The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715-1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic

The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715--1747: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic. By Jean-Francois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny. Translated by Gordon M. Sayre. Edited by Gordon M. Sayre and Carla Zecher. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012. Pp. [xiv], 455. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3722-1.) Jean-Francois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (1696-1760) was, to put it mildly, a real piece of work. Indeed, this French naval officer-turned-picaro cuts quite a figure in his lengthy memoir, held in manuscript form since the early twentieth century at the Newberry Library in Chicago and now published in English translation for the first time by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic, Dumont's narrative affords a unique view of everything from gender relations, to French-Native American diplomacy, to the gossipy inner workings of Louis XV's military, all filtered through the mind of an author keen to present himself as an honest man (if an unusually witty one) in a world of liars and dullards. Completed in 1747, Dumont's manuscript memoir recounted his experiences in a period that, to an observer in Europe, might have seemed exceptionally peaceful. Between the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), ministers Andre-Hercule de Fleury and Robert Walpole strove to maintain a fragile entente cordiale between France and Great Britain, managing to limit the outbreak of hot wars between the two old rivals. Dumont's life, however, was defined by violent conflict at the edges of empire. After voyages to Quebec and Mobile Bay in the 1710s, he arrived in the Mississippi River Valley in 1721 just as Louisiana began to emerge from the financial collapse of John Law's Company of the Indies. Spending the better part of the next two decades in French Louisiana, Dumont participated in the 1723 French war with the Natchez and the first Chickasaw war in 1736. He also described the 1722 French war with the Natchez, the bloody Natchez revolt of 1729, and the second Chickasaw war in 1739 in his memoir. Enmeshed in a world of native enemies, native allies, designing monarchs, and the slow-burning presence of Louisiana's growing population of African slaves, Dumont's tale reflects the possibilities and perils of life in a contested, multicultural borderland. …

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