Biography
French military engineer, mathematician, spy, and explorer. Born at Chambéry, Savoy, in 1682, and expected to enter the legal profession, Amédée-François Frézier managed to convince his father, a lawyer, professor, and advisor to the Duke of Savoy, to send him to Paris to pursue his interest in science. At the end of his studies, he published a thesis on navigation and astronomy and then travelled to Italy to study architecture.
On his return to France in 1700, he joined the French army. To relieve the boredom of garrison life, he wrote a treatise on pyrotechnics, which became a standard text for firework makers. It included recommendations for the military use of fireworks, which earned him a posting to Saint-Malo as a military engineer with the intelligence corps.
In January 1712, he was dispatched to South America aboard the armed merchant ship Saint Joseph on a secret mission to study the defense fortifications of Chile and Peru. His cartographical and hydrographical observations corrected the mistakes in Louis Feuillée's Relations, but resulted in a bitter feud between the two explorers. Arriving in Concepcíon, Chile, on 16 June 1712, he spent two years and five months visiting the fortifications and insinuated himself into the good graces of colonial officials by passing himself off as a touring merchant trader. His clandestine maps of the fortifications indicated the best approaches for attack, where munitions were stored, and routes of escape. He also reported on the colonial governments, the indigenous populations, the Church, and the colonies' resources, including the flora and fauna. He paid special attention to plants of economic value, the most important being Fragaria chiloensis (L.) Duchesne or the Beach Strawberry.
The Treaty of Utrecht, which gave commercial privileges to the British in Spanish colonies, hastened his return to France in February 1714. An account of his travels in South America was published in Paris later that year, followed by English, Dutch, and German translations in 1718. For his maps he received 1000 écus as a reward from King Louis XIV, to whom he also presented plants for the royal garden. Of the five live plants of Fragaria chiloensis that he brought back from South America, one went to Antoine de Jussieu, another to the botanical garden in Paris, and the rest were grown on his property in Plougastel near Brest.
He returned to the New World in 1719, on a two-year assignment to fortify the island of Santo Domingo, a mission that extended indefinitely before he was allowed to return to France in 1728, where he received the Croix de Louis. In the remainder of his career, which lasted until 1764, he built 26 defence structures in Philippsburg and Landau, wrote a treatise on civil engineering for use in architecture, became director of fortifications for Brittany in 1739, and was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1752. In 1755, he published Lettre Concernant l'Histoire des Trembiements de Terre de Lima. He died at Brest in 1773.
Sources:
L. Allorge, 2003, La Fabuleuse Odyssée des Plantes: les Botanistes Voyageurs, les Jardins des Plantes, les Herbiers: 331-342.
