Antoine Walsh

Antoine Vincent Walsh (1703 – 1763), was an Irish-born shipowner and slave trader, operating in Nantes, France; whose family were exiled Jacobites.

His father was Philip Walsh, a Waterford merchant, who settled in Saint Malo about 1685, and who would die at sea on an African voyage. It was Philip who had conveyed the defeated James II of England from Kinsale,Ireland to Saint Malo, France in 1690 after the Battle of the Boyne thus starting the family connections to the Stuarts.

Antoine was born 22 Jan in Saint Malo. After serving in the French navy, he ettled in Nantes which had emerged as the France's chief slaving port; where he found advantage in its close-knit Irish community.

He became a merchant was a major figure in and made a fortune from the slave trade of Nantes. slave-trading and plantation-owning had made him the friend of kings. Antoine became wealthy on the back of the slave trade. The trade operating in a triangular fashion, supplying Africa with textiles, brandy, and firearms); slaves for the French West Indies in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue; sugar and tobacco for Europe.

In 1741 he married Mary O'Shiell a French-Irish businesswoman in Nantes in France, where she is a known figure in the history of Nantes, alongside her sisters Agnés O'Shiell and Anne O'Shiell. She was the daughter of the Irish Jacobite Luke O'Shiell (1677-1745), who was born in Dublin but emigrated to Nantes after the Irish defeat, and Agnès Vanasse (1690-1724). The family manor of the O'Shiell, Manoir de la Placelière, became the gathering place of the large Irish colony in Nantes.

In 1744 he commissioned a new French privateer the Du Teillay (18 guns), in Nantes. She played a central role in the Jacobite rising of 1745, ferrying Charles Edward Stuart to Ardmolich with supplies and funds to support his cause.

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