French Navy Corvette le Dragon in the American Revolutionary War: Naval destinies of Chevalier de L’Espine from 1778 to 1793

This book retraces the story of the Dragon, a corvette of the French Navy of the king Louis XVI, engaged in secret against the backdrop of the American Revolutionary War. The ship, destroyed on January 22, 1783, tells the tale of a nobleman from the South of France, Joseph de L'Espine (1759-1826) and his devotion to the service of his king. This book retraces the story of the Dragon, a corvette of the French Navy of the king Louis XVI, engaged in secret against the backdrop of the American Revolutionary War. Taking an inductive approach, the work begins by describing the unidentified wreck of a small eighteenth-century warship. It goes on to reconstruct the tangled threads of the destinies of a young Navy officer and his corvette between France and the Americas. The Dragon was a former privateer cutter from Guernsey that had been captured and integrated into the French fleet. The ship, destroyed on January 22, 1783, tells the tale of a nobleman from the South of France, Joseph de L'Espine (1759-1826) and his devotion to the service of his king. At the end of 1782, at the age of 24, this lieutenant was tasked with transporting Captain de Courrejeolles, the bearer of encrypted missives, to Saint-Domingue. The Dragon was chased by a British squadron of 18 ships, and, cornered, L’Espine made the decision to blow up the ship. Applying practices from both archaeology and history, this work is testament to the importance of the cooperation between the two disciplines by not confining itself to the study of the wreck alone (microhistory) and by extracting a rich historical narrative of greater scope.