One of the great pleasures of writing this blog is hearing from its (often unanticipated) readers. Today I was delighted to receive and email from the French author and genealogist Jean-Luc Brachet, who maintains a blog on the history of the Binoche family. Jean-Luc is, by coincidence, currently researching one of the other passengers who sailed to Pondicherry with Macintosh on the Brisson, Jean Paul Fonclar de Grenier. Jean-Luc’s research brought him to my earlier post on the Brisson‘s passenger list, and he was very helpfully able to explain to me what the term “sr” signified in the list’s remarks on Macintosh: “au service du roi [in the service of the king]”. This is a small, but very significant, piece of information, since it corroborates a key statement in Macintosh’s travelogue, namely that he travelled to India with the explicit permission of Louis XVI.

It would, of course, be wonderful to find a copy of that mandamus, but in the absence of that, these two characters—”sr”—logged in the passenger list of the Brisson in 1778, provide some very welcome triangulation. Merci, M. Brachet!