton of rare whiteness and finesse, indigo, coffee, spices, etc. The manuscript appears to be unpublished. The manuscript appears to be unpublished, and there is no explicit mention of it in Fauvel's Unpublished Documents on the History of the Seychelles Islands anterior to 1810 (1909). A manuscript of great interest for the history of the colonization of the Seychelles. It comes from the library of Raymond Decary (1891-1973), Colonial Administrator in Madagascar, with an ink stamp at the head of the first page. Bibliography: Gérard Buttoud, La Colonisation française des Seychelles (1742-1811), 2017.