“I could spend the night writing to you,” Marie wrote.
“I cannot wait to possess you,” Anne expressed.
Both women were writing to their husbands, French sailors on the same ship, unaware that the men had been captured and imprisoned. Only one would live to see her husband again.
Such are the stories revealed in a cache of letters at Britain’s National Archives that sat unopened for nearly 265 years. The letters from wives, girlfriends, parents and siblings of sailors aboard the French navy ship Galatée were written in 1758, while France and Britain were at war.
While en route to Quebec to fight, the ship’s crew was captured by the British and imprisoned. The packet of letters had been waiting in a French port until postal administrators knew where to send it; when they learned of the crew’s imprisonment, they forwarded it to the Admiralty in London.
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“It’s agonizing how close they got,” said Renaud Morieux, a history professor at the University of Cambridge who recently opened and translated the more than 100 letters for the first time. (Once the letters were in London, it appears that clerks opened two of them before setting them aside, he said.) In a news release Monday, Cambridge described the discovery as “love lost and found,” though it also seems ripe for an episode of the history podcast “Stuff the British Stole.”
The French and Indian War was fought between France and Britain, along with each empire’s Indigenous allies, over control of the Americas. Sparked accidentally in 1754 by a 22-year-old unknown named George Washington, it erupted into the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict fought on five continents that many historians regard as the original “world war.”
In the end, Britain defeated France, winning much of what is now Canada and forcing French colonists known as Acadians to migrate to Louisiana, where they became “Cajuns.” The British military’s poor treatment of American colonists also set the stage for rebellion in following years.
Morieux identified all 181 men aboard the Galatée and found letters addressed to a quarter of them. Anne Le Cerf, who wrote that she couldn’t wait to “possess” her husband, was writing to Jean Topsent, a noncommissioned officer. Marie Dubosc, who told her husband she could write to him all night, was married to the ship’s first lieutenant, Louis Chambrelan.
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“I realized I was the first person to read these very personal messages since they were written,” Morieux said. “It was very emotional.”
Sadly, Dubosc would never see her husband again. She died of an illness the next year, before Chambrelan was released.
Another series of letters reveals that moms have been momming since, well, forever. “I think about you more than you about me,” 61-year-old Marguerite chided her sailor son, having learned that he had written to his fiancée but not to her. “I think I am for the tomb, I have been ill for three weeks,” she added. A later letter from the fiancée urges him to write his mother and save the young woman from an awkward situation.
In those days, writing was an undertaking, with paper expensive and literacy haphazard. Many people relied on scribes like the one who probably wrote Marguerite’s letter as she dictated. Even so, sentences were written with nonstandard spellings and little to no punctuation — making the letters difficult to translate.
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Still, the longing for loved ones is familiar, no matter the era.
“When we are separated from loved ones by events beyond our control, like the pandemic or wars, we have to work out how to stay in touch, how to reassure, care for people and keep the passion alive,” Morieux said. “Today we have Zoom and WhatsApp. In the 18th century, people only had letters, but what they wrote about feels very familiar.”
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