The Cape Girardeau area is usually not an area that people envision as the setting for an international spying mission. However, it was just that when a spy visited the area in 1796. Georges-Henri-Victor Collot was a 46-year-old soldier in the French Army. He came to America to fight with Continental forces, and became a major-general, then governor of the island of Guadeloupe in 1793. The British soon captured Guadeloupe and sent Collot to Philadelphia.
The French minister to the United Stats, Pierre Adet, needed information about the newly won Illinois country because of concerns the U. S. would ally with Britain. He recruited Collot to visit the interior of the continent to view geography and fortifications and gather other intelligence. At that time, the east side of the Mississippi was American territory, while the Spanish held the west side, having received the territory after the French and Indian War.
Collot departed Pennsylvania in March 1796 to descend the Ohio River by flatboat. The mission included Collot, a French military cartographer Joseph Warin, two Canadian voyageurs, and three American boatmen. They first surveyed the Pittsburgh area, then descended the Ohio, recording the settlements, natural history, environment, and Indigenous people along the way. Their real mission was to document and map fortifications and military installations. Secondarily, Collot visited George Rogers Clark, who had earlier attempted to lead a mercenary mission to seize New Orleans and determine if he remained interested in a similar venture. Collot found Clark deep in depression and alcoholism, however.
The party attracted the attention of General Anthony Wayne, who issued orders to stop Collot’s party. Zebulon Pike, father of the explorer, detained and searched the party at Fort Massac, but Collot managed to talk his way out of arrest. It was helpful that all his notes were in French and no one at the fort could read them.
Collot went upriver to St. Louis after reaching the Mississippi and explored up the Illinois and Missouri rivers. At one point, natives attacked them, wounding Warin. Next, they descended the Mississippi and reached New Orleans by October 27, 1796. They were immediately arrested by Spanish officials and imprisoned. Warin had died of his wounds by the time the Spanish released Collot on December 22.
Surprisingly, Collot retained his notes, returned to France, and worked his manuscript and maps into a publication that remained unprinted. When Napoleon acquired Louisiana from Spain in 1800, he named Collot and Adet as two of the commissioners to administer the territory. However, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the U. S. before they could depart France.
Collot died in 1805, but later a publisher, A. Bertrand, obtained his manuscript, maps and drawings. Three hundred copies in French and 100 copies in English in two volumes appeared in 1826. The maps show the entire middle Mississippi Valley to St. Louis and river settlements. Drawings depict life and material culture among the French and American settlers, and Indigenous peoples.
The level of detail and draftsmanship of the maps is outstanding. Furthermore, from the standpoint of Southeast Missouri history, detailed maps of New Madrid and Cape “Girardo” capture a brief span of time in the mid-1790s. Indeed, the Cape Girardeau map is of the first site of the old Cape, and Louis Lorimier moved the settlement to its present location at about the time Collot visited. Only deed records would have remained to document the old site north of Cape Rock without the Collot map.
