John Henry Bastide
British engineer
Lieutenant-General John Henry Bastide (c. 1700 – September 1770) was a British army officer and military engineer who played a significant role in the early history of Nova Scotia. He was the chief engineer at both of the sieges of Louisbourg (1745 and 1758) and the siege of Minorca (1756).
Early life and career
Bastide was born around 1700, the son of a French military officer, Colonel Armand de la Bastide, a Huguenot born in Bern, Switzerland, the son of Colonel John de la Bastide. After Armand became a naturalised British citizen in 1691, he was given command of Count Nassau's Regiment. Later he was appointed as Governor of the Isle of Wight. He died in 1744. Armand is Sir Derek Jacobi's seven times great uncle on his mother's side.
John Bastide joined the British Army as a boy; a notation in the Army List describes him as a ‘child’. His first commission, dated 23 August 1711, was as an ensign in Hill's Regiment. He purchased his promotion to lieutenant in the same regiment on 25 February 1718.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “John Henry Bastide” as british engineer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british engineer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6238736. VIAF identifies the subject as 307439713. The Library of Congress control number is nb2014001975. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1700, 1770, 1745 and 1758.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Henry Bastide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.