River Road to China Read online

  Even the enthusiastic Garnier was affected by the dreary atmosphere of this Cambodian outpost. Nothing, he wrote, better demonstrated the results of the despotic system by which the country was ruled. The avarice of the officials insured that there should be no spark of initiative among the population at large. But there was surely more than this to the tone of gloom that pervades the reports of the mission's stay at Kratie. For all their confident assertions of the future value of the Mekong, here, below the first known major set of rapids—those Lagrée had already seen—the explorers had to face the possibility that these hopes were unrealizable. With the expedition scarcely under way, this was more than enough to compound the gloom of the physical surroundings.

  Two days were spent in transferring the expedition's supplies from the gunboat to the shore, and then in loading some of the cases onto the pirogues that were to carry the explorers further north. Already the impossible bulk of the stores was apparent; both men and equipment had to be accommodated aboard narrow craft, each between thirty and fifty feet in length, carved from the trunk of a single tree. Going upstream these pirogues were neither rowed nor paddled. Rather, a team of six to ten men positioned on the bamboo platforms built on top of each canoe either used long poles to punt the craft forward or employed the hook at one end of their poles to pull the boat along against the current, hugging the shore, where trees and rocks were available to assist this strange method of progression. This “painful” style of travel, as Garnier called it, was the only way to proceed when the river was already in flood and the current was running in the opposite direction to the explorers' destination.

  Leaving Kratie on July 13, after a sleepless night caused by a mix of excited conversation, rain, and mosquitoes, the explorers made one final stop before they reached the rapids of Sambor. This was at the settlement of the same name, only a few miles north of Kratie, which was the residence of the last senior Cambodian official they would meet—a man whose uncertain rule extended to the mountains and uplands of the east. From these high regions came exotic forest products and slaves, the latter in sufficient quantity to make this isolated post a rewarding one for officials who were both prepared to risk fever and unconcerned by the exigencies of life in this Cambodian Ultima Thule. Strangely, for the French explorers were extremely curious for fact and legend, there is nothing in the records to suggest that the alien travelers were aware of Sambor's important place in Cambodian history. When they saw Sambor they could scarcely have known that it had been a Cambodian city whose distant greatness was remembered in the official and folk literature of the state. They might, on the other hand, have been expected to learn that only thirty years earlier Sambor had been a larger, more prosperous settlement before it was sacked by Thai troops. But most surprising of all is the failure of any member of the expedition to mention the stupa built over the ashes of Princess Nucheat Khatr Vorpheak. In 1834 the princess had been taken by a crocodile. Later her remains were recovered, miraculously preserved, when the crocodile was caught and killed, and after her cremation the stupa was erected over the ashes. By the 1860s this stupa had already become a site for pious pilgrimage. Nearly a century later Prince Sihanouk sought the advice of this royal ancestor, through the medium of a woman of Kratie province, when he considered matters of international import.

  Beyond Sambor were the rapids, where fast-moving water dominated a world in flood. In the low-water period the river bed north of Sambor is a jumbled mass of islands set amid countless water channels, broken by a seemingly endless series of rapids. All this is transformed by the rising waters of the rainy season. With surprising speed all but the largest islands along the river's course are submerged. In mid-July when the French explorers began their slow progress along the eastern bank of the river, the water level was at least fifteen feet above low water, and rising steadily. The gray rocks forming the low-water rapids seldom showed above the water streaming south at more than five knots, and the tops of trees waved liked feathers blown in the wind as they remained just above the advancing flood. Already the Mekong had spread to more than a mile in width. In later months its spread is broader still, and the river height is so great that no sense of the rocks below is gained by a traveler whose boat, even nowadays when propelled by a powerful outboard engine, must still hug the shore to progress against the current. In flood the Mekong above Sambor is a majestic sight, not least in the closing hours of daylight when the storm clouds frame the dark, distant hills, and lightning heralds yet another downpour which will raise the river's height even further.

  Ever optimistic, and still unaware of the difficulties ahead, Garnier at Sambor pronounced this region to be quite certainly navigable. Since the flooding submerged the rapids, all that was needed was a vessel with sufficiently powerful engines to overcome the force of the current. For the expedition itself, however, the means at their disposal were more primitive. Slowly their pirogues were hauled by the boatmen along the eastern bank. By July 16 the party had reached the most difficult area of the rapids. No longer were there any clearly defined banks on either shore, and the boatmen had to strain to achieve even minimal progress. Garnier's dream of the Mekong as a route for trade from China to southern Vietnam, still held only three days earlier at Sambor, “seemed from this moment gravely compromised.” There was no way of knowing where the main channels of the river lay, and the sudden alternation of depths and shallows promised little assurance that any deep water channels would persist long enough to make them navigable. To match the disappointment of the days as the explorers moved through the area of the rapids, there were the rigors of the night. Unable to land and set up camp in the evenings, the expedition remained on the pirogues, drenched by frequent rainstorms, sleeplessly watching the spectacular electrical storms that circled around the dark skies.

  During these days between July 15 and 19 as the flotilla of pirogues made its slow progress up the eastern bank of the Mekong, the Frenchmen heard repeated references from their boatmen to the great rapids of Preatapang. These, they were told, lay near the western bank of the river, not far from the northern limits of the rapids they had been traversing since they left Sambor. When, just as they were entering calmer water at the northern end of the rapids, the boatmen announced that Preatapang was nearby, Garnier immediately attempted a brief reconnaissance. Using a light pirogue, he urged his Cambodian boatman towards the opposite bank. But try as he might, his boatmen adamantly refused to do more than indicate the general direction of the Preatapang rapids. Disappointed, Garnier returned to his companions as the party now passed into calmer water below Stung Treng. The fury of the rapids, stretching for more than thirty miles, was now replaced by the familiar broad sweep of calm river characteristic of the Mekong in its lower reaches.

  One day later the explorers were at Stung Treng itself. By now they had passed out of the territory of the Cambodian King. In this distant northeastern area authority had shifted many times in the preceding centuries. Where once Cambodian kings had ruled, the Stung Treng region was now in vassalage to the Thai ruler in Bangkok. The nature of authority at Stung Treng was vital to the expedition, since from this point on they had to rely on local officials to provide them with transport and boatmen. Their glacially reserved reception by the Laotian Governor who represented Thai power in Stung Treng was therefore disturbing for the difficulties it might present, and also puzzling.

  The explanation, as they quickly found, was simple. Yet it leaves some intriguing questions unanswered. He was less than well disposed to the expedition, the Governor said, because he and the population under his charge had only recently met another Frenchman, a trader who had penetrated into the Stung Treng region, where he abused confidence and repaid assistance with poor faith. By their own combination of threats and blandishments, Lagrée and Garnier were eventually able to overcome the mistrust that this mysterious figure had engendered. But the question remains: who was he? At a time when the region through which the official expedition was passing was qui
te unknown to the Western world, who was the lone French trader whose travel to Stung Treng must be regarded as just as notable, in its own solitary way, as the efforts of the well-equipped and sizable official party. Even if he did not reach Stung Treng by way of the Mekong—and nothing suggests that this was the case—the journey overland, presumably from Bangkok, was still a remarkable achievement. Yet like so many solitary travelers in isolated regions, his existence is almost all that is known of the man.

  In Stung Treng, Lagrée weighed the next steps that he and his subordinates should take. Set at the confluence of the Mekong and the Se Kong Rivers, Stung Treng with its eight hundred inhabitants was an ancient commercial center. In 1866 its chief trade was in human beings: slaves who were brought out of the high country to the east and sold downstream to Cambodia. With the knowledge that there were further settlements to the east of Stung Treng, Doudart de Lagrée decided to extend the investigations of the expedition up the Se Kong. But for Garnier there was another task, one that suited his adventurous character. There was the need to travel down the Mekong towards Sambor once again, to investigate the dangers and the possibilities of the rapids at Preatapang. To leave them a mystery was unacceptable to both Lagrée and Garnier.

  Still hoping to find a navigable channel between Sambor and Stung Treng, therefore, Garnier set out to travel down the right bank of the river, and so close to Preatapang. Two Cambodian boatmen had been persuaded to remain while the rest of their countrymen returned direct to Kratie. For a special payment in silver, they were to take Garnier and a member of the expedition's escort, a French sailor named Renaud, down the western bank so that a complete survey might be made of this vital section of the river.

  Leaving Stung Treng on July 24, Garnier and Renaud found that the swift current carried them south at such a rate that after only half a day they were at the head of the rapids. Following a night spent in a forest clearing beside the river, the travelers began their journey again. As the speed of the current increased, they reached a point where they could hear the distant rumble of the Preatapang rapids. Garnier called for the boatmen to continue on their course, following the right bank and heading directly for the rapids. He still hoped that this would be the direction in which a navigable passage might be found. The boatmen protested. With Renaud, who had spent some years in Cambodia, acting as interpreter, they told Garnier that only a madman would attempt the passage, that the water was so agitated it seemed to be boiling and that the current was swift as lightning. Nothing was more calculated to urge Garnier onward. He would, he told the boatmen, pay double their promised wages, but they must head towards the rapids.

  Seemingly they agreed, but soon Garnier realized that they were heading crosswise towards the distant left bank, away from Preatapang. Grasping his revolver, he threatened the Cambodians as he pointed again to the dangerous route they were to follow. Reluctantly they obeyed and the light pirogue once more headed towards the roar of the rapids, moving ever faster as the current gripped the fragile craft and the boatmen struggled to insure their survival. Garnier's own account of the events that followed is still the best one:

  …the current now ran at a speed of six or seven miles an hour, and it was too late to turn back. If I had not been preoccupied with an examination of this section of the river, the appearance of comic anguish shown by my two boatmen would have made me laugh. For the rest, I could see from their faces that if there was danger in making this terrible passage, there was no certainty of death. … Our threat to take the paddles in our own hands had achieved its effect. They preferred to rely on their own skill and knowledge of the region to save themselves rather than to place their fate in the hands of audacious but uninformed Europeans.

  Now I saw the nature of the rapids. … Angered by the sudden barrier they encountered, the muddy waves furiously attacked the banks, leaped over them, rushed into the forest, foaming about each tree and each rock, leaving only the largest trees and the heaviest outcrops of rocks standing. Debris piled up along the waves' passage. The banks were leveled, and in the middle of a broad, strikingly white sea of water, full of whirlpools and flotsam, a few forest giants and dark rocks still withstood the assault, while columns of spray rose and fell ceaselessly on their summits.

  Now we were there with the speed of an arrow. Of the greatest importance was the need to avoid being drawn by the current into the submerged forest where we would have been smashed into a thousand pieces. … I saw this all as a vision, in a flash. The noise was deafening, the spectacle fascinating to behold. Crossing this vast area of water, moving in every direction, with the current running at a speed that I estimated could not be less than ten or eleven miles an hour, our fragile craft was dragged through the middle of rocks and trees, hidden and tossed in the spume. It would have given the least impressionable person a sense of vertigo. Renaud had the courage and skill, when I gave him the signal, to take a sounding that showed there was thirty foot of water beneath us. But he had no time to do more. A moment later we brushed against a tree trunk that caused the water to surge many feet into the air. My boatmen were bent over their paddles, pale with fear, but with speed and skill they prevented us from smashing into the tree. Little by little the sickening speed of the current diminished and we entered calmer water. The bank was once more definable and my boatmen wiped away the sweat that coursed down their foreheads.

  Garnier now knew the worst. Though the channel that he had just traversed was deep enough for a powered craft, there seemed no possibility that the current could be overcome. At half past two in the afternoon of July 25 he and his exhausted boatmen reached Sambor. In a little more than twelve hours they had covered the same distance that the expedition working against the river's flow had completed only in six long days. Pausing merely for a night's rest in Sambor, Garnier and Renaud again set off to the north, reaching Stung Treng on July 30.

  When Garnier returned to Stung Treng, the expedition had been in progress for less than two months, yet its fundamental raison d'être was already in question, if not totally destroyed. In an all too human and understandable fashion, this was something the explorers found difficult, if not impossible, to accept. In spite of what they now knew, the thought that some means might still be found to overcome the barrier of the rapids sustained them. And the tasks of exploration, as they mapped the course of the river and recorded their detailed observations on the country and people about them, served to push the unpleasant truth into the background. While Garnier had been shooting the rapids of Preatapang, Lagrée had been leading a small party up the Se Kong to chart its course and note what possibilities there were for commerce. In Stung Treng itself, Garnier and others recorded details of the population, of the Chinese merchants who had taken up residence even in this remote town, and of the forest products that filtered out of the uplands and mountains to the east. And as the necessary pirogues and boatmen were slowly assembled for the next stage of the journey, the explorers discussed the way ahead to the Khone waterfalls. This was the next great obstacle along their route, and virtually the only remaining known feature ahead of them until they reached the area well to the north of Vientiane that Henri Mouhot had visited in 1861.

  In this atmosphere of hopeful preparation the first major illness struck the expedition. Garnier and Joubert were the victims. While dysentery was accepted as an almost normal, even daily hazard — Dr. Thorel had contracted a severe case at Angkor that lasted until after the expedition passed Kratie — the explorers' greatest fear was of “fever.” In both his official and his unofficial accounts of the expedition Garnier passes rapidly over his illness, only briefly noting its gravity. But it was serious indeed. Whereas Joubert was well on the way to recovery within ten days of the onset of the sickness, Garnier's more acute attack left him either unconscious or delirious for eighteen days.

  The nature of the fever he contracted is uncertain. As his companions tended him, becoming ever more concerned for his life, they learned from the inhabitants of Stu
ng Treng that it was “forest fever.” Dr. Thorel later gave a detailed account of the illness, but the state of medical knowledge at the time prevents certainty as to its nature. It may have been scrub typhus. As time passed, and as the likelihood of Garnier's death seemed to grow stronger, Lagrée decided that the expedition could no longer delay its journey, even though to proceed meant transporting the still unconscious second-in-command in one of the narrow pirogues carrying the explorers towards Khone.

  The very day that they started north again, Garnier, left un-tended for a moment, tossing and turning in his delirium, plunged unwittingly into the water from the canoe in which he lay. He was rescued from the water with difficulty, but this sudden shock was followed by a marked improvement. When four days later, on August 17, the expedition paused just below the Khone waterfalls, Garnier came to his senses for the first time in eighteen days. Much of his skin was sloughing away, and he was to lose all his hair as a result of the illness. His left leg was partially paralyzed, and it was six months before it regained its strength. He could assume few duties for the expedition until the beginning of October, thirty-three days after the illness began.

  That Garnier recovered at all is remarkable, and is an indication of an underlying physical capacity that matched his strength of will. For the leader of the expedition, the illnesses of those around him were not a minor matter, but neither were they a subject for extended commentary. When towards the end of October he sent an official report to the Governor of Cochinchina, his summary of the expedition's health was brief and unemotional. “Since our departure from Kratie,” Doudart de Lagrée wrote on October 27, 1866, “the only serious illnesses that have occurred are the following: Monsieur Thorel, dysentery; Monsieur Garnier, typhoid fever; the sailor Mouëllo, bilious fever; the principal Annamite soldier, bilious fever with hemorrhage.” As he put it in summary, “The general state of health is as good as one might desire in the conditions in which we live.”