Rascals in Paradise Page 7

  In the jungle were millions of mosquitoes laden with malaria. Others carried dengue fever, which racked a man to death in sweaty agony. Still others bore the horrible parasite causing elephantiasis, which corroded the blood vessels and quickly loaded the lymph glands of the human body with larval feces. The accumulation strangled circulation and produced arms and legs as big as large tree trunks. In man this foul collection of larval dirt often settled in the scrotum, so that an afflicted man’s privates might become as big as the largest watermelon, and as heavy.

  Along the ground scurried scorpions and biting insects and snakes. Worst of all the crawling things were the thousand-leggers, ghastly white centipedes whose sticky glands exuded a poison which raised fearful blisters wherever they touched. And there were flies. There were so many flies that a baby left in the sunlight might become black with them in an instant. There were big flies that stung and tiny ones that, unseen, crawled through the hair, and the ears, and the nose. And as if that were not enough, there were the battalions of warrior ants, brutal red-fanged things that rushed for a sleeping man’s eyes and tried to eat their way through into his brain.

  These things might have been conquered, but there were three fatal weaknesses to the site the Marquis de Rays had chosen for his empire while sitting in his comfortable library sticking pins in a map of Oceania, which he had never visited.

  First, the natives surrounding the proposed settlement were all cannibals, and they lurked in shadows until such time as an unwary white man became even slightly separated from his group. Then they clubbed his brains out and ate him.

  Second, there was no earth. Literally, at Port Breton there was no earth. A thin strip of land, mostly sand with a little decayed matter in it, clung to the foreshore, but immediately back of it the rocky lower limits of Mount Verron began, so that the settlers were perched on the edge of an inhospitable sea where no fish came. There could be no agriculture, no village, no spacious farms, no network of roads. The sides of the mountain were too steep to conquer. The jungle was too dense to clear away from land which, if cleared, could have produced nothing. The terrifying result of this miscalculation was that there was no food. Nor could there be any. There was not one hectare on which food could be grown.

  Third, and most fatal, there was endless rain. The prevailing winds, heavily laden with moisture picked up from the sea, could not escape striking Mount Verron, whereupon their burdens of water were deposited, often in torrential downpours that lasted for seven or eight days at a time, upon the slopes of the bay. During some months the rainfall would total forty inches. Often a foot would fall in a day. Even the stars were denied the colonists, for it rained all night.

  Even today, with all modern conveniences, the effect of such constant moisture can be demoralizing. A shoe, left unattended, gains an eighth of an inch of mold within two days. A blade rusts within a week. Clothes, if washed, never dry. Food, if not eaten at once, rots. And a fever, once contracted, rarely subsides. The patient’s chest seems to drown in moisture, to collapse with the weight of rain that falls upon it.

  No roof can keep out the incessant rain, no coral footpath can be kept negotiable for long. Disease lies everywhere: in the blood stream of mosquitoes, in the dank trees, in the swampy land. And the dreadful rains produce one affliction which even today is particularly terrifying. If anyone scratches or even bruises his shin, the skin is so thin and the moisture so omnipresent that the wound never heals. The tissues cannot dry and heal themselves; for days and months and into years the sore slowly enlarges, until a whole leg becomes a ghastly thing, slowly but inevitably rotting away. The terror of this disease is that everyone knows that even three days of bright, dry sunlight would mend the leg, but the dry sunlight never comes. And, of course, if in scratching the leg one scrapes into the wound any decaying animal matter—a dead scorpion, or a bit of rotting fish—death is quick.

  To step ashore at this particular point of New Ireland was, in 1880, almost certain suicide. If there was any spot on this globe entitled to the phrase “Hell on earth,” this was it; yet it was here that the unwilling passengers of the Chandernagore had to disembark in search of the kingdom of the Marquis de Rays.

  When the settlers saw from the ship what awaited them, when they saw that not a single promise made in the prospectus had been fulfilled, they rebelled. But they were forced to land, under the firm orders given the captain by the Marquis. Despite these orders, many remained on the ship, which was now their only home, twelve thousand miles from France.

  While the settlers ashore were battling disease and rain, the Chandernagore suddenly upped anchor during a storm on January 30, and with no explanation deserted the settlement, finding an anchorage at Liki-Liki on the other coast of the island.

  Three days later a native brought the message that the ship was at Liki-Liki. Incredible as it seems, the abandoned settlers hacked their way for twelve miles through the jungle to where the Chandernagore was anchored. There, bleeding and nearly dead from starvation and exhaustion, they pleaded to be taken back aboard the ship and evacuated.

  They were met at the landing point by one of the Marquis’ henchmen, who pointed a revolver at them and reminded them sternly that they had journeyed halfway around the world to live in the Marquis’ paradise—and here they would stay. Shortly thereafter the Chandernagore forcibly disgorged all passengers and fled the unlucky colony altogether, leaving the colonists marooned on their muddy shore. Captain MacLaughlin had been left behind with the others, but his efforts could do little to save them from their fate.

  The settlers bought fifty acres from the natives for a string of beads, and mournfully studied the new site of their colony. If possible, Liki-Liki was even more hopeless than Port Breton. It lay in the middle of a swamp. No land was available for growing food, no hope was at hand. They built a ramshackle blockhouse as headquarters and a few small huts to provide a little protection from weather and other enemies.

  Cannibals—some of the fiercest known in the world—started eating off the stragglers, and the most malignant diseases struck nearly all the pathetic band of people. Without food, without adequate guns, and with little shelter from the elements, they began quietly to die. As death approached, so did the warrior ants, whereupon there would be agonizing screams as the vicious insects began to eat their way into the body’s openings. Then the screams would diminish, but soon there were no able-bodied men left to dig the graves, and no solid land where they could have been dug.

  Forty-two days after the Chandernagore had abandoned the settlers at Liki-Liki, an Australian missionary who lived down the channel heard of their plight, and in his own small vessel went to the rescue. His report of what he saw at the settlement is on record.

  “There was a rising swell coming from the south,” wrote the Reverend Benjamin Danks, “so that the Ripple could not anchor, but stood off and on. About twenty men came staggering down to the beach, and stood there awaiting us; some with bandaged legs, all emaciated, sunken-eyed, and mere skeletons, a ghastly sight. Eager questions were asked and answered, and when they knew they were to go aboard the Ripple they rushed as fast as their tottering limbs could take them to the places they called houses, and in less than five minutes they were back on the sand with their little all and remained standing in the driving rain. They could not take their eyes off the ship; and do what we would, they madly rushed the boat, each man feebly struggling for a place, nor could any of them be induced to land and await her return. So, loaded down to the gunwales, the boat put out to sea, and I had grave doubts about it reaching the steamer.

  “I walked through the settlement with Captain MacLaughlin. It consisted of a road about twenty feet wide and lined with miserable huts. Even to think of sleeping in such a place gave one the creeps. I turned and said, ‘Captain MacLaughlin, you ought to thank God any of you are left alive!’ …

  “I went through the storeroom, and examined their stock of provisions, which consisted of biscuits, not of the best
kind, and coffee in the berry. The stock of wine had turned sour, the salted fish had become putrid. There were three barrels of salt pork, a few bags of beans, and one or two bags of peas, but no tea or sugar. These were all the stores sixty men had to live upon for an indefinite time. There were a few suits of clothes, some tin basins, and some large flasks.

  “Some attempt had been made at cultivation. There was a small banana plantation, also a small patch of sweet potatoes, a few tobacco plants, and some flowers on each side of the path. We returned to the beach, and the poor fellows who had missed the first trip asked again and again: ‘Will the boat come back?’ They seemed to doubt their own sense of sight, and our word. When we answered them it would, they said: ‘We hope so!’ and nothing would induce them to seek shelter from the rain which fiercely fell upon us as we stood there, and which, despite my mackintosh, wet me to the skin. It was a pitiful sight.”

  On the mercy trip away from Nouvelle France, at least seven men died and two went mad. The rest reached the missionary headquarters on a small island off the coast of New Ireland, but some were so dazed by their struggles against cannibals, mosquitoes, flies, ants and starvation that they would never fully recover. The attempt to found King Charles I’s kingdom of Nouvelle France had ended in disaster.

  Why did so fair a venture—on paper—come to such a cruel finish? The principal reason was that the Marquis de Rays, when reading Duperrey’s account of his stay at New Ireland, had become obsessed with the idea that the southern tip of that island was an ideal spot for a settlement. He never wavered from this judgment, and he so imbued his assistants with this belief that they also became incapable of sound thinking. As we have seen, his aides forced men over the side of the ship when it was obvious that landing at Port Breton meant almost certain death.

  But how can we account for the fact that in 1823 Duperrey, an honorable witness, had written such a glowing account of this hellhole set within the encroaching bowl of Mount Verron? The Duperrey expedition had stopped there in what, in that part of the world, was the moment when the rainy season was about to begin. Thus the gloomy bay experienced one of its rare nine-day stretches without heavy rain.

  The mountain was beautiful, the sea placid, and the foreshore of the land was warm and inviting. Then one could walk under trees that did not drip a poisonous moisture, and scorpions, startled by the unaccustomed dryness, stayed hidden beneath logs. At night, of course, Duperrey slept aboard ship, and escaped the lethal mosquitoes. After long days at sea, the explorers must have found New Ireland a heavenly place, and so they described it, little dreaming that at some distant date a vainglorious Marquis de Rays would be unbalanced by their favorable description.

  Again, the Marquis did not read very carefully the account published by the historian of the Duperrey expedition. The possibility of torrential rains is hinted in this passage from the report: “The channel … is protected by two mountains whose elevation appears to be considerable and whose peaks seem to be covered uninterruptedly with black, thick clouds, in such a manner that when it is beautiful weather in Port Praslin”—which the Marquis rechristened Port Breton—“the rain falls in torrents all along the circumference of the bay.” Moreover, the same report suggests the horrors of the jungle: “As soon as one steps on the foreshore the vegetation appears so active and vigorous that one sees it as overwhelming the shore and not stopping until the sea disputes the possession of the soil; on this shifting borderline lie enormous trunks of overturned trees rotting into a kind of rich soil, which nourishes another section of gross plants which fight with it for the least little space. This mass of vegetation leaves no clear spot, and it covers this whole place with a single, vast forest.”

  It is possible to explain the Marquis’ self-induced blindness to unpleasant facts, but nothing justifies his callous behavior. In his propaganda he never admitted that neither he nor any one else connected with the venture had seen Nouvelle France. He never told the would-be settlers the truth about the houses and the churches and the stores and the roads fifteen feet wide. Worst of all, he had made no arrangements whatever for title to the land, and thus invited the retaliation of the cannibals who owned it and who promptly ate the most adventurous of the claim-jumping strangers.

  It is to the credit of the French government that it suspected some fraud like this and endeavored to dissuade the colonists from leaving Europe. But the lure of quick wealth was so great that the doomed adventurers insisted upon their right to embark upon their Pacific tragedy.

  So far, the story of Nouvelle France is the story of something that might have happened anywhere: a smart promoter soft-talks a group of dupes into a catastrophe. That has occurred before and it will happen often again. But what gives this particular swindle an overtone of special horror is the relentless manner in which the great fraud proliferated, the unfeeling manner in which lives were sacrified; and it is in connection with these later developments and refinements that the Marquis de Rays, King Charles I of Nouvelle France, stands forth in particular shame.

  To comprehend the proportions of his fraud, we must go back to the moment when the Chandernagore deserted the dying colonists, who would certainly have perished en masse had not some been saved by missionaries. The Marquis’ henchmen speeded south to Sydney, Australia, where their leader, the recently invested Baron de Villeblanche, had an opportunity to make an honest confession of the tragedy. Instead he cabled the Marquis as follows: “Liki-Liki occupied. Friendly relations entered into with natives. Send money and orders. In hurry. Letter following.”

  This news was inflated by the Marquis, in a widely distributed prospectus, La Nouvelle France, into the following dispatch: “Captain MacLaughlin and his companions are firmly established at Liki-Liki, and are provided with everything necessary to facilitate their establishing themselves in this new country. The officers of the Chandernagore have entered into friendly relations with the natives.… The Baron has hired the Australian brig Emily, and has loaded her with everything necessary for the colonists at Liki-Liki, that they may found a village in a savage country.” This brochure became the most popular piece of South Seas fiction of its time, and countless European readers, huddled about their firesides, read it and envisioned owning acres of waving sugar cane in a Pacific Eden.

  At this point everyone connected with the Marquis masked the true state of affairs. Instead of evacuating the dying settlers who were recuperating with the missionaries down the channel, the heroic Marquis ordered that they be returned at once to Nouvelle France. And instead of dispatching a rescue ship to save these poor unfortunates from inevitable death, he sent from Europe a second shipload of colonists.

  This infamous second vessel, the Génil, was in charge of a man whose depths of evil are, even at the present time, impossible to explain. Captain Gustave Rabardy was a young maritime officer of medium build, sturdy character and great devotion to the Marquis de Rays. He wore mutton-chop whiskers, his eyes were close together, and he was a taciturn man. He could not plead ignorance of the South Pacific, for he had made several voyages among the Bismarck group and the Solomons. Looking back upon the disaster in which Rabardy became the central figure, one is tempted to say that out of all the sailors in Europe, the Marquis de Rays had uncannily picked the one officer whose capacities for evil matched his own, but in fairness to the Marquis one must state that prior to Rabardy’s return to the Pacific in the Génil, there was nothing in his history to indicate that he was on the verge of becoming a hopeless maniac, and one concludes that it was the operation of a malignant fate that brought these two psychopaths together in a mutual enterprise that was to cost the lives of so many innocent and trusting emigrants.

  Since most of Europe was now suspicious of the Marquis, he outfitted Captain Rabardy’s ship, the Génil, in Spain and then seduced the Liberian government into accepting it as a vessel registered by that nation. Consequently, during all the later time when Captain Rabardy was shooting Negroes wholesale, capturing them, selling them
as slaves for $100 each, and mutilating black islanders on the ground that they might become his enemies, he was operating under the flag of the Negro republic of Liberia.

  Rabardy was given secret orders which, in pursuit of the divine authority which God had vested in his vicar, the Marquis de Rays, empowered Rabardy to execute anyone who questioned his decisions. He apparently read these extraordinary orders before sailing from Spain, for the Génil had progressed only a short distance on the long run to Singapore before its pig-eyed captain broke out a complete set of medieval torture instruments, which he used freely in maintaining discipline. He also revived ancient marine punishments and actually strung offending men up by their thumbs so that their toes barely touched the pitching deck. He lashed and swore and terrorized, so that at Singapore he was rewarded by complete desertion; every man except his cook fled, and he had to muster a gutter crew, which finally pushed the worm-eaten little ship to the paradise of Nouvelle France.

  Arriving at this bleak, rain-swept beach, Rabardy found nothing but the graves of his predecessors. The Chandernagore, after deserting the colony, had retreated to an easier climate in Australia, where the leaders of the expedition were seen dining regularly in the best restaurants; while the settlers who had escaped were still being cared for by the missionaries. At this point it would have been well if Nouvelle France had been abandoned as an evil dream, but Gustave Rabardy was so pigheadedly committed to his Marquis that he stolidly dropped anchor, captured a pleasant little native girl to sleep with, placed two pistols beside his plate, and publicly defied his crew to murder him. When they asked how long the Génil would stay anchored at this lonely and forbidding place he replied simply, “Forever.” When they tried to plead against such a stupid decision, he threatened to execute them.

  Now comes another incredible development in this grisly affair, for the gay Marquis was able to enlist a third boatload of emigrants and to steal from each his entire savings. This is the more remarkable in that the European public had been made fully aware of the disaster in Nouvelle France. Deserters from Rabardy’s hell ship had cabled the true story from Singapore, while from Australia a few refugees who had reached Sydney had sent to Paris circumstantial accounts of the terror they had undergone. Stories from both sources appeared in major European newspapers, but the good Marquis was able to face them down by sanctimoniously charging his enemies with religious persecution, so that he emerged stronger than before. Then, mouthing revolting platitudes and references to God’s approval of his venture, he chartered a third ship and with no apparent remorse sent three hundred additional emigrants to hell. They left Barcelona, Spain, on July 7, 1880.