François Thurot

François Thurot (22 July 1727 at Nuits-Saint-Georges near Dijon in eastern France – 28 February 1760 off the Isle of Man) was a French privateer, merchant naval captain and smuggler who terrorised British shipping in the early part of the Seven Years' War.

He may have been the son of the postmaster at Nuits-St-Georges or his grandfather was Captain O'Farrell from Ireland who had served in the Irish Brigade of the French army. As a teenager Thurot rebelled against a Jesuit education, and was apprenticed in 1743 to a surgeon in Dijon. His father had died in 1739, and to help pay his mother's debts he pawned some silver he found at his aunt's house. It did not belong to his aunt, and he decided to leave Dijon to keep out of the way of the angry owner, a town councillor. Since March of that year, 1744, France and Britain had been on opposite sides in the War of the Austrian Succession, and François enrolled as surgeon aboard the Cerf Volant, a privateer at Le Havre. In August, on its first cruise, the Cerf was captured by the British. After some months in captivity, during which he acquired an excellent grasp of the English language, Thurot met the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, a key member of the French government, who had been captured in Hanover, but was being released in exchange for British military officers captured on 11 May 1745 at the Battle of Fontenoy. Many French army and navy personnel were also released in the same prisoner exchange during that summer, but privateers were not eligible. In August, Thurot, who was being held aboard a "prison hulk" at Dover, escaped, stole a small boat, and crossed to France. Joining another privateer as a common sailor, he swiftly proved his skill, and became captain, first of that vessel, then, aged twenty, of a new, very well-armed privateer operating out of Dunkirk, in which he captured a large number of enemy merchant ships before the war was ended by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. For a time he worked as a merchant captain, beginning with a little six-ton lugger, the Levrette. Some biographers claim that about 1750 he married a Miss Sarah Smith, daughter of a London apothecary, but there is no surviving evidence of this. It seems that François also acquired a reputation as a skilful smuggler, too smart for the Customs officers. In July 1753, while he was moored off the well-known smuggling coast near Baltimore in south-west Ireland, they boarded his cargo vessel, the Argonaute, searched it and seized it. Although there was insufficient evidence to charge him, the vessel was impounded, and Thurot spent over two years unsuccessfully trying to get it released.

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