London, April to September 1822
Fac pelagus me scire probes, quo carbasa laxo.[12]
SO SAID my countryman, Guillaume le Breton, some six hundred years ago. Restored to the sea, I began to contemplate its vast solitudes again; but across the ideal world of my daydreams, like stern monitors, loomed the realities of France and its troubles. My refuge during the day, when I wanted to escape the other passengers, was the roundtop of the main mast: I used to climb up limberly, to the applause of the sailors, and take my seat there, high above the waves.
Space stretched out before me in its double azure, as though it were a canvas ready to receive the future creations of a great painter. The color of the water was like liquid glass. In the gullies that opened between its long, steep undulations, one caught glimpses of the desert that we call the Ocean: those wobbling landscapes made clear to me what the scriptures mean when they say that the earth reels like a drunken man before the Lord.[13] At times, one would have said that space was narrow and limited, for there was no vanishing point; but if a wave happened to rear its head, the billow would curl in imitation of a distant coast, until a school of dogfish passed along the horizon and created a scale of measurement. The expanse was revealed all the more when the mist, spreading over the surface of the deep, appeared to increase its immensity.
Climbing down from the eyrie of the mast, as I had formerly climbed down from the nest I had made in my willow, reduced as always to a solitary existence, I would eat a ship’s biscuit and a bit of sugar with a lemon, and then go lie down, either on deck in my cloak or below deck in my bunk: I only had to stretch out my arms to reach from my bed to my coffin.
The wind forced us to bear north, and in a matter of days we were coasting along the banks of Newfoundland. Icebergs prowled in the cold pale mist.
Men of the trident have some games handed down to them by their ancestors: when you cross the Line, you must be “baptized.” The same ceremony takes place in the Tropics as on the banks of Newfoundland, and, whatever the locale, the leader of the masquerade is always “the Old Man of the Tropics.” Tropical and dropsical are synonymous to sailors: the Old Man of the Tropics therefore has an enormous paunch. Even under the tropical sun, he is outfitted in all the sheepskins and fur coats that the crew can find. He sits crouching on the maintop, bellowing from time to time like a wild animal. Everyone stares up at him. Then he starts climbing down the shrouds, heavy as a bear and staggering like Silenus. When he lands on deck, he roars some more, leaps, seizes a pail, fills it with water from the sea, and pours it over the head of anyone who has never crossed the Line or reached the icy latitude. You may flee below deck, leap onto the hatches, or shinny up the masts, but Old Man Tropic is always after you. It all ends with the sailors getting a large sum of drink money. Such are the games of Amphitrite, which Homer might have celebrated as he did Proteus, if old Oceanus had only been more fully charted in Ulysses’ time; but then no one had seen anything except his head, at the Pillars of Hercules: his hidden body covered the world.
We steered for the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, looking for a new port of call. When we came in sight of the former, one morning between ten and noon, we were almost on top of it. Its coast, in the shape of a dark lump, pierced the fog.
We dropped anchor before the island’s capital. We could not see it, but we could hear the sound of land. The passengers hurried to disembark. The Superior of the Sulpiciens, perpetually harried by seasickness, was so weak that he had to be carried to shore. I took a room apart, where I waited for a squall to tear through the fog and show me the place I inhabited and, so to speak, the face of my hosts in this country of shadows.
The port and anchorage of Saint-Pierre lie between the eastern coast of the island and an elongated islet called the Île aux Chiens. The port, known as the Barachois, runs deep into the land and terminates in a brackish swamp. A few barren crags are clustered together in the center of the island. Some of these, detached from the others, overhang the shoreline; others have a strip of leveled and peaty lands at their base. A watchtower atop one of these crags can be seen from town.
The Governor’s House stands across from the wharf. The church, the rectory, and the provisions shop stand in this same place; then come the houses belonging to the naval commissary and the harbor-master, beyond which, along the pebbles of the beach, runs the town’s only street.
I dined two or three times with the governor, an extremely hospitable and courteous officer; he was cultivating a few European vegetables on a glacis: after dinner, he showed me what he referred to as his garden.
A sweet and subtle scent of heliotrope was exhaled by a small patch of beans in flower; it was brought to us not by a breeze from home but by a wild Newfoundland wind with no relation to this exiled plant and with no sympathy of shared memory or pleasure. In this fragrance not breathed by beauty, not cleansed in her breast, not scattered in her footsteps, in this fragrance of another dawn, another culture, and another world, there was all the melancholy of regret, and absence, and youth.
Up from the garden, we climbed the slope until we stood at the base of the flagpole beside the watchtower. The new French flag floated above our heads, and, like the women in Virgil, we stared at the sea in tears;[14] it separated us from our native land! The Governor was anxious. He belonged to the defeated party, and besides, he was bored in this safe haven, well suited to a dreamer of my type, but merely a rude sojourn for a man interested in worldly affairs, or for anyone not carried along by that passion which suffuses everything and makes the rest of the world disappear. My host inquired about the Revolution, and I asked him for news of the Northwest Passage. He was on the front lines of the wilderness, but he knew nothing of Eskimos, and the only thing he had acquired from Canada were some partridges.
One morning, I went alone to the Cap-à-l’Aigle to watch the sun rise from the direction of France. There, a brumal stream had formed a cascade that with its last leap reached the sea. I sat down on a rocky ledge with my feet dangling over the water which frothed at the bottom of the cliff. A young fisher-girl appeared on the upper declivities of the crag. Her knees were bare despite the cold, and she walked barefoot in the dew. Her black hair came down in tufts from under the Indian kerchief she had wrapped around her head, and over this kerchief she wore a hat woven from local reeds and shaped like a cradle or a keel. A bouquet of purple heather peeked from between her breasts, which were outlined by the white fabric of her blouse. From time to time, she stooped to forage the leaves of an aromatic plant known on the island as “wild tea.” With one hand, she dropped these leaves into a basket that she held in the other. She caught sight of me, and came fearlessly to sit by my side, setting her basket beside her. Like me, she dangled her legs over the sea and calmly watched the rising sun.
We sat for a few minutes without speaking. At last, I was the more courageous and I said, “What are you gathering there? The season for bilberries and cranberries is over.”
She lifted her large dark eyes to me, timidly but with great dignity, and said, “I was gathering tea.” And she showed me her basket.
“You are taking the tea home to your father and mother?”
“My father is away fishing with Guillaumy.”
“What do you do on this island all winter?”
“Oh. We weave nets. We fish the ponds through holes in the ice. On Sundays, we go to Mass and vespers and sing hymns. And then we play games in the snow and watch the boys hunt polar bears.”
“Will your father be back soon?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “The captain is taking the ship to Genoa with Guillaumy.”
“But Guillaumy will come back?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Next season, when the fishermen return. He will bring me home a striped silk corset, a muslin petticoat, and an ebony necklace.”
“And you shall be decked out for the winds, the mountains, and the sea,” I said, musing. “Would you like it if I sent you a corset, a petticoat, and a necklace?”
“Oh, no!”
She got up, grabbed her basket, and hurried down a steep path along a forest of pines. She was singing a Mission hymn in a sonorous voice:
Tout brûlant d’une ardeur immortelle,
C’est vers Dieu que tendent mes désirs.[15]
On her way, she sent flying some of those lovely birds called egrets, because of the tufts on their heads: at that moment she looked as though she were one of their number. When she came to the sea, she hopped into her boat, unfurled the sail, and sat down at the rudder. One might have taken her for Fortune: she sailed away from me.
Oh, yes, oh, no, Guillaumy! The image of this young sailor up on the shrouds in the howling winds transformed that awful rock of Saint-Pierre into a land of delights: L’isole di Fortuna ora vedete.[16]
We spent fifteen days on the island. From its desolate shores, one looks across at the still more desolate shores of Newfoundland. The inland crags extend in diverging chains, the highest of which stretches northward toward Rodriguez Bay. In the valleys, granitic rock, mixed with red and greenish mica, is padded with mats of sphagnum, lichen, and dicranum.
Small lakes are fed by tributary streams: the Vigie, the Courval, the Pain de Sucre, the Kergariou, and the Tête Galante. These puddles are called the Ponds of the Savoyard, the Cap Noir, the Ravenel, the Colombier, and the Cap à l’Aigle. When the whirlwinds descend on these ponds, they split the shallowest waters and lay bare a few scattered stretches of underwater meadowland, which are soon hidden again beneath the newly woven veil of water.
The flora of Saint-Pierre is the same as that of Lapland and the Strait of Magellan: the variety of vegetable life diminishes toward the Pole. In Spitzbergen, there are fewer than forty species of phanerogamous plants. When they change their place, the plant races become extinct. Those that thrive on the frozen steppes of the north, in the south become the daughters of the mountains; those that thrive in the tranquil atmosphere of the thickest forests, decrease in height and vitality, and die on the stormy ocean shores. On Saint-Pierre, the marsh myrtle (vaccinium fuliginosum) is reduced to the state of a creeper; it is quickly buried beneath the wadding and padding of the mosses that serve as humus. Being a traveling plant myself, I have taken precautions to disappear on the seashore, where I was born.
The sloping crags of Saint-Pierre are overlain with balsam firs, medlars, dwarf palms, larches, and black firs whose buds are used to brew an antiscorbutic beer. None of these trees grows taller than a man. The ocean wind pollards them, shakes them, prostrates them like ferns, and then, gliding underneath this forest of shrubs, it raises them up again; but the wind finds no trunks, nor branches, nor vaults, nor echoes to respond to its howling, and it makes no more noise here than on a heath.
These rickety woods contrast with the tall woods of Newfoundland, on the neighboring shore, where the firs are overgrown with a silvery lichen (alectoria trichodes), as though polar bears, the strange creepers of these trees, had torn their fur against the branches. The swamps on this island explored by Jacques Cartier contain paths beaten by these bears that look like the rustic footpaths around a sheepfold. All night, the cries of hungry animals resound through the forest. The traveler is reassured only by the no less despondent sound of the sea, whose waves, so rough and unsociable, become his companions and friends.
The northernmost point of Newfoundland reaches the latitude of the Cape of Charles I in Labrador. A few degrees higher, the polar region begins. If we are to believe the accounts of travelers, these landscapes have their charm. In the evening, the sun, touching down upon the earth, seems to remain motionless, but then climbs into the sky again instead of dipping below the horizon. The mounts swathed in snow, the valleys carpeted in white moss on which the reindeer browse, the seas covered with whales and strewn with icebergs, and the whole scene agleam, as though illuminated simultaneously by the fires of the setting sun and the light of dawn, makes it impossible to know whether one is present at the creation or at the end of the world. A small bird, similar to the one that sings at night in our woods, makes his plaintive warbling heard, and love leads the Eskimo to the icy rocks where his companion awaits him. These human nuptials, at the farthest ends of the earth, are not without dignity or happiness.