Jean-François-Marie de Surville
Jean-François-Marie de Surville was a merchant captain with the French East India Company. He fought in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, twice becoming a prisoner of war. In 1769, in command of Saint Jean-Baptiste, he sailed from India on an expedition to the Pacific looking for trading opportunities. De Surville drowned off the coast of Peru on 8 April 1770 while seeking help for his scurvy-afflicted crew.
About Jean-François-Marie de Surville in brief
Jean-François-Marie de Surville was a merchant captain with the French East India Company. He fought in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, twice becoming a prisoner of war. In 1769, in command of Saint Jean-Baptiste, he sailed from India on an expedition to the Pacific looking for trading opportunities. De Surville drowned off the coast of Peru on 8 April 1770 while seeking help for his scurvy-afflicted crew. He was one of nine children and left home at the age of 10 to join the company. He married Marie Jouaneaulx at Nantes in 1750 and had two sons, who later joined the French Army. He spent the next few years on trading voyages around the French ports in the Indian Ocean and during this time, acquired a farm on the island of Réunion. By 1753 he was commander of Renommée and had made the acquaintance of Marion Dufresne, who would later become known for his voyages to thePacific. He later commanded Duc de Praslin on its voyage transporting the new governor of Pondicherry, Jean Lawiston de Lauriston, to India in 1765. Afterwards, he went on to become governor of Chandernagore, which was a French settlement. He died in 1770 and was buried at La Fortuné, near Cape Town, South Africa, in 1780. He is buried at the Cimetière de Saint-Louis, near Nantes, in the town of Saint-Germain-du-Laurier, where he was born in 1717.
He had a son, Jean-Francois-Marie, who was also a ship captain and served in the French Navy during the Seven years’ War. He also had a daughter, Marie-Louise, who became the first woman to serve as a captain of a French warship in the First World War. Surville died in 1801 and is survived by his wife, Marie, and two children, Marie and Jean-Pierre. He leaves behind a son and two daughters, all of whom were born in France, and a daughter-in-law, Marie-Anne, who died in Paris in 1834. He left behind a wife and two sons. He never married and died in France in 1881. He survived by leaving behind a daughter and three sons, Jean-Philippe, who served as a French naval officer in the Second World War and later became a French ambassador to the United States. In his last years of life, he lived on Réunion with his wife and had several children. He wrote a book about his experiences, The Voyage of Jean Jean-Jean-B Baptiste: A Voyage in the South Pacific, published in 1769–70, and was awarded the Cross of Saint Louis by the French government in 1781. In the same year, he also wrote a biography of James Cook, who had preceded him on the Pacific voyage.
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This page is based on the article Jean-François-Marie de Surville published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
