Surcouf Captures Kent: French Corsair's Glory

Robert Surcouf commanded an 18-gun privateer when he spotted a 38-gun British East India Company ship off the Seychelles on August 31, 1800. La Confiance had 190 men. Kent had 437. The odds were absurd. Surcouf boarded anyway. Born in Saint-Malo, France, in 1773, he went to sea at thirteen and became a corsaire, a licensed privateer authorized by the French government to prey on enemy shipping during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. By twenty-seven he had already captured several British merchant vessels in the Indian Ocean, but Kent was his masterpiece. He closed the distance under darkness, masked his approach, and launched a boarding attack that caught the British crew in the middle of a meal. His men took the ship in forty-five minutes of close-quarters fighting. The cargo was worth 131,000 pounds sterling, an enormous sum that made Surcouf wealthy and famous overnight. The French wrote a popular song about the engagement, "Le Trente-et-un du mois d'aout," and Surcouf returned to Saint-Malo as a national hero. He used his prize money to fund more privateering ventures and eventually retired ashore as one of the wealthiest men in Brittany. He captured over forty British vessels during his career and was never defeated in a boarding action. Napoleon offered him a commission in the French Navy, but Surcouf declined, preferring the independence and profit margins of privateering to the discipline of naval service. He died in Saint-Malo in 1827 at fifty-three, and his statue still stands in the city's harbor. The British, for their part, pretended the capture of Kent had never happened, omitting it from official naval histories for decades.