A wreck of the French East India Company identified at the bottom of a port in the Antilles

The Caribbean depths of Antigua's Tank Bay aren't just home to speckled seahorses and butterflyfish.

They also envelop a ship, whose robust carcass has been resting for more than two centuries in the mud of this tourist cove in the Lesser Antilles.

The presence of an underwater structure was identified in 2013, during a hydrographic survey carried out on the south coast of the island.

Troubled waters once protected the site's secrecy.

Ten years later, archaeologists finally see it clearly: it was the wreck of the

, a former ship of the French East India Company, sunk in 1778.

The ship, which rests approximately five meters deep, in the UNESCO-listed port of English Harbour, is believed to be the Company's only known wreck to date.

The remains are in an area quite close to the mangroves, which means that the salinity of the water has kept the xylophagous worms

says archaeologist Jean-Sébastien Guibert, lecturer at the Martinique campus of the University of the West Indies.

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In collaboration with the National Parks of Antigua, the American University of East Carolina and the Association Archeologie Petites Antilles, the researcher excavated the wreckage last fall, a year after a first tighter campaign which had made it possible to square the site.

The team made up of 26 specialists, including ten American students, already had a good clue about the identity of the ship which is still at the bottom of the port of Antigua and Barbuda.

A map.

Not a treasure map, in vellum battered and seasoned by adventure, but a military map, expertly drawn, in 1783, in an office of the British Admiralty.

An O – rather than an X – indicated, in a corner of the cove,

Lyon

.

The wreckage had to be reported to local navigators.

A few centuries later, it enchants historians.

From the spice trade to the English blockade

Anxious to put a story on the name of this wreck, but also to verify that it is indeed the

, the researchers comb through the archives to find a trace of the ship.

The vessel is said to have been built in Lorient in 1762 for the French East India Company.

Initially armed with 22 guns, she was launched under the name of

- a model of the ship is presented at the Dieppe museum.

His first expeditions lead him to Reunion, China, Bengal.

In 1774, the

was bought by two slave shipowners from Saint-Malo, renamed

then ceded again in 1777, this time to a certain Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont.

Steward of the Invalides, the man is more focused on powder than on spices.

Above all, he sympathized with the cause of the Thirteen Colonies and then with the revolutionaries of the New World, at the outbreak of the American War of Independence.

Study of the rudder of the

.

The French wreck lies 4 to 5 meters deep, at a place called Tank Bay, in the port of British Harbor (Antigua and Barbuda), a historic site listed by Unesco.

Claude Michaud, AAPA, University of the West Indies

Under this new patronage, the former ship of the French East India Company is armed with 40 guns and heads for the American coasts to break through the blockade imposed by England on its renegade colonies.

If it sails alongside the squadrons of Louis XVI, the

is not ceded to the Royal Navy.

Its captain at the time, Jean Michel, was even tempted to become a privateer.

, ”says Jean-Sébastien Guibert.

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The

was however intercepted on November 3, 1778, when it was sailing - laden with tobacco - towards the metropolis.

A Royal Navy-flagged frigate, HMS

, looms on the horizon.

A duel begins off Cape Henry and the strategic bay of Chesapeake, where the fleet of the Count de Grasse will inflict a decisive setback on the English forces, three years later.

The

and the

maneuver, exchange volleys of guns.

Smoke and gunpowder sing for nearly fourteen hours until this ballet on the high seas ends with the surrender of the French ship.

Bloodless, the

escorts his catch and what remains of his crew back to Antigua.

The two ships reach the port of English Harbour, where there was a naval base at the time.

A ship from beyond the grave

“The two ships were in very bad shape after their engagement,

notes Jean-Sébastien Guibert.

The French ship is stripped to the bone, meticulously dismembered and then scuttled in a corner of the cove.

During their underwater surveys, archaeologists indeed noticed traces of this dissection operation before reuse.

All the cannons have disappeared;

and the furniture collected by a sediment vacuum cleaner is reduced to a few shards of ceramics, a flint, a few fragments of smoking pipes or even a musket ball.

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Despite everything, several clues allow the researchers to accredit their identification of the wreckage.

advances Jean-Sébastien Guibert.

”.

The examination by dendrochronology of the wooden remains taken from the site should make it possible to refine, in the coming months, the dating of the wreck and to remove the last doubts about it.

In the meantime, the researchers are delighted to have found so many clues that support their hypothesis.

remarks Jean-Sébastien Guibert.

Funded in particular by the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs and by the Department of Memory, Culture and Archives of the Ministry for the Armed Forces, this research should continue in the coming years.