Batteau or Bateau

Batteau.net

Bill Trout
During the James River Batteau Festival in Lynchburg, Virginia June 15, 2002.

If you prefer to see Bill's other half, click Bill's photo above.

More on the spelling of Batteau

By: Bill Trout.

We have a statement in our atlases - the first paragraph is from the Dan River Atlas, p.93:

To combat modern attempts to strip our language of its character, we prefer to spell BATTEAU with two t's as it was spelled back in batteau days. That's the way it was spelled by the state legislature, the canal company, and other educated people. After the batteau era, this spelling was forgotten and reverted back to "bateau," the generic French spelling for "boat."

Readers are invited to search older documents for "batteau" and "bateau" and to tell us what they find.

Editors Note: Due to the conflicting counts regarding the number of instances of either spelling I have decided to make notation to both statements. Who's to say all documents for either case have been found and documented, therfore let's keep this as an open area of interest to be researched further. ...Editor

REVISED STATEMENT FROM BILL TROUT:
Subject: Batteau spelling!
Date: August 4, 2005 8:42:06 PM EDT

Former Statement:

"[We searched the Official Army and Navy Records of the Civil War, which are now online, and found that "batteau" is the predominant spelling and most of the time when "bateau" is used, it doesn't refer to our kind of boat, but to pontoons for floating bridges.]" ...Bill

Revised Statement:

...Editors Note: Bill Trout states in his email:

I went through the Civil War records again and found I was wrong - please remove that sentence [Editors note: See above text with ~~strikeout~~ lettering.] from the Batteau spelling statement I made so I don't disgrace the canal society! Here's a table:
                        batteau(x)   bateau(x)
Navy Records         4                12
Army Records         7                94

So, one T certainly is the thing in those records. Maybe someone could go through the records again in more detail to find out how Yankees vs Confederates spelled it. In many cases "bateau" clearly refers to pontoon boats, sometimes called French pontoons, so the one T is understandable, and it is understandable in French influenced areas such as Louisiana and the northern US. But it appears that at least in the Civil war records, most people spelled it with one T. Perhaps the two T's were already reverting to the French spelling by the time of the War Between the States, and also, most of the writers of these reports were not from Virginia!

Even so, we found two T's almost exclusively, in the canal company records and in the laws of Virginia, but these mentions were of course in the early days during the Batteau Era, before the Civil War. If a lawyer or law student has access to these laws on-line, it would be interesting to make a table for Virginia and other states, for mentions of batteau(x) or bateau(x) by state and year, to see if this holds up. And there are probably other searchable records on the net now, so tables can be made by region and year to see what was going on.

My impression has been that two T's was the spelling at least in Virginia, and for at least through the first half of the 19th Century, and one of the dictionaries of American idiomatic English says it was the predominant American spelling during the first half of the 19th Century. Was this dictionary right? Can someone please make a study of it?

...Bill Trout