Page:Final French Struggles in India and on the Indian Seas.djvu/129

Rh II.

A contemporary, a fellow-townsman, and almost to the same extent a destroyer of English commerce on the Indian waters, was François Thomas Lemême, whose adventures I am now about to record.

Born in 1763 at St. Malo, Lemême enrolled himself as a volunteer on board the privateer the Prince de Mombany, commanded by one Boynard. This was during the war for the independence of the United States; when opportunities offered to the sons of Brittany and of Normandy to prey upon the commerce of the great rival of France. The cruise of the Prince de Mombany was not altogether fortunate. She took, indeed, some merchantmen, but she was forced herself to succumb to an English frigate; "and it was in the prisons of Great Britain," says M. Gallois, "that Lemême learned, in his early youth, to hate with a hatred altogether national the islanders whom he was destined later often to encounter and to overcome."

Released from his British prison by the treaty of Versailles, Lemême continued his seafaring life. He happened to be at the Isle of France in 1793 in command of a small transport brig, the Hirondelle, when