Les Demoiselles Desauniers and John Hendricks Lydius: Windows into the Contraband Trade, New York, New France, and Beyond, 1700–65

In the early eighteenth century the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers combined to form a riverine highway linking Albany with Montreal. Illicit trade between la Nouvelle France and colonial New York dictated the fortunes of competing British and French empires in significant ways. From 1700 to 1754 Haudenosaunee peoples, mainly Mohawk women, served as the Euro-Americans’ intermediaries by exchanging furs from New France for British woolens from New York. Smuggling along the Hudson and St. Lawrence Rivers demonstrated Mohawk power as smugglers, disseminated information along this inter-imperial borderland, and profited a privileged few. Marie-Anne, Marie-Madeleine, and Marguerite Desauniers and their Anglo-Dutch competitor, and sometimes ally, John Hendricks Lydius illuminate these webs of contraband trade.

            This essay will show that like many smugglers, Lydius and the Desauniers turned to smuggling to secure autonomy and profit in the Atlantic World. Both parties conducted their trade between the 1720s and 1760s and became smugglers despite their privileged births. Lydius grew-up the son of a Dutch Reformed Domine in Albany and the Desauniers the daughters of a well-to-do Montreal merchant. To make their trade possible, they cultivated relationships of patronage and partnership with fellow merchants and traders and fiercely challenged competitors. Lydius and the Desauniers also built relationships with Mohawk Indians who helped the Euro-Americans avoid imperial authorities by carrying their trade goods along the Hudson-St. Lawrence corridor.  Relationships offered Lydius and the Desauniers versatile mobility within the Atlantic World; they allowed them to operate in Albany, Montreal, the Mohawk Settlement of New Caughnawaga, Ft. Lydius on the strategic Wood Creek portage, in La Rochelle and Bordeaux, France, and even in Guyane, South America. The lives of Lydius and the Desauniers illuminate complex webs of trade that operated during times of war and peace and in all corners of the early-modern Atlantic World.