Marion DuFresne

Marion DuFresne (1724-1772), French navigator who explored New Zealand, where he was killed by Maori inhabitants. Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne (also Du Fresne) was born in the port town of Saint-Malo in northern France to a family of merchants. At the age of 11, he embarked on a seafaring career with the French East India Company. In the European conflict known as the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), Dufresne commanded private ships in raids on British ships. In 1746 he evacuated Charles Edward Stuart (also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie), the Scottish pretender to the British throne, from Scotland to France after Stuart’s defeat in the Battle of Culloden. Soon afterward, Dufresne entered the French navy. He later returned to the French East India Company, whose vessels he commanded on voyages to China and the Indian Ocean.

In the 1760s Dufresne lived for a time on the island of Mauritius, then a French territory in the Indian Ocean, where he was harbormaster of the island’s main port. He also commanded trading voyages to India and the Seychelles Islands. In 1771, after the French East India Company had gone out of business, Dufresne returned to active duty in the French navy. That year, he sailed from Mauritius to Tahiti in command of two ships that were returning Tahitian chief Ahu-toru from France to Tahiti. Ahu-toru had been brought to France by French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Soon after leaving Mauritius with Dufresne, Ahu-toru died of smallpox. Consequently, instead of continuing on to Tahiti, Dufresne set out to explore the extreme southern part of the Indian Ocean in search of Terra Australis, the great southern continent that European navigators had been seeking for the past two centuries. (Dutch navigators, beginning with Willem Jansz in 1606, knew of Australia’s existence, but the Dutch kept it a secret the prevent other countries from extending their trading empires to the area.)

Dufresne headed southward, toward Antarctic waters. About 1900 km (about 1200 mi) south of the Cape of Good Hope, Africa, he discovered some uncharted islands (present-day Prince Edward Islands). The islands were rocky, sparsely vegetated, and inhabited by seals and penguins but no people. With no sign of a larger landmass nearby, Dufresne sailed eastward, landing on the Australian island of Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania), which had been visited by Dutch navigator Abel Tasman in 1642. Dufresne then spent five weeks in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, at the northern end of North Island.

While in New Zealand, Dufresne and his expedition undertook coastal explorations and established friendly contacts with the native Maori. However, on January 12, 1772, Dufresne went ashore with some of his men, and they were suddenly attacked—for no apparent reason—by the Maori. Dufresne and all of the members of the landing party were killed. More Maori attacks followed, and soon afterward the expedition left New Zealand and sailed for the Philippines.

Dufresne’s surviving officers made important contributions to the study of Maori life and culture, noting the similarities between the Maori language and that of the Polynesian inhabitants of Tahiti. Moreover, scientists with the expedition made some of the earliest studies of ocean temperatures and salinity levels at varying depths. Four years after the voyage, British navigator Captain James Cook followed up the reports of Dufresne’s discoveries in the far southern parts of the Indian Ocean. Cook located the islands Dufresne’s expedition had found and renamed them the Prince Edward Islands.