Everything about Marquis De Rays totally explained
Charles Marie Bonaventure du Breil, Marquis de Rays (
2 January 1832 –
29 July 1893) was a
French nobleman who had ambitions of starting a great French colony in the
South Pacific. He led four European expeditions to establish colonies in a place he called New France which is the island now referred to as
New Britain in the
Bismark Archipelago of present day
Papua New Guinea.
Charles was born on the family estate
Quimerc'h in
Brittany, the son of Charles du Breil and Mari Prevost. As a child in 1838 he succeeded his father as marquis and spent his youth in fortune-seeking but ineffective adventures abroad: in the
United States,
Senegal,
Madagascar, and
Indo-China. He eventually returned to France, where, on
22 September 1869, he married Emilie Labat, who gave him five children, including one known son: Eugène Paul Emile.
It was the defeat of France in the
Franco-Prussian War and the readings he made of some navigators' journals that prompted de Rays to embark on further adventures for the glorification of France and the
Roman Catholic Church. The theatre for his ambitions was to be the South Pacific, where in 1877 he was self-proclaimed "Charles, King of New France" (
La Nouvelle France), an imaginary Oceanic empire covering territories as yet unclaimed by any European powers. Through advertisements, word of mouth, and a journal of his own publishing,
Nouvelle France, de Rays brought to public attention his plans for converting and then colonising the South Pacific, which he claimed abounded in fertile soil. Specifically, de Rays planned to start a colony, "Colonie Libre de Port Breton", at Port Praslin. His ideas were universally rejected by governments, but enough people believed his wild predictions to support an expedition.
The third of his expedition, often referred to simply as the
de Rays Expedition, in 1880 is most famous for its absolute failure. Aboard the ships
Chandernagore,
Gentil,
Nouvelle Bretagne, and
India, a motley group of 570 ill-prepared colonists, in the main French,
German, and
Italian, arrived at
Port Breton. The marquis is widely believed to have deliberately mislead the colonists, distributing literature claiming a bustling settlement that didn't exist, near present day
Kavieng, which had numerous public buildings, wide roads, and rich,
arable land. This port was further purported to be capital of a great empire, his "Kingdom of New France". In fact, the site was an extremely poor choice: supplies were difficult to get through and malaria was unavoidable. The high death rate convinced most colonists to soon flee to
Australia,
New Caledonia, and the
Philippines.
De Rays himself didn't visit his colony and was arrested for fraud in
Spain in July 1882. He was extradited to France and sentenced to six years in prison for
criminal negligence, but his career as an adventurer wasn't over. He died in a French asylum near
Rosporden after accruing several more failures to his name.
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