London, April to September 1822
HAVING returned from the wilderness to Philadelphia, as I have already said, and having hastily written on the road “what I have just related,” like the old man in La Fontaine, I did not find the remittances waiting for me as I had expected.[8] This was the first of those pecuniary embarrassments in which I would be submerged for the rest of my life. Fortune and I took a dislike to each other at first sight. According to Herodotus, certain Indian ants gather heaps of gold; according to Athenaeus, the sun gave Hercules a vessel of gold to land on the island of Erytheia, the home of the Hesperides: although I am an ant, I do not have the honor of belonging to the mighty Indian family, and although I have been a sailor, I have never crossed the waters in anything but a vessel made of pine.[9] Such was the ship that carried me from America back to Europe. The captain gave me passage on credit. On December 10, 1791, I embarked in the company of several of my countrymen, who, for manifold reasons, were like me returning to France. The ship’s destination was Le Havre.
A gust of wind took us at the mouth of the Delaware and propelled us across the Atlantic in a mere seventeen days. Often we scudded under bare masts and bore off only with great effort. The sun did not show its face once. The ship, steered by dead reckoning, was swept along before the surge. I crossed the ocean under shadows; never had it seemed to me so sad. But I myself was sadder still: I was returning dismayed by the first step I had taken into life. “Palaces are not built on the sea,” says the Persian poet Farid ud-Din.[10] I felt an indescribable heaviness of heart, such as one feels at the approach of a great misfortune. I let my eyes wander over the waves, and asked them about my destiny, or I wrote, more disturbed by their motion than by their menace.
Far from calming, the tempest grew in fury the nearer we came to Europe; but it blew steadily, and the uniformity of its rage produced a sort of furious stillness in the livid sky and on the leaden sea. The captain, unable to sound the depths, became uneasy; he climbed the shrouds and looked through his spyglass at every point of the horizon. A lookout was stationed on the bowsprit, another on the maintop. The waves turned choppy; the sea changed color: these were signs of approaching land, but of what land? Breton sailors have a proverb: “Who sees Belle-Isle, sees his isle; who sees Groie, sees his joy; who sees Ouessant’s shore, is not long for this world.”
I had spent two nights pacing on the upper deck, while the waves hissed in the darkness, and the wind whistled in the rigging, and the sea leapt back and forth over the boards. All around us was a riot of waves. On the third night, weary from these jolts and jostlings, I went below early. The weather was horrible. My hammock swung and shuddered with each blow from the sea which, breaking on the ship, shook it from stem to stern. Soon, I heard loads of cordage falling on one part of the deck after another, and I experienced the reeling sensation one feels when a ship starts to tack. The hatchway to the ladder between boards was thrown open. A terrified voice called out—captain, captain! This voice, amid the darkness and the roaring tempest, was an ominous thing. I prick up my ears, and I seem to hear the sailors talking about the lie of the coast. I hurl myself down from my wobbly hammock, and at that moment a wave bursts into the forecastle, floods the captain’s cabin, overturning tables, beds, chests, and guns in a roiling mess. I climb to the deck half-drowned.
When I put my head out the hatchway, I was dumbfounded by a sublime spectacle. The ship had attempted to put about, but, failing the attempt, she had been embayed by the wind. Under the light of a sickle moon that emerged from the clouds only to be submerged in them again, I squinted through the thick yellow fog and spied, on either side of the ship, a coast bristling with rocks. The sea was blistered with waves like mountains that rolled all over the bay in which we found ourselves engulfed. Sometimes, these mountains sparkled with spume and spray; sometimes, they appeared oily and vitreous at the surface, marbled with black, coppery, or greenish stains, according to the color of the bottom over which they churned. For two or three minutes, the wailings of the abyss and the wind were blent; a moment later, we could hear the fast retreating currents, the hissing of the reefs, and the voice of the distant surge. Then, from the hold of the ship came sounds to set even the most intrepid sailor’s heart to pounding. The ship’s prow sliced the dense mass of waves with a dreadful heave, and torrents of water rushed in a maelstrom around the helm as though escaping from a floodgate. Beneath this uproar, nothing was more alarming than a certain dull murmuring sound, like the sound of a vase being filled.
Lighted by a dark-lantern and held down by lead weights, portulans, maps, and logbooks were spread over the floor of the chicken coop. A squall had already extinguished the binnacle-lamp. Everyone was arguing about the land. We had entered the Channel without knowing it, and now the ship, staggering with each wave, was adrift somewhere between the islands of Guernsey and Alderney. Shipwreck seemed inevitable, and the passengers gripped their most precious possessions in hopes of saving them.
Among the crew there were a few French sailors. One of them, in the absence of a chaplain, intoned that ancient hymn to Notre Dame de Bon-Secours which was the first song I had learned in my childhood. I would sing it again at the sight of the coast of Brittany, when I was nearly before my mother’s eyes. The American Protestant sailors joined in heartily with the songs of their French Catholic comrades: danger teaches men their weakness and unites their prayers. All of us, passengers and sailors alike, were now together on the deck, clinging to the rigging, the planking, the capstans, or the flukes of the anchors, trying not to be swept away by a swell or toppled into the sea by the rolling of the ship. The captain shouted, “An ax! An ax!” and the masts were cut down. The rudder, its tiller abandoned, swung side to side with a croaking sound.
One experiment remained to be tried. The sounding line showed us that we were no more than four fathoms over a sandbank that crossed the length of the channel; it was therefore possible that a surging wave might lift us over this sandbank and into deeper water. But who dared to seize the helm and take the safety of everyone on board in his hands? One false turn of the wheel, and we would be lost.
One of those men who burst forth from events, one of those spontaneous offspring of peril, came forward: a sailor from New York took the post deserted by the steersman. I seem to see him still, in his shirtsleeves and canvas trousers, barefooted, his hair drenched and tangled, his powerful fists gripping the tiller, while, with head turned, he watched for that wave which would save us or lay us to waste. And then there it was: a wave as wide as the channel itself, rolling high without breaking, like a sea invading another sea. Large white birds, flying calmly, preceded it like birds of death. The ship struck and heeled; there was a deep silence, and every face went pale. The surge arrived. At the moment it touched the vessel, the sailor wrenched the helm, and the ship, about to fall on her side, turned her stern, so that the swell, which looked sure to swallow us, lifted her over. The lead was heaved; a sounding was taken: the water was found to be seventeen fathoms deep. Our cheers rose up to heaven, and we all joined in a cry of Long Live the King! God did not hear this prayer for Louis XVI; it was for the benefit of ourselves alone.
Though we had escaped the two islands, we were not out of danger; we could not sail beyond the coast of Granville. At last, the ebbing tide carried us onward, and we doubled the cape of La Hague. I should say that I experienced no anguish during this quasi-shipwreck, and I felt no joy at being saved. It is better to clear out of life while you are young than to be evicted by time.
The next day we entered Le Havre.
All the population rushed out to see us. Our topmasts were shattered, our longboats were lost, the quarterdeck had been razed, and
we shipped water at every pitch of the vessel. From this floating wreck, I stepped down onto the pier. On January 2, 1792, I was again treading my native soil. It was soon to slip from beneath my feet again. With me I brought no Eskimos from the polar regions, but two savages of an unknown race: Chactas and Atala.