Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville

French-born colonial Canadian military leader and explorer

• Born: July 20, 1661 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Ville-Marie de Montréal, Quebec (now Montreal, Quebec)
• Died: July 9, 1706
• Place of death: Havana, Cuba

Iberville’s success as a military leader helped to secure French colonial claims around Hudson Bay. In 1699, he founded the first French settlement on the Gulf of Mexico, and he later established the colony of Louisiana.

Early Life

Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (pee-ayr luh-mwan dee-bur-veel) was the third of thirteen children born to Charles Le Moyne and his wife, Catherine Thierry-Primot, one of colonial Quebec’s most illustrious families. Charles Le Moyne had come to New France in 1641 as an indentured servant of Jesuit missionaries, but his proficiency in native languages and his political savvy soon made him one of the wealthiest men in the colony. The family’s high social status was exemplified by the seigneurial titles that Charles was able to obtain for his sons, all of whom distinguished themselves through military service or exploration, or as colonial administrators. Pierre’s own title, sieur d’Iberville, came from a fief held by the Le Moyne family in Charles’s native Normandy.

Iberville attended the school in Montreal staffed by the Sulpicians, but when he was only twelve years old, his father obtained a position for him in the navy and his formal education ended. For the next ten years, he trained for his career as a seaman by sailing on the Saint Lawrence River and making multiple trips to France. On one of these trips, he was designated the official courier for dispatches between the governor of Quebec and the minister of marine and colonies, but even the governor’s strong endorsement failed to gain for him a formal commission from the ministry. Upon his return to Quebec, however, Iberville received the opportunity to prove his military skills when he joined in the assault upon the British trading posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Life’s Work

Iberville’s determination to drive the British out of the Hudson Bay area and gain a French monopoly over the lucrative fur trade occupied his attention for more than a decade. During his first Hudson Bay campaign in 1686, Iberville captured the post at Moose Fort and then, with only a handful of men in two canoes, managed to seize the ship that carried the British governor of the colony. These exploits won him an appointment as administrator of three of the captured posts, and he used this opportunity to begin his own involvement in fur speculation. Many of his subsequent military adventures likewise carried some promise of economic advantage.

At the outbreak of the War of the League of Augsburg (also known as King William’s War), Iberville led an attack in 1690 on the British settlement of Corlaer (now Schenectady, New York). Arriving to find the village unguarded and the stockade gates open, he led an assault that resulted in the death or capture of more than one hundred inhabitants, while the French suffered only two casualties. For the remainder of the 1690’s, Iberville split his time between policing the posts on Hudson Bay, ferrying furs between Quebec and France, and raiding British settlements along the maritime coast. Although shifting European alliances often annulled his military conquests, he was always careful to protect his own financial interests. His raids along the Newfoundland coast in 1695, for example, not only destroyed thirty-six British settlements but also produced a financial windfall for Iberville in his sale of captured codfish.

In September, 1697, Iberville fought his last and most celebrated naval battle in the Hudson Bay area. Separated from the rest of his fleet and surrounded by three British warships, he managed to sink one ship, capture another, and drive the third away before he had to beach his own damaged ship. Once reunited with the French fleet, he also participated in the capture of Fort Nelson. The victory proved ephemeral, however, when the Treaty of Ryswick restored the Hudson Bay region to its antebellum status.

The end of hostilities gave the French government the opportunity to consolidate its claims along the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, claims first established almost two decades earlier by the explorations of Sieur de La Salle. La Salle had been unable to colonize the area because he could not locate the mouth of the Mississippi River from the gulf; this task was now assigned to Iberville, who, with his brother Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, set sail for the Gulf of Mexico in the winter of 1698-1699.

In March of 1699, Iberville and a small crew entered the North Pass of the Mississippi, attempting to match their observations with the accounts from the La Salle expeditions. Near present-day Natchez, Iberville was satisfied that he was indeed on the Mississippi, and he returned to the Gulf and constructed fortifications along the entrance to Biloxi Bay. Leaving behind a small garrison, he returned to France to report his success to King Louis XIV and to argue for the immediate colonization of Louisiana . Despite the reluctance of the Crown to support such an expensive undertaking, he received sufficient provisions to return to the Gulf in order to cultivate alliances with the Louisiana Indians, to inhibit Spanish expansion, and to gain a foothold against the British.

Iberville returned to Biloxi in January, 1700, and fortified a second location on the Mississippi at a point about thirty miles below the future site of New Orleans. When hostilities again erupted between France and England later that year (the War of the Spanish Succession or Queen Anne’s War), Iberville again traveled to France to stress the strategic military value of a colony in Louisiana. When he returned to Louisiana in early 1702, he brought not only fresh supplies for the garrison at Biloxi but also the first colonists. In order to be closer to the Mississippi, the colony was established at Mobile Bay rather than Biloxi; Mobile thus became the first permanent colony in French Louisiana. Iberville negotiated an alliance with the Chickasaw nation and sent a request to the bishop of Quebec for missionaries. Confident that he had fulfilled his mission to plant a colony, he returned to France.

Iberville never returned to Louisiana, but his interest in the success of the colony led him to develop ambitious proposals intended to secure its stability, as well as increasing his personal wealth. His grandiose plans, however, were met with skepticism by the French crown and outright hostility by the Canadians, who resented Iberville’s attempts to keep Louisiana independent from Quebec. Returning to service as a naval commander, Iberville led an assault upon the British colony on Nevis, in the Caribbean, but he succumbed soon after to yellow fever. He died onboard his ship while it was anchored in Havana harbor.

Significance

Iberville has often been termed Canada’s first great national hero, and certainly his military skills helped to preserve the French empire in North America during years of conflict with the British. To the French, he was a man of valor and determination; to the British, he was little more than a pirate and an unmerciful foe. Beyond such biased portrayals, however, Iberville must be judged objectively as a man committed to the French colonial enterprise and a brilliant, if sometimes ruthless, military commander.

Although his contributions to French Canada were considerable, it is as the founder and chief promoter of the Louisiana colony that Iberville should be remembered. Unfortunately, the French impulse to colonize North America was beginning to wane even during his lifetime, and Louisiana would never achieve the place of significance within the fading French empire that Iberville imagined. However, his skills as a sailor and administrator and his persistent support of the colonial effort left an indelible French culture in the region that stretched from Mobile to Natchitoches and beyond.

Bibliography

Crouse, Nellis M. Lemoyne d’Iberville: Soldier of New France. 1954. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Still the best biography in English, although often criticized for relying too heavily on secondary resources. This edition has an introduction by Daniel H. Unser that contains a brief survey of the biographical literature.

Frégault, Guy. Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville. Rev. ed. Ottawa, Ont.: Fides, 1968. A revised and updated version of Iberville le conquerérant (Montreal, 1944); generally considered to be the best biography of Iberville but available only in French.

Giraud, Marcel. The Reign of Louis XIV, 1698-1715. Vol. 1 in A History of French Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. A revision of Giraud’s original history, which was published in French in the 1950’s. Although Iberville is mentioned in all five volumes (not all of which have been translated), he figures most prominently in this volume.

Higginbotham, Jay. Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711. Mobile, Ala.: Museum of the City of Mobile, 1977. A massive and detailed history of Iberville’s colonization efforts in Mobile Bay based on original documentation.

McWilliams, Richebourg Gaillard, trans. and ed. Iberville’s Gulf Journals. University: University of Alabama Press, 1981. English translations of three separate journals that recount Iberville’s explorations of the Gulf Coast, prefaced by a brief biography.

O’Neill, Charles Edwards. Church and State in French Colonial Louisiana: Policy and Politics to 1732. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966. Contains substantial information on Iberville’s policies in Louisiana based on extensive use of primary documents.