Bouchard in the Islands of the Pacific

Abstract

Almost unknown to Anglo-Saxon historians of the Pacific Coast is the story of the earlier activities of the Buenos Aires privateering expedition under Hippolyte Bouchard which raided the coast of Spanish California late in 1818 an odyssey of sixteen months of voyaging eastward from Buenos Aires by way of the Indian Ocean, the Philippines, and the Hawaiian Islands in the course of a cruise which eventually all but circumnavigated the globe. Hippolyte, or Hip61lito, Bouchard, a Frenchman, had been in the naval service of the patriots of the Rio de la Plata almost from the outset of the Hispanic American Wars of Independence, taking a prominent part in the Paraguayan and Plata estuary campaigns against the Spaniards.' In I8I5 he was second in command of the privateering expedition to the Pacific under the great Irish-Argentinian naval hero William Brown.2 Brown and Bouchard, with three ' vessels, successfully rounded the Horn in the closing weeks of that year and over a period of several months harassed the royalists of the West Coast of South America, capturing several prizes, prominent among them being the merchant frigate Consecuencia. ' When the two commanders parted company at the Galipagos Islands, the