♂Basile Prejean

Basile Prejean (about 1744 – January 1823) was an Acadian exile who settled on the Acadian Coast^W of the Mississippi in the 1760s and lived out a long life there, latterly in the district of Lafourche des Chetimaches, now Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Floyd Amatus Delahorne (1922–2014), through his daughter Éléonore Prejean (born 1770). In 1785, when the Spanish governor made inquiries about the family, the district’s commandant passed on what Basile had told him of a brother who had gone from Europe to Martinique, turned pirate, and been shot dead on his quarterdeck in a fight with two English frigates.

Early years

Basile came to Louisiana with the Acadian exiles in the middle of the 1760s, and in 1766 he was living at St. James. The census of the Acadian settlers on the Mississippi between St. James and the site of Donaldsonville, taken in 1766, lists him on his own, aged 22, next to the households of Amand, Joseph and Charles Prejean. These were the four Prejeans who, as the commandant recalled in 1785, had all settled in his district.

Marriage and family

Basile Prejean and Marie Josephe Godin, the widow of Pierre Arceneaux, were married between 1766 and 14 September 1769, most likely at St. James; no record of the wedding is known. The census taken along the river at St. James in September 1769 lists Bazille Prejean, aged 24, his wife Marie Lincourt, aged 25, and her sons Usebe and Pierre Arceneaux, aged 7 and 5. The registers name four children of the marriage: Éléonore, Antoine Celestin, Emilie and Constance. Éléonore married Nicolas Thibodeaux of the Attakapas District^W at Ascension on 21 October 1793 and made her home with him far to the west; her sisters married at Ascension too, Emilie to Charles Himel in 1803 and Constance to an Englishman, Alexandre Rinton, in 1812.

The governor’s inquiry

In the autumn of 1785 Governor Esteban Miró^W ordered the commandants at Lafourche and the Attakapas to look into the Prejeans, after rumors linked the family to one of the French privateers then active along the Louisiana coast. Louis Judice, commandant at Lafourche des Chetimaches, answered on 16 October. Of the four Prejeans, he wrote, Joseph had died ten years before and two had moved to the Attakapas: “The only one remaining here is Basil Prejean.” Basile had told him that he “had a brother in Europe who went to Martinique, where he became a pirate”. The brother took many prizes, giving most of the proceeds to his crew, until on his last cruise he met two English frigates; as he came about to fire a broadside he was shot dead on his quarterdeck, “losing both his life and his fortune”. Judice was expecting Basile that day to tell him more.

Later life

A list of Spanish land grants in Sidney A. Marchand’s Acadian Exiles in the Golden Coast of Louisiana (1943) places Basile’s land on the east bank of the Mississippi, with one grant between it and the land of Pierre Carmouche. Two of his children married in 1812: Antoine Celestin married Marie LeBlanc at St. Michael, Convent, in April, and on 5 July Basile was a witness, as “bride’s father”, when Constance married at Ascension. Marie Josephe had died before 23 September 1822, when Antoine Celestin was buried at St. James and the record named his mother as dead. Basile was buried at Ascension on 6 January 1823. The register gave his age as 90; his census ages make him about 78.

Notes

Two men named Basile Prejean

A younger Basile Prejean, son of Joseph Prejean and Marguerite Durel, married Rosalie LaChaussée at St. James on 16 May 1792; Steven A. Cormier’s compiled history of the Acadians of Louisiana, quoting the St. James census of 1777, gives him as a boy of eight in that year. The Basile of this page is the one named as the father in the baptisms and marriages of Éléonore, Antoine Celestin, Emilie and Constance, and the one who witnessed Constance’s marriage in 1812. The burial of 1823, at a stated age of 90, fits him and not the younger man, who would have been in his fifties.

Dates and parentage

His census ages, 22 in 1766 and 24 in 1769, point to a birth about 1744, the year Bona Arsenault’s compiled genealogy of the Acadians gives. Arsenault makes him a son of Joseph Prejean and Marie-Louise Comeaux of Chipoudy, in Acadia, places his marriage about 1768, and gives his death as 4 November 1805; that date cannot be his, since he witnessed Constance’s marriage in July 1812.

The children

Éléonore was baptized at St. James on 7 October 1770, and Antoine Celestin, written Antoine Coelestin, was born on 23 September 1777 and baptized there on 20 October. Emilie is most likely the Milienne, daughter of Basil and Marie Joseph Gaudin, baptized at St. James on 2 February 1780. A Louis, born on 30 January 1773 and baptized at Ascension on 11 April with the commandant Louis Judice as godfather, is entered in the published abstract of the register as a son of Pierre Prejean and Marie Josepha Godin; Arsenault takes him for the son of a separate Pierre Prejean, while a compiled Prejean family genealogy counts him among Basile’s children.

The letter of 1785

Judice’s letter is among the Spanish colonial records at Seville. Carl A. Brasseaux translated it and published it in the Attakapas Gazette in 1989, noting that first-hand accounts of the Acadian migration to Louisiana are almost non-existent, and describing Basile as a leader of the Acadian community in the Lafourche basin.