[Jean?] de Brougens. Partial Autograph Letter Signed (with initials, full name identified in docketing note). [Somewhere in France? (postmarked F.P.O.), Feb. 12, 1828. 2pp. with integral stampless address leaf. To Francis Robinson, Strand, London.
Rare historical missing link in the two-century quest for a “fabulous treasure” accumulated in the early 19th century on the African island of Madagascar by two French adventurers, the brothers Bonet.
This letter, while apparently missing some opening text, clearly details what may be the earliest attempt by one of many purported Bonet descendants to claim the fortune. De Brougens, an Englishman, writes his partner, a London solicitor, that he was courting a French General, who was “like all Frenchmen cursed figity and suspicious for fear…that he was enlightening me too much”, but had promised to give a “more clear” narrative of his family story: That the Bonet brothers, speculating in iron ore and coming to Madagascar on a trading vessel in the mid-18th century, had made “an immense fortune”, which only grew larger after the British occupied the island during the Napoleonic Wars. When both brothers died without children, they left their fortune to close relatives, only one of whom –the “figity” General – was still living. De Brougens sought the General’s legally-binding contract of partnership in return for funding a treasure-hunting expedition to the island on the ship Prosperity (an ex-slaver?) but he feared that in the “great intrigue” surrounding the inheritance, the General would instead accept one of the many other offers he was receiving “in different forms and shapes”
A book published in London in the 1930s summarized the first hundred-year quest for the Bonet legacy. Many different versions have since emerged – that the Bonets were Italian or Spanish, not French, that one had married the daughter of the native King of Madagascar, that the enormous accumulated fortune was being secretly held in British banks. The legal quest continued: An Australian newspaper in 1950 estimated the value of the legacy at $600 million; a 1979 British article put it at “ thousands of millions” of British Pounds.
Looking backward, however, the first published reference to the fortune was dated 1829 (with an early American mention appearing in Niles Register in 1834) so that this 1828 letter may be the very first known document about the quest for the legendary Bonet inheritance.