The largest and most famous French sailboat, The Belem, will make its triumphant arrival on Wednesday May 8, 2024 in the harbor of the port of Marseille, to bring the Olympic flame to French soil. Built in 1896, the same year as the Games of the first Olympiad, the famous three-masted ship was launched on June 10, 1896 in Nantes, and chartered to transport cocoa between France and Brazil on behalf of the Menier chocolate factories. The chocolate family that owns the Château de Chenonceau.
A sailboat filled with cocoa beans
The Menier chocolate factory, founded in 1816, allowed the family of pharmacists and industrialists to build a colossal fortune on a global scale. In 1895, Henri Menier bought Anticosti Island in Canada to make it his private hunting and fishing reserve and founded Port-Menier there. A year later, his firm chartered The Belem, which is named after this city in Brazil on the Amazon. Built in the Dubigeon shipyards, in Nantes, The Belem is equipped by the Crouan house of Nantes, which has worked since 1879 with the Menier chocolate factory. At that time, the industrial empire of the Menier dynasty had a fleet of eight sailboats dedicated to transporting cocoa, including the Belem.
The Château de Chenonceau has been the property of the Menier family since 1913.
© Photo archives NR, Raphaël Chambriard
The Meniers bought Chenonceau in 1913
The Belem sailed the Atlantic for years, the holds filled with cocoa beans from the Amazon for the Menier firm. In 1902, the boat miraculously escaped the eruption of Mount Pelée which devastated the port of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. The few survivors of the disaster will be rescued by The Belem. The ship was operated until the start of the First World War by the Meniers and two other shipowners who traded in rum and sugar cane. It also supplies Cayenne and its penal colony.
In April 1913, Henri Menier acquired the Château de Chenonceau; When he died a few months later, the estate returned to his brother Gaston, whose descendants are still the owners of the famous “Château des Dames”, one hundred and eleven years later.
The Duke of Westminster’s yacht
The commercial career of Belem was interrupted in 1914, competing with more reliable and regular steamboats. The Belem was bought by the Duke of Westminster who converted it into a luxury yacht.
The Menier chocolate factory which had been founded in 1816 (at the time, a pharmacy which sold chocolate-based medicines) was sold to Cacao Barry in 1959, and passed into the fold of the Perrier group in 1965, then Rowntree in 1975 , and finally Nestlé in 1988.
