Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  From driftwood and the remains of the Aimable the 130 colonists erected a stockade, constructed pens for their pigs and geese, and raised three huts, one for the women and children, another for La Salle, his ‘gentlemen’ and an extravagant library that King Louis had bestowed on them, and a third for the enlisted men. They assumed the lodgings were temporary and that soon they would be moving up the Mississippi. But as La Salle discovered, the land to the north comprised not a network of rivers, but endless prairies: they were not in the delta at all, but far to its west.* Precisely how far he could not tell, but it was clearly too great a distance for the colonists to walk, and the Belle was too small to contain them all. He also found that most of his soldiers had joined the expedition only because it gave them a chance to escape prison, and that none of the artisans knew their business. The only people upon whom he could rely were his brother Jean Cavelier; Cavelier’s son, who was little more than a schoolboy; La Salle’s hot-headed and objectionable nephew Moranget; two friars, Zenobe Membré and Anastase Douay; the son of a Parisian friend’s gardener, Henri Joutel; plus the Marquis de Sablonnière, a feeble artistocrat who was already beginning to show signs of the venereal diseases he had contracted in Haiti. They were in unfamiliar country, surrounded by hostile Indians – one of the first things La Salle built was a punishment cell for men who fell asleep on watch – with little food other than the buffalo they shot on the prairies that should not have been there and the fish they speared in the river that wasn’t the Mississippi. Their nearest source of fuel was six miles away. Within the first week two men deserted and a volunteer was bitten in the foot by a snake. He lingered until Easter Sunday when he died following the amputation of his leg. The master carpenter went hunting and never returned. Their crops were hit by drought. By autumn another 30 people had died of the fever they had caught in Haiti.

  La Salle sent the Belle to find the Mississippi, but it returned without success. In November, therefore, he put Joutel in charge of the fort – like almost everything he discovered or built, La Salle named it St Louis – and took 30 men and the Belle in search of what Joutel now called ‘the fatal river’. He and 15 others returned in March, the Belle having sunk and the rest of the men having either deserted or been killed by Indians. He led a second expedition in April, this time with a team of 20. On 22 October he brought eight of them back: four had deserted, one had been eaten by an alligator and the others had got lost along the way. On 7 January 1687, after a prolonged bout of fever, he went out again. Previously, he had left Fort St Louis on the understanding that he would return with news of the Mississippi, but this time he was leaving for good, taking every able-bodied man with him. Fort St Louis, manned by a rump of 20 settlers – mostly women and children – was left in the hands of Friar Membré and the Marquis de Sablonnière, now so crippled by disease that he could not walk. La Salle gave them stores and ammunition and told them they were on their own: if he reached the Illinois they could expect a French rescue ship in two years. Until then they would have to fend for themselves.

  By March 1687 La Salle was no nearer the Mississippi than he had been on his previous journey, and the party had become separated. While he trudged forward with his relatives, his Indian servants, plus Joutel and the two friars, five men lagged behind to shoot buffalo. Their leader, a gentleman volunteer named Duhaut, was becoming tired of La Salle’s personality and his methods. He had a financial grudge, too, having invested heavily in the expedition. When La Salle sent two Indian servants, accompanied by his nephew Moranget, to hurry them along, Duhaut took umbrage. Moranget was no less objectionable than his uncle, and while the three men slept Duhaut ordered them to be killed. The lot fell to one Liotot (conveniently a surgeon), who crushed their heads with an axe. The Indians died at once, but Moranget ‘started spasmodically into a sitting position, gasping and unable to speak’. Duhaut ordered another man to finish him off. After a few days La Salle rode back to see what had happened to Moranget. Duhaut shot him in the head, shouting, ‘There you go, great Pasha, there you go!’

  The shock was so great that Duhaut slid easily into the role of expedition commander. Even Joutel, one of La Salle’s most capable and trustworthy employees, thought it prudent to obey his orders. ‘We were all of us oblig’d to stifle our Resentment, that it might not appear,’ he wrote, ‘for our Lives depended on it.’ Yet Duhaut had no real idea what he wanted to do. He suggested now that they go back to Fort St Louis, now that they continue looking for the Mississippi, looking constantly to Joutel for guidance. In the end, they went north.

  As they proceeded towards the Mississippi they were reminded constantly of La Salle’s heavy-handedness. From every Indian tribe they met there emerged a man – sometimes two – who had deserted from one or other of La Salle’s expeditions. Naked, long-haired and tattooed, they had taken Indian wives and in some cases had forgotten how to speak French. They all showed a marked reluctance to identify themselves, and did so only when assured that La Salle was dead. By May the group had still not found the Mississippi and the mutineers were in disarray. Duhaut suggested they turn back for Fort St Louis, then after they had gone a few miles changed his mind and said they should carry on to the Mississippi. At this, one of his fellow conspirators, ‘English Jem’ Hiens, became angry. After a brief quarrel over how to divide the remaining trade goods, Hiens shot Duhaut. Then, as Liotot was to hand, he shot him as well.

  ‘These Murders committed before us, put me into a terrible Consternation,’ Joutel wrote, ‘for believing the same was design’d for me, I laid hold of my Fire-Lock to defend my self.’ Hiens, however, assured him that he and the others would be safe, and that he had merely been avenging the death of La Salle. Timidly, Joutel suggested they continue the journey north. Hiens merely laughed, saying ‘that for his own Part, he would not hazard his Life to return into France, only to have his Head chopp’d off’. Magnanimously, however, he gave Joutel a fair share of the trade goods, in return for a document written in Latin by Jean Cavelier that exonerated him from any part in La Salle’s murder – ‘which was given him, because there was no refusing of it’. Then, in early June 1688, the Mississippi party departed. Two of the group decided to stay with the Indians, leaving only seven men – Joutel, Jean Cavelier and his son, Father Douay, and three others named Bartholomew, De Marle and Teissier – plus three Indian guides and six horses. ‘A very small Number for so great an Enterprize,’ Joutel wrote, ‘but we put ourselves entirely into the Hands of Divine Providence, confiding in God’s Mercy, which did not forsake us.’

  For the first week or so it rained without cease, and the ground turned into a quagmire – ‘which very much fatigued us, because we were oblig’d to unload our Horses for them to pass, and prevent their sticking in the Mire and fat Soil, whence we could not have drawn them out, and consequently we were fain to carry all our Luggage on our own Backs’. On 23 June De Marle drowned. They went on, following a ‘pleasant and navigable’ river that they hoped was the Mississippi, marvelling all the while at the Indians’ hospitality and friendliness. In late July they came over a hill and saw a large cross beside a building that had clearly been built by Europeans. It contained two men, the remainder of a six-strong party that Tonty had sent from Starved Rock to rescue La Salle.

  ‘It is hard to express the Joy conceiv’d on both Sides,’ Joutel wrote. ‘Ours was unspeakable ... [but] the Account we gave them of Monsr. La Sale’s unfortunate Death was so afflicting, that it drew Tears from them, and the dismal History of his Troubles and Disasters render’d them almost inconsolable.’ Whether they cried for La Salle is debatable. More likely they were concerned for their own fortunes: should the Indians learn that the founder of the colony was dead it might be difficult ‘to keep them still in Awe and under Submission’. It was agreed, therefore, to say nothing of the matter, but to get Joutel and the survivors to France as swiftly as possible ‘to give an Account at Court of what had happen’d, and to procure Succours’. They were wise to maintain the prete
nce that La Salle was still alive, for at every stop the Indians asked nervously after him. The Iroquois were on the rampage, and although Tonty was currently fighting them he did not command the same prestige as La Salle. Even when they reached Starved Rock on 14 September they did not reveal the truth. Choosing their words carefully, they said La Salle had left them halfway into the journey and that the last time Joutel and Jean Cavelier had spoken to him he was in good health – none of which was strictly untrue. The news was received with jubilation. But as the Indians and French settlers fired their muskets into the air, Joutel wrote that ‘[it] refresh’d our Sorrow for his misfortune; perceiving that his Presence would have settled all Things advantageously’. Their one satisfaction was that a Jesuit priest who had been sent by La Barre to keep an eye on the colony’s spiritual health became extremely nervous at the prospect of La Salle’s return. Although sick, the man was so frightened that he left shortly afterwards. When Tonty returned in October Jean Cavelier drew a quantity of furs in his dead brother’s name and, accompanied Joutel and the rest, used them to pay their way to Quebec. For a short while they hid in the town’s seminaries to avoid detection, then scurried aboard a ship in August 1688. They arrived two months later in France.

  Their story was greeted with indifference. The king issued a slightly pointless edict that La Salle’s murderers were to be arrested if they set foot in Nouvelle France. (By this time Hiens had been shot by one of the Indianized deserters.) Jean Cavelier continued defiantly to pretend that his brother was still alive until he had secured the property that would otherwise have been seized by his creditors. The only person who seemed to care about La Salle was Tonty who, still under the illusion that he was somewhere in the interior, left Starved Rock in late 1688 to find him. For two years he ranged unsuccessfully through the territory where Jean Cavelier and Joutel had suggested they last saw their leader. Most of his party deserted in the early stages, leaving him with just one Frenchman and one Indian. The three explorers tramped west and south, and although they explored large sections of modern Arkansas they found no sign of La Salle. They returned to Starved Rock in September 1690, after a fatiguing passage through 150 miles of Mississippi floodwater.

  There remained only the settlers at Fort St Louis on the Gulf of Mexico. Ever since La Salle’s ketch had been captured, and its crew interrogated, the Spanish had searched for his other ships. They found the wrecks of the Aimable and Belle, discovered too some of La Salle’s deserters; but Fort St Louis eluded them. In April 1689, however, a captain named Alonzo de Leon stumbled across it. His men blew trumpets to announce their presence, but there was no reply. De Leon rode on horseback through the gates. Nobody met him: ‘Doors were torn from their hinges; broken boxes, staved barrels, and rusty kettles, mingled with a great number of stocks of arquebuses and muskets, were scattered about in confusion.’ Everything was a mess. More than 200 books were trampled into the mud – ‘many of which still retained the traces of costly bindings’. There was no sign of the inhabitants, but Leon discovered three skeletons, one of which, still wearing the remains of a dress, belonged to a woman. He could extract no information from the local Indians, but eventually two of La Salle’s deserters (one of whom, a man named L’Archevêque, had been part of the murder conspiracy) emerged from the bush and, having secured a promise of clemency, told how three months earlier the settlers had first been hit by smallpox and then attacked by a tribe of warlike Indians. Everyone had been killed except an Italian, a Frenchman and a group of five children, who had been taken captive. They themselves had buried 14 of the bodies. De Leon managed to retrieve all the prisoners, save for the Frenchman, whose fate was never ascertained. Reneging on his promise, he sent the two deserters to Spain, where they were imprisoned along with the Italian, whose only crime was his nationality. The youngest children – two boys and a girl – were also taken back to Spain, but the two oldest spent seven years in the Spanish navy before being captured by a French ship and taken to the family of their dead father. De Leon then razed Fort St Louis so comprehensively that it was more than 300 years before archaeologists located its site.

  The enigmatic, iron-handed Tonty later helped secure possession of Louisiana, before dying of yellow fever in 1704. For some 50 years it looked as if France might yet fulfil its imperial ambitions in North America, but in the second half of the 18th century the territory became a colonial football, passing now to Spain, now to England and then back to Spain before reverting to France in 1800. Three years later Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the United States, bringing to an end a dream that might have changed the face, and the language, of modern America.

  PART 2

  THE AGE OF INQUIRY

  THE AGE OF INQUIRY

  ‘Dare to know!’ These words, written by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, encapsulated the spirit of the 18th century, a period of such unprecedented intellectual upheaval that it became known as the Enlightenment. Rejecting the preconceptions under which they laboured, scholars strove to explain the nature of the world – and in explaining it to alter it for the better. (Both the French and American revolutions were a product of Enlightenment thinking.) Science, which had been largely subservient to religion, took on a life of its own, and by 1750 every European nation boasted at least one learned body dedicated exclusively to the pursuit of knowledge. These societies, of which the French Academy of Sciences was one of the earliest and most influential, were haunted in equal measure by wise men, quacks, eccentrics and aristocratic amateurs. Ludicrous theories were floated, to be met by equally far-fetched counterproposals. On occasion tempers ran so high that academicians settled their disputes not by debate but by duel. Amidst the arguments, however, all parties accepted one obvious truth: to understand properly the world’s workings, they had first to learn more about its undiscovered regions.

  Unlike their predecessors, who had performed the rudimentary task of finding what was out there (and then, if it contained gold, silver or spices, conquering it), Enlightenment explorers were driven by a spirit of scientific inquiry. Evangelism, which had played such an important part in Renaissance discovery, was replaced by empirical fervour. They sought to investigate the unknown, to place it in context and, if necessary, to redefine that context: Leibniz, for example, having read travellers’ journals, suggested China send missionaries to civilize Europe. The old anxieties of wealth and trade were never far away, as witnessed by the ongoing search for a short-cut to the Far East, but science, in some form or other, underpinned most expeditions. The leaders’ instructions were specific: in exploring the globe they were to take meteorological, astronomical, magnetic and gravitational observations; they were to study the geological composition of the lands they visited, to chart their coastlines and to investigate the nature of the populations they contained.

  So blurred were the boundaries between art, science and literature that few explorers considered themselves scientists. Indeed, many branches of science did not even have a name, falling under the catch-all description of ‘natural philosophy’, a term that captured admirably the Enlightenment desire to compress man and his surroundings into a seamless construct. Some people could be slotted into a recognizable category: the horde of adventurers, mostly French, who struggled over the globe, from India to Hudson Bay, in order to record the 1769 transit of Venus, were clearly astronomers; men like Jean de Luc and Horace de Saussure who investigated the Alps were geologists; Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who travelled to South America, were everything from zoologists to marine biologists; Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who made his name in the Pacific, was a botanist. But at the time, if you had asked them what they were, they would probably have replied that they were natural philosophers.

  Perhaps the most versatile natural philosopher was Britain’s Sir Joseph Banks. Wealthy, well-connected and adventurous, he circumnavigated the globe between 1768 and 1771 with the century’s outstanding explorer, Captain James Cook, botanized South America, Australia and New Zealand, an
d collected such a wealth of information that, two centuries later, his findings were still being examined. On his return, he founded the African Association, whose declared aim was to unravel the mysteries of the dark continent – and, unscientifically, to seize its gold-bearing territories. His home, 21 Soho Square, London, was for several decades the most exciting place to be for anyone interested in discovery. He sponsored several expeditions, both to Africa and to the Arctic. None of them were particularly successful, with the exception of that led by Mungo Park in 1805 to discover the River Niger – even then, Park and his entire party perished – but Banks did not seem to mind. Cheerfully, casually even, he let matters take their course. He was observant to the end: shortly before his death in 1820 he passed a kidney stone that, he remarked, bore an uncanny resemblance to a piece of coral he had encountered in the Pacific.