In his preface to Voyage autour du monde, Bougainville is slightly coy about this claim to be the first French circumnavigator, saying only that he is the first of his countrymen to ‘carry out a voyage of this sort in Your Majesty’s ships’ (my italics). A little further into the book, the reason for his strangely precise wording becomes clear when Bougainville mentions that a French explorer called Le Gentil de la Barbinais might actually have sailed around the world before him. Not that this changes anything, Bougainville adds, because Barbinais had set off in a privately owned vessel, so it wasn’t an official mission. What’s more, he had also stopped off in China for over a year, and then sailed home in a different ship. ‘In truth, he [Barbinais] did personally go around the world,’ Bougainville concedes, ‘but one couldn’t call it a circumnavigation carried out by the French nation.’ Like so many things in France, exploration was all about who you knew.
How to lose the Falklands without a battle
Bougainville’s book makes no comment on the name of his purpose-built flagship, even though it was called La Boudeuse, or Sulky Lady. It was a strangely pessimistic name for a vessel that was meant to carry a crew of superstitious sailors on such a long and dangerous journey, but it was appropriate, because Bougainville knew that the first major event of his trip was going to be a sad one.
He had been ordered to stop in the southern Atlantic and take part in a ceremony to hand the Falkland Islands, then a French territory called Les Malouines (or ‘Islands of Saint-Malo’), over to the Spanish. Three years earlier, Bougainville had gone out there to establish a French colony, a task he had achieved by stranding seventy-five Acadien refugees from Canada at the end of a relatively sheltered bay and naming the settlement Port Saint-Louis in honour of the Kings of France past and present. This had caused much annoyance in Spain, which claimed the whole of South America, and now Louis XV had agreed to give the islands back, and was making the man who had settled them in the first place make the presentation.
Poor Bougainville describes the historic ceremony in one laconic sentence: ‘I handed over our settlement to the Spaniards, who took possession of it by raising the Spanish flag.’ He then read out a letter from King Louis to the Acadiens, informing them that after being ousted from Canada, they were now being kicked out of the Malouines too. France had let them down again, and it probably came as no surprise that several of the families decided to take their chances and become Spanish, even though their windblown outpost had now been rather too frankly renamed Puerto Soledad – Port Solitude.
Bougainville had hoped to put this indignity behind him by setting off immediately for the Pacific, but he was now forced to hang around in the newly Spanish ‘Malvinas’* waiting for his supply ship, L’Étoile (The Star), which was meant to rendezvous with him at Port Saint-Louis, sorry, Puerto Soledad. Bobbing impatiently at anchor in the recently lost French colony, La Boudeuse probably lived up to its name more than ever.
It wasn’t until two months later that Bougainville finally met up with the Étoile in Rio, where two key characters joined the French mission. The first was a botanist called Philibert Commerson, the man who later discovered the flower that bears Bougainville’s name. The second was his assistant, Jean Baré, who would turn out to be a very unusual man indeed.
Not such a virgin island
When Bougainville’s two ships finally sailed out of the stormy South Atlantic and into the shimmering Pacific, he must have felt a huge weight lifting off his shoulders. At last, a year after he had left France, he was getting down to the fun part of his job. Reading his book, you get a palpable sense of his glee as uncharted islands begin to appear on the horizon. But he seems to have forgotten the wording of Louis XV’s commission, because instead of ‘erecting poles and attaching orders of possession to them’, often he simply logged their position, gave them French names, and didn’t take the risk of getting snagged on a reef or attacked by fierce-looking natives.
When, in April 1768, the Boudeuse and Étoile came in sight of a larger-than-usual mountainous island at a latitude of 17 degrees 35 minutes and 3 seconds South (Bougainville’s measurements, not mine), he was delighted with his discovery and named it Nouvelle-Cythère, after the Aegean island of Kythira.
The natives seemed friendly, too. The men who canoed out to meet the French ships were brandishing coconuts, bananas and other ‘fruits délicieux’ rather than spears and battle clubs. Everything, Bougainville notes, ‘augured well for their good character’.
As soon as he landed, however, he got two major shocks.
First, if he understood the islanders correctly, another ship full of pale, overdressed men had been there before. He would find out later that this was the Cornishman Samuel Wallis, who had visited Tahiti in June of the previous year, while Bougainville had been waiting around for his supply ship. So the French hadn’t discovered the island, after all – those blasted Brits had.
Never mind, though – Bougainville did his best to tell the islanders the advantages of being a subject of Louis XV (long holidays, unlimited access to the Malouines – oh no, forget that one, but there were lots more), and consoled himself that no one seemed to be waving Union Jacks.
The second surprise was even greater. When the botanist Commerson and his assistant Jean Baré went ashore, they provoked a minor riot. Not because the islanders’ religion forbade botany, but because the men were crowding around Baré and making lewd gestures that implied they wanted to have sex with him. The Frenchmen tried to explain that sexual intercourse between males was taboo (despite anything the Brits might have told them about French sailors), but the islanders made it clear that this wasn’t a problem because they were sure the young assistant was not a male. And when Bougainville’s men managed to extract Baré from his admirers and get him back on board, Jean tearfully confessed to being Jeanne. She had disguised herself, Bougainville writes, because she knew that a woman would never have been allowed to join the expedition. (In fact she was obviously the married Commerson’s mistress, but Bougainville is too discreet to reveal this.)
It might seem unbelievable to us that a woman could have been on board ship for ten months without being discovered. Bougainville admits that there had been rumours amongst the crew that she was female because of her lack of beard and her ‘meticulous care not to perform her necessities’ in front of the other men, but, with all the sexual prejudices of his age, he explains that you would never have guessed she was a girl.
‘How could you see a woman in the indefatigable Baré,’ he asks, ‘an experienced botanist, whom we had seen following his master on all his gathering trips, through the snow and up the icy mountains of the Straits of Magellan, carrying food, weapons and plant books with such courage and strength?’ In short, she was a hard-working scientist, so she obviously couldn’t be a woman.
Now that her true nature had been revealed, though, Bougainville had a chance to get his mission into the record books for an indisputable reason: Jeanne would be the first woman ever to sail around the world. But he didn’t let her steal his glory, and later put both Commerson and Baré ashore in Mauritius, where they stayed until Commerson died in 1773. Jeanne subsequently returned to France, completing her circuit of the globe and probably becoming the first woman to do so – although, by Bougainville’s rules, her stopover had no doubt disqualified her from making the claim.
In fact, Bougainville didn’t get rid of her in case she grabbed the limelight – it had become, he says, ‘difficult to prevent the sailors from alarming her modesty’, because the stay in Tahiti had really got their hormones raging …
Nailing the Tahitians
The first canoes to greet the French had been crewed entirely by men. But after this friendly encounter, things rapidly got more co-ed. When the Étoile and the Boudeuse came closer to shore, a whole flotilla of canoes paddled out, and the sailors were astonished to see naked women in them, ‘making tempting movements’. Even more incredible, the men were signalling that the European
s were welcome to choose a woman, and ‘were gesturing to show us exactly how we should make her acquaintance’. It was every mariners’ dream come true, and Bougainville was as dumbfounded as the rest of his crew: ‘I ask you: how, before such a spectacle, is one supposed to restrain 400 Frenchmen, young sailors, who haven’t seen a woman for six months?’ (Presumably if they had been British, they would have been much easier to control.)
At first Bougainville forbade all shore leave, and only one man disobeyed – a cook, who came back ‘more dead than alive’. He told his captain that he had gone ashore, been instantly stripped naked by the islanders, and had every part of his body gazed and prodded at, before being given a girl and told to perform with her in front of everyone. When he didn’t rise to the task, the disappointed Tahitians brought him back to the ship.
Once the French did go ashore en masse, they found a society where sex was as exchanged as freely as bananas. It was perfectly natural for the sailors to be invited into a house where a young girl would be offered as a sign of hospitality, and a crowd would gather to watch the ceremony. ‘Each coupling is a cause of national celebration,’ Bougainville says, and he admits that the Tahitians were mystified at the foreigners’ preference for privacy. ‘Our morals forbade such a public show,’ he assures his readers, ‘though I cannot guarantee that all of my crew remained reluctant to adopt this local custom.’
His book was dedicated to Louis XV, who was quite a ladies’ man himself, and must have been delighted with the description of a way of life that was probably his fantasy of how Parisian court life should be. And the followers of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau were even more excited – they believed in the Noble Savage, the innocent primeval man unspoilt by the hypocrisies of modern civilized life, and the Tahitians’ ability to walk around naked and engage in public humping clearly proved that they were free of Adam and Eve’s original sin.*
Other aspects of island life confirmed this idealistic view. There was no concept of locking anything away, and Bougainville states that ‘everyone picks fruit from the first tree they see, or takes it from any house. It would seem that the necessities of life can be no individual’s property, and belong to all.’
The Noble Savage fans didn’t read Bougainville closely enough, though, because he also stated that Tahiti was constantly at war with other islands, and that their methods of warfare were far from noble – when the Tahitians won a battle, they kidnapped the women to be their sex slaves and killed all the men and boys, scalping the chin of anyone with a beard.
Bougainville also pulled no punches about the true relations amongst Tahitians: ‘The kings and nobles have the power of life and death over their slaves and servants, and have the same rights over the people they call Tata-einou, or low men. It is from this class that they choose the victims for their human sacrifices.’ Not quite such a paradise after all, even if it did make for a pleasant fortnight’s stopover on the Frenchmen’s round-the-world trip.
But there was one aspect of life on the island that robbed it of its Garden of Eden status even for the sex-hungry sailors – and this is where those annoying Brits came in.
When James Cook returned from his own circumnavigation on 13 July 1771, he was able to list all the discoveries that the French explorer had missed: Australia, the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that New Zealand was made up of islands rather than being the fabled southern continent, for example. And the Englishman also began to spread malicious rumours about Bougainville and his crew.
In his journal, Cook talks about the Tahitiennes’ easy morals. He says that he had to punish his men for stealing nails to exchange for sex, and he accuses the French of making the situation even more complicated. In his log for 6 June 1769, he describes the islanders telling him that two ships (clearly the Boudeuse and the Étoile) had stopped at Tahiti ten or fifteen months earlier. He adds that ‘they [the Tahitians] likewise say that these ships brought the venereal Distemper to this island where it is now as common as in any part of the world.’
An open-minded man, Cook considers the possibility that either he or Wallis, the man who had beaten Bougainville to Tahiti, might have caused the epidemic. But he dismisses both charges: ‘No such thing happened to any of the Dolphin’s [Wallis’s ship] people while they were here,’ he states. And Cook’s own men get a clean bill of health, too: ‘I have the satisfaction to find that the Natives all agree that we did not bring it here.’ The conclusion is obvious – it was the Frenchmen’s fault.
Cook rubs salt into Bougainville’s moral wound by predicting that, given the islanders’ sexual habits, the disease would spread throughout the South Seas ‘to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them’. And he closes the long entry for 6 June 1769, which is entirely given over to sexually transmitted diseases, with a killer piece of circumstantial evidence – he has seen several islanders with iron tools that ‘we suspected came not from the Dolphin, and they now say they had from these two ships’.
French ironwork in the hands of Tahitians could mean only one thing: Frenchmen having sex with the local girls and giving them an STD as a farewell gift. QED.
In fact, we know from Wallis’s account of his voyage that his men had also exchanged nails for sexual favours, and he eventually had to forbid any contact with the islanders for fear that the Dolphin would fall apart for lack of iron. But Cook didn’t know (or didn’t care to acknowledge) this, and the accusation was there in his travel diary for all in Europe to see: Bougainville had visited Adam and Eve and given them the clap.
Bougainville couldn’t let Cook get away with this. ‘Their [the Brits’] accusations that we gave the unfortunate Tahitians the disease are groundless,’ Bougainville pleads in his book, ‘and we would perhaps be more correct in suspecting that it was passed to them by the crew of Monsieur Wallis.’ It is amazing, more than two centuries later, to read two of the world’s most famous explorers locking horns over sexual hygiene.
Bougainville goes even further, and widens the issue to health in general. Here, he is on more solid ground, and ends his book with a mean jibe at Cook. The British captain had lost thirty-eight crew members during his voyage, mainly to an outbreak of dysentery caught in Indonesia. Bougainville, on the other hand, could boast that the Boudeuse entered Saint-Malo ‘having lost only seven men in the two years and four months since leaving Nantes’. And, as if to convince any floating voters, he appends a footnote to the effect that the death toll on the Étoile was an even more healthy two. The subtext is clear: who had the disease-bearing crews, les Français ou les Anglais? Do the maths, dear readers, the final score was 38 –9 in France’s favour.
Case closed.
Final impressions of Tahiti
Sadly for Bougainville, his initial claim to French sovereignty over Tahiti was ignored. He died thirty-one years before France finally got its hands on the island. In 1842, a rogue French admiral sneaked in and annexed the place while the British Consul was away. Even then, it was something of a joyless acquisition – by this time, the previously innocent islanders had been got at by British missionaries, and the girls were hiding their natural charms inside tent-like Victorian dresses.
When the French painter Paul Gauguin arrived there at the end of the century (bringing his own case of European syphilis), he was horrified to find that Bougainville’s description of a nation of promiscuous love goddesses was cruelly out of date. And if you look at the Tahitian paintings that don’t feature his lover or models, Gauguin’s Tahitiennes are decidedly covered up. It really was a case of paradise lost.
* What Voltaire doesn’t mention is that he had invested some of his personal savings in French India, and was unhappy to lose them, and not so much the colony.
† Today these are called respectively Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai, and Pondicherry is now officially Puducherry, but I shall stick to old colonial names in this chapter on colonialization.
* This is not an ancestor of the former French President Valéry Giscard d’Est
aing, whose family pulled all kinds of strings to add the d’Estaing tag to their name in the 1920s.
* The islands wouldn’t become the Falklands until the Brits grabbed them in 1833, though the French still call them Les Malouines today.
* The same can presumably be said of the people who do similar things every summer at France’s biggest naturist resort, Cap d’Agde.
15
The Guillotine, a British Invention
‘There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.’
P. G. Wodehouse
Before France plunges itself into the self-flagellation that they called a revolution, one key historical mistake has to be cleared up: the guillotine, which will play a surprisingly limited role in the ensuing action, was not French. The earliest references to a decapitation machine with a falling blade are British.
To put it bluntly, Docteur Guillotin never invented such a machine, and in fact he was most upset that his name had been misappropriated to describe a way of cutting off people’s heads. In any case, the first French guillotine was built by a Prussian.
So, the guillotine – a French invention? Apologies to France (and P. G. Wodehouse), but it’s another misconception that has to be knocked on the head.
Killing with (and without) kindness
As the executioners responsible for the deaths of Mary Queen of Scots and King Charles I would probably agree, the main problem with cutting an important person’s head off is accuracy. The axe is heavy, your hands are sweaty, you’re wearing a mask, and you’re being watched by some very powerful people. To make things worse, you know that if you mess things up, the story will be repeated in history books for ever more. What could be more natural than to let the blade stray right or left, to cut into a shoulder or take off a scalp? This was why it was a privilege in England to be executed with a sword. There was much less chance of a messy, multi-swing botch job.
1000 Years of Annoying the French Page 30
