The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715–1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic by Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (review)

In The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny delivers a riveting account of life as a colonial officer in the eighteenth-century French Atlantic world. Most of the memoir finds him on the move. Crisscrossing the Atlantic six times, Dumont sets foot in nearly every corner of the French Empire: the North American colonial outposts of Quebec City, New Orleans, New Biloxi, and Natchez; the French port cities of New Rochelle and Lorient; and the urban metropole, Paris. Although his last appointment in France’s eastern colonies (1754–60) falls outside the scope of the memoir, his travels take him to Gorée, Senegal, Madagascar, and finally to Pondicherry, India. For the sheer geographical sweep of his tale, Dumont’s memoir will be a valuable addition to Atlantic studies, French Atlantic studies, and the francophone literatures of North America. The memoir will also be of particular interest to scholars who study colonial Louisiana, Dumont’s announced focus in the opening pages.

English-speaking audiences now have access to this lively but relatively unknown text, translated by Gordon Sayre and published in English for the first time. Historians and anthropologists have long referred to Dumont’s two-volume history Memoires historiques sur la Louisiane (1753) as an important source on eighteenth-century Louisiana, but most were unaware of the earlier manuscript memoir. In a masterful arrangement by Sayre and Carla Zecher, the edition includes a chronology, maps of Dumont’s transatlantic journey and the Louisiana colony, a biographical dictionary of persons named in the memoir, the Dumont family tree, and several images of Dumont’s drawings and maps. This trove of accessory materials situates his narrative within larger historical phenomena and enhances appreciation of his versatile talents. For in addition to memoir and history, Dumont lists poetry, ethnography, cartography, and drawing among his accomplishments. Sayre and Zecher’s introduction usefully supplies multiple frames for understanding the book’s significance. They observe that the memoir offers a “counterpoint to exaggerated promotional tracts that lured emigrants and investors to the colonies and travel narratives that portrayed Europeans easily dominating native populations” (5). Indeed, Dumont’s experience is colored by hardship and misfortune; and his vision of the French Empire in North America is that of a disorganized project festered with theft and fraud, where no group falls completely under the sway of the Company of the Indies (the corporation holding a monopoly on the French colonies in North America and the West Indies). Colonial officials smuggle and embezzle, low-ranking officers and ordinary soldiers resist commands and desert ranks, and Native Americans and African slaves rise up against French control.

Dumont’s movements continue well beyond his transatlantic voyages; transit is a defining feature of his experience as second lieutenant and second engineer for the French colonial venture in Louisiana. As a middling military officer, Dumont is always acting on orders—completing missions on behalf of the company—while hardly ever catching word of the larger plan. In May 1719, Dumont sets sail on a ship full of prisoners who are to be released in the Louisiana Territory. Thus his first assignment is to transport an important labor source for the colony. Merely one week after arriving at the French settlement on Dauphin Island, he joins a convoy to Pensacola, the location of a Spanish stronghold the French plan to recapture. The French prove victorious after several dizzying twists and turns. What becomes clear in his description of the skirmish is that he has landed in the crosshairs of a chaotic rivalry between two superpowers, a conflict exemplified by reckless decisions on both sides. After the French take Pensacola, Dumont does...