The Bordeaux-Dublin Letters, 1757: Correspondence of an Irish Community Abroad

Edited by Louis M. Cullen, John Shovlin, and Thomas M. Truxes (London, 2013).

Winner of the 2014 Prix Brives Cazes, awarded by the Académie Nationale des Sciences Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux, founded under a charter issued by the French king, Louis 14th in 1712.

From the introduction

“Among the thousands of documents that comprise the prize court papers of the High Court of Admiralty at The National Archives (Kew), there is an innocuous bundle labelled ‘Two Sisters—John Dennis’. Its contents include, along with miscellaneous customs documents, 125 letters (100 of them in English and 25 in French) taken off an Irish trading vessel, the Two Sisters of Dublin, in March 1757. A British privateer had intercepted the Two Sisters as it returned home from the French port of Bordeaux, site of a thriving Irish expatriate community. King George II’s declaration of war in May 1756 prohibited commercial contact with the French by all British subjects, rendering ships and cargos involved in trade with the enemy subject to confiscation. Most of the letters seized aboard the Two Sisters were written by members of the Irish community in the Bordeaux region to family, friends, and business associates in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, and other places in Ireland. Nearly all of the letters date from early January through the first week of March 1757, a time of high anxiety in a community that had been cut off from its homeland by war.”