THE FIRST RAPIDS
Death was a close companion for the French administrators who came to Saigon in the 1860s. The colony's official newspaper, the Courrier de Saigon, lists a constant succession of early deaths, with few of those who died being above thirty years of age. Fever, malaria and dysentery took their continual toll. Yet the letters that have been left by those who survived give little if any sense of an atmosphere of mortality hanging heavily over the small colonial society that developed in Saigon as the French hold over southern Vietnam slowly tightened. For those who survived, the risks of tropical disease and the deaths of their friends were accepted with a forbearance that reflected experience in a Europe where many of the great medical advances were still to come. But this only partly explains the sense of confidence and impatience for activity that marked the letters the young men based in Saigon wrote to their families and friends. There was so much of importance to be done. And for many of them in the 1860s the exploration of the Mekong was the most important concern.
The great river and the riches thought to lie along its distant northern banks were discussed again and again in the evening gatherings that took place under the informal direction of Francis Garnier, the young naval officer appointed “prefect” of Cholon in 1863. A faded photograph of one of these evening meetings, held on the outskirts of Saigon, shows solemn young men, grouped about the base of a tree, eyes firmly fixed to the front, luxuriant beards only partially disguising their relative youth. It is an unfair picture, for if Garnier and his associates could be serious they were certainly not solemn. More than enough is known to be sure of this. Wine was drunk and plays acted in fancy dress. But above all there was discussion of the “great idea.”
Frenchmen such as these were the last persons to live easily with the clear but bitter fact that the new colony in which they served was a commercial failure. Garnier and the other young naval officers who formed the nucleus of the colony's administration believed passionately in the worth of what they were doing and in the need to do more. France had gained a colony in Cochinchina; now they feared that foolish minds in Paris might renounce the new possession. If the colony was to be retained, it must find some commercial justification. By 1865 earlier tentative thoughts had become firm convictions. Trade should be sought with China, up the Mekong River. This was the thinking that spurred men to speak and write of exploring the upper reaches of the Mekong. Fears that the British might preempt the trade of Yunnan by a route through Burma, or that the Thais might block French efforts to trade along the Mekong, added urgency. But this was not all. For those who thought and talked about the possibility of opening trade with China by an inland route there was also the attraction of mystery. No one knew what lay along the river's length. This fact of mystery only encouraged speculation — which rapidly became belief — that the Mekong could make Saigon, and the colony spread about it, rich.
From the monotonously flat, humid landscape of Saigon and its twin city Cholon, Garnier wrote letters, reports and pamphlets that summoned up visions of a very different world to be found along the yet unexplored reaches of the Mekong, one of coolness and mountains, and a fresh exoticism superior to the frequently tawdry life of Saigon. From the high, unknown wastes of Tibet the Mekong River flowed down into the “chaos” of tribes and peoples who knew nothing of the Western world. If France were to penetrate into this chaotic region, Garnier argued, the Mekong could then provide a certain route for the commerce of China. Despite a total lack of positive evidence, there was no disposition, on the part either of Garnier or of others in Saigon, to doubt that riches would be found. Garnier's was only the most vocal expression of a generally assumed truth. So, he urged his countrymen to “take the measure of the unknown riches enfolded in the valleys and mountains that enclose these rivers. If one believes the travelers' tales these valleys contain active and industrious peoples who trade with the Celestial Empire. What is certain is that the Chinese province of Yunan each year sends many workers to the mines of amber, serpentine, zinc, gold, and silver that lie along the upper course of the Mekong.”
The man who wrote these words in 1864 was twenty-five years old. The son of an army officer, Francis Garnier determined, from his earliest years, to enter the navy. His slight frame seemed insufficient to withstand the physical and mental demands to be made of it. In a century more attuned to the psychological implications of adolescent experience, it is hard not to see a connection between the nickname “Mademoiselle Bonaparte” that his physique caused his fellow naval cadets to give him, and his later intense determination to strive and to succeed. That Garnier was driven by strong inner compulsions is clear from his private correspondence. In his relations with his family he was surrounded by affection but at the same time beset by repeated efforts to frustrate his dearest wishes. His entry into the navy was opposed. Once this opposition was overcome and he had taken up his post in Vietnam, his new hope to explore the Mekong brought impassioned pleas from his mother that he should not by embracing this cause burden her with yet another “thorn for her cross.” As with the men who climbed Everest seventy years later “because it was there,” Garnier's own summary of his motives was both simple and profound. For him, he wrote in a letter to a friend, the “unknown was irresistible.”
He must have been a difficult companion for many, if a dearly cherished friend for a few. Even in an age that was more accustomed to open emotion, despite its high esteem for stoic courage, Garnier's life seemed to go beyond the normally high expectations of heroic behavior. Once in the navy, he suffered a shattering fall to the deck of a training ship while engaged in showing that his slight stature was no handicap to madcap balancing on the peak of the mainmast. He recovered by force of will after jettisoning the prescribed medicines into his slop bucket, but was to continue coughing blood like a consumptive for years after-wards. In 1858 Garnier, by now a lieutenant, saved a shipmate who had fallen overboard from the Duperré as it sailed through the China Sea, plunging into the sea in the darkness of the tropical night without thought for the sharks that had been escorting the vessel. Impatient with authority and with the prospect of routine employment, and with a nature he himself recognized as “stormy,” Garnier seems to have been a man whose great talents did not always prevent him from being a wayward subordinate in official terms, and in personal relationships somewhat self-righteous. This latter trait, not least, made it difficult for Garnier to understand those with whom he disagreed.
For people in the twentieth century to whom the inherent virtues of the French colonial occupation of Vietnam are less than self-evident, Garnier's aims and beliefs seem both prejudiced and presumptuous. “Nations without colonies,” he proclaimed, “are dead.” Frenchmen needed to remember that in Vietnam “we carry out the political and moral education of a people entrusted to us by Providence.” His chauvinistic vision of France's colonial goals led many to embrace his ideas, but the side of Garnier's character that made a few men hold dear his friendship as opposed to his dreams may be sensed only occasionally. Fellow colonial officials such as Eliacin Luro disagreed with many of his extravagant views but responded to the warmth of his feelings and his irrepressible enthusiasm for anything that interested him. No one can read his letters to his future wife, Claire, without sensing that this passionate man could inspire love as well as exasperation. If many of Garnier's pronouncements on empire seem almost to be caricatures of an imperial age's self-image, those addressed to his wife remind us much more of a France both delighted and scandalized by the romantic life of men such as Franz Liszt.
By 1865 the desirability of exploring the Mekong was widely accepted. The colony's Governor, Admiral de La Grandière, had initially been hesitant about the proposal. His predecessor, Admiral Bonard, had been a supporter of the idea, but in this enterprise, if nothing else, La Grandière showed initial caution. Eventually, however, he joined the ranks of the enthusiasts both in France and Cochinchina. In mid-1865, while he was on leave in Paris, La Grandière gained the approval of the Minister for the Colonies to send an expedition up the Mekong.
Garnier had played a vital part in bringing opinion to this point. Now he wished to be part of the expedition. At first La Grandière seemed disposed to deny him this wish. This, above all, was a case of like resisting like. La Grandière was no less an enthusiast than Garnier for France's role in the East. They shared the same prejudices, the same arrogant assumptions about France's “civilizing mission.” In short they were far too alike to confront each other easily, not least since the Admiral found the younger man overly ready to press his views beyond the point of discretion usually expected from a junior officer. In the small, introspective world of Saigon, however, Garnier's passion for the expedition could not be easily denied because of personal animus. Moreover, La Grandière was shrewd enough to recognize both Garnier's undoubted abilities and the desirability of seeing this troublesome spirit absent from Cochinchina. When La Grandière chose the personnel for the projected expedition, in the early months of 1866, Garnier's name was on the list.
La Grandière wanted a more senior officer as leader of the expedition, however, and his choice fell on the French representative in Cambodia, Doudart de Lagrée. Age, temperament, and experience set Lagrée apart from Garnier. In 1866 Lagrée was forty-two, Garnier's senior by sixteen years. He was a graduate of France's most renowned educational institution, the Ecole Polytechnique. The two men did share one thing in common. Both were naval officers who had embraced colonial service when France invaded the Indochinese region. But before this Lagrée's much longer record of service had included distinguished participation in the Crimean campaign. Where Garnier's nature predisposed him to action, Lagrée was a much more contemplative individual. Before he came to serve in Cambodia, few periods of his life seem to have been more satisfying than an extended archeological excursion in Greece.
Beyond the convictions that he felt concerning France's role as a colonial power, Doudart de Lagrée had a practical reason for seeking a post in Indochina. Following service in the Crimea, he had been forced, in the late 1850s, to renounce a life at sea because of a chronic throat ailment, which was aggravated by winter conditions. His choice of Indochina was in part dictated by the possibility that the warmer climate would cure his ulcerated throat. As his letters show, this was never to be: and the Mekong expedition was led by a man in frequent and sometimes severe pain from an apparently incurable condition. Yet this had no effect on Lagrée's enthusiasm and determination.
Once in Indochina, Lagrée found his appointment one of the loneliest possible. As the French representative at the court of King Norodom of Cambodia from 1863, he had few European companions, yet his detailed letters to friends and relatives in France give little sense of this isolation being a burden. His personality contrasts sharply with that of his chief assistant. Where Garnier was forever restless, Lagrée's private and public character was marked by a calm acceptance of his circumstances and a general disinclination to mix emotion with duty. To be able to observe the Cambodian court and delve into the country's history was satisfying in itself.
It is perhaps one of the most notable ironies of the Mekong expedition that Lagrée was chosen to lead it when he had already seen what might be the greatest barrier to navigation up or down the river. As early as July 1863 he had traveled up the Mekong and seen the Sambor rapids. Then, he had judged the rapids to be an “uncrossable barrier.” Yet the possibility of exploring further lingered in his mind. Even though the rapids seemed impassable when he saw them, there might be other periods of the year when a passage would be less difficult: a highly powered steam launch might overcome the force of the current at the high water season; or there might be a deeper channel that could be navigated in the calmer period during March or April before the river became swollen by the combined effect of the melted Tibetan snows and the monsoon rains.
But while the exploration of the Mekong was being actively canvassed in Saigon, other matters demanded Lagrée's attention. Cambodia and its “kinglet” — to use Lagrée's own term — had to be brought under France's protection, and once this was achieved there was the daily need to persuade the Cambodian monarch that there were some courses of action that would gain French approval and others that would not. In these circumstances, the possibility of exploring the Mekong was interesting but scarcely overwhelmingly so for the French representative in Cambodia. Nothing makes this clearer than Lagrée's own reaction to La Grandière's proposal that he should lead a French party up the river. When in December 1865 the governor asked, “Would you not be the man to try and ascend the river for six or seven hundred leagues, to see what occurs in Tibet, in the interior of China?” Lagrée's response as the ultimately laconic “Why not?” And both men laughed.
After the years of debate the French Mekong expedition left Saigon on June 5, 1866. At first glance, its material needs seemed adequately provided for. For costs along the way there were gold bars, Mexican dollars, and Thai coins, to a value of 25,000 francs. Packed into one hundred and fifty cases were more than five hundred kilograms of hard rations, biscuits, and twice-baked bread. There were over three hundred kilograms of flour. And since this was a French expedition, the commissary in Saigon had provided more than seven hundred liters of wine and three hundred liters of brandy. There were fifteen cases of trade goods but only one case of scientific instruments.
These supplies were to sustain a party of six principal explorers and a secondary personnel of sixteen. Among the principals, Lagrée and Garnier, leader and second-in-command, both possessed several years of experience in the Indochinese region. This was not a qualification the other explorers, with one exception, could claim. Clovis Thorel, aged thirty-three when the expedition left Saigon, had, it is true, served as a naval doctor in Cochinchina since 1861. During this time he had shown a strong interest in botanical research, and this, in addition to his medical skills, had commended him to the expedition's planners.
The other doctor in the party, Lucien Joubert, also gained his place because of a combination of capacities. He took the place of a mining engineer previously under consideration. At thirty-four his record of long and healthy service in Senegal plus an interest in geology proved sufficient recommendation. Another regular naval officer, Louis Delaporte, an amateur musician and better-than-amateur artist, had been based in Cochinchina less than a year when he found himself assigned to the expedition and made responsible for the pictorial record of its achievements. In 1866 Delaporte was twenty-four years old.
Finally, and most controversially, there was the youngest member, Louis de Carné, Delaporte's junior by one year. Although selected to represent the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he clearly owed his inclusion to the fact that he was Governor La Grandière's nephew. Where Delaporte's natural exuberance acted to dissipate tensions and encourage harmony, de Carné's tautly enthusiastic personality seemed fated to give frequent offense. His mind was filled with grand plans: France's colony in the East could be the economic equivalent of the American Far West, and “Socialism” could be contained by the success of French expansion overseas. But he had little talent for friendship and found it difficult to accept the details of discipline and control in an expedition led by a military man. From the very beginning both Lagrée and Garnier made little secret of their belief that this young diplomatist had been unwisely chosen for the task that lay ahead. Indeed, at the start of the expedition, Garnier appears to have held serious doubts about all the other members except the party's leader.
And even at this early stage there was abundant evidence of inefficient planning. If supplies seemed adequate, there is little sign in the surviving records of the expedition that any serious thought was given to how these cases were to be transported, or to how any surplus was to be returned as the group's instructions required. The same lack of planning was apparent in the designation of an escort. To the already large party of six principal explorers were added three interpreters (one French, one Cambodian, and one Laotian), four French military men, two Filipino soldiers, and seven Vietnamese militiamen. Porters and boatmen were to be found along the way. Lagrée later bitterly decried the large size of the party as a heavy burden to its leader.
In addition, although the matter seemed less demanding at this early stage, the expedition prepared to leave Saigon without any certainly as to when its members might receive the necessary passports for travel into, and through, China. Satisfactory arrangements had been made for territories that fell under the authority of the Thai court, and it did not seem of great consequence that passports were not in hand from Burma; the Frenchmen doubted that the weakened Burmese kingdom could do much to hinder their progress. But China represented a different problem. The great state to the north was their final goal so that it would be foolish, at best, to try and enter China without proper authorization. This was even more true in the middle sixties when, as the explorers knew, southwestern China was the scene of a major Islamic revolt against the imperial authorities. To delay, however, did not any longer seem possible. Their hope had to be that the passports would soon reach Saigon and be sent on after them.
At Angkor the explorers found the jungle had taken over most of the ruins.
Leaving Saigon on June 5, the expedition traveled by steampowered gunboat, first to Kompong Luong, a little north of Phnom Penh, and then, more importantly, to the great ruins of Angkor. Garnier described this as “consecration” of the expedition's scientific purpose, emphasizing the extent to which Lagrée throughout his service in Cambodia had worked to record the details of the temple ruins. Yet for all the scientific detail, and less than scientific speculation that the visit to Angkor produced, these few days between June 23 and July 1, 1866, spent among the ruins had the air of a holiday. There was even a group photograph taken of the explorers ranged along one of the broad temple entrances. Reproduced as an engraving, it is a sobering reminder that this was the last period when the expedition was not beset by almost daily problems of health and purpose.
Backtracking from Angkor, the explorers paid their visit to Phnom Penh at the beginning of July. Despite its exotic character, they, in common with other French explorers of the nineteenth century, could not believe that they saw a city ruled over by a descendant of the Angkorian monarchs. When the time came to leave Phnom Penh, the morning after Norodom's great banquet, the Cambodian interpreter, Alexis Om, refused to leave. As his first name suggests, Om was a Cambodian Christian, one of a tiny minority holding this faith in a Buddhist kingdom. Well aware that rebellion was brewing in the eastern provinces of Cambodia, he had no stomach for the adventures the Frenchmen so confidently expected would lie ahead. Despite his earlier agreement to travel with the party, he now changed his mind. But his appeals to be allowed to stay behind were ignored, and Lagrée gave orders for him to be held under guard on board the gunboat. From the leader's point of view it was essential to have the services of all three interpreters: the Frenchman Séguin for travel in Thailand, the Laotian whom they called Alévy and whose knowledge of the distant regions north of Luang Prabang would make him invaluable as they moved nearer to China, and Alexis himself for the early stages of their travels.
Leaving Phnom Penh early in the morning of July 7, the group traveled rapidly up the Mekong to Kratie, in the northeast of the kingdom. Here, at the limit of their gunboat's capabilities and nearly at the limit of the Cambodian King's domains and their own known world, exploration proper began. Strung out along the left bank of the Mekong, Kratie in the 1860s had a population of about five hundred. A century later it was still a distant, isolated place, only rarely visited by foreign travelers. When the Frenchmen saw the little town in 1866 the houses of the inhabitants were set against a background of dark tropical landscape, with their fruit trees and rice fields scattered behind them. Few who have not seen these regions can appreciate the general somberness that pervades upcountry Cambodia, where only the yellow robe of an occasional Buddhist monk or the straggling vines of bougainvillea present a touch of bright color against the darkness of the trees and distant hills. By mid-July, the season at which the expedition paused at Kratie, the rainy monsoon had set in, and the monotonous landscape was matched by a gray sky to further depress the spirits.
Even the enthusiastic Garnier was affected by the dreary atmosphere of this Cambodian outpost. Nothing, he wrote, better demonstrated the results of the despotic system by which the country was ruled. The avarice of the officials insured that there should be no spark of initiative among the population at large. But there was surely more than this to the tone of gloom that pervades the reports of the mission's stay at Kratie. For all their confident assertions of the future value of the Mekong, here, below the first known major set of rapids—those Lagrée had already seen—the explorers had to face the possibility that these hopes were unrealizable. With the expedition scarcely under way, this was more than enough to compound the gloom of the physical surroundings.
Two days were spent in transferring the expedition's supplies from the gunboat to the shore, and then in loading some of the cases onto the pirogues that were to carry the explorers further north. Already the impossible bulk of the stores was apparent; both men and equipment had to be accommodated aboard narrow craft, each between thirty and fifty feet in length, carved from the trunk of a single tree. Going upstream these pirogues were neither rowed nor paddled. Rather, a team of six to ten men positioned on the bamboo platforms built on top of each canoe either used long poles to punt the craft forward or employed the hook at one end of their poles to pull the boat along against the current, hugging the shore, where trees and rocks were available to assist this strange method of progression. This “painful” style of travel, as Garnier called it, was the only way to proceed when the river was already in flood and the current was running in the opposite direction to the explorers' destination.
Leaving Kratie on July 13, after a sleepless night caused by a mix of excited conversation, rain, and mosquitoes, the explorers made one final stop before they reached the rapids of Sambor. This was at the settlement of the same name, only a few miles north of Kratie, which was the residence of the last senior Cambodian official they would meet—a man whose uncertain rule extended to the mountains and uplands of the east. From these high regions came exotic forest products and slaves, the latter in sufficient quantity to make this isolated post a rewarding one for officials who were both prepared to risk fever and unconcerned by the exigencies of life in this Cambodian Ultima Thule. Strangely, for the French explorers were extremely curious for fact and legend, there is nothing in the records to suggest that the alien travelers were aware of Sambor's important place in Cambodian history. When they saw Sambor they could scarcely have known that it had been a Cambodian city whose distant greatness was remembered in the official and folk literature of the state. They might, on the other hand, have been expected to learn that only thirty years earlier Sambor had been a larger, more prosperous settlement before it was sacked by Thai troops. But most surprising of all is the failure of any member of the expedition to mention the stupa built over the ashes of Princess Nucheat Khatr Vorpheak. In 1834 the princess had been taken by a crocodile. Later her remains were recovered, miraculously preserved, when the crocodile was caught and killed, and after her cremation the stupa was erected over the ashes. By the 1860s this stupa had already become a site for pious pilgrimage. Nearly a century later Prince Sihanouk sought the advice of this royal ancestor, through the medium of a woman of Kratie province, when he considered matters of international import.
Beyond Sambor were the rapids, where fast-moving water dominated a world in flood. In the low-water period the river bed north of Sambor is a jumbled mass of islands set amid countless water channels, broken by a seemingly endless series of rapids. All this is transformed by the rising waters of the rainy season. With surprising speed all but the largest islands along the river's course are submerged. In mid-July when the French explorers began their slow progress along the eastern bank of the river, the water level was at least fifteen feet above low water, and rising steadily. The gray rocks forming the low-water rapids seldom showed above the water streaming south at more than five knots, and the tops of trees waved liked feathers blown in the wind as they remained just above the advancing flood. Already the Mekong had spread to more than a mile in width. In later months its spread is broader still, and the river height is so great that no sense of the rocks below is gained by a traveler whose boat, even nowadays when propelled by a powerful outboard engine, must still hug the shore to progress against the current. In flood the Mekong above Sambor is a majestic sight, not least in the closing hours of daylight when the storm clouds frame the dark, distant hills, and lightning heralds yet another downpour which will raise the river's height even further.
Ever optimistic, and still unaware of the difficulties ahead, Garnier at Sambor pronounced this region to be quite certainly navigable. Since the flooding submerged the rapids, all that was needed was a vessel with sufficiently powerful engines to overcome the force of the current. For the expedition itself, however, the means at their disposal were more primitive. Slowly their pirogues were hauled by the boatmen along the eastern bank. By July 16 the party had reached the most difficult area of the rapids. No longer were there any clearly defined banks on either shore, and the boatmen had to strain to achieve even minimal progress. Garnier's dream of the Mekong as a route for trade from China to southern Vietnam, still held only three days earlier at Sambor, “seemed from this moment gravely compromised.” There was no way of knowing where the main channels of the river lay, and the sudden alternation of depths and shallows promised little assurance that any deep water channels would persist long enough to make them navigable. To match the disappointment of the days as the explorers moved through the area of the rapids, there were the rigors of the night. Unable to land and set up camp in the evenings, the expedition remained on the pirogues, drenched by frequent rainstorms, sleeplessly watching the spectacular electrical storms that circled around the dark skies.
During these days between July 15 and 19 as the flotilla of pirogues made its slow progress up the eastern bank of the Mekong, the Frenchmen heard repeated references from their boatmen to the great rapids of Preatapang. These, they were told, lay near the western bank of the river, not far from the northern limits of the rapids they had been traversing since they left Sambor. When, just as they were entering calmer water at the northern end of the rapids, the boatmen announced that Preatapang was nearby, Garnier immediately attempted a brief reconnaissance. Using a light pirogue, he urged his Cambodian boatman towards the opposite bank. But try as he might, his boatmen adamantly refused to do more than indicate the general direction of the Preatapang rapids. Disappointed, Garnier returned to his companions as the party now passed into calmer water below Stung Treng. The fury of the rapids, stretching for more than thirty miles, was now replaced by the familiar broad sweep of calm river characteristic of the Mekong in its lower reaches.
One day later the explorers were at Stung Treng itself. By now they had passed out of the territory of the Cambodian King. In this distant northeastern area authority had shifted many times in the preceding centuries. Where once Cambodian kings had ruled, the Stung Treng region was now in vassalage to the Thai ruler in Bangkok. The nature of authority at Stung Treng was vital to the expedition, since from this point on they had to rely on local officials to provide them with transport and boatmen. Their glacially reserved reception by the Laotian Governor who represented Thai power in Stung Treng was therefore disturbing for the difficulties it might present, and also puzzling.
The explanation, as they quickly found, was simple. Yet it leaves some intriguing questions unanswered. He was less than well disposed to the expedition, the Governor said, because he and the population under his charge had only recently met another Frenchman, a trader who had penetrated into the Stung Treng region, where he abused confidence and repaid assistance with poor faith. By their own combination of threats and blandishments, Lagrée and Garnier were eventually able to overcome the mistrust that this mysterious figure had engendered. But the question remains: who was he? At a time when the region through which the official expedition was passing was quite unknown to the Western world, who was the lone French trader whose travel to Stung Treng must be regarded as just as notable, in its own solitary way, as the efforts of the well-equipped and sizable official party. Even if he did not reach Stung Treng by way of the Mekong—and nothing suggests that this was the case—the journey overland, presumably from Bangkok, was still a remarkable achievement. Yet like so many solitary travelers in isolated regions, his existence is almost all that is known of the man.
In Stung Treng, Lagrée weighed the next steps that he and his subordinates should take. Set at the confluence of the Mekong and the Se Kong Rivers, Stung Treng with its eight hundred inhabitants was an ancient commercial center. In 1866 its chief trade was in human beings: slaves who were brought out of the high country to the east and sold downstream to Cambodia. With the knowledge that there were further settlements to the east of Stung Treng, Doudart de Lagrée decided to extend the investigations of the expedition up the Se Kong. But for Garnier there was another task, one that suited his adventurous character. There was the need to travel down the Mekong towards Sambor once again, to investigate the dangers and the possibilities of the rapids at Preatapang. To leave them a mystery was unacceptable to both Lagrée and Garnier.
Still hoping to find a navigable channel between Sambor and Stung Treng, therefore, Garnier set out to travel down the right bank of the river, and so close to Preatapang. Two Cambodian boatmen had been persuaded to remain while the rest of their countrymen returned direct to Kratie. For a special payment in silver, they were to take Garnier and a member of the expedition's escort, a French sailor named Renaud, down the western bank so that a complete survey might be made of this vital section of the river.
Leaving Stung Treng on July 24, Garnier and Renaud found that the swift current carried them south at such a rate that after only half a day they were at the head of the rapids. Following a night spent in a forest clearing beside the river, the travelers began their journey again. As the speed of the current increased, they reached a point where they could hear the distant rumble of the Preatapang rapids. Garnier called for the boatmen to continue on their course, following the right bank and heading directly for the rapids. He still hoped that this would be the direction in which a navigable passage might be found. The boatmen protested. With Renaud, who had spent some years in Cambodia, acting as interpreter, they told Garnier that only a madman would attempt the passage, that the water was so agitated it seemed to be boiling and that the current was swift as lightning. Nothing was more calculated to urge Garnier onward. He would, he told the boatmen, pay double their promised wages, but they must head towards the rapids.
Seemingly they agreed, but soon Garnier realized that they were heading crosswise towards the distant left bank, away from Preatapang. Grasping his revolver, he threatened the Cambodians as he pointed again to the dangerous route they were to follow. Reluctantly they obeyed and the light pirogue once more headed towards the roar of the rapids, moving ever faster as the current gripped the fragile craft and the boatmen struggled to insure their survival. Garnier's own account of the events that followed is still the best one:
…the current now ran at a speed of six or seven miles an hour, and it was too late to turn back. If I had not been preoccupied with an examination of this section of the river, the appearance of comic anguish shown by my two boatmen would have made me laugh. For the rest, I could see from their faces that if there was danger in making this terrible passage, there was no certainty of death. … Our threat to take the paddles in our own hands had achieved its effect. They preferred to rely on their own skill and knowledge of the region to save themselves rather than to place their fate in the hands of audacious but uninformed Europeans.
Now I saw the nature of the rapids. … Angered by the sudden barrier they encountered, the muddy waves furiously attacked the banks, leaped over them, rushed into the forest, foaming about each tree and each rock, leaving only the largest trees and the heaviest outcrops of rocks standing. Debris piled up along the waves' passage. The banks were leveled, and in the middle of a broad, strikingly white sea of water, full of whirlpools and flotsam, a few forest giants and dark rocks still withstood the assault, while columns of spray rose and fell ceaselessly on their summits.
Now we were there with the speed of an arrow. Of the greatest importance was the need to avoid being drawn by the current into the submerged forest where we would have been smashed into a thousand pieces. … I saw this all as a vision, in a flash. The noise was deafening, the spectacle fascinating to behold. Crossing this vast area of water, moving in every direction, with the current running at a speed that I estimated could not be less than ten or eleven miles an hour, our fragile craft was dragged through the middle of rocks and trees, hidden and tossed in the spume. It would have given the least impressionable person a sense of vertigo. Renaud had the courage and skill, when I gave him the signal, to take a sounding that showed there was thirty foot of water beneath us. But he had no time to do more. A moment later we brushed against a tree trunk that caused the water to surge many feet into the air. My boatmen were bent over their paddles, pale with fear, but with speed and skill they prevented us from smashing into the tree. Little by little the sickening speed of the current diminished and we entered calmer water. The bank was once more definable and my boatmen wiped away the sweat that coursed down their foreheads.
Garnier now knew the worst. Though the channel that he had just traversed was deep enough for a powered craft, there seemed no possibility that the current could be overcome. At half past two in the afternoon of July 25 he and his exhausted boatmen reached Sambor. In a little more than twelve hours they had covered the same distance that the expedition working against the river's flow had completed only in six long days. Pausing merely for a night's rest in Sambor, Garnier and Renaud again set off to the north, reaching Stung Treng on July 30.
When Garnier returned to Stung Treng, the expedition had been in progress for less than two months, yet its fundamental raison d'être was already in question, if not totally destroyed. In an all too human and understandable fashion, this was something the explorers found difficult, if not impossible, to accept. In spite of what they now knew, the thought that some means might still be found to overcome the barrier of the rapids sustained them. And the tasks of exploration, as they mapped the course of the river and recorded their detailed observations on the country and people about them, served to push the unpleasant truth into the background. While Garnier had been shooting the rapids of Preatapang, Lagrée had been leading a small party up the Se Kong to chart its course and note what possibilities there were for commerce. In Stung Treng itself, Garnier and others recorded details of the population, of the Chinese merchants who had taken up residence even in this remote town, and of the forest products that filtered out of the uplands and mountains to the east. And as the necessary pirogues and boatmen were slowly assembled for the next stage of the journey, the explorers discussed the way ahead to the Khone waterfalls. This was the next great obstacle along their route, and virtually the only remaining known feature ahead of them until they reached the area well to the north of Vientiane that Henri Mouhot had visited in 1861.
In this atmosphere of hopeful preparation the first major illness struck the expedition. Garnier and Joubert were the victims. While dysentery was accepted as an almost normal, even daily hazard — Dr. Thorel had contracted a severe case at Angkor that lasted until after the expedition passed Kratie — the explorers' greatest fear was of “fever.” In both his official and his unofficial accounts of the expedition Garnier passes rapidly over his illness, only briefly noting its gravity. But it was serious indeed. Whereas Joubert was well on the way to recovery within ten days of the onset of the sickness, Garnier's more acute attack left him either unconscious or delirious for eighteen days.
The nature of the fever he contracted is uncertain. As his companions tended him, becoming ever more concerned for his life, they learned from the inhabitants of Stung Treng that it was “forest fever.” Dr. Thorel later gave a detailed account of the illness, but the state of medical knowledge at the time prevents certainty as to its nature. It may have been scrub typhus. As time passed, and as the likelihood of Garnier's death seemed to grow stronger, Lagrée decided that the expedition could no longer delay its journey, even though to proceed meant transporting the still unconscious second-in-command in one of the narrow pirogues carrying the explorers towards Khone.
The very day that they started north again, Garnier, left un-tended for a moment, tossing and turning in his delirium, plunged unwittingly into the water from the canoe in which he lay. He was rescued from the water with difficulty, but this sudden shock was followed by a marked improvement. When four days later, on August 17, the expedition paused just below the Khone waterfalls, Garnier came to his senses for the first time in eighteen days. Much of his skin was sloughing away, and he was to lose all his hair as a result of the illness. His left leg was partially paralyzed, and it was six months before it regained its strength. He could assume few duties for the expedition until the beginning of October, thirty-three days after the illness began.
That Garnier recovered at all is remarkable, and is an indication of an underlying physical capacity that matched his strength of will. For the leader of the expedition, the illnesses of those around him were not a minor matter, but neither were they a subject for extended commentary. When towards the end of October he sent an official report to the Governor of Cochinchina, his summary of the expedition's health was brief and unemotional. “Since our departure from Kratie,” Doudart de Lagrée wrote on October 27, 1866, “the only serious illnesses that have occurred are the following: Monsieur Thorel, dysentery; Monsieur Garnier, typhoid fever; the sailor Mouëllo, bilious fever; the principal Annamite soldier, bilious fever with hemorrhage.” As he put it in summary, “The general state of health is as good as one might desire in the conditions in which we live.”