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Check to Your King

Chapter Seven — A Peak in Darien

Chapter Seven
A Peak in Darien

At St. Thomas, where the Momus landed the party early in December'34 (popping off her guns in the royal salute as she stood out again to sea), they laid in stores of swords, epaulettes, gold lace, scarlet and sky-blue cloth, firearms, plumes white and flamingohued. Hundreds of gaily coloured cotton and flannel shirts for the natives were added to the baggage, and a huge supply of negro-head tobacco, the last somewhat against the wishes of Charles, who, as a strict non-smoker and non-chewer, regarded tobacco as a vice.

They intended to recruit no soldiery for the settlement's defence. The plan was a combined militia of settlers and friendly natives, mustered and drilled by Major Fergus, who was dying for a chance to sport his plumed helmet. The settlers, they decided, had better be raised in Sydney, where their provisioning and journey money would fall less heavily on the Royal Exchequer.

Charles says that at this stage most of the expenses came out of his private purse. What is this about a private purse? There are page 56 the other de Thierrys over in France, Caroline and Francis, keenly interested in the expedition. Now that the Atlantic sea-birds are startled out of their scant wits by the poppings of the royal salute, it may be that they clubbed together to help.

Major Fergus, for the honour of Britain, be it said, is the only one who hasn't an invincible objection to paying his way. Charles, however, develops a real affection for his Secretary for the Foreign Department, Vigneti, a pale, serious, scholarly young man. It may be that there is a little of the motherly spirit in the Sovereign Chief. Poor M. Vigneti, he becomes with ease so terribly seasick. All the way to St. Thomas, nothing but one porthole after another. One tries him with green apples, with champagne, with ghostly consolation. “Don't look at the deck-rail, my dear fellow, that will make you worse. Keep your eyes fixed on mine.” A terrible glare between them, Vigneti's eye glaucous as a frog's egg, the Baron's sinister with attempted mesmerism. It is useless. Vigneti rushes again to the side of the ship.

Bertholini and Morel already are showing themselves in their true colour. It is black, alas… black brows, black finger-nails; even Charles begins to suspect, black designs. But the flood-tide pulls; there is no time for a rearrangement of the expedition.

Frederic, Baron Oxholm, was then Governor of St. Thomas, and made himself most amiable to the de Thierrys, manifesting a friendly interest in the Panama Canal project. One becomes familiar with his copper-plate handwriting:

M. le Baron,
I have the honour to thank you for your letter. The great and general usefulness of the enterprise you have in hand without doubt deserves the interest and support of all
.…

Many further civilities are stored away with those hoards of paper. However, it is fair to state that Baron Oxholm seems to have been a more impulsive man than the average Excellency of his day; indeed, Captain Fitzroy, of the ship Beagle, meeting later with the Baron de Thierry, was either libellous or frank enough to say that “St. Thomas was a nest of pirates, and its Governor no better than a protector of filibusters”.

On December 12th, Charles chartered from Joseph Plise the schooner Roarer, paid for by four hundred milled Spanish dollars in gold, and with Captain Nickerson as skipper continued their journey without incident as far as Chagres. Here they spent three days preparing to cross the Isthmus of Darien.

page 57

Everywhere they were warned against fever. Panama City, their goal, had a special fever of its own, a recurrent malady. Once catch it, and one was always turning blue and chattering like an ape. Then there was the yellow pest. Both these plagues, and several others, hung miasmic over the Isthmus. There was, however, no turning back. Margaret Neilsen, brushing out the hair of her Baroness, talked loudly about the probable wrath of God, but bundled into their hired canoes next morning. They made their way by river to Gorgona, one of the canoes, laden with gorgeous military paraphernalia, coming to grief in mid-stream.

At Gorgona they hired horses, with peons as carriers for their luggage. The rest of the journey was vague to Charles, who was seized by the Panama fever, and found it difficult to sit his horse. Morel tumbled down in delirium before the end, and finished in state, carried in a litter. Isabel rode with Major Fergus, who was immensely civil to the womenfolk, and made it a point of etiquette to call the dark-haired lady “Princess”. He also presented her with a marmoset, a sad-faced, wise, and wizened atomy, promptly christened Alexander the Great. The Baroness rode placidly ahead, her habit of chestnut cloth restrained and decorous among all the irresistible, shrieking parrot-greens of the tropical verdure.

At sunset they topped the rise above Panama City and reined in their horses. The carriers dropped down, sprawling limbs pouring sweat. Negro-head tobacco was doled out, a fig to each man. Most of them chewed it steadily. They conversed but little, and in grunts. A mixture of Mexican and Indian blood, they did not appear a communicative or versatile race.

As Cortez had once seen it from his peak in Darien, that untrammelled ocean shone out, deepened and paled at last, far beyond man's sight. There was a ring of foam, hard-white as salt, on that honey-yellow which was Panama. Palms leaned out with lashing fronds. But the sea from its shallows deepened to a colour of harebells, and beyond that fringe the green tourmaline of shifting currents showed beneath it, as beneath a transparent robe. At last it was nothing but a vast bubble, a blue crystal of ocean hermetically sealed by sky, and all power of time and thought lay enclosed in this. A ship moved white-sailed across the nearer bay, but Charles knew it could never escape from the sealed bubble. A ship in a glass bottle.…

Panama was a dream in deep slumber, honeycomb-yellow save where the sun flared on windows of old stucco and brick houses, with cavernous pitted balconies and high-walled courtyards. It was no wonder that the waves emptied their strength quietly on page 58 that entranced shore. The wonder was that they should break at all.

They set their horses at a canter for the city. There was a crackle of fireworks here and there, and the isolated stroke of a bell was laid severely on the air. It was New Year's Eve.

“And I ushered in the New Year with that broad expanse of the Pacific before me.”

Everything here is done in the grand manner. Charles takes two houses, one for his family and Major Fergus, one for the rest. (I suspect the Sovereign Chief simply could not live with Bertholini and Morel, whom he denounces as “swaggering, insolent, and coarse”, though the Baroness is humane enough to pull Morel through his sharp bout of fever.) However, there are outdoor resources. Charles hires twelve horses; Major Fergus constitutes himself instructor of the junior cavalry. Charles Frederick is rising seventeen now, as tall as his papa. The other boys, Richard and George, shoot up. Everyone except Baby Will, who remains placidly under his mosquito-netting, learns the excitement of morning rides, crisp yellow sand scattering in fine spray under the flying hooves.

An American consul as Panama god of affairs should be useful. Mr. J. B. Feraud is a friend and business associate of M. Salomon, and, in addition to his consular status, his general store is the most delightful place in Panama. The children use it when disporting themselves as pirates and treasure-seekers. The store looks rather like a big yellow doll's house, a stair curling through to the second storey, and an attic festooned with cobwebs. Here are chests which might contain treasure. (One discovers on investigation, that they hold nothing but fragrant China tea.) Mr. Feraud, looking, with his wrinkled, leathery face and goatee beard, exactly like the newspaper portraits of Uncle Sam, makes himself very friendly to the treasure-seekers by day. By night he collects Papa and lugs him off to the brown brick house on the hill. Here they plot and plan, evening being the time for business and politics in Panama.

A communication from Salomon indicated that for the Canal scheme a preliminary loan of 100,000 francs must be floated; then, a step of equal importance, the assent of the Congress of Bogota to the actual cutting of the Canal must be obtained without delay.

Eventually a deputation of three was sent off to conciliate this Congress: Captain Labarrière, a well-known resident of the city, the Hon. Marianoa Arofsemena, and the Hon. José Albadia, Congress members who had become keenly interested in the page 59 Baron's undertakings. The full text of the Canal proposals was printed for distribution, and this document, bearing the signatures of the deputation, still survives. It appears as a pamphlet: Documentos Importantes sobre la Apertura de un Canal Fluvia entre los Oceanos Atlancico y Pacifico, Por el Istmo de Panama: Los Publica, La Sociedad Amigos del Pais, Panama. Imprenta de José Angel Santos, Ano de 1835.

To keep Salomon apprised of the expedition's progress and assist in raising the preliminary 100,000 francs, Vigneti is parcelled off to Guadeloupe, supplied by his Sovereign Chief with a thousand francs' journey-money. The vessel, laden with grain, sprang a leak and put back to port. Less than a week after his exit there is a knock on the door. Outside stands a deplorable figure. It is Vigneti, who, by fatal chance has lost the whole of the journey-money.

The motherliness which the Baron developed for his Secretary for Foreign Affairs now comes to the fore. Vigneti, warmed like a serpent at the hearth, tells how the passage from Carthagena became unbelievable. He himself was seasick.…

Charles pulls a long face. This, anyhow, is credible.

Pulling out his handkerchief as he stood at the deck-rail, doubled up in a paroxysm, M. Vigneti pulled out with it the whole thousand francs. Over the side they fluttered, a meal for the fishes.

Our Charles concludes the affair thus in his records: “When a man in whom I trust makes a statement to me, I am bound to accept his word.”

Vigneti's expensive bout of seasickness is accepted. Once again he is furnished with funds, and starts afresh on his mission to Pointe-à-Pitre.

Did he look back, as he turned away? The Secretary for Foreign Affairs never saw the Sovereign Chief again. For years the man whom he had deserted refused to hear a word against him, insisting that he had certainly been shipwrecked. In his last days the Baron wrote of the vanishing Vigneti: “One on whose single-minded disinterestedness I would have staked my life.”

From the first the bills were mutely handed over to Charles. “Doubloons lessened in bulk, and a something of doubt crossed my mind,” he writes. But things got moving.…

How far Mr. Feraud in conjunction with M. Salomon, went in promises to assist the New Zealand expedition can only be a matter of broken record. As far as the documents in the case go, everyone says frankly enough that everyone else was a thief and a shameless liar. Salomon, in later letters to Charles, accuses page 60 Feraud of grossly neglecting and betraying the interests of the colony. The most definite assurance seems to have been the charter of an armed ship, to sail from Panama as escort to the settlers. Whilst the cutting of the Panama Canal was being negotiated with the Congress of Bogota, attempts were certainly made to arrange the charter of the frigate Columbia. A further expectation, most bitterly disappointed, was that Vigneti should follow Charles to New Zealand, bringing fresh resources and settlers. From Tahiti, Charles wrote sadly to Sir Richard Bourke, Governor of New South Wales, of “the armed ship from Panama, which I still expect… though a deep and painful mystery hangs around its non-arrival.”

The mystery, painful enough to Charles, was not so deep. Possibly there was enthusiasm enough in that fantastic company which at Pointe-à-Pitre decided to cut the Isthmus of Darien, furnish the globe with a new highway, found an Independent State, attend to the brotherhood of man. But the expedition suffered its morning after. The New Zealand end of the project, in which the Sovereign Chief's whole heart was wrapped up, seemed vague, dangerous, and expensive. The Panama Canal, on the other hand, looked like turning over a profit. But did they actually need a king? Mightn't the civilised world laugh?

However it went, nobody ever sends an armed frigate chasing after the expedition. M. Vigneti evaporates. Bertholini and Morel are so communistic that the King fires them half-way across the Pacific – when they at once return to Panama, and spread the most damaging reports, swearing he is a crazy Robinson Crusoe, beached high and dry on a coast of dreams. Fergus is the only sticker of the lot.

“At the opening of the Panama Canal, the Chairman was good enough to say that the Baron de Thierry had originally held the concession for cutting the Canal, but had lost his opportunity through the dishonesty of others.”

This is all for the future. Meanwhile, the expedition has a fine send-off from Panama.

Between J. A. Phipps, master of the Active, and Charles, Baron de Thierry, Sovereign Chief of New Zealand, was signed a charter for the voyage to Otaheiti (Tahiti) in May 1835. It was covenanted that the Active must be tight, staunch and strong, carrying fifteen passengers if required. For the voyage to Otaheiti – then a mid-Pacific native kingdom, now a French protectorate – the said Baron de Thierry was to pay 1,220 milled Spanish dollars in gold. He also had right of charter over the Active for a second voyage, page 61 when the vessel would pick up Vigneti and his recruits. The deal was made in Feraud's country house, a few miles from Panama, the American consul having proved very obliging in finding a good ship. The party's last breakfast in Panama was eaten at Mr. Feraud's house of brown bricks, gorgeous purple masses of bougainvillaea sprawling over its exterior.

A great send-off.… Everyone at the breakfast-table is dressed to kill; the little Baroness in cerise and black. Her pelisse of cherry cloth, stitched with satin flowers, falls softly to touch the panniers that widen the skirts spreading from a figure not yet too matronly. There is a prim starched cravat, a bonnet with black plumes and fluting of silk beneath its brim. Her hair is worn curled, a cliff of ringlets dominating the nape of the neck. Fifteen years of an Odyssey that has taken her half round the world, the remnant of her life to be spent heaven knows where, but unfailingly among carnage and cannibals, and she looks as demure as when he first saw her in the Archdeacon's study, straightening up stray pages of sermons and removing the traces of Papa's gillyflower snuff.

First the earthquake. It is as if an enormous cannon booms from the hills. The coffee-cups fling themselves into the laps of the company, the dishes slide off the table-cloth. Before there is time to cry out, the lower wall in front of the house is seen to split quite quietly, like a big brown fan unfolding. There is a cloud of brick-coloured dust. “Still… keep still… it's a 'quake” – from Mr. Feraud, whose face is sickly green. The world hesitates, steadies itself, though above the table the little crystal pennants dangling from the lamp-bracket continue to swing violently from side to side. The Negro who served the coffee patters back, a peculiar colour but otherwise unimpaired. “Earthquake, saar.” He picks up pieces of crockery, while the crystal pennants still swing to and fro.

At three in the afternoon the party, with Fergus, Bertholini, and Morel in the wake of the de Thierrys and their faithful Margaret Neilsen, went aboard the Active. It was June 1st, 1835. Sunlight sparkled on the glorious harbour.

Before Feraud's store were mounted some of the old fortifications, pieces of ordnance, growing civilised since the days when they held off the shifty craft flying the Jolly Roger. As a mile of water brightened between the Active and Panama City, the guns spoke again and again. The deep vault of the afternoon echoed with their rumbling voices… twenty-one guns, booming the royal salute to the man who goes forth to found a kingdom.

“Look, Papa, look!” Isabel's voice, her hand pointing upward.

page 62

In St. Thomas they had purchased three flags, a great silken banner of crimson and azure, and two smaller bunting pennants. Now, as he watched, the sails leaned into the slight wind, and his own colours took the breeze from the west and shone out between sea and sky.

For a moment he could not take his eyes from the sparkling of the water, painful as little needles between the eyelids. When he did look up, the tears were on his face. He couldn't have checked them if he would. But the bitterness of the wasted years, the sudden feeling of standing naked and ridiculous as a radish, quarrels with the trivial, friendship offered and quietly withdrawn – each had its second in memory now, and so slipped into the smother of foam, lost for ever in the wake of the ship.

“We sail under our own flag now, my darling. And this tiny track over the water ends in our own kingdom, where the world's fair and the sunshine builds us a gold castle in the woods. Watch the waves curtsy to their Princess.…”

The wind took up the black curls, fondling them as it did the crimson and azure – a light-hearted, unstable wind, fond of any novelty. The rest laughed and shouted. But the child in his arms stayed intent, her eyes never moving from the flag. He had a feeling that she was indeed a princess, a little spirit with her own sovereignty over the fleeting and intangible loveliness of this life. There were many invisible corridors in Charles de Thierry's mind. But no matter where he went, at the heart of the dream he was sure to find Isabel.