Biography
Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec was born on 13 February 1734 at the manor of Trémarec, in the commune of Landudal, in Cornouaille (Finistère). He was the son of Guillaume-Marie de Kerguelen, lord of Trémarec and Carpont, an officer in the Piémont regiment and later commander of a coastal-guard militia battalion, and of Constance-Rose Morice de Beaubois. He entered the Royal Navy in 1750 as a garde de la Marine, became an enseigne de vaisseau in 1755, a lieutenant of artillery in 1762 and a lieutenant de vaisseau in 1763.
During the Seven Years' War he served as a privateer, with limited success according to Anglo-Saxon notices. In 1767 he sailed in the North Atlantic toward the rock of Rockall, and published a chart of those waters in 1771. He was a resident member of the Académie royale de marine from 1769 to 1775. These years earned him enough credit with the ministry that he was entrusted, in 1771, with the search for the great southern continent that geographers supposed to lie south of the Indian Ocean.
Leaving Lorient in May 1771 with the storeships la Fortune and le Gros-Ventre, he sighted on 12 February 1772 a coast lashed by storms: these were the islands that now bear his name, which he took possession of in the king's name. His report to Louis XV greatly exaggerated their riches. He set out again in 1773 with three ships, including the Roland, accompanied notably by the astronomer Dagelet, but found only islands without resources; the expedition then called at Madagascar to refit and tend the sick. The account of these two campaigns appeared in Paris in 1782, from Knapen et fils, under the title Relation de deux voyages dans les mers australes et des Indes, faits en 1771, 1772, 1773 et 1774.
On his return he was indicted. According to the sources consulted, he was reproached notably with neglecting the exploration requested, with taking a young woman and trade goods on board, and with carrying aboard the Roland enslaved people from Madagascar. The court martial of Brest sat in 1775 and condemned him in 1776: he was struck from the officer corps and shut up in the château of Saumur. The length of the sentence varies between works: six years in most notices, twenty in Universalis. Freed after a few years, he wrote on the Navy, on the war against England and on the North Sea, including a Relation d'un voyage published in 1772 at Amsterdam and Leipzig, then a Mémoire sur la Marine addressed to the National Assembly in 1789.
Recalled to service under the Revolution, he was promoted rear admiral and took part in the battle of Groix in 1795, after which he was set aside. He retired in 1796 and died in Paris in March 1797, on the 3rd according to one notice, the 4th according to the CTHS. His Relation des combats et événements de la guerre maritime de 1778 was published posthumously. Among the reference works, one cites the biography by Auguste Dupouy (1928), that of Rear Admiral de Brossard (1970) and that of Alain Boulaire (1997). The file of his trial, kept at the Service historique de la Défense in Brest, has been digitised and put online on Mémoire des hommes.
