River Road to China Read online

  Listening to Laotian music.

  In Bassac the escort lived a life of enforced idleness. Their lack of contact with the outside world was total. Just occasionally an indication of the sexual frustrations endured by the party as a whole emerges obliquely in Garnier's own record of events. He noted his mildly embarrassed realization that the women of Laos had come to seem gracious and “even pretty.” Whether this was the result of his long stay in Cochinchina or because Laotian and European women shared certain physical characteristics, he could not decide. In the account of his return from Stung Treng to Bassac he refers, almost with the vicarious pleasure of a voyeur, to his belief that a young Cambodian girl who had drunk deeply from his supply of brandy was afterwards an easy conquest for a youth of the village. But, he continues after this observation, “I will be as discreet as the tamarind trees that lent their shadowy silence to the two lovers.”

  Vicarious enjoyment was not enough for the secondary personnel. Upon his return to Bassac, Garnier found one member of the French escort in chains, under guard by the local ruler's men. There had been heavy drinking and a chase after women. The interpreter Séguin had threatened one of the French soldiers with a knife. A general fracas had ensued, and when it was quelled Delaporte, in charge while both Lagrée and Garnier were absent, had clapped one of the men in irons — not Séguin, curiously, but a soldier named Rande who, initially at least, had been incited to violence by the French interpreter.

  Other concerns played on the minds of the principal explorers. For all of them the failure of the colonial government in Saigon to find some way to send the passports for China was a matter for increasingly bitter feelings. Garnier, indeed, came close to believing that the delay might stem from the earlier antagonism that had marked his relations with Admiral de La Grandière. Lagrée fretted at the delay and dwelled upon the error that had been made in burdening him with an excessively large party. De Carné, well aware that his inclusion in the expedition had not been welcomed by either Lagrée or Garnier, lived resentfully with the fact that the party's leader acted as if he were commanding a ship at sea. Monsieur de Carné, Lagrée insisted, did not have the right to communicate directly with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, nor as they traveled could he decide what matters required his personal investigation. If Garnier's private correspondence at this time is any guide, the tensions between the explorers had become open and troublesome.

  The frequent need to divide the party into smaller groups did little to add a sense of solidarity. Beset by uncertainty, yet seeking to find useful ways of occupying their time until the passports should arrive, sections of the party set off on their separate ways. While Garnier was making his abortive trip to Stung Treng, Lagrée undertook a major reconnaissance of the Bolovens Plateau, to the east of the Mekong. Accompanied by Joubert and de Carné, he went up the Se Don River as far as Saravan and then marched south to the commercial center of Attopeu, on the headwaters of the Se Kong, traveling some of the way on elephants. This was the river the explorers had already encountered at Stung Treng, where the Se Kong flows into the Mekong. At Attopeu, as at the other isolated commercial centers they had visited previously, the chief business seemed to be in slaves, though they also learned that gold was dredged from alluvial deposits nearby. The isolation of the little town and the reputation it had as an unhealthy area meant that Attopeu was a rare exception among centers of any size in the Indochinese region: a place where there were no Chinese residents. Yet it, too, had its cosmopolitan element. Here, in a location as distant from the known world as any the Frenchmen had yet encountered, there was a small colony of Burmese traders, dealing in gemstones and European trade goods.

  The party soon found how well Attopeu deserved its reputation for being unhealthy. Doudart de Lagrée suddenly fell seriously ill. Just before leaving Bassac he had written to his brother's wife, mocking in gentle terms the vision of Laos that such men as Mouhot had provided in the past. “I do not know,” he wrote on November 1, “the origin of these tales of fever and frightful sickness in Laos.” This was a bold and curiously thoughtless observation for a man like Lagrée. Mouhot, as he well knew, had died from fever in northern Laos. Garnier and Joubert had been seriously ill with fever in Stung Treng. Now it was Lagrée's turn. He was stricken with fever in Attopeu, and his companions, especially Joubert with his medical training, came close to despairing of his life. In the course of the illness Lagrée lost the use of his limbs as they became cold and rigid. Characteristically, his next letter to his sister-in-law, written after the party had returned to Bassac on December 4, made light of the whole affair. They had all been affected by fever to some extent, he remarked; but although he now had to admit that the infamous fevers of Laos were no “myth,” he could reassure her with the knowledge that “heavy doses of quinine easily cured us.”

  This was a brave but fundamentally foolhardy assessment. Just as Lagrée and the rest of the expedition were reluctant to admit that the Mekong was an unlikely route for significant trade between southern Vietnam and the regions to the north, so did their remarkable standards of courage and fortitude lead them to discount the heavy toll that tropical disease might take of their ability to survive the travails that still lay ahead. They were modern men, but modernity in the 1860s still did not imply an understanding of the cause of disease. It would not be long before the dangers of drinking unboiled water in a tropical setting would be widely known, but this was not knowledge the explorers possessed.

  In early December 1866 the overwhelming need to press on was apparent to all. The expedition's experience of river travel during the height of the rainy season had been discouraging. Now, with the end of the year drawing near, they knew that within five, and possibly only four months, the Mekong would again be rising to its flood level, making progress along it a slow, perhaps impossible affair. Henri Mouhot's description of the river near Luang Prabang, in upper Laos, suggested that the experience of the Sambor rapids might, at the very least, be repeated there. Adding urgency to the situation was the failure of the Cambodian interpreter Alexis Om to travel south from Stung Treng to Phnom Penh. Ever since Garnier had left him at Stung Treng, the explorers had been able to hope that he had bypassed the rebel bands and gone on to alert the French authorities to their desperate need for the passports to China. As long as it seemed possible that Alexis had made the trip to Phnom Penh, there was an added element of indecision. When, unexpectedly in early December, Alexis reappeared at the Bassac camp, having found the way down the Mekong still barred by the rebels, hopes were dashed and action could be delayed no longer.

  Lagrée and Garnier agreed on a new plan that would solve several problems simultaneously. The expedition as a whole would leave Bassac, travel a short stage up the Mekong, and then ascend the Se Moun River to Ubon in the northeast of Thailand. Lagrée believed that, because of its presumed political importance, this sizable settlement should be visited before the expedition embarked on its definitive route to the north. At the same time he accepted the proposal that Ubon should provide a jumping off point for yet another effort by Garnier to penetrate Cambodia and gain news of the missing passports. With Garnier would travel three of the expedition's secondary personnel who were now a clear liability to the party's progress. As a final if dubious precaution, Alexis Om would be left at Bassac in the hope that he might still make his way overland to Angkor and Phnom Penh and alert the French representatives as to how matters stood. He was to ask that the passports now be sent to Angkor, where Garnier might collect them.

  Despite the courageous prose that flowed from the explorers' pens in the official and private accounts of their situation at this time, an air of something very near to desperation is easily discerned. Typically, both Lagrée and Garnier continued to discuss the possibility that the Mekong was, after all, navigable. But the tone of their recommendations had begun to change. Lagrée, always more cautious and restrained than his younger second-in-command, admitted that there was no longer any reason for th
inking that a steam-powered vessel could pass beyond the Khone falls. Even to reach that far, passing through the Sambor rapids, would be a tour de force. The issue was not so clear for Garnier; he thought further investigation was necessary. The falls at Khone might be a barrier in themselves, but some means might be found to bypass them. In the circumstances of such apparent failure as now surrounded the French party, hope, however unjustified, was the only way to ward off despair.

  On Christmas Day 1866 the explorers left Bassac with few regrets. The weather was fresh, even cold for men accustomed to the overpowering heat of Cochinchina. To be on the move again was exhilarating in itself, and it is striking that none of the records left behind by the explorers give any further sense of difficulties caused by those men of the escort who were now to return to Cambodia. They — Sergeant Charbonnier, Renaud, and Rande — had the prospect before them of resuming a pattern of life that, however difficult it might be, was something they understood.

  The journey to Ubon was one of familiar difficulties. Shortly after the expedition began ascending the Se Moun they encountered rapids. The first came only a mile and a half after the party's pirogues turned out of the Mekong into the tributary. During the afternoon of December 31 in a series of slow portages the expedition covered less than a mile. New Year's Day was little better, except that Delaporte succeeded in shooting a hare which seemed a feast to the meat-hungry travelers.

  By January 2, 1867, however, progress was no longer impeded by rapids, and the French party moved on easily, reaching Ubon on January 7. The settlement was in Garnier's terse description, “too large for a village and yet still not a town.” But it was strikingly more lively than any population center the group had seen since leaving Phnom Penh six months before. There was more than one street, and two of the settlement's pagodas were built in brick rather than wood. In moving west of the Mekong the explorers found that the importance of Bangkok took on a new dimension. Stung Treng, Bassac, and even Attopeu were vassal areas to the Bangkok court, but now they were in a settlement that was linked economically as well as politically with the Thai capital. The local ruler, again a “king,” was affable and ready to help them.

  Once more the time had come for the expedition to split up, with Garnier now facing the longest and loneliest path. He would have had the three French military men and a Vietnamese soldier as his traveling companions as far as Angkor, or even Phnom Penh if Alexis Om had not completed his journey; but he could only look forward to returning with the one, non-French assistant. The main party was to divide into two groups. One, led by Lagrée, would continue north by land towards Khemmarat, another important settlement on the Mekong. Finally, since the necessity to survey all of the Mekong remained a paramount duty, Delaporte was detailed to travel down the Se Moun to the Mekong and thence to ascend the great river and rejoin the main party at Khemmarat. Garnier with his party was the first to set off once more into the unknown, leaving Ubon on January 10 to begin a grueling journey through unexplored territory that was to last for two months before he saw his companions again.

  For much of the time the expedition members had to negotiate vegetation as dense as this.

  CHAPTER V

  PASSPORTS FOR CHINA

  With Garnier gone in search of the passports, the res, of the expedition was ready to resume its slow passage north. Before leaving Ubon, however, they watched the coronation of the local ruler, recording the event in terms of mixed interest and deprecation. They found impressive the sight of the “king” dressed in rich green velvet and borne to the ceremony on an elephant of great size, followed by twenty-two more of these huge creatures and by cavalrymen and foot soldiers bearing banners. But the band that preceded the procession played in a “deafening” fashion, and the calm of the long night after the coronation ceremony was “disturbed” by the sound of singing and the music of strange instruments. In the brevity and matter-of-fact style used to describe this affair, there is already a strong sense that the exotic had become an everyday matter for these travelers.

  Delaporte was the next to leave Ubon, departing on January 15. After traveling back down the Se Moun, he started up the Mekong. Once more the great river gave Delaporte little reason to hope that it might ever provide a navigable route to China. Where the Mekong's course was not broken by rapids the current flowed lazily south, the water level as much as fifty feet below the high point reached during flood time. But each stretch of calm water was followed by the seemingly inevitable barrier of rapids. On occasion, eight boatmen paddling furiously were unable to force Delaporte s light pirogue upstream against the current, and to proceed he had to resort to portage or have his men haul the craft by ropes through the shallows at the edges of the rapids. Meticulously charting the river's course, and sketching the countryside about him, he made his way to the small political and commercial post of Khemmarat, arriving there on January 26, 1867, ahead of the main party.

  Lagrée's group had remained a further five days in Ubon before setting off on January 20. Their overland route took them almost directly north for some eighty miles. After traveling through cultivated regions, their path then passed through a dry and deserted area of northeastern Thailand. Still preserving many cases of their vast stocks of stores and supplies, the explorers headed a caravan of six elephants, fifteen ox carts, and more than fifty porters. At Amnat, halfway along their route, the roads used by the ox carts came to an end. Nine more elephants and a hundred porters now bore the expedition's supplies towards Khemmarat, with beasts and men kicking up a choking pall of dust from the dry ground. The strength of the sun was still not at its maximum, but the combination of dust and heat was enervating. Dr. Joubert was carrying his pet dog, Fox, when the group reunited with Delaporte in Khemmarat on January 30. The scene is captured in a charming engraving; flanked by the other explorers, Lagrée and Delaporte eagerly grasp hands against a background of elephants, palm trees, and fascinated villagers.

  This was a place of warm welcome. The Frenchmen with their servants and charts were seen as men of deep astrological knowledge and their opinion was sought on matters of consequence: when, they were asked, should an official of the settlement depart for Bangkok so as to be in harmony with the heavens' wishes? They were invited to watch all aspects of life in the village. So they saw a man and a woman judged for adultery. The fines levied were small, but before the judgment was made the guilty lovers had been punished in a local version of the pillory. They were tied to a large length of bamboo, facing each other, and made to beat upon it to draw attention to their plight.

  For thirteen days Khemmarat was also a base camp for surveys of the surrounding area. Although the explorers' accounts of this activity are curiously reticent, the intent seems to have been political intelligence. Was there any significant Vietnamese influence near the east bank of the Mekong? If this could be discovered, then future French policy might be able to capitalize upon it to prevent any further expansion of Thai power. The surveys, however, were indecisive, and again the expedition took to the river, heading north on February 13, 1867.

  Lagrée and Delaporte clasp hands at Khemmarat.

  For two days rapids again succeeded rapids, enforcing a slow pace on the party. Then, in its apparently unpredictable fashion, the Mekong's course became wide and free of barriers. The expedition moved steadily up the river, stopping to inspect any pagoda which seemed of special interest, seeking information from whatever local authorities they encountered. By February 22 they were at Nakhon Phanom, the site of a famous stupa, a Buddhist shrine, or that in Laotian. The importance of the monument was soon made clear to the French members of the party. Alévy, the Laotian interpreter who joined the expedition in Phnom Penh, had during his varied life once been a Buddhist monk. But he had abandoned his saffron robe to marry. Confronted by this sacred place, his desertion from the monkhood suddenly became a matter for concern and expiation. While the others rested at Nakhon Phanom, Alévy spent the days in prayer. Contemplating the errors of his w
orldly life, he made a gesture of atonement to the Buddha by cutting off the top joint of his left index finger. Neither Alévy's portrait engraving, nor the brief and skeptical references to his character in the various accounts of the expedition, suggest a man of devout faith. Yet, on this occasion at least, the spiritual power of That Phanom caused Alévy to reflect with shame on his past.

  Beyond Nakhon Phanom, as the Mekong pursued its northwesterly course, was Thakhek, and beyond that again Uthen—each reached in easy stages along the river. By March 6 the party was at Uthen, a provincial center which served as an outlet for lead mined a short distance from the river, and the expedition halted for a reconnaissance of its production. While the rest of the group remained by the river, Lagrée and Joubert set off for the mines. In their absence the main party was finally rejoined on March 10 by Garnier, still alert and eager after two months of almost constant travel.

  When Garnier left Ubon on January 10, 1867, he knew neither how long his journey would take nor the nature of the route ahead. For companions he had the three French military men who were being sent back to regular duties — Charbonnier, Rande, and Renaud — and a Vietnamese orderly, Tei. He had, too, his pet bitch Dragonne, whose presence with the expedition is only at this point suddenly and emotionally noted in Garnier's record of his travels. His pet since her birth on a gunboat of the same name in 1860, she was not to be with him much longer. Dragonne had fretted ever since the party left Saigon, and her removal now from the company of her one canine companion, Joubert's Fox, was too much. Two days after Garnier and his little group left Ubon, Dragonne disappeared during the night and plunged into the Se Moun, whose course the party still followed westward. Garnier felt inconsolable. Like other travelers in distant regions, not least the unfortunate Henri Mouhot, Garnier found that his pet dog filled a vital emotional gap in his life.