Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 26, 1999

Jean Beranger might have landed on the Acadian coast

He made a petit dictionnaire of Attakapas words

Jim Bradshaw

Beginning in 1718, colonial officials pushed to set up a fort at the Baie Saint-Bernard that had been found by Bernard de la Harps as a result of the misfortunes of Simars de Belle-Isle. Skirmishes with the Spanish along the Gulf coast interrupted those plans, but on Aug. 26, 1720, Beranger sailed from New Orleans on the Joseph. He followed the coast and found Baie Saint-Bernard, but the wind was so strong that he had to sail 10 miles past it. He found himself in another "very attractive bay," and decided to send men ashore to look for fresh water.

They landed on one of this bay's islands, but spied a group of Indians and scampered back to their ship. The Indians grabbed the barrels the sailors left behind and stripped them of their iron hoops. Seeing this, Beranger took things into his own hands, went ashore, and made friends by handing presents to the Indians.

He found the Indians "very fond of clothes, knives, axes, powder, and guns." He comments, apparently with some surprise, "They lived comfortably though they do not cultivate the land." They liked bread, so he offered them some of the most spoiled." The Indians mashed it to a pulp, mixed with acorns and ashes, and cooked the mixture.

"I ate some to be polite," Beranger said, "but it was nasty food."

The Indians ate mostly seafood. They stored fish "dried without salt and swarming with worms." Their fishing lines were made from roots that looked like horsehair, but they also made rope with mulberry bark. There were plenty of buffalo, deer, bear and turkey on the mainland, but the Indians seldom hunted there, since they were at war with the mainland tribe.

Beranger describes the Indians as tall, fat, and sturdy. Their average height was five and a half feet, but he measured one who was six feet two inches tall. They were quick to rob the sailors. The island Indians lived in leather huts that could be folded like tents if they decided to move. The tribe must have been fairly large, since Beranger claims to have seen a village with at last 500 people. He tells us, almost off-handedly, "They eat their enemies," but he did not seem disturbed by the idea since they were friendly toward him. The Indians visited the ship several times, and as many as 40 came aboard at once.

After some time on the island, Beranger tried to reach the mainland, but he could not get his ship to it. He landed on another island, which he named for Bienville. On his way back to the ship he saw a snake 15 feet long, but it got away. Nobody else saw the snake.

The next day, on his way to formally claim the land for France, he says, he killed and measured a rattlesnake that was exactly eight feet, seven inches long and eight inches thick. Before he could get it back to the ship, an eagle swooped down, grabbed the snake, and carried it off into the swamp.

Beranger placed a lead plaque on a tree, then sailed back to New Orleans. On the way back he drew up what he called un petit dictionnaire -- a list of almost 100 words from the Indian language.

According to one account, Beranger left three Frenchmen there to learn the Indian language, promising to come back and pick them up and to bring presents for the Indians. Beranger himself does not mention anything like this and, according to his Mémoire sur la Louisiane, written about 1772, he never went back to that bay.

By 1739, Beranger was one of the most experienced of the pilots sailing on the Mississippi River. He had made 17 trips through the mouth of the Mississippi River by then. With good winds, he wrote in a report in that year, the trip from New Orleans to the Gulf could be made in 32 hours. But with contrary winds it might take as long as 45 days. In really contrary times, his ships had to be towed downriver, with crews pulling on lines wrapped around trees for leverage.