The scenic pleasures of the previous few days were at an end as the explorers moved into a higher region. Flowers and shrubs disappeared as they marched through a bleak landscape made more forbidding by the evidence of the rebels' justice along the way. Set beside the various crossroads they passed were roughly constructed gallows with the bodies of hanged men twisting slowly in the wind. A grisly audience to watch over the gallows, the heads of other enemies rotted atop tall bamboo poles. And, much more immediately disturbing to the tired explorers, there was snow. The path continued to rise until they once again passed over a ridge more than nine thousand feet high, the second time their route had risen to this height in less than three weeks of hard traveling.
Temporary relief was in sight. Once over the towering pass, the explorers' route lay through less elevated country. On February 21 they reached Pin-ch'uan, an important settlement in a wide valley, and here they found rebel officials who were ready to aid them on their way. A sight of Lao Papa's letter and judicious distribution of presents seemed all that was required. Two days later, after one further tiring climb to more than nine thousand feet, the explorers came to Father Leguilcher's mission station. They were exhausted after eleven consecutive days of the most arduous marching they had undertaken during the entire expedition. Delaporte was ill with fever, and all were in need of rest. Garnier took almost malicious pleasure in recounting the shocked reaction of the missionary who met them. Leguilcher's face betrayed his disbelief that this rough-clad, bearded figure who stood before him, a revolver on his hip and a carbine in his hand, could be Lieutenant Garnier of the French navy. “You will not blame us for our lack of proper clothing?” Garnier asked the astounded priest.
For all their exhaustion, and despite Delaporte's illness, the party did not rest long at Leguilcher's mission station. The end of February was at hand, and the party had still not reached Tali, let alone the Mekong lying farther west. On February 25 they left the mission station, accompanied by Father Leguilcher; four days later they saw the great lake on which the city of Ta-li was set. Leguilcher was little help as Garnier planned the next steps of their journey. The missionary priest had managed to remain where he was largely by keeping himself out of sight. Whenever there had been a suggestion that Islamic troops might be in the region of his mission station, he had fled with his few followers deeper into the hills. It was years since he had visited Ta-li, and he could give no useful information on the political situation there.
A few of Leguilcher's fearful converts followed the party as it descended to the plain where the large but narrow lake ran north and south, with Ta-li on its western shore. These worried Christians transmitted the gossip and rumor they gathered to the French priest, who then passed it to Garnier. They told of “sixteen Europeans” who had come to Ta-li with “four Malay” assistants to make bombs for the Islamic rebels. The Europeans, it was said, had been executed and the Malays were in chains. Garnier wisely disregarded it all.
Twenty miles from Ta-li the explorers were brought to a halt. The land between the lake shore and the snow-covered mountains that rose abruptly to the west narrowed at this point, so that a fortress could completely dominate passage north and south. Garnier had already sent ahead a request for permission to enter Ta-li. Seeking a positive response from Tu Wen-hsiu, the Muslim leader who now styled himself Sultan of Ta-li, he had joined to his own letter the words of recommendation written by Lao Papa. The commander of the fortress that barred their way was polite but unyielding. They had to remain until permission to proceed was sent from Ta-li. It came on March 1. The next day, early in the morning, they began their march to the Muslim capital.
Traveling over a paved road, the explorers entered Ta-li in the middle of the afternoon. Their arrival was expected and a large crowd pressed about them, waking memories of the incidents earlier in the expedition's journey when curiosity seekers had become a threat to safety. Followed by the crowd, but escorted by Muslim soldiers, they came to the center of the city. Here they halted in front of the Sultan's palace, a grim fortified building. None of the Frenchmen was ready for the next development. As they stood expectantly below the palace walls, a soldier grasped de Carné's hair, jerking his face upward, apparently seeking to show the European's face to a hidden watcher in the palace. De Carné struck out and the soldier retreated, his face bloodied. For an instant it seemed that the French party might be overwhelmed. The crowd surged forward, only to hesitate before the expedition's escort who stood with their long bayonets fixed to their rifles. Two Muslim officials hastily intervened to bring the incident to a close. It was an unhappy augury for the future.
Lodged in the south of the city, the explorers received a visit from the most senior Muslim official they had yet met. He was courteous but seemed unconvinced of their claims to be explorers, and he was quite unready to believe they were French. Surely, he insisted, they were English. Bridling at this supreme insult, Garnier nonetheless thought that some progress was achieved. Ceremonial for a visit to the Sultan was agreed upon; the Frenchmen could greet the Muslim ruler with a European bow, and it seemed that the party could retain their arms. Yet some uncertainty hung over the exchange, and shortly after two more senior officials called on the French party. They asked much the same questions appearing to take it amiss that Garnier did not claim to have been sent to Ta-li by his ruler for the express purpose of paying respect to the Sultan. They also departed and Garnier began to contemplate his most special desire. If all went well, he would leave his companions to rest in Ta-li and would himself march rapidly to the Mekong. The river which had exercised such a continuous fascination over him was only four days' fast marching further west, and known here as the river “whose waves are vast.”
By noon of the next day the hollowness of such hopes was made clear. Early in the morning of March 3 a messenger came requiring Father Leguilcher's presence at the Sultan's palace. The missionary returned three hours later totally discouraged. The Sultan would not receive the explorers, who must leave Tali the next day. A follower of Islam he might be, but his message to the French party was couched in the formal and dismissive phrases of the Chinese empire. Did they not know that, only a few days before, he had executed three Malays? “If I choose not to take the lives of those who accompany you,” he told Leguilcher, “it is because of my concern for their position as foreigners and respect for the letters of recommendation they carry. But let them hasten to depart.” Leguilcher was frightened to the point where he could scarcely speak. But he did try, unsuccessfully, to convince the Sultan and his retinue that these were not Englishmen who lodged within the city. They did not or would not believe him.
There was now no choice but to retreat. The French party was heavily outnumbered, and the city was full of soldiers who, however poorly armed, could readily overcome the small group should they choose. Garnier's growing concern was the possibility that their ordered expulsion might become imprisonment instead. Before first light, at five in the morning, the French party left their lodgings. To avoid traveling through the streets of Tali, they passed through the city walls by the south gate, then skirted the city's eastern flank to rejoin the great road leading north. There was no incident. Twenty miles of forced marching later, however, as they reached the great fortress that controlled the road, a confrontation threatened. The Muslim officer who had escorted them this far told them he had orders to retain the party at this point. Garnier refused to stop and the party passed on to take up quarters beyond the fortress, clear of immediate obstructions to their passage east.
After some hours' rest and further unsatisfactory exchanges with local officials, who tried to persuade the Frenchmen to wait for orders from the Sultan, Garnier resolved to place an even greater distance between his party and Ta-li. Despite the twenty miles they had marched earlier in the day, the tired men set off again in the evening and continued to the head of the lake. All had gone well, it seemed, until a major loss was discovered. Along with the rest of his equipment, De
laporte had been carrying a gold bar. It represented half of the party's financial resources, and it was no longer there. They searched in the dark, but without success. The need to speed their return to the east was suddenly made even more urgent than before.
The next night was as worrying as any. Still well within the territory controlled by the Muslim rebels, the French party could not avoid the settlements lying in their paths. On the evening of March 6 the Governor of the town where they had halted demanded the presence of Leguilcher. Garnier would not let the priest go, despite the threats of Muslim soldiers that this refusal would end with the Frenchmen's heads rotting on the gallows in the marketplace. In the morning, with the rest of the party escorting him, Leguilcher learned from the Governor that he had orders to escort the French party through the territory held by the Islamic rebels. Convinced that this was a trap, Garnier refused to comply. They would travel independently, and he made clear their readiness to fight if impeded. They were allowed to go on alone.
If the members of the expedition were retreating in good order, the situation was more acutely dangerous for the missionary. Deeply distressed, he accepted Garnier's argument that to stay at his mission station would be unnecessarily risky. As the party continued on its eastward route, Leguilcher accompanied them.
Eleven days after the dawn departure from Ta-li the party was back in imperial territory. They had failed to gain their dearest wish, the sighting and mapping of the upper Mekong, but their visit to Ta-li was still remarkable. In spite of the speed with which they had traveled and the constant need to be alert against potential dangers, they had mapped and sketched the area through which they passed with care and in astounding detail.
With these problems behind them the explorers hoped for news of their leader. Reaching Hui-li at the beginning of the last week of March, they found news of a sort. Soldiers who had come from Hui-tse gave conflicting reports. Some said Lagrée had already moved on to I-pin, north on the Yangtze; others spoke of his being still in Hui-tse on March 9. On March 25 the anxious travelers had the first world that Lagrée was dead, only to have this denied the next day. Puzzled and deeply worried by these uncertain rumors, they hurried on, sending runners north and east to try to gain certain information. They received it on April 2, when a messenger returned with a letter for Garnier from Joubert. Lagrée, they learned, had been dead for three weeks. Garnier immediately pressed on ahead for Hui-tse.
With the return of Garnier's party and the news of Lagrée's death, the expedition was at its end, symbolically and in fact. Garnier was now the senior member of the party, and automatically the new leader. His first decision, once the rest of the party rejoined him at Hui-tse, may seem strange by twentieth-century standards. By the values of the 1860s it was right and proper. Lagrée's body, which had lain for three weeks in its grave, should be exhumed with ceremony. They gathered for this awful moment on April 5. In its heavy coffin Lagrée's body would be borne by porters into I-pin. In singular testimony to the respect that the dead leader inspired, the men of the expedition's escort volunteered to carry out this task. The labor was, in fact, beyond them, for these almost anonymous men were suffering from disease and exhaustion no less than the Europeans. With the exception of Tei, Garnier's special companion, none in the escort emerges from the records left behind as a personality in his own right. Yet they were essential members of the expedition.
So, too, was the sailor Mouëllo, who was now charged with the duty of destroying Lagrée's papers. Joubert had been reluctant to carry out this charge, but Garnier saw no choice. Under his new leader's eyes Mouëllo carried out his last sad duty to the man he had served so well. Although Lagrée had died in Mouëllo's arms, neither this fact nor his final burning of the papers are described in either Garnier's official or unofficial published accounts of the expedition. For an otherwise generous man, Garnier's omission is surprising, even in the rigid world of rank and discipline that was his own.
When the expedition left Hui-tse on April 7, seven of the fourteen remaining members of the party were ill with fever. The mission's tasks were at an end, but the route to I-pin, on the Yangtze, remained to be covered. With the coming of spring there was frequent rain to plague the exhausted men and hinder the Chinese porters carrying Lagrée's coffin. Only after a week of debilitating stages over mountain paths did the explorers descend to lower altitudes and more temperate conditions. On April 20 they were finally able to embark on a boat that could carry them down one of the Yangtze's tributaries to the great river itself, and so to I-pin. When, on April 26, the mission reached that important commercial center its members were, in Garnier's words, at the end of their energies and resources, but they had “not lost their courage.” It was well that they retained some of their courage, for once again at I-pin they had to confront the dangerous results of curiosity that turned to rage when the explorers refused to be treated as some kind of circus exhibit.
The party left I-pin on May 9. Four slow weeks of travel by junk brought them to Hankow and, although Garnier did not realize it at the time, a fateful meeting. Among the French community who feted the members of the expedition once they reached Hankow was Jean Dupuis. In 1868 he had already spent nearly eight years in the Far East, gradually building a thriving trade in armaments. When he met the members of the French mission he was forty years old, fluent in Chinese and accustomed to dressing in mandarin robes. Later British generations might have called him a rough diamond, for he would have been an entertaining figure in a club, if not necessarily the type of man to be invited home. But for all his Chinese ways, he remained proudly French.
He also possessed a commercial flair, a sense of where money might be made. We may readily believe that he listened attentively when the explorers, particularly Joubert, who came from the same region of France, told Dupuis of their belief that the Red River was navigable to the sea, at the very least from the borders of Tonkin with China. Later Dupuis was to deny bitterly that any such conversation took place, claiming that he had known of the Red River's possibilities for years, indeed since 1861. It is hard to credit this claim. Dupuis was resourceful, not least in lying, but even in his own publications he provides no convincing evidence. Shortly after the expedition left Hankow, however, he started his preparations to visit Yunnan, where the opportunities for an arms salesman seemed unlimited. Garnier and Dupuis were to meet again, five years later.
When, after passing by way of Shanghai, the members of the expedition reached Saigon on June 29, 1868, they had been absent for two years and twenty-four days. Whatever the disappointments they had encountered in their survey of the Mekong, or their hopes for the future use of the Red River, it was the recital of the distances they had traveled that impressed those who greeted them in the French colony. And with good cause, for during their travels the explorers had mapped some four thousand miles that had never been surveyed previously. Garnier alone had mapped more than three thousand one hundred and fifty miles of territory. The course of the Mekong had been established and areas of southwestern China visited that had never previously been seen by a European. All this had been accomplished under conditions a modern traveler finds difficult to imagine.
Garnier had vowed to return Lagrée's body to French soil, and in Saigon it was buried with funerary pomp. The naval shipyard furnished lead for a new coffin, and the Governor of Cochinchina led the mourners. Lagrée's old missionary friend from the time when they had both been in Cambodia together, Bishop Miche, gave the benediction beside the tomb. Lagrée, it seemed, had come home to his people. In France, however, the news of Lagrée's death and the return of the French expedition passed almost without comment. Going back to Paris before the end of 1868, Garnier was first disillusioned and then angry. Worse, he was in addition the target of a bitter personal denunciation by Louis de Carné as the tension of the expedition flamed into open accusation and counter accusation in France. For a period, at least, success had a bitter taste in Garnier's mouth.
A merchant t
rain in Yunnan
CHAPTER XI
POST-MORTEM IN PARIS
The explorers returned to the “City of Light,” to passing attention, bitterness, and altercations. Paris, at the end of 1868, was poised unknowing before disaster. The Franco-Prussian War was a bare two years away, and the conditions which would hasten that French debacle were, with the wisdom of hindsight, clearly and vividly present. But no one seemed even to guess that Napoleon Ill's empire had so little time to run. Like a patient afflicted by a terminal disease but unaware of the fact, there was business as usual. Business of all sorts: the Emperor puzzled over ways to gain a revival of electoral approval; the Empress dreamed of young Prince Louis' finally coming into an imperial inheritance; the French armed forces, complacent after years of peace, paraded and postured in their brilliant uniforms; and le tout-Paris, the elegant men, the actress-courtesans, the demimondaines, danced to waltzes, to polkas, and to cancans before fading into a gaslit darkness for marginally more private pleasures.
This was not Garnier's world, nor that of de Carné, Joubert, Delaporte, and Thorel. Whatever differences there were between them, they had been, and still were, men of action. Unlike most of the splendidly clad army officers who clattered in cavalry troops along the boulevards or gathered at the famous cafés, the members of the expedition had actually known danger and the threat of death. Not that the military fops they now saw proved to be cowards two years later. Lack of leadership rather than cowardice doomed the French forces then. The essential difference between the Mekong's explorers and the society to which they returned was a difference of values. Above all, they had believed in the importance of the painful search for a southern route into China. They found, in general, that their countrymen did not.
Always outspoken, Garnier did not wait long to make his critical views public. He had been invited to visit the imperial court and had spoken with the Emperor. But no new official decoration followed this occasion. The Geographical Society of Paris showed its admiration for both Lagrée and Garnier by awarding them a shared medal in April 1869, yet this could only be recognized as applause from the converted. And, already, the bitter private criticisms had begun. Admiral de La Grandière, the former Governor of Cochinchina, deeply resented any suggestion that Garnier had conceived the exploration project. Whatever honor was to be gained, he argued, some share should be his. In a stormy confrontation, in late January 1869, Garnier s former superior upbraided him for supposedly unwarranted and disloyal behavior. If Garnier's account is correct, La Grandière, in his anger and disappointment, hovered between threats and pleas, begging finally to have the original instructions, which the Admiral had signed, included in the official report on the expedition that Garnier was preparing.
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