by Clare Clark
‘What is your other name?’ she asked.
Marguerite hesitated. Then she shook her head.
‘It is something between me and my mother.’
‘Like a secret?’
Marguerite frowned, puffing out her mouth consideringly.
‘Like when I call the cow,’ she said. ‘And I know she’ll come.’
The baby stirred on Elisabeth’s shoulder. She lowered her face to his brow, inhaling his sweet grassy smell.
‘I should like to have a name for you like that,’ Elisabeth said softly. ‘One just for us.’
Marguerite leaned against the cow’s broad brow, pulling on her ears.
‘It has to mean something. Like wise friend. It can’t just be a thing like a bead or it doesn’t work.’
‘Like girl with no comb?’
‘No!’
‘Like little chickweed?’
Marguerite was silent.
‘Yes,’ she said finally, very quietly. ‘Like little chickweed.’
The moon rose high over the clutter of cabins that huddled on the bluff. In the shadow of the great live oak, the stillness of the cattle byre was stirred only by the sonorous breathing of a drowsing cow. Close by, beneath a tattered palmetto roof, a mother slept and a father and an infant who opened his round eyes and stared up at the roof as though the very shape of the air astonished him. The yard was still and bleached with moonlight, empty but for the girl who stood in the middle of it, her head tipped back and her arms stretched up towards the swarm of stars that filled the sky, and the shadow that marked the shape of her, as definite as day.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I first came across the story of the first French settlers in America when researching my previous novel, The Nature of Monsters, which is set in London in the same period. In 1720, London’s nascent stock market had crashed when the South Sea Bubble had spectacularly burst. Paris’s own stock market had collapsed just six months earlier in similar circumstances, driven by the spectacular rise and then fall in the value of shares in their great trading company, the Mississippi Company. Living at a time when shares were soaring in value, while house prices spiralled ever upward and governments claimed that such growth was indefinitely sustainable, my curiosity was piqued by the hubris of Europe’s first – but hardly last – speculators.
More captivating still were the tales of the women who became known as the ‘casket girls’, young girls of marriageable age who were sent from France to Louisiana as wives for the colonists. Paid a stipend for a year or until they were married, whichever was the shorter, these girls embarked upon a perilous voyage of several months, sold as brides for men they had never met in a country of which they knew nothing. Already the seeds of Elisabeth’s character were starting to take hold.
By 1703, when the Pélican set sail from La Rochelle, Louisiana had been in French hands for only two decades. The French had established New France in the north in 1608, but it was not until 1678 that a Frenchman, Cavalier de La Salle, was charged by Louis XIV with the exploration of the areas south and west of the Great Lakes, making him commander of any forts he might construct there. The following year La Salle began the descent of the Illinois River, eventually reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. There, in April 1682, he erected a cross and claimed the territory as a French colony, naming it Louisiane in honour of the King.
However, when La Salle attempted to return to the Mississippi two years later, the mist was thick and he failed to locate it. Though he built a fort at Biloxi Bay, his men were mutinous and murdered him in 1686. It was to be another twelve years before Pierre d’lberville, a Canadian from the Lemoyne family of Normandy, sought permission from Louis XIV to occupy Louisiana. With his brother, Bienville, he left France in the autumn of 1698, at the head of a fleet of five ships, determined to establish an outpost to secure the French claim to the Mississippi River. Besides officers and soldiers, Iberville brought four families of colonists to settle the land.
Iberville constructed his fort at Mobile Bay, where the island that he named Massacre Island offered protection and adequate harbour, and moved there most of the garrison previously posted at Biloxi. When he returned to France, he left his brother, Bienville, in charge as the fort’s commandant. By 1704 the town consisted of eighty wooden cabins roofed with palmetto, with a population, including soldiers, of fewer than two hundred souls.
From the outset, the colony struggled. Louisiana was a territory many times larger than France, stretching from the mouth of the Mississippi for three thousand miles north, taking in the present-day states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, as well as parts of Canada. This vast land mass was uncultivated, largely unexplored and inhabited only by tribes of Native Americans. No one knew what treasures it contained, most of France had no notion of where the colony even was, but rumours described it as a kind of paradise, rich with gold and silver and awash with precious stones.
But the area chosen by Iberville for settlement was poor, the soil too sandy for the successful raising of crops. The wheat that the Frenchmen had brought from France came up well, but the damp climate rotted the ears before they could come to maturity. There were fertile lands farther inland but no one dared risk his life there alone. Besides, the French had not come to Louisiana with the intention of tilling the soil. The first settlers were not farmers nor hardy pioneers of the English type, but city dwellers, mostly poor and unskilled, who had crossed the ocean with dreams of instant riches, of fabulous mines and tame buffaloes. They had no intention of scraping a living from the land. Instead they dragged out an idle existence around the forts of Mobile, and to a lesser extent, Biloxi.
Everyone, including the officers and soldiers, traded with the Indians and the Canadians who came down from New France. They raised a few cattle, pigs and chickens; in summer they hunted and fished. Otherwise they waited for the ships from France to bring them what they needed. But the mother country was distracted by war in Europe and her resources were more urgently required elsewhere. To find serviceable ships and supplies to send to Louisiana was an almost insuperable problem, to the extent that Louis XIV seriously considered abandoning the colony. To those who were there, it must have felt as though he had already done so. In winter when food was scarce, they threw themselves on the mercy of the Native Americans. One Frenchman, Picard, was said to have taught the women of the Colapissas to dance the quadrille in exchange for a dish of sagamity.
It was with great excitement, then, that the colonists greeted the arrival in 1704 of two ships from France, the Loire and, some months later, the Pélican. The ships brought supplies, soldiers and, of course, twenty-two girls who would, Iberville hoped, give solace to the dissatisfied men and form the basis for an eventually populous colony. He had originally asked Pontchartrain, then Minister of the Marine, for one hundred girls, but a lack of funds, not to mention the difficulty of convincing ‘young and well-bred’ girls of the advantages of life in Louisiana, made a less ambitious number more feasible. Certainly the demand for wives far outstripped supply. All but one of the girls aboard the Pélican were married within a month.
The Pelican’s passenger roll still exists today, and many of the names upon it appear in this novel. Elisabeth Savaret is herself the amalgam of two real-life passengers, Elisabeth Deshays and Gabrielle Savaret, though the situation of her marriage to Jean-Claude Babelon is entirely imagined. We have little information about the details of these women’s lives, for the women of Louisiana kept no journals of this time and any letters they may have written are few and far between. Their lives are mapped only by the stark records of marriages, baptisms and deaths contained in the Mobile parish register.
These show how commonly infants did not survive beyond babyhood, which prompted some to claim that the Louisiana climate made women sterile. The records also show that it was common for colonial men and women to marry three or four times, and that it was not unusual for a widow to remain unmarrie
d for only weeks before finding a new husband, though, as in France at this time, a wife was always referred to by her maiden name. Interestingly, under Louisiana law, established in 1712 in line with the law of Paris, a wife enjoyed a number of economic protections; even in a first marriage, a husband did not acquire full rights to his wife’s property, while, in any subsequent union, he enjoyed no marital power over her assets at all. In the novel Elisabeth’s slave therefore continued to belong exclusively to her even after her marriage to Fuerst; Vincente’s estates too remained entirely hers. This continued to be the case until the Spanish took control of the colony in the 1760s.
The lack of women caused significant headaches for both Bienville and the colony’s priests. Not only did many Canadians live openly with women of friendly nations, they also raided villages indiscriminately in pursuit of slave concubines. Traders exploited this by establishing a black-market trade in sauvagesses, seized in the interior and sold to garrison members as slaves. Children of mixed white and Native American blood, known as mestifs, are not uncommon in the records of baptism (Pierre Charly, the merchant, whose mixed-race child is discussed by the wives in the novel, was a real person), while interracial marriages, though not sanctioned by the Church, are also in evidence, referred to as marriages naturel. While mutually agreeable partnerships were made, there were also incidents of rape and other brutal treatments, especially by the Canadian coureurs-de-bois. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that the situation faced by Elisabeth Savaret, in which her husband took their slave as his lover, was not unknown.
Elisabeth Savaret is not the only character in the book based loosely on a real-life character. In March 1703, after Bienville had assembled the chiefs of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw nations in Mobile to promote a tripartite alliance, the Chickasaw took a French boy, Saint-Michel, back with them to their village. The boy was charged with learning the Chickasaw language so that he might serve as interpreter to those French and Canadians who passed through, and with keeping a close eye on the Chickasaw, whose friendship with the French was far from certain. Saint-Michel was one of four boys distributed in this way around the most important nations in Louisiana and likely, at fourteen, the oldest. By the time he went to live among the Chickasaw, he had already been in Louisiana some time and had learned the Ouma language.
Two years later, Saint-Michel found himself at the centre of a major diplomatic incident. In 1705 the French learned that the English had persuaded a number of Chickasaw warriors to seize several Choctaw families who were visiting Chickasaw villages, thereby stirring up old enmities and causing a split in the carefully constructed alliances of the French. When the Chickasaw chiefs discovered this complicity, they went to the French and explained the situation, blaming the Choctaw raid on a few renegade warriors. The Choctaw were furious. They declared the Chickasaw perfidious and claimed that they had betrayed their French friends by burning Saint-Michel at the stake.
The Chickasaw chiefs flatly denied this rumour. The Choctaw therefore proposed a test: several Chickasaw runners would be sent to bring the boy back to the Choctaw village as proof that he was alive and well. The Chickasaw chiefs, meantime, would be held in the Choctaw village as hostages. The Chickasaw agreed to these terms. What they did not know was that the Choctaw had sent their own runners in pursuit of the Chickasaw, to murder them before they could reach their own village. When the Chickasaw runners did not return, the Choctaw slaughtered their Chickasaw hostages, and thus extracted their revenge for the Chickasaw attack. It was of course a trick – young Saint-Michel returned to Mobile unharmed in the winter of that year.
This quicksand of duplicity and shifting alliances that underpinned what passed for diplomacy in Louisiana is central to the novel. History has been generous to the French colonists, suggesting that in their dealings with the Native Americans they were more enlightened than their English or Spanish counterparts. There is no evidence of this. It was rather a matter of pragmatism. With woefully insignificant military muscle (in 1713 there were a mere sixty-seven soldiers in the Mobile garrison, ten of whom were too old or infirm to serve), the French had to exploit the military strength of the largest nations or see the hinterland between the Appalachians and the Mississippi fall to the English, who, richer and much more numerous, exerted relentless pressure from their colonies along the Eastern seaboard. Indeed, Bienville was quick to set the tribes against each other if it served French interest, and boasted of one conflict that ‘it has not cost one drop of French blood, through the care I took of opposing those barbarians to one another’. Given the paucity of French supplies with which to purchase friendship and the better quality and prices of English goods, his adroitness in managing these alliances to French advantage was nothing short of remarkable.
Relations between the French and a number of their Native American neighbours eventually grew so warm that some nations, including the Houma, relocated to the coast to facilitate trade, and Bienville’s envoys travelled regularly up the Mobile and Mississippi rivers, as Babelon did, to purchase maize from the nations there. It was not long before Bienville was accused of profiteering from the sale of native food and, in 1708, a commissary was sent by Louis XIV from France to investigate the claims against him. The inquiry, though rigorous, failed to elicit sufficient hard evidence and the matter was quietly shelved. These days historians tend to agree that the accusations against Bienville were not entirely unjustified. The illegal trading in the novel is an invention, then, but one that might bear more than a passing resemblance to the truth.
Certainly the scandal that accompanied the trial in France not only discredited Bienville’s family but also the colony in general, and went some way to explain why the Crown was content to sell the claim upon it to a wealthy private financier, Crozat, in 1712. Crozat ploughed more than 1.5 million livres into Louisiana, and specifically into the search for mines. But in 1717, faced with a massive tax bill and in the absence of a single significant mineral find, he was obliged to relinquish his concession and the colony returned to the Crown.
Meanwhile Louis XIV had died in 1715, leaving his country more than two billion livres in debt. In desperation, the Duc d’Orléans, who was to act as regent until the five-year-old Louis XV might come of age, turned to a Scotsman, John Law, to reverse the country’s fortunes. Law proposed the creation of the first national bank in France, financed by shareholders and underpinned by the most powerful conglomerate the world had ever seen, the Mississippi Company, with exclusive rights to all commercial interests in Louisiana. To ensure the success of his venture, Law granted large concessions of land to influential noblemen and pledged to supply to the colony seven thousand new French settlers and three thousand African slaves.
Law’s Louisiana propaganda machine was immense. France’s official newspaper, the Nouveau Mercure, wrote rapturously of a latter-day Eden, cooing over its temperate climate, its fertile soil, its rich seams of gold and silver. In 1719 the newspaper described New Orleans as a prosperous town of ‘nearly 800 very comfortable and well-appointed houses, each one of which has attached 120 acres of land for the upkeep of the families’, while the quantity and purity of the mineral finds exceeded that of ‘the richest mines of Potosi’. ‘Nothing almost is wanting,’ one journalist declared, ‘but industrious people and numbers of hands to work.’ Investors stampeded Paris. In a matter of months, the share price rose from 150 livres to more than 10,000.
Meanwhile the colony was struggling to stay afloat. By the end of 1717, only five hundred prospective colonists had set sail for America. At least one nobleman, like Vincente’s dead husband-to-be, wrote imperiously to the Ministry of the Marine to send him a wife, but enthusiasm for such emigration was already on the wane. Though Bienville banned colonists from returning to France without his express permission, rumours of the miseries in America inevitably found their way back to the motherland.
As the stream of voluntary colonists dried to a trickle, Law was obliged to fulfil his obligations to t
he colony through force. Prisons were emptied; gangs of bandoliers scoured the country for beggars and vagabonds, receiving a bounty from the Company for each one arrested. Louisiana became a dumping ground for undesirables, smugglers, criminals and prostitutes. When the Mississippi Company finally crashed in 1719, Louisiana had become in the French imagination a kind of hell on earth, a vast pestilential swamp where the midday sun struck men dead, the natives were all cannibals, and the frogs were so big they ate children whole.
In 1720 the Banque Royale folded, and Law fled France. In a bid to straighten out its affairs and to appease its impoverished shareholders, the Mississippi Company implemented drastic cuts. The remaining settlers of Louisiana suffered dreadfully. Law’s paper money had penetrated the colony, and when his bank collapsed, it lost 80 per cent of its value. Supplies were in pitifully short supply. A pair of stockings in poor repair, for example, which in France would have cost six sols, in Louisiana cost six livres – one hundred times as much.
Famine and fever continued to devastate the colony. Then, in 1723, a terrible hurricane devastated the new capital of New Orleans. Crops were ravaged, farms blown away and three ships in port completely wrecked. For a period of months there were two deaths a day in the settlement. As the colonists sought to drown their sorrows, drunkenness and gambling became so excessive that Bienville was obliged to outlaw gaming altogether.
But the colonists rallied. By the end of 1724, they had rebuilt the town, this time partly in brick. Though Law’s legacy was hardly the one he had hoped for, his Mississippi Company had transformed Louisiana. Between 1717 and 1720, of the thousands that undertook the perilous voyage to Louisiana, more than half died en route and hundreds more on arrival from disease or starvation, but the population had grown from four hundred to nearly five thousand. Slaves had been introduced by the hundred and the establishment of sizeable plantations had begun the vital process towards self-sufficiency.