Landfalls
Page 36
Only there was almost nothing left to find. Captain Cook, that greedy bastard, had made off with most of what was left besides Antarctica. We surveyed the Hawaiian Islands—we called them the Sandwich Isles back then—and created our own charts, but they didn’t improve much on the existing ones. We did land on Maui, the first Europeans to do so, and that bay still bears our captain’s name—La Perouse Bay. We pressed him to claim the island in the name of France. Claiming territory for our king seemed very much of a piece with completing the globe for him—especially territory the English had seen first but not bothered to walk around upon. Our captain declined, however. “Who are we to take possession of this place?” he said. “These people have lived here for hundreds of years. Do they have no rights, simply because we have muskets?” We felt chastened and puzzled and, to be frank, a little cheated by this response.
Making charts that just confirmed the greatness of Cook’s accomplishments didn’t quite fit our notions of fulfilling work either. Not that Cook’s work was perfect. His people had charted Pylstaert Island, a tiny outlier of the Friendly Archipelago first spotted by Abel Tasman in 1643, and placed it almost two leagues too far south. We set that to rights, of course. The Friendly Isles did very well by us, in fact, for we also corrected the location of Vava’u, one of its biggest islands, a place with a decent harbor and fresh water. A Spanish captain, Francisco Mourelle, had discovered it just a few years earlier but located it six degrees too far west. A mistake of that magnitude could consign one to sailing a long time in vain in search of safe anchorage and refreshment. We were forever correcting the work of the Spaniards, who for all their colonies and missions and galleons seemed unable or unwilling to create an accurate chart.
But who among us aspires to be the great cavilers and naysayers of the high seas? We began with Isle Grande and proceeded to erase more from the world’s maps than we added. It was one thing to be rid of Davis Land—the name itself lacked inspiration. And it’s true most geographers were already suspicious of Nuestra Señora de La Gorta, an island no respectable eighteenth-century sailor had ever seen. But what a pity to lose Los Mojos—or was it Los Majos, Las Mojas, or Los Mauges? We sank not only the islands but the entertaining controversy over their proper name. And when we expunged Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata, said to be wealthy islands inhabited by civilized and friendly white people, east of Japan—at that point we weren’t in the business of completing the globe so much as laying waste to dreams. We lost a man during that search—a young sailor from Saint-Brieuc who fell into the sea from the fore-topmast, drawn there, like so many of us, by the captain’s promise of a reward for the first man to sight land. It was a shame to lose him. And the islands. “Rich with Gold.” “Rich with Silver.” Every map should offer a few such temptations. Sometimes we felt less like explorers than like inquisitors rooting out cartographic heresy.
Do not misunderstand. We did make some discoveries of our own. Like Frenchman’s Bay in southeast Alaska, though it’s not called that any longer, a terrible place where an errant tidal current swept twenty-one of us away, the first calamity of the expedition. And Necker Island, a tumorous, uninhabited rock outcropping northwest of Hawaii, which we found one moonlit November evening. Two nights later, we veered away just in time from a mostly submerged atoll that our captain called—and which we are pleased to say are still called—the French Frigate Shoals. And Moneron Island, a tiny speck off the southern tip of Sakhalin, all steep cliffs and raucous birds and sea lions. We also added a few pieces to the Samoan archipelago (we called them the Navigators), site of our second calamity, twelve of us massacred by natives. Still we hoped to find something wondrous, a large landmass with people, a place to rival Tahiti or Hawaii or New Zealand. We discovered Vanikoro, of course, one of the Solomons, although no one would know that for many years. No sooner had we seen it than our third and final calamity was upon us.
Perhaps it was our passion for discovery that doomed us, drawing us too close to the Vanikoran reefs when the weatherglass was falling and the sky boiling with storm. Making us beat into the wind when we should have borne away. Inuring us to risk. Wasn’t it what had led twenty-one men to their watery deaths while surveying a new bay? And tempted a young sailor too far out a yardarm? And blinded a watering party to the hostility of the islanders? Our immoderate desire eroded caution.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
For before our undoing in Vanikoro, before the melee in Samoa, there was the hallucination.
It was June 16, 1787. We had come north through the Sea of Japan and were exploring the Strait of Tartary. Fog obscured the continent, but around us, the day was clear and pleasantly warm, with a cooperative breeze. Around four in the afternoon, the lookout cried that he spied land, and there in the south appeared a great landmass lying nearly perpendicular to the mainland, the gap between them very narrow. Drawing nearer, we could make out every detail of its terrain—mountains, ravines, coast, even curls of smoke that spoke of human habitation. Our hearts soared. Perhaps here—west of Japan, not east—was the fabled island of wealth and white people. Most likely it was nothing so wonderful. But surely it would be a discovery to rival any of Cook’s. We held to the wind and made for the south-southeast. As we approached, however, the island began to shift, its forms and colors blending into one another, peaks swirling skyward, mountainsides collapsing into canyons, the shoreline draining into the ocean. We watched, despairing, as our discovery resolved itself into the most extraordinary fog bank any of us had ever seen, and then it dissipated like a conjurer’s trick, leaving empty blue water and a clear view of the Tartary coast. We sailed all night in the ocean space our phantom island had seemed to occupy, though there was no need to confirm its nonexistence. It was a sad, defeated exercise, like trying to console oneself while holding a dead lover’s dress.
The illusion was complete and shared by us all. So was the disillusion. Something faltered that day in the Strait of Tartary. For it turned out we were no better than the La Roches and Davises whose cartographic fantasies we’d laughed off the world map. And if nearly two hundred experienced sailors could mistake mist for land, then there was no misapprehension to which we were not vulnerable. Suddenly, every outcome seemed equally possible and equally unreal. So when we first spied Vanikoro between the angry dark of sea and sky, a ribbon of green that appeared on no charts in our possession, we didn’t know whether to believe our eyes. When the full power of the storm fell on us, we were loath to accept its lashing reality; it could so easily have gone the other way. We were still in doubt as the waters closed over us, the globe we had tried so hard to complete swallowing us whole.
AFTERWORD
Peter Dillon was only the first of many to begin unraveling the mystery of the Lapérouse expedition’s disappearance. The Dumont-d’Urville expedition arrived in Vanikoro just a few months after Dillon, collecting more artifacts from the wrecks and largely corroborating what Dillon had learned from the islanders. For the next century and a half, most expeditions to Vanikoro were undertaken by missionaries, some of whom suggested on entirely paltry evidence that the survivors of the wrecks had been cannibalized by the islanders—a “fact” that got repeated over and over, even in otherwise careful treatments of the Lapérouse expedition, well into the twentieth century.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s, when scuba diving technology had advanced sufficiently to allow for sustained and more mobile underwater explorations, that substantial new relics of the shipwrecks were recovered from the ocean floor. In the decades since, numerous expeditions, some mounted by the French Navy and the Association Salomon in Nouméa, New Caledonia, have turned up more and more evidence about where and how the Boussole and the Astrolabe came to grief.
I relied on the work of numerous scholars to piece together the factual elements of this story. The single most important source was The Journal of Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, 1785–1788, translated and edited by John Dunmore and published by the Hakluyt
Society in two volumes in 1994. Dunmore’s comprehensive introduction and footnotes provided historical context and suggested many of the ideas for the tales in this book.
The most helpful source in French, besides the French-language edition of the journal itself, was Catherine Gaziello’s exhaustive 1984 study of the expedition, L’Expedition de Lapérouse 1785–1788, published by Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques. The Musée Lapérouse in Albi, France, and the relevant rooms in the Musée National de La Marine in Paris also provided helpful facts and visuals. The curious and compulsive reader may find a more comprehensive bibliography for this project at my website: www.naomijwilliams.com.
I am, of course, indebted to numerous individuals and organizations for their artistic, material, professional, and moral support of this project and its creator. Thanks first and foremost to my agent, the warm, witty, and wise Nicole Aragi, and to my gently persistent editor, Eric Chinski. Also thanks to Duvall Osteen at Aragi, Inc.; Peng Shepherd, Frieda Duggan, Sarah Scire, and everyone at FSG; Clare Smith, Rachel Wilkie, and everyone at Little, Brown, UK; and the excellent people at the Abner Stein Agency and the Marsh Agency.
Many teachers and mentors have helped light the way for this book. Thank you, Lucy Corin, Karen Joy Fowler, Lynn Freed, Pam Houston, Alessa Johns, Yiyun Li, Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy, Elissa Schappell, and Jim Shepard.
I am indebted to several organizations and individuals for their generous support of my work. I completed a first draft of this book while a student in the UC Davis Masters in Creative Writing program. Hedgebrook provided me with the incomparable gift of a month’s residency in 2010. A 2013 Promise Grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation allowed me to devote time to completing the manuscript. The Maurice Prize, established and funded by John Lescroart, has been a great boon to emerging writers from UC Davis for many years. Thank you, all.
My heartfelt gratitude, collectively, to everyone who has read and commented on parts of this book over the years: the Davis Writers Group; participants in the Sacramento Master Writers weekend workshops; the brilliant and supportive women I met at Hedgebrook; my wonderful classmates at UC Davis; the regulars at Don Schwartz’s Tuesday night creative writing class at the Davis Art Center; the ASH Writing Group; and fellow workshoppers at Squaw Valley and Tin House. For assistance with research questions, thank you, Eric Berti, Sarah Curtis, Rachel Fuchs, Judy Kalb, Ricardo Lezama, Lynda Newman, Jesper Olsson, and Dimitri Salichon. Any historical inaccuracies are obviously my fault alone.
For support of the variously moral, literary, and culinary varieties, thank you, Carlos Davidson, Valerie Fioravanti, Teresa Herlinger, Cynthia Kaufman, Marian Mabel, Jen Marlowe, Linda Matthew, Paul Rauber, Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Cora Stryker, Josh Weil, and Elise Winn. Chris Chang and Rae Gouirand offered not only their warm and indispensable friendship but the gift of undistracted writing time in their homes. Thank you, thank you. And I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Susan Wolbarst, who read nearly every page of this novel, many of them more than once, including hundreds of pages I ultimately discarded. Greater love hath no writer friend than this.
I am inordinately lucky when it comes to family. My mother, Atsuko Williams, and my sister, Mari McQuaid, always expressed confidence that I would publish a book, even through the long decades when there was little evidence to support their faith. My in-laws, Norman and Rachel Fuchs, offered unflagging moral support, bought references for me, and funded a research trip to Paris and Albi. My children, Julian Fuchs and Eliot Williams, can scarcely remember a time when their mother was not working on this book. Thank you, guys, for your patience, your love, and your always insightful and timely encouragement. My husband, Dan Fuchs, has been chief breadwinner, co-parent extraordinaire, head chef, and first reader. Your love and your belief in me have made my entire adult life possible. And now this.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Naomi J. Williams lives in Northern California with her family. Landfalls is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Prologue: Galley Stoves
1. Items for Exchange
2. Lamanon at Sea
3. Concepción
4. Snow Men
5. Cenotaph Island
6. Fog
7. Letters from Monterey
8. A Monograph on Parasites
9. Dispatches
10. The Report
11. Among the Mangroves
12. Skull House
13. Permission
14. Relics
Epilogue: Folie à Plusieurs
Afterword
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Naomi J. Williams
Map copyright © 2015 by John Gilkes
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
The following chapters have been previously published, in slightly different versions: “Items for Exchange” (Sycamore Review), “Lamanon at Sea” (A Public Space), “Snow Men” (One Story), “The Report” (American Short Fiction), and “Folie à Plusieurs” (Ninth Letter).
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Naomi J., 1964–
Landfalls / Naomi J. Williams. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-18315-8 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71247-1 (e-book)
1. Scientific expeditions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I55925 L36 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014039367
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