Benyovszky Moric

* Verbó, 20 September 1741200 – † Agoncy/Madagascar, 23 May 1786 / military officer, traveler, geographical explorer, memoirist, adventurer ; ; His father was Sámuel Benyovszky, cavalry general, his mother was Baroness Róza Révay. He was raised as a soldier, but in 1758 he left the imperial army and settled on his Lithuanian estate. After his father's death, he got into a dispute with his relatives, who excluded him from his father's inheritance. He tried to obtain satisfaction by force, for which he was reported to the empress and exiled by Maria Theresa. He settled in Poland and, considering a plan for a trip to India, he delved deeply into geography and the science of navigation. In 1767, he became involved in the anti-tsarist Polish noble movement, participated in several battles, and was finally captured by the Russians in 1769 and exiled to Kamchatka. From there, he escaped on May 11, 1771, and, sailing along the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and the coast of Japan, reached Macao in southern China by the end of September 1771. This voyage was also notable from a scientific perspective, as he was the first European to sail along the aforementioned route (years before the Englishman James Cook and the Frenchman La Pérouse), and he even touched several islands for the first time. During his further journey, he docked in the then-independent Madagascar, where he later founded the colony called Louisbourg in 1774 on behalf of the French government. On his instructions, French units led by Captain Nicolas Mayeur also carried out several domestic exploration voyages. He did not personally participate in these, but based on the reports, he prepared a fairly detailed description of the island, which contains a lot of valuable data. The native population elected him king in 1776, but he resigned from his governorship due to the accusations of the governor of the neighboring Isle de France, discouraged. He returned to Hungary for a short time, at which time Maria Theresa granted him the title of count, certainly in recognition of his merits in the War of the Bavarian Succession. Between 1779 and 1784, he made several voyages between Europe and America, while working on a plan to organize Hungarian water freight traffic, and even founded a sailmaking factory on the Adriatic coast. After waiting in vain for support for his commercial plans from Vienna, he sailed again to North America and returned to Madagascar on behalf of the merchants there. The governor of Isle de France sent a force against him, and he lost his life in a battle with the French. He recorded his adventures in his memoirs. There were several obscure and controversial periods in his life. It is still unclear whether he played a role in the American War of Independence, and even his “kingdom” in Madagascar has not been clearly proven. Several films have been made about his life, including a Hungarian-Slovak TV series in the 1970s. Tamás Szarka, a member of the Ghymes Ensemble, in 2008 Benyovszky c. wrote a dance play. ; ; Work: ; Memoirs and travels of Mauritius Augustus count de B. (London, published by William Nicholson from the original French manuscript), 1790, In Hungarian: Benyovszky Móric grof étérajza, észég émémkiratai és táleiréssai I-IV. (translated by: Jókai Mór, Budapest, 1888).