HISTORY | LEGENDS
The Wreck of the Saint-Antoine An 18th-century maritime mishap provoked a tense Franco-Spanish standoff over who controlled Mobile Bay. text by JOHN SLEDGE • illustration by ANNA THORNTON
W
e have it by the pen of a shipwright. André Pénicaut was born around 1680 in La Rochelle, France, and in 1699, joined Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s second Louisiana voyage as a skilled carpenter. Upon arrival, he settled in Mobile (originally located upriver at 27-Mile Bluff ) and traveled extensively throughout the colony. Between then and 1721 when he returned to France, he witnessed many remarkable things that he recorded in a series of journals, or annals, published much later. According to an entry for the year 1707,
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though it was actually autumn 1705, Pénicaut accompanied two dozen men commanded by Antoine Le Moyne de Châteaugué, the second-youngest of Iberville’s many brothers, to ferry some flour over to Spanish Pensacola. If a presumed portrait of Châteaugué is to be believed, he had a pudgy face and the merest curling wisps of a moustache at the edges of his upper lip — he was only 22 — but he was a decisive leader, as events would soon prove. On their return to Mobile, the French spied a vessel aground at Sand Island. Châteaugué feared it might be English and cautioned his men to be on their
guard. “Approaching nearer,” Pénicaut wrote, “we saw some people signaling us to help them. M. de Chateaugué had the traversier [a larger boat] close up to calling distance. Then we heard them shouting distinctly enough in French for us to have pity on them and to please come and save their lives.” Châteaugué immediately steered alongside, where his men began offloading the crew into a longboat and transporting them the short distance to Dauphin Island. When the boat’s prow grated onto the shelving sand, the grateful survivors staggered onto shore, where according to Pénicaut, they “kissed the
