Michel Bégon papers

The collection contains correspondence, reports, journals, lists, pamphlets and broadsides, and other papers relating to Michel Bégon and French colonial administration in the Caribbean, French maritime commerce, foreign relations, domestic economic matters, and botany in the 17th century.

Reports concern expeditions led by Jean d'Estrées and other French naval officers during the Dutch War and War of the Grand Alliance, voyages of French ships to Africa and the West Indies, and commercial and military activities of other colonial powers, particularly Spain. The collection contains intelligence profiles on Spanish mining and trade of silver and salt, as well as the movements, structure, and economics of the Spanish fleet. Several reports are addressed to French Navy Secretary Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, and some were compiled for Bégon in his capacity as intendant of Saint-Domingue, and later La Rochelle. Other topics of reports include French relations with the Vatican and political developments in the Ottoman Empire. Also present are decrees, publications, correspondence, and writings related to horse breeding in France, and trade of tobacco, sugar, and chocolate.

The collection additionally contains journals, correspondence, and reports of Jean de la Mousse, a Jesuit missionary living among the Kalina people in French Guiana; an account of Spanish food offered to d'Estrées in Cadiz; and a journal detailing the voyage of a French ship to the West Indies, which contains references to slavery and the slave trade.