14

starvation and scurvy

The Spice Islands, August–September 1768

The heavens opened in one last effort to drown these unwelcome visitors, or at least to wash away their sins. Caught between the north-west and the south-east monsoons, it rains heavily in New Guinea year round, even in the dry season – from 2 to 4 metres, reaching a monstrous 8 metres on some of the clouded mountain tops.

Eventually, towards the end of July, a calm, clear day dawned. Bougainville ordered the tents packed and they departed from this ‘wet and unpleasant hole’. He kept the crew busy as they drifted on light breezes away from the shore. The tents were sewn into trousers, for they were not just running short of food, but clothes as well. He could hardly leave his own men as naked and exposed as the locals in all their ‘their enormous and pendulous nudity’.

The two ships sailed along the north coast in the stoic hope of reaching their destination before anyone died. The signs of scurvy returned. The sailors were weakened and irritable, their bones ached, their gums bled and their skin bruised red and black.

I am wondering about Jeanne’s health. I have read so much about Commerson’s and the crew’s but, apart from her initial seasickness and Vivez’s vague insinuations in South America, there is no record of Jeanne having been ill. She must have had a strong constitution. But they were all on the same rations on the ship, so everyone must have suffered from the same nutritional deficiencies.

‘What food, Good Lord, is our lot!’ declared Bougainville. ‘Rotting bread and small quantities of it and meat the smell of which the most intrepid cannot bear when the salt is removed. In any other circumstances our salted provisions would be thrown overboard.’

Small chance Jeanne could fall pregnant under such conditions. Scurvy is not conducive to fertility. Malnourished and weak, it was unlikely that Jeanne was even fertile towards the end of the journey. In any case, Commerson was a doctor. Both contraception and abortion were so widespread in eighteenth-century France that there was a notable decline in the birth rate in the second half, even if Jean-Pierre Barret’s birth in Paris suggests that the former was not always reliable.

All things considered, I am not surprised that Jeanne did not fall pregnant on this voyage. She did not have any children later in life either, despite still being relatively young on her return to France. Ongoing health issues caused by the hardship of a life at sea were common among sailors. Perhaps this was Jeanne’s fate as well.

Even the locals did not seem to want to come close to the ships. As they sailed to the north of New Guinea, they saw no-one.

‘There have been many arguments about where Hell is situated,’ Bougainville said. ‘Truly we have found it.’

By September, they had reached the Moluccan islands controlled by the Dutch. Bougainville began to recognise landmarks from his charts, was able to identify bays and mountains and predict settlements. They finally knew where they were and the waters were familiar, even to those who had never been there before. The prospect of resupply and fresh food awaited.

They anchored at a small Dutch posting on the island of Buru and were greeted by two unarmed men, one of whom spoke French. When asked what brought them here, Bougainville replied tersely, ‘Hunger.’

The Resident, Hendrik Ouman, sent word to invite the officers to dine with him. When presented with supper they could not help but devour every scrap of it. Their joy at eating fresh meat was indescribable. It felt like the best meal they had ever eaten.

The Resident and his traditionally dressed Ambon wife were kind and generous beyond measure. He hospitably opened his beautiful Eastern home to his unexpected, and somewhat unwelcome, guests. Dutch regulations explicitly forbade foreign visitors. But humanitarian principles overrode that concern – and the fact that the French ships were considerably better armed than the small settlement. They brought Ahutoru ashore, who behaved with all the dignity and decorum one might expect from a Tahitian prince.

It did not take Bougainville long to procure the refreshments they needed to restore the health of the crew. Price was no object. Loaded with rice, dried venison, fish and a few cattle, the ships were restored to some semblance of normality. The sick were sent ashore to revive in the good air and they began to recover from their scurvy, having nothing to do but walk in the attractive countryside and relax.

I don’t know if Jeanne accompanied Commerson ashore, where she slept or how she dressed. I expect that she was still dressing as a man, and that she was still assisting Commerson with his work. Commerson’s leg wound had reopened in Tahiti and he continued to suffer from it for the next two or three months. He would have needed Jeanne’s assistance and was not likely to have received it from anyone else. She may also have felt safer keeping close company and continuing to work and behave as she had before.

The native wildlife was spectacular – birds of wild and ornate plumage, highly collectable shells, cockatoos, a strange wild cat that carried its young in a pouch, a huge bat, and snakes so big they could eat sheep while others flung themselves from trees onto those passing beneath. And then there were the enormous crocodiles that infested the riverbanks and indiscriminately hunted both man and beast.

In the online herbarium collections of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, it is easy to find the plants that Jeanne and Commerson collected from here. The keywords of ‘Commerson’ and ‘Bouru’ or ‘Indonesia’ swiftly bring to view the beautiful pink dendrobium orchids, black pepper vine, cannas and lilies. Some were collected from the woods, but the lily was from the governor’s garden. I don’t think they ventured far – it is a fairly minimal collection from a country full of botanical beauties, oddities and treasures.

They also collected birds, including a spectacular rainbow bee-eater and kingfisher. But some birds are anomalous. Not all of them should have been here. Commerson’s collection also includes a southern cassowary, not found in the areas they visited, and birds from the Philippines. It is possible Commerson obtained these later, by trade in Java, or in Mauritius from his colleagues Pierre Poivre and Pierre Sonnerat, who had been to the Philippines.

In Commerson’s scrawled notes on birds, there is also a description of Psittacula brevicauda, which literally means a short-tailed parakeet. Commerson’s handwriting is too hard for me to transcribe and translate from Latin, but he mentions green a few times, as well as red, yellow and black. A colourful parrot with a short tail then. I cannot tell which of the twelve parrots found on Buru this description might refer to. But in the margin Commerson has written, ‘le perruche de Baret de Bouru, Septembre 1768’. He wasn’t naming it after Jeanne but perhaps he was noting that she caught it? I don’t know, but it is one of the few times Commerson ever wrote Jeanne’s name.

I had reached the end of my voyaging at Madang in New Guinea. It was my only ocean crossing and my last time living aboard Caliph. I flew back to Australia to continue my studies while Dad sailed the boat back some time later.

We had already stopped living on the boat by the time we reached north Queensland. My Siamese cat, my constant companion since I was four years old, who had bested dogs, snakes and sharks, been lost overboard, chased by a shark, abducted, left behind in port and yet followed us everywhere by car, boat or on foot, retired comfortably into a terrestrial old age, while I headed off to study at university on the other side of the country.

It had taken us four years to build the boat, a year to refine it, and three years to travel from South Australia to the far north. It was neither a long journey nor a particularly adventurous one, but it was rich in memories and experience. It left me with a passion for wilderness, for the diversity of the Australian landscape, and an unquenchable thirst to test the assumptions behind the stories we tell and the history we think we know. Not all voyages end just because you step ashore.

They would have liked to have stayed in Buru for longer. But the end of the eastern monsoon was approaching and with it, contrary winds and currents. No matter how good the food, they had to leave, and quickly. The English, in any case, were up to something. Their activity was everywhere. A ship conducting a world tour had left just eight days before their arrival. The Dutch would not maintain their monopoly on this spice trade for long, it seemed.

They navigated the shoals and shallows of the Macassan Straits with more ease than the Dutch claimed possible. There were plenty of locals keen to sell them food, no doubt at a premium but still cheaper than from the Dutch, and both ships were soon full to the gunwales with fruit and fowl, as well as a prodigious quantity of cockatoos and parrots with the most beautiful plumage. With all the fresh food, their scurvy abated, but they knew, even as they approached Batavia (now known as Jakarta) on the north coast of west Java, that it was the start of the notorious fever season.

The city was a wonder, simultaneously exotic and cultured. How could they tire of the wondrous feasts, the exceptional company, the Chinese concerts and comedies, the charming walks, the conspicuous wealth and luxury, the monuments and grand mansions and gardens of the city, so fine that they rivalled even Paris? The officers and passengers, and presumably their servants with them, stayed in a hotel in the city and hired several coaches to take them wherever they needed to go. While Bougainville and his officers made all the required courtesy visits, Commerson and Jeanne attended to their collections, which swelled here. Whether they travelled to the outskirts of the city to collect for themselves, or simply traded specimens with other interested naturalists, is impossible to tell. Batavia was a centre for all trade in the region – including natural history and conchology.

Even so, I am unlikely to have much luck finding any shells that Jeanne collected here. The Portuguese, the Spanish and the Dutch had been bringing Pacific shells back to Europe for decades, and the shells from this region were already well known in Europe. The Dutch apothecary and collector Albertus Seba published a pictorial inventory of his natural history collection between 1734 and 1765. It was an impressively cosmopolitan collection, including a great many species from the southern and Pacific hemispheres. The book contains one of the earliest depictions of a marsupial ‘opossum’ and a fine illustration of a sulfur-crested cockatoo. It covers a full taxonomic spread, as well as occasional fantasy animals, bottled foetuses, two-headed creatures and minerals. And among the many plates of shells are species from the Indo-Pacific. There are no fewer than seven plates illustrating cones – around 230 or more than a quarter of known conid species. Not bad for a collection of shells from the other side of the world in the early 1700s. I increasingly feel that in hoping to find Jeanne’s shell collection, I am chasing a mirage.

The city was insufferably hot. The canals created an unwholesome humidity and the drinking water was so bad that the wealthy Batavians would drink only imported Seltzer water. And there was something about the extreme privilege and pretension, and the harsh duress under which the general population lived, not to mention the slaves, that made even the French uncomfortable.

‘We had scarce been above eight or ten days at Batavia, when the diseases began to make their appearance,’ said Bougainville, hastening his plans for departure. Ahutoru fell gravely ill here, swiftly falling into docile submission from the excitement with which he had greeted everything new and wondrous. He recovered under careful medical care, but thereafter referred to Java as enoua maté – the land that kills. Two of his countrymen who later sailed with Cook on the Endeavour died here.

Compared to other long-distance expeditions struggling against tropical fevers and scurvy, Bougainville did remarkably well. He knew the importance of fresh food and good shipboard hygiene. He understood the risks of bad water, poor food and diseased locations. He prioritised the health of his crew and adjusted his voyage to minimise those risks and prevent deaths. He lost only seven lives out of well over 340 men on the journey – just 3 per cent. It was an excellent achievement at a time when earlier long voyages had lost up to half of their crew to scurvy and other illnesses. Bougainville lost fewer men than the contemporary expeditions of Byron or Wallis and far fewer than Cook, who lost more than 30 men – one-third of his crew – to dysentery and typhoid on his first voyage in the Endeavour, which left shortly before Bougainville’s return.

Everyone must surely have been tiring of their journey by this time, including Jeanne. The revelations about her identity would almost certainly have changed the way people behaved towards her. I suspect she lost something of the freedom she had enjoyed when she first embarked on her journey, the freedom many women report when they take up a male persona: the freedom to be appraised as an individual, rather than either as an object of sexual desire or an object of no importance whatsoever. Commerson may not have cared who people were, a servant or an aristocrat, a slave or a savant, provided they were intelligent and had an interest in natural history. He may not have particularly cared if Jeanne was a woman or not, but it is certain that most other men did. Even if they sometimes forgot, and reverted to treating her as they had for so many months on the journey as a man, there would have been times when they remembered, and their expressions would have changed, their friendship or tolerance been withdrawn and replaced with either a new reserve or an entirely unwanted interest.

Bougainville’s haste to leave was well judged. Without waiting even to load further livestock they left in mid-October, having by and large completed their mission’s objectives, and headed for French territory in the Indian Ocean, the distant speck of Mauritius, then known as Île de France.

In these familiar waters, the Boudeuse dispensed with keeping pace with the Étoile and promptly disappeared over the horizon. They were on the home strait.

There is nothing to do on a long sea voyage. In the steady winds, the sails set so still and unmoving that you sometimes have to tap them to check that they have not turned to stone. You walk the deck to relieve the boredom but before you know it you are back where you started. Nothing has changed. The sea still circles in a never-ending circumference as if you are making no progress at all.

You stand at the heads to watch the bow wave surging beneath your feet. Or stand at the stern and watch the ship’s wake foaming with glowing phosphorescence into the far distance. It gives some sense of movement. You can’t help but think about what would happen if you tripped and tumbled into the watery depths. If anyone would even notice if you were gone. If the ship would just sail on without you until there was nothing at all but you and the sea and the sky all around, all the way to the heavens and all the way to the darkest depths.

Imagine that first shock, the gasp of breath, the lungful of water, the strangled struggle to breath, to float. Control the panic, still the flailing arms and legs, chain them into dutiful strokes, calm the wheezing gulps of air. You are afloat and you can breathe. The water is the same temperature as your blood. You can barely tell it’s there – that there is a difference between air and water.

Imagine sinking. This is a fantasy – you don’t need to breathe. Let the water rise up over your mouth, over your eyes. Relax. Let the water fill your lungs like oxygen-rich amniotic fluid. They’ve done this before. They’ll remember what to do.

You are sinking slowly through the euphotic zone, the sunlit region of the upper oceans. Here the water sparkles with phytoplankton and marine plants charging themselves on the solar power of the sun. The water is clear, mid-ocean, free from the turbulence and debris of the coastal fringes. The sun’s rays reach deep, more than 200 metres, before they become too weak for photosynthesis.

Beyond this lies the twilight zone – the bathyal layer, where light still filters dimly but photosynthesis is no longer possible – and then the deep-sea zone where no light reaches at all. This is the cemetery of the ocean, where the life of the surface sinks to its end. Despite the darkness, the lack of plants, life thrives. The detrivores rule, feasting on the bounty that falls from above. But there are other sources of energy here too. In the cracks on the ocean floor, along the Pacific, Southeast Indian and Central Indian Ridges, deep-sea hydrothermal vents spurt geysers of heated water into the frigid depths, crystallising minerals into smoking spires and chimneys. Chemotrophic bacteria feast on hydrogen sulfide and methane expelled from beneath the rock, while 2-metre-long tubeworms provide forests for tiny fish, crabs, shrimps, sea snails, mussels and limpets. It is an inconceivable world filled with unimaginable creatures.

What is it about the sea that inspires such dread imaginings, such a sense of loss and irrelevance, of floating in empty space? Perhaps is it that we are drawn to the earth, that we are terrestrial, not oceanic, pelagic, demersal or aerial? Our two feet long to be planted firmly on the ground. Gravity pulls us down, even against the pressure of the water, against the dark horrors of the depths, the water in our lungs and the cemetery of skeletons and zombie worms that await in Davy Jones’s locker. An alien world in which shallow-lunged air-breathers like us have no place.

But we are nothing if not explorers. No alien world has been forbidden. We are never content to stay home where we belong. We streamed north out of the cradle of Africa not once, but multiple times, waves of human emigration like a tide rising on a beach, each successive wave outreaching the last until eventually we had spread throughout Europe, across Asia and down into Australia. But still the waves of people kept coming, diluting, intermingling, changing and adapting. Sea levels changed, land bridges disappeared, populations were isolated. The ice retreated, the seas fell, and the Bering land bridge opened the floodgates into the Americas, the human flow cascading down the continent to reach the tip of Tierra del Fuego at least 12,000 years ago.

Neither frozen wastes nor searing deserts deter us: no jungle is thick enough to withstand penetration; our trail is blazed with the bodies of our explorers and those who stood in their way. No continent remains untrodden. Our footprints dent the lunar landscape and our trails of rubbish spiral out in a dirty orbit from our planet, matching the spirals of rubbish that circle and collect at the heart of the Pacific, as even more of our refuse drifts, unheeded and unnoticed, into the depths below.

It is hard to predict the value, or even the consequences, of a discovery. Who can predict the lives saved from antibiotics from the fungus growing in a lab during a break? It takes a special kind of mind to foresee microwave ovens from a chocolate bar melting near a magnetron. Or Velcro while picking burrs from your socks. Or frequency-hopping torpedos and wi-fi from player pianos.

Of what value is a voyage of discovery through the Pacific? Perhaps it should be measured by the new lands it finds, the coastlines it charts, the colonies it founds, the territory it claims, the species it identifies, the collections it brings back or the riches it steals. Or should it be measured by the cost, the diseases spread, the species introduced, the violence done and the cultures destroyed?

‘It is easy, no doubt, to exclaim,’ Commerson wrote to his brother-in-law, ‘as is already done on all sides, that the journey is beautiful! That it brings glory! But who can imagine its cost? A thousand pitfalls faced by night as by day, the foulest and most revolting food, the dogs, the rats, the leathers of our ships prepared by the hand of famine which pursued us for several months; scurvy, dysentery, putrid fevers carrying off the best of our troop, and, sadder still, a state of distrust and internal warfare pitting us against each other. These are the shadows of this grand and beautiful history.’

Saint-Germain, the clerk, was more succinct.

‘Of what use is this voyage to the nation?’ he queried peevishly.