Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  But now, in February, 1882, as the last miserable group of colonists huddled on the rain-soaked shore, thirty-five were dying of fever and only five were reasonably well. They stalked the tiny beach and tried to contrive some means of escape. As they plotted, they were watched constantly by Captain Gustave Rabardy, who was more determined than ever that they must remain there and perish.

  Finally, in true French fashion, the settlers convened and solemnly declared themselves the Republic of Port Breton. Thus ended the Kingdom of Nouvelle France. Then, with democratic ardor, they defied Rabardy and his little black girl. They established contact with a planter across the bay at Duke of York Island. When he arrived, they were finally evacuated. There was room on the Port Breton beach for not one more grave, and nobody had the strength to hew a tomb from the solid rock of the mountain slope.

  Captain Rabardy’s resistance had collapsed and, in ungracious surrender, he called his crew back on board and sailed his ship to the plantation on Duke of York Island. Hearing that the three dozen surviving colonists were planning to take the Génil to Australia, he fell ill and sulked in his hammock. Then an incident occurred which has never been explained. A daughter of one of the surviving colonists describes it:

  “On February 15, 1882, about a quarter past ten in the evening, Mr. Farrell [the planter] came on board, and used all his powers of persuasion to induce the captain to come to his residence and enjoy the comforts of a well-appointed home where he could receive proper nursing. Rabardy resisted every argument, every wile advanced by Farrell. The doctor, rather surprised by the pertinacity shown by the planter, was afraid to allow Rabardy to leave the shelter of the ship, for he knew full well the temper of the colonists who had been so cruelly wronged.

  “Next morning the doctor left the Génil to visit his patients on board the pontoon. On his return he was surprised to find the captain’s hammock empty.

  “ ‘Where is Captain Rabardy?’ he asked M. Dessus.

  “ ‘On shore. Mr. Farrell came this morning, and renewed his invitation. He would take no refusal, so finally the captain yielded to his importunity.’ …

  “Although the doctor was uneasy (he could not explain why), he decided to remain on board until after the midday meal. While he was still at luncheon, he heard a voice calling him from afar. He hurried on deck and saw a canoe with Chambaud on board, coming at full speed.

  “ ‘Rabardy is dead!’ shouted the surveyor.

  “ ‘Thank God!’ exclaimed a colonist standing among a group on deck.

  “Without the loss of a second of time the doctor jumped into the canoe, and ten minutes later entered the Farrells’ drawing-room, where the ex-governor of Port Breton lay dead, extended on a couch, his hands hanging limply by his sides. An empty cup, which had evidently been recently washed and dried, was on a small table beside him.

  “The doctor made the necessary examination. Rabardy was indeed dead. Turning to Mr. Farrell, who was watching every movement with the closest attention, the doctor said: ‘I must conduct a postmortem.’

  “To which Mr. Farrell replied: ‘Impossible, in this climate. For reasons that you fully understand, burial cannot be delayed, and must take place before nightfall.’

  “Much against the doctor’s will, arrangements were made for a speedy interment. By three o’clock all was ready; the pastor, the bier, the candles, and three canoes to convoy the cortege to the neighboring island-cemetery.

  “On a brilliant sunny afternoon, with waves dancing in the sun, the final scene in the story of Rabardy takes place. About three o’clock on the sandy stretch between Mr. Farrell’s house and the sea, a catafalque is erected. On an open bier, supported by four bamboos, lies Rabardy, dressed in his uniform, hands crossed on the hilt of his sword. The doctor delays the burial until unmistakable signs of dissolution have set in, which happens very speedily under a tropic sun. Officers from the Génil, also dressed in uniform, come in their boats, and stand at attention around the open coffin. Little Tani [Rabardy’s Melanesian wife], bowed with grief, sobs her heart out at the foot of the bier; Fijian ministers chant their dirges. Rabardy, lying there, is at last at peace, is at last free from the ever present terror of assassination.…

  “Tani wept for two days, and then played with the light-heartedness of youth among the bevy of young Samoan maidens.

  “ ‘Where is your Capi?’ the doctor asked her.

  “ ‘Gone, gone,’ she replied; then blithely continued her game.”

  The Marquis de Rays, meanwhile, was having a delightful time in Spain and France. Altogether he had collected about two million dollars, of which he had probably spent on colonization less than one fourth. Even when his entire colony lay dying, he had refused to cable a single franc to Manila to save it.

  What did he do with his money? He maintained several houses in lavish style, paraded three notorious mistresses—one Spanish—around Europe and overwhelmed them with luxuries, and continued to mouth his debt to God for having made possible an empire of religious and forthright men in the Pacific, where noble savages who knew not the ways of the Lord were being saved.

  No matter what grim stories filtered back to Europe, his reputation seems not to have suffered. In his three main ships he sent a total of at least 610 European men and women to Port Breton. It is impossible to find out the fate of each of these, although the Chandernagore passenger list furnishes a sample: out of 90, no less than 27 died and 21 disappeared. We know that at least 200 survivors, mainly Italians, reached Sydney; 65, mainly Spaniards, reached Manila; and a final 36 got to Australia after Captain Rabardy’s death. Of course, many counted as rescued died quickly, as did about half the crew members, who are not included in these figures. That leaves more than three hundred passengers unaccounted for.

  If only one of these unfortunates had died as a result of the Marquis’ folly, or lack of planning, or downright carelessness, the nobleman would have been guilty of criminal negligence. If, as there is good reason to suppose, he actually gave surreptitious orders to his captains to mistreat the colonists, or worse, he was guilty of murder. That he perpetrated these deeds under the guise of Christianity was nauseating. But that he callously claimed that he and his henchmen, in the year 1881, were above jurisdiction because they acted under the sanctions of divine right, was insane.

  Belatedly the French government, which had always opposed the Marquis’ schemes, came to the same conclusion. In 1882 he was extradited from Spain on charges of swindling, infraction of emigration laws and homicide through criminal imprudence. At his trial, for certain legal reasons, the last two charges were dropped; nevertheless, under the swindling charge alone the prosecution brought in as evidence no less than twelve thousand documents.

  Unbelievably, while the Marquis was awaiting trial and the newspapers were exposing his heartlessness, many of his adherents refused to believe in his guilt. Here is a translation of an address submitted to him on New Year’s Day, 1883:

  “Sire:

  “The more your raging persecutors torture you in body and soul, the more they attempt to blacken your character in the eyes of your fellow citizens, the more is it our duty to express our admiration for your esteemed person. We humbly pray you to permit us to express the reasons for our love, our fidelity, and our veneration.

  “(1) Veneration. You are a real martyr; you suffer persecution because you wished to colonize for God.

  “(2) Fidelity. How disappointed your accusers would be, could they but lift the veil of the future; could their stupefied gaze but see you occupying a throne in Melanesia. But if your enemies could be satisfied only by your death, we would immediately cry: ‘The King is dead—long live the King,’ and your eldest son would immediately be proclaimed by us Charles II of La Nouvelle France.”

  On the opening day of the trial in March, 1883, the Marquis made a splendid impression, with his nobility of bearing and his dreamy pale blue eyes—slightly resembling those of Napoleon III, his hearers remarked. They wept when he wept.
But the public prosecutor did not spare him, and the frightful tale unfolded.

  To his loyal defenders only one item of the shocking evidence seemed to detract from De Rays’s reputation, and that only slightly: the prosecutor proved that the supposed marquis was not really a marquis at all. He was really only a viscount.

  Nearly a year later, after a sensational trial, he was convicted, fined a sum equivalent to $600, and sent to jail for six years, of which he had already served two. Imprisonment affected the unthroned Charles I very little. Shortly after his release—the unspent portion of his Nouvelle France money stashed away safely somewhere—he offered Europe a medicine guaranteed to heal all known illnesses. It was made of powdered granite rocks from his Quimerc’h estate. The Paris police soon put a stop to its sale.

  His jail term did no apparent damage to his reputation, for we last see this engaging nobleman in the evening of his eventful life. Still strutting as King Charles I, he conducted a gala world cruise—probably the first of its kind—on the luxury liner Tyburnia. He announced, with studied condescension, that only English and French passengers with titles would be accommodated, since he wished the trip to be free of crudeness or unpleasantness of any kind.

  On its triumphant tour the Tyburnia did not visit Port Breton.

  3

  Coxinga, Lord of the Seas

  Sturdy Francis Drake, first Englishman to penetrate the wealth-laden waters of the Pacific, stood on the quarterdeck of his voyage-worn little ship, the Golden Hind, which was riding just north of the Equator, in wait for prey off the coast of South America. Drake, already known to the plundered Spanish merchants of the Caribbean as the terror of the Spanish Main, was about to strike anew, here in the Pacific.

  It was at dawn on March 1, 1579, that his young cousin John Drake rushed up and cried, “Yonder comes the Spanish galleon!” He had spotted a great prize, for there, a dozen miles astern, loomed the high-pooped Spanish argosy they had been hoping to ambush.

  “This gold chain is your reward, coz,” cheerily replied Drake, taking the heavy chain from his neck and putting it over the boy’s head. The Prince of Buccaneers then gave orders to throw aft some huge jars on ropes, in order to slow down his speedy ship so that the unsuspecting treasure galleon would overtake her around dusk. Drake did not want the captain of the galleon, the Cacafuego, to discover that his little ship was English until it was too late to escape or to pitch the treasure overboard.

  The galleon creaked and blundered on, its crew never imagining that ahead lay the ship of Drake, whose name had been translated by the Spaniards as “The Dragon,” and that the vessel held a gang of English buccaneers who were already almost sated with plunder after six months of ravaging ships and towns along the exposed western coast of South America. At dusk, the captain of the Cacafuego curtly refused to pause at Drake’s hail. But when a cannon ball knocked down the Spanish mizzenmast and the navigator was wounded by an arrow from an English longbow, the great galleon abruptly surrendered.

  After clapping the Spanish crew below hatches and putting his own men aboard to sail the Cacafuego out of the dangerous coastal waters, Drake had to wait two days before he had time to take an inventory of the cargo of the captured galleon. He found aboard fourteen great chests full of coined pieces-of-eight, eighty pounds of gold bullion, caskets of pearls, bars of pure silver weighing twenty-six tons and many rich pieces of massy plate, chains and gleaming jewels. The crew grumbled at the labor of transferring this huge booty to their own ship, for it took several days. Even without the jewels, the cargo of the Cacafuego was worth £250,000 sterling—which today would be the equivalent of about twenty million dollars.

  Yet even this was not enough for Drake. The dignified old pilot of the Spanish ship privately owned two fine silver bowls. The Englishman eyed them greedily. “Sir pilot, you have two cups here; I must needs have one of them!” Disdainfully the old man gave him one and in stinging rebuke tossed the other to Drake’s steward. The great freebooter, already possessed of one of the richest prizes ever taken, could afford to ignore the insult. He ordered the ship to sail to a quiet island where he could divide up the loose money among his men.

  There were only forty-five men in his crew and each, the Spaniards later reported, was given sixteen bowls full of coins. But many men heaved their share overboard, because the overladen, hundred-ton Golden Hind could not carry it all! No wonder that, when the plundering Drake returned to England after being the first of his countrymen to circumnavigate the globe, he was knighted on his quarter-deck by Queen Bess, who lovingly addressed him in her letters as “My dear pirate.”

  Western readers are apt to think of piracy as a brutal art which flourished mainly in the Caribbean, where the principal pirates of romance operated. Because names like Jean Lafitte, François L’Ollonais, and “Blackbeard” Teach struck terror in the forecastles of Atlantic trading vessels, we have become accustomed to think of the West Indies pirate as the leading exemplar of his cutthroat trade. But even Sir Henry Morgan, who sacked Panama and switched from being admiral of a pirate fleet to governor of Jamaica, never took booty such as the argosies of the Pacific regularly yielded.

  For there the richest prizes sailed—the yearly galleons from Manila to Mexico, laden with spices, silks, Oriental art, gold plate, pearls and other gems. There, too, sailed the silver fleets, overburdened with refined metal from the mines of Peru. The lure of these defenseless treasure ships was too great to resist, and buccaneers from many nations flocked to the Pacific to ply their bloody trade.

  The luckiest were those who, like Drake, Cavendish and George Anson, came early. Thomas Cavendish, “The Corsair,” who arrived eight years after Drake’s voyage and burned nineteen Spanish ships, earned enough to have bought him an earldom when he succeeded in capturing the Santa Ana, merely one of the huge Manila galleons. His world-circling little Desire returned to London with her topmasts wrapped in cloth of gold and her crew ostentatiously lolling on deck, magnificently clad in priceless silks and brocades. Plunder like this, which the Pacific offered each year, put the pillaging of Henry Morgan into eclipse.

  Although Francis Drake never flew the skull-and-bones or made a fat merchant walk the plank, he was nevertheless the most successful buccaneer among a long roster of fellow pirates of the Pacific. Despite the romance of the Caribbean, the pirates of the Pacific levied the greatest toll upon the world’s shipping and were also the most fierce and bloodthirsty, fighting and dying for the joy of slaughter.

  The Malayan breed of pirate that haunted the Straits of Malacca west of Singapore, for example, was incredibly fiery and persistent. For centuries these devils focused at the northern tip of Sumatra, where their descendants, unconquered even now, wage desultory warfare today against the Indonesian government. It is recorded in American naval history that when one of our warships showed our flag for the first time in the Straits of Malacca, the pirates of Sumatra joyfully leaped into their terrifying craft, sped out to sea, and engaged the American ship in a fierce battle “just to see whether the men in the strange new ship could fight.” Toward dusk the pirates were satisfied that the American flag bespoke a certain bravery, if no great skill, and the marauders retired content.

  For terror, for merciless brutality to passengers of captured ships, and for ability to withstand the efforts of European nations to dislodge them, the Malayan pirates were unsurpassed. One can read of their prowess in the works of Joseph Conrad, but perhaps the most fascinating account of their depredations is found in the records of British naval officers sent to subdue the pirates of Borneo, who were ravaging the newly founded kingdom of the great white Rajah of Sarawak, the Englishman Sir James Brooke. The Borneo pirates were an almost indestructible crew, and well into the twentieth century they defied as much of the British fleet as could be spared for use against them. Even to this day, at the slightest diminution of visible police power, the Malayan pirate springs back into action, his courage as strong and as unabated as it was in the early 1500’
s, when any ship from India or from the Spice Islands was likely to be overhauled and all hands slain.

  But the spot where the history of piracy goes back at least to pre-Christian times, and continues today almost unabated, is the China Sea, the breeding ground for the adventurer who became undoubtedly the greatest pirate of the Pacific. This man, a Chinese-Japanese, could probably be termed the premier pirate in history, for before his untimely death he built himself a broad empire and made sovereign nations tremble at his name. His life encompassed not only success in ocean fighting, not only the winning of incomparable riches, but also the exhibition of victory and defeat on the epic scale and a persistence of character—displayed in an unshakable loyalty to lost causes—which actually won him godhood in the pantheons of two different nations.

  To comprehend the story of this majestic pirate we must go to the inconspicuous little Chinese village of Anhai at the opening of the seventeenth century. The mud huts of Anhai lay not far from the important South China seaport of Amoy, and were thus only a few miles due north of the strategic island of Quemoy, which in turn lay only about a hundred miles west of the great and rich island of Formosa. Japan was about nine hundred miles to the northeast of Anhai, and the riotous Portuguese enclave of Macao only three hundred and fifty miles to the southwest.

  Anhai, therefore, although itself insignificant, lay along the principal trade routes that interlocked China, Japan, Formosa and Portuguese Macao. Any venturesome boy of Anhai was likely to become involved with this trade. That was true of one particularly alert child, born about 1603, the illegitimate son of an obscure Anhai workman.

  Little is known of his youth, but he left home to seek his fortune, and in 1621 he suddenly appeared in the colony of Macao, where he mastered the Portuguese language and got a post with a Chinese merchant. Contemplating a permanent residence in that wild, rich city, he had himself baptized a proper Christian, taking the Catholic names of Gaspar Nicholas. He was to be known to history as Nicholas Iquan—the latter name deriving from Chinese words meaning “eldest son.”