Interview with Franck Goddio

June 28, 1999

Q: How long you have been working on the Napoleon project, and how did you get started?

Franck: Well, in 1985, when I wanted to launch underwater archaeology activity, I made an inquiry about what was done around the world on this subject. I met Jacques Dumas, who was Director of a team making an excavation on a boat he had discovered in Aboukir Bay, it was the flag ship of Bonaparte, L'Orient. He made a survey in 1983 with a French Navy boat and discovered this ship. He started an excavation and invited me to dive.

I dove for my first time in an underwater archeology excavation on this boat and during my very first dive when Jacques was showing me the rudder, I saw an inscription on it. It was written the Royal Dauphine. I was a little bit annoyed because I knew he was thinking he was excavating L'Orient and obviously this was not the name of L'Orient. When I came to the surface I said to Jacques: There is a bit of a problem on the bronze rudder. There is a name and it is Royal Dauphine. Is it not strange and a bit annoying? He said, no, my God, this is a former name of L'Orient before the French Revolution. This was my first discovery, I would say.

Q: Can you talk just a little bit about how that felt, given all you have done since, how that felt, making that first dive, that first discovery?

Franck: Jacques Dumas said: You have good eyes for archeology, you should go on it, you know. We decided to work together and to launch a mission in the Philippines, which was the Royal Captain and Griffin mission and do it together. Unfortunately, he died in early 1985, then I went on, on my onw. I started to work in Egypt in 1991 and we performed a survey in 1992 in Alexandria and in the Bay of Aboukir. Not as a matter of fact to discover the fleet of Bonaparte, but to make a kind of inventory of any archeological vestiges in the Bay.

Q: So, in this case, Franck, the greatest challenge was not in actually locating the ships. Is that true?

Franck: Absolutely. It was very well known that the French fleet was sunk in this bay. It was, I would say, extremely easy to find, to relocate it. We found the boat again and we started an excavation and this was the main challenge, because the L'Orient had exploded, you know. Everything was scattered around L'Orient. To give you an idea of the blast, the distance between the two more distant cannons is 225 meters. This gives you an idea of the explosion. The weight of those cannons is more than three tons.

Q: Could you speak about the history that led up to this?

Franck: Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to invade Egypt and he did embark a very important fleet in Alexandria. Of course, the English knew that there was a French fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, but they did not know where this fleet was going, which is most unbelievable. Nelson was ordered to pursue this fleet, to find it, and try to stop it wherever she was going. In the very first weeks, Nelson could not reach the fleet, because he did not know where she was. As a matter of fact, the French fleet was going to Egypt, and this was absolutely not known by the English.

Bonaparte disembarked all his soldiers on Egyptian soil and gave the order to his Admiral to go to Corfu, but the Admiral did not follow the order of Napoleon and stayed in Aboukir, just 25 kilometers north of Alexandria. Maybe he thought to stay as a support for the soldiers in case Napoleon was defeated in Egypt, but this was against the order of Napoleon.

Then on August 1, the fleet of Nelson came into Aboukir and found out that the French fleet was there. The French fleet was anchored at that time and the fight was started right away. Nelson did not want to wait in order to start the fight, because he knew the French were not fully prepared to fight at that time. The French boats were on line from a small island called Nelson Island, going towards southeast. Nelson maneuvered in order to put half of his boats between the Nelson Island and the first French boat on the line. And the French boats were caught between two lines of fire and after several hours of fighting, fire came upon L'Orient, and she blasted.

One thousand men died in a second and the blast was so huge that the fight stopped for ten minutes. L'Orient was the biggest ship of its type. She had 120 cannons on board and she was carrying not only the powder to fight herself, but also powder for the campaign of Egypt on board. It was a real nightmare when she exploded. After she exploded, the French were more or less defeated.

Q: Could you talk just a little bit about what you found in and around the wreck of L'Orient?

Franck: The wreck of L'Orient was extremely scattered. We found part of the bottom of the hull, but the whole stern part was missing because of the explosion. Totally disintegrated and disappeared. All the artifacts were scattered around L'Orient and some of the artifacts were found 250 meters away from L'Orient, which gives you an idea of the blast.

We found a lot of usual objects. We found weaponry, ammunition, pipes, shoes, buckles, and buttons of uniforms. We found bottles. We found pharmacy objects. We found also a lot of silver and gold coins. This is extremely interesting because we found on one spot a lot of gold coins from the French, dating back from the time of Louis XV and XVI, which were the King's coins. These are very strange to find after the French Revolution. And we found in another spot, gold coins which were totally different and were from Malta, Spain, Portugal, Venice, and Istanbul. We do think that those coins were from the treasure of Malta which had been looted by Napoleon, when he took Malta before invading Egypt.

Q: What will you bring to the public about this discovery in Aboukir?

Franck: Soon we will present the archeological excavation that we have performed on L'Orient and another ship, which is the smallest ship in the Napoleon Fleet. We will show the public what has been found. We can also detect, from what we have found, how the fight happened, because at the time of the explosion of L'Orient, all the other boats fighting, defending L'Orient, wanted to escape, not to catch fire and not be hurt by the explosion. They cut the cables of their anchors in order to get away. The anchors were still there. We were able to spot all the positions of the remaining anchors and this gives you a kind of a picture of the positions of the different boats around L'Orient at the time of the explosion.

Q: What remains to be done in this excavation?

Franck: We go on with the wood study of the remains of the hull of L'Orient and, of course, the blast was so strong that we could excavate for years all around L'Orient in the Bay of Aboukir, and we would always discover artifacts. But we do think that for the time being we have a representative sample of what was on L'Orient.

A scientific publication will be published on the excavation of L'Orient, of course. We need time to study all the artifacts and do the naval architecture study, but we will start very soon on a book, giving a picture of the underwater excavation and explaining the history of Napoleon's and Nelson's fight in Aboukir.