Surcouf took his flying _Confiance_ back to France, with a letter of marque; he caught a Portuguese vessel on the passage, and arrived at La Rochelle on April 13th, 1801. His adventure in the East had not cooled the ardour of his feelings towards Mlle. Marie Blaize, whom he married six weeks later; and he now became in his turn the _armateur_ or owner of privateers.
He was persuaded, however, to go to sea once more in 1807, when war had broken out again, in a vessel which he named the _Revenant_--_i.e._ the _Ghost_: and she had for a figure-head a corpse emerging from the tomb, flinging off the shroud.
With 18 guns and a complement of 192 men, the _Revenant_, a swift sailer, was quite as formidable as her predecessor; and so effectually did Surcouf scour the Bay of Bengal and the adjacent seas, so crafty and determined was he in attack, so swift in pursuit or in flight, that his depredations called forth an indignant but somewhat illogical memorial, in December 1807, from the merchants and East India Company to the Admiralty. The fact was that the British men-of-war on the station were doing pretty well all that could be done, but the _Revenant_, when it came to chasing her, was apt to become as ghostly as her figure-head--she had the heels of all of them, and her captain seemed to have an intuitive perception as to the whereabouts of danger.
Surcouf eventually settled down as a shipbuilder and shipowner at St. Malo. He had, of course, made a considerable fortune, and his business prospered, so he was one of the most wealthy and influential men in the place. He died in 1827.
Captain Marryat, in one of his novels, "Newton Forster," gives a vivid description of a fight between Surcouf and the _Windsor Castle_ Indiaman, commanded by the plucky and pugilistic Captain Oughton. Such a yarn, by an expert seaman and a master-hand, is delightful reading, and the temptation to transcribe it here is strong. It must, however, be resisted, as the story is, after all, a fiction, and therefore would be out of place.
There are other French privateersmen well worthy of notice, did space permit, foremost among whom is Thurot, who, single-handed, contrived to harass the English and Irish coasts for months; the brothers Fourmentin, the eldest of whom has the Rue du Baron Bucaille in Boulogne named after him, though his biographer informs us that he never called himself Bucaille, nor was he a baron--but somehow this title became attached to him.