London, April to September 1822
IN NEW YORK, I boarded a packet boat bound for Albany, a city situated far up the Hudson River. The company was numerous. Toward evening on the first day, we were served a collation of fruits and milk; the women sat on benches on the upper deck, the men on the boards at their feet. Conversation was not long maintained. At the sight of a beautiful natural tableau, we fall involuntarily into silence. All of a sudden, someone cried out, “Over there is the spot where Asgill was captured!” A Quaker girl from Philadelphia was implored to sing the ballad called “Asgill.”[2] We were sailing between mountains, and the passenger’s voice faded over the water, then rang out when we skimmed nearer the shore. The sad fate of a young soldier, a lover, a poet, and a worthy man, honored by Washington’s interest and the generous intervention of a doomed queen, lent added charm to the romantic scene. The friend whom I have lost, M. de Fontanes, let fall a few courageous words in memory of Asgill when Bonaparte was poised to ascend the throne upon which Marie Antoinette once sat. The American officers seemed touched by the Pennsylvanian girl’s song. The memory of their country’s past troubles made them more sensitive to the present moment’s calm. With great emotion, they contemplated those places which had only recently been burdened with troops, resounding with the noise of warfare, and which now were buried in profoundest peace: those places gilded by the last fires of daylight, animated by the whistling of cardinals, the cooing of blue wood pigeons, and the song of the mockingbirds, whose inhabitants, resting their elbows on fences fringed with begonias, watched as our boat passed by below them.
On arriving in Albany, I went in search of a Mr. Swift, to whom I had been given a letter of introduction. This Mr. Swift traded furs with the Indian tribes enclaved in the territory that England had ceded to the United States: for the civilized powers, republican and monarchic alike, divide land among themselves that does not belong to them. After hearing me out, Mr. Swift raised some very reasonable objections. He told me that I could not undertake a voyage of this magnitude straightaway, alone, with no assistance or letters of recommendation addressed to the English, American, and Spanish outposts through which I would have to pass. He said that if I was lucky enough to traverse so many solitudes, I would arrive in icy regions where I would die of cold and hunger. He advised me to begin by acclimating myself, urged me to learn the languages of the Sioux, the Iroquois, and the Eskimo, and to try living among the fur-trappers and the agents of the Hudson Bay Company. With this preliminary experience under my belt, I might then, in four or five years, with the aid of the French government, proceed on my hazardous mission.
This advice, which deep down I recognized as reasonable, rubbed me the wrong way. Yet if I’d really believed in myself, I should have departed for the North Pole at once, as one sets off from Paris for Pontoise. Instead I hid my displeasure from Mr. Swift. I asked him to hire me a guide and some horses to take me to Niagara and Pittsburgh. From Pittsburgh, I would travel down the Ohio and gather useful notions for my future expeditions. I still had it in my head to follow my earlier plan.
Mr. Swift hired a Dutchman for me who spoke several Indian dialects, and I bought a pair of horses and left Albany.
The whole stretch of country between the city of Albany and Niagara Falls today is cleared and inhabited; the New York canal crosses it;[3] but at that time a large part of this country was wilderness.
When I had crossed the Mohawk and entered a forest where no tree had ever been felled, I was seized by a sort of drunken fit of independence. I went from tree to tree, to the left, to the right, saying to myself, “Here, there are no more paths, no more cities, no more monarchies, no more republics, no more presidents, no more kings, no more men!” And, to test whether I was really reestablished in my original rights, I gave myself over to acts of buffoonery that infuriated my guide, who, in his heart of hearts, must have thought me mad.
Alas! I imagined myself alone in that forest where I held my head so high, when, all of a sudden, I nearly rammed my nose against a lean-to shack. Under this lean-to, I set my flabbergasted eyes on the first savages that I ever saw in my life. There were about twenty of them, as many men as women, their half-naked bodies painted up like sorcerers, their ears slit, crow feathers on their heads, and rings pierced through their nostrils. A little Frenchman, with hair powdered and curled, wearing an apple-green coat, a drugget vest, and a muslin jabot, was scraping a pocket fiddle and making these Iroquois dance to “Madelon Friquet.” M. Violet (for this was his name) was a dancing instructor among the savages. He was paid for his lessons with beaver skins and bear meat. He had been a scullion in the service of General Rochambeau during the American war. Staying on in New York after our army had departed, he resolved to instruct the Americans in the fine arts. His successes widened his purview, and soon this new Orpheus was carrying civilization all the way to the New World’s savage hordes. Speaking to me of the Indians, he always said, “These savage ladies and gentlemen.” He was very proud of the sprightliness of his students, and indeed I have never seen such gamboling. M. Violet, holding his little violin between his chin and his chest, tuned the fatal instrument, then cried out to the Iroquois: À vos places! And the whole troupe started jumping like a band of demons.
Was it not a devastating thing for a disciple of Rousseau, to be introduced to savage life by a forest ball organized for the Iroquois by a former scullion in the army of General Rochambeau? I wanted very much to laugh, but I felt cruelly humiliated.