Under the not very informative cover title of Munger Africana Library Notes 3, the library of that name published in 1971 a group of four French documents, collectively called The Choiseul papers, secret documents prepared for the peace negotiations to end the Seven Years' War in 1762/63. There is no indication as to the original authorship of these documents, except that the first, with a date of 6 January 1681, is noted as “sent on behalf of M. de Bussy.” The editor, Monique le Blanc, in her short introduction which places these documents in their historical setting, says that they were obtained from the family of the Duc de Nivernais, the French representative at the negotiations. The editor also notes that they were used in part by André Delcourt in his IFAN Memoire La France et les établissements français au Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763 (Dakar, 1952). The translator, James Greenlee, provides brief notes concerned mainly with the orthography of the copyists, who, he suggests, may in two cases have been Spanish. (Their French spelling is in some ways similar to that of Jean Barbot nearly a century earlier--were they, like him, from La Rochelle?)

The purpose of the present brief note is both to draw attention to these documents, which are reproduced in facsimile (slightly reduced in size), but also, regretably, to warn those who wish to use them to beware of the translation which accompanies them. The documents consist of four secret mémoires--one entitled “first secret mémoire on the Coast of Africa”, dated 1761 (translated as “last secret communication…”), a second entitled “First secret mémoire on Senegal and the Island of Gorée,” followed by a second secret mémoire on Senegal and Gorée and a third secret mémoire on the west coast of Africa, forwarded to the Duc de Nivernais by the Comte de Choiseul, then Minister of Foreign Affairs.