Robert Surcouf was a French privateer known in his lifetime as “the King of the Corsairs” for a string of captures against British shipping in the Indian Ocean, most famously the East Indiaman Kent in 1800. Unlike outlaw pirates of the Caribbean a century before him, Surcouf sailed under official French letters of marque for most of his career, and he died a wealthy shipowner rather than at the end of a rope.
From Slave Ships to His Own Command
Surcouf was born in 1773 in Saint-Malo, Brittany, to a merchant family, and fled a seminary at thirteen to go to sea. His early service in the late 1780s and early 1790s was aboard French slave ships; on one voyage, aboard the Aurore, roughly 400 enslaved Africans died when the ship wrecked in the Mozambique Channel. In 1795, without proper authorization, he took command of the schooner Modeste (renamed Émilie) and began seizing British and neutral shipping in the Indian Ocean. His boldest early success came in January 1796, when he captured the 26-gun East Indiaman Triton with a crew of only 26 men after a 45-minute fight.
The Capture of the Kent
Surcouf’s reputation was made on October 7, 1800, commanding the 18-gun privateer Confiance with roughly 150 men, when he engaged the much larger East Indiaman Kent off Bengal. The Kent was carrying several hundred people, far more than her normal complement, after taking on survivors from another wrecked ship; accounts differ on the exact numbers, but by most tallies the fighting killed around a dozen French sailors and considerably more of the Kent’s crew and passengers before Surcouf’s men boarded and took her. The capture caused a sensation in Britain, which put up a reward for Surcouf himself, and earned him the Legion of Honour in 1802.
A Final Campaign, Then the Docks
After several years ashore, Surcouf had a new privateer, the Revenant, built to his own specifications and sailed on one last campaign in 1807 and 1808, taking sixteen British merchant ships before returning to the Indian Ocean colony of Isle de France (now Mauritius). From 1809 onward he gave up sailing himself and became a shipowner, financing other privateers against British trade during the remaining Napoleonic Wars. His later business dealings included illegal slave-trading voyages in the 1810s, a part of his career that sits uneasily beside his reputation as a naval hero and that some biographical accounts leave out entirely.
Death and a Legend That Outgrew the Man
Surcouf died in Saint-Servan, near Saint-Malo, in 1827, and was buried with military honors. He remains a celebrated figure in French naval history — five French Navy ships have carried his name, including a submarine that served in the Second World War — but several popular stories about him do not hold up. The Kent carried no gold, despite legends claiming otherwise, and a widely repeated tale of Surcouf fighting a duel against twelve Prussian officers in 1816 has no reliable source behind it.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “Robert Surcouf” and “Kent (1799 ship).”