Bertrand d'Ogeron de La Bouere, born in Rochefort-sur-Loire on March 19, 1613 and died in Paris on January 31, 1676, was a 17th century French colonial officer and administrator.
He was governor of Turtle Island (Haiti) from June 1665 to late 1668 and then, after a short interim, from 1669 to 1673 and from April 1673 to early 1675, a total of ten years at the head of the filibustiers colony. Its passage to the Turtle corresponds roughly to the lifespan of the French West India Company.
Biography[]
Bertrand d'Ogeron c.1650
The son of Bertrand Ogeron, a merchant who farmed large estates, and Jeanne Blouin, he obtained the rank of captain in the Marine Regiment in 1641 and made his mark in the War of Catalonia (1646-1649).
His services earned his family an abode. On the death of his father(June 29, 1653),he succeeded him as lord of La Bouere, living in Anjou until 1655 and becoming the owner of the Noyes cemetery in Angers. In 1656, he joined the company founded to colonize the Onantinigo River. Arriving in Martinique in September 1657,he renounced his project following unfavourable reports.
D'Ogeron had led the life of buccaneers on the northwest coast of Santo Domingo, Petit-Goave,and tobacco planters in Leogane and Port-Margot. He contributed to the settlement of Santo Domingo,which did not yet have a governor, transporting hundreds of employees (called 36 months,the duration of their contract), from Nantes and La Rochelle,to Port Margot first and the Turtle then, and also organized the auction of white women from Europe.
He worked to organize the colony, gave racing commissions to the pirates to attack the Spaniards. But when he launched the colonization of Cap-Français,he unleashed a revolt of the filibusters against him. Jacques Neveu de Pouancey replaced him at the beginning of 1675, shortly after the creation of the tobacco farm,which set a very low purchase price for tobacco for the planters and caused the ruin of the buccaneers. The new governor fortifies Cap-Français to accelerate the flight of filibusters and try, initially unsuccessfully, to encourage the cultivation of sugar.
He died in Paris, rue des Mâcons-Sorbonne, on 31 January 1676. A marble plaque, affixed to a pillar of the Church ofSaint-Séverin (5th arrondissement of Paris) in which he rests, recalls his death: "From 1664 to 1675, he threw the foundations of a civil and religious society among the filibusters and buccaneers of the islands of Turtle and Santo Domingo and thus prepared, through the mysterious ways of the Republic of Providence,the destinies of Haiti.