ABSTRACT
Élie Neau (1662?-1722), a French Protestant merchant seaman, has been described by Émile Léonard as both ‘the great mystic of the galleys’, and the most striking representative of a mysticism that was ‘new to Huguenots’ 1 – an opinion I shall have some reason to revisit in my conclusion. Neau was originally from the west coast of France, from the town of Moëze in Saintonge, but he left home in 1679 in order to escape the escalating anti-Protestant legislation that was to culminate in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which outlawed the Reformed tradition in France. Neau spent some years in the Caribbean, later moved to Boston where he married Suzanne Paré, and eventually he and his wife settled in New York. In the autumn of 1692, he was in charge of a merchant vessel sailing to Jamaica when French privateers, who were active on the high seas during the War of the League of Augsburg, waylaid it. As Neau was unable to pay the 3,500 livres demanded in ransom, he was taken hostage and brought back to Saint Malo (his captors’ port of origin), because they were hoping to exchange him for the ransom. However, the authorities discovered that Neau was Protestant and retrospectively invoked legislation put in place under Louis XIV to condemn him to the galleys in perpetuity because he had left France without royal permission. 2
