Читать книгу Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia - John Keay - Страница 10

‘The highest point previously fixed by the French on the Great Cambodia River [i.e. the Mekong] was Cratieh, about 280 miles from the mouth. Beyond this a long succession of rapids was encountered, occurring in a scarcely inhabited region of splendid forest which separates Laos from Cambodia.’

SIR RODERICK MURCHISON,

President of the Royal Geographical Society, May 1869

ABOVE PHNOM PENH the river is at last the Mekong proper rather than one of its deltaic necks. Low-lying islands of unremarkable verdure clutter the stream and conceal its full extent; in Garnier’s day they were planted with cotton from which King Norodom derived a sizeable tax yield. Beyond them, knee-deep in bamboo fronds and badly in need of a hairbrush, spindly sugar palms reel across the floodplain like pin-men with hangovers. Untroubled and still unconfined, the Mekong wallows, buffalo-brown in a swamp of green, as if reluctant to reveal its majestic proportions in such disrespectful company.

More interesting is the traffic. Smaller, slimmer launches than the Angkor cruisers today swoop upriver to Kratie, bus-stopping at riverside pontoons to offload passengers and take on hardboiled eggs. Sampans and the occasional rustbucket recall the Delta; but both are here upstaged and outpaced by the first pirogues. In October, as the annual water festival in Phnom Penh draws near, pirogues predominate, darting out onto the river like agitated crocodiles. From bays and side creeks, from round the next bend and behind the last island, they nose into midstream, an Oxbridge armada not of rowing eights but of paddling eighties. The climax of the water festival is the boat races, and to that end competitors practise hard and then make their way downriver.

Most waterside villages, and quite a few nowhere near the river itself, participate. Each has its long racing pirogue and each racing pirogue is propelled by anything from twenty to a hundred paddlers ranged along its length in file. Many boats sport flags with their crews attired in identical bandanas, like cadres of some Khmer Rouge water fraternity. Others, clearly scratch outfits, have yet to master a stroke or merit team status. Adding much to the hilarity as well as the hazards, supporters offer abuse and encouragement from an accompanying flotilla of listing workboats and redundant ferries. Nowhere else, and at no other time, is the river so animated. The pirogues, sensationally tapered from hollowed-out tree trunks, skim between the sky above and the sky in the water, prows raised like fabulous sea-serpents.

Steaming upriver in July, with the rains growing heavier by the day, the Mekong Exploration Commission missed this spectacle. But come October they would find themselves at Bassac (now Champassak) in lower Laos and would there witness the same festival with equivalent boat races. Again Delaporte would be vindicated. He duly drew the scene: and but for the spectators, who seem somewhat underdressed and anthropologically over representative, he again took few liberties. Two of his most reproduced prints depict, respectively, the river races in the morning and the fireworks at night. In each there is much, perhaps too much, livestock and vegetation. Would not the pigs have taken their dustbath in the shade, or the elephants have been stampeded by the fireworks? But to carp at this is to nitpick, just like the mother cradling her child in the foreground. Delaporte’s pirogues are superb; profiled against the great white river they are aligned like words in an unknown script, random runes adrift on an empty page.

Kompong Cham, the first port above Phnom Penh, is today notable as the hometown of Prime Minister Hun Sen and as the site of a brand-new bridge. The two things are not unconnected. Kompong Cham roots for Hun Sen and Hun Sen rewards Kompong Cham. The country’s strongman is as locationally linked with its most impressive piece of civil engineering as are the two sides of the river by the bridge. This is, in fact, the only bridge across the Mekong in Cambodia, and as is the way with high-striding spans of gleaming ferro-concrete, it makes the river look misleadingly manageable. Having passed under it with eyes shut, a Mekong-lover may be excused for passing over it in silence.

In the 1860s there were no bridges over the Mekong anywhere, and this remained the case for more than another century. In Chinese Yunnan, where the river is called the Lancang, a rickety Meccano construction reportedly replaced the ferry in the mid-twentieth century; but below that, for over three thousand kilometres, the river was unspanned until 1994. It was as if, in the United States, there were no way to cross the Mississippi south of Minneapolis. The engineering was not the problem. Few rivers so obligingly constrict themselves. Bridges were not built because the traffic which might use them did not exist.

Amongst the world’s major rivers the Mekong, though neither the longest nor the largest, still enjoys the distinction of being the least utilised. No great ports disfigure its shores. Phnom Penh and Vientiane, though national capitals, scarcely qualify as cities; the towns are few and mostly disappointing; and the villages keep their distance, preferring the seclusion of a sidestream or the security of adjacent hill and forest.

In English, rivers are usually masculine and often geriatric – ‘Ol’ Man River’ or ‘Old Father Thames’. Fleuve in French is also masculine. But it was rivière, a feminine noun denoting a youthful river indirectly connected to the sea, which slowly gained currency among the personnel of the Mekong Exploration Commission. Their river was unquestionably female. Clad in virgin forest, she suffered no bridges across her bosom, no promenades along her brow nor trade routes down her limbs. Beguiling, wanton and capricious, in a pre-feminist era she conformed to every bearded bachelor’s fantasy of a wild maiden from the hills.

For this apparent neglect of commercial grooming there are sound practical reasons, the first of which was about to confront the Mekong Exploration Commission. Above Kompong Cham the islands of greenery compose themselves and rejoin the shoreline. In the dry season, their place midstream is taken by shoals of the finest sand on which the skeletons of mighty trees lie stranded. Propped on tangled limbs, the trees recline on the sandbars with feet in the air like giants on holiday. But in July, with the river rising, the giants launch themselves into the flood, a hazard to diminutive gunboats. More worryingly for the expedition, glistening gobs of muddy foam accompanied the trees and, drifting erratically with no apparent regard for the current, told of sub-surface disturbance and turbulent times ahead.

Low hills loomed simultaneously through the mist to the north. Excluding solitary outcrops like Phnom Krom, the hills were the first hint of higher ground. The landscape had at last acquired a horizon and the Delta a conclusion. To the Commission the prospect imparted a new sense of direction and purpose. This was quickened by the changing shoreline. Almost imperceptibly the river had settled between natural margins. Just low sandy ledges, they were the sort of cliffs on which thrift might thrive and sand-martins nest. Though unsensational, to new arrivals from the Delta they were another welcome novelty. After five hundred kilometres of welling, slopping, brimming confusion, the river had recognisable banks.

They soon grew higher. On the second day the expedition reached Kratie and had to climb from the landing stage up a long flight of muddy steps to gain the palm and bougainvillea parkland on which the village was scattered. Here they halted for a week. Though barely thirty-six hours into the voyage, it was time to trans-ship.

The new boats were dugout canoes, and although they had evidently been pre-ordered, they needed to be substantially customised for the conditions ahead. Meanwhile the five tons of baggage had to be carefully sorted and, not for the last time, ferociously reduced. ‘It foreshadowed the utter destitution which awaited us further on,’ noted the rueful de Carné.

This transfer, so soon after leaving Phnom Penh, raises questions about just how much Lagrée and Garnier already knew of the river ahead. Was it really about to take them by surprise? Or were they rather better informed than they pretended? If nothing was known of its navigational properties, why had they anticipated the need for canoes? Yet if canoes were inevitable, why had they burdened themselves with such an impossible quantity of luggage? And why, as the downpours of June were succeeded by the deluges of July, were they tackling the river at the height of the rains, the least comfortable season for travel and the surest for contracting malaria?

While they unpacked and repacked, the canonnière took its departure. Last letters home were hastily written and entrusted to the crew. As the gunboat pulled away, the six explorers felt as if they themselves were being cast adrift. Their last link with all that was French and familiar steamed out of sight round a bend in the river, leaving them to a silence broken only by the whine of mosquitoes. Kratie had nothing to offer. They lodged in a hut through whose roof dripped the rain. It was ‘a completely isolated village … with no commercial trade of any kind’, according to Garnier. The only way home was now the way ahead. ‘Henceforth France was before us, not behind us,’ wrote de Carné. ‘Our sights were set on China.’

But Lagrée, with the wisdom of years and the economy of the sore-throated, sounded a note of caution. Between Cambodia and China lay more than sixteen hundred kilometres of river attended, no doubt, by a like number of perils and disappointments. Excitement was premature, he croaked, if not downright dangerous; for was not ‘enthusiasm near neighbour to despair’?

Above Kratie leggy trees of impressive height and symmetry take up position along the river’s bank like spectators awaiting a naval review. The mud-thick flood, over a kilometre wide, nuzzles their roots and tugs at their dangling lianas but concedes nothing to them in scale. During the few months of the year in which navigation onwards to Stung Treng is possible, the little white passenger launch looks like a bathtime accessory as it skims through the frothy suds. In a setting so grand something more palatial seems called for – a Mississippi paddle-steamer, perhaps, with the orchestra playing, the tables set, and Scarlett O’Hara on the topmost deck against a blood-red sky.

This is not altogether fanciful. To patriotic French explorers the Mekong also brought to mind the Mississippi. Primed on colonial history, Garnier rarely missed a relevant parallel, while Louis de Carné’s diplomatic training lent an international dimension to his political horizons. In the early eighteenth century Louisiana had been French. It had been named in honour of Louis XIV, and its port of New Orleans had developed to provide continental access by way of the Mississippi. Subsequent French losses in the New World had been as much a matter for patriotic regret as those in India. To redress them, the Second Empire had just wished Maximilian on the Mexicans. And now, with the delicious complementarity which so appealed to Gallic logic, Saigon and the Mekong were supposed to afford that exclusively French access to the Asian interior which New Orleans and the Mississippi had promised to the American interior.

That was the theory anyway, and although it was about to be seriously compromised, the dream of one day being able to paddle-steam into the heart of the continent would not readily be relinquished. In the wake of the Mekong Exploration Commission a succession of pounding little vessels would, over the next fifty years, try and generally fail to force a passage upriver, prompting all manner of bizarre technological solutions, most of which would also fail.

The slim launch which today plies, conditions permitting, from Kratie to Stung Treng is the unworthy inheritor of this dream. A twenty-first-century apology for nineteenth-century presumption, it addresses the increasingly angry flood with circumspection, swooping across its troubled surface in search of sheltered water and unimpeded channels like an ice-queen on a busy rink. Hastily the luggage is lashed beneath plastic tarpaulins; passengers are ordered inside and the cabin door sealed. The turns become sharper, the engine noisier. Condensation streams down the windows as if the exertion were too much. But wiping away the trickles makes no difference. The waves thrashing against the hull on the outside preclude visibility. It is like being marooned in a storm-tossed diving capsule.

Although not the ideal way of experiencing the Mekong’s first rapids, the voyage compares favourably with a week of wet boating at the height of the monsoon. For the same run the expedition had secured a fleet of the dugout canoes which they called radeaux. The word translates as ‘barges’, but they were really modified pirogues. Closely related to those now reserved for racing, they were destined to become painfully familiar. Though their numbers would be reduced from the initial eight, this mode of transport would remain the same until the expedition abandoned the river altogether. Boats and boatmen would be frequently changed, a cause for endless delay and no little grumbling, but the style of boat and the method of propulsion would be much the same throughout.

Delaporte’s sketches faithfully portray the design. To the basic hollowed-out tree trunk, some twenty to thirty metres long, was added a roof made of hooped bamboos thatched with palm fronds which extended from stem to stern and made the boat look like a large waterborne caterpillar. This canopy was supposed to afford shade and shelter for the squatting passengers but was never quite high enough for comfort and nowhere near waterproof enough to keep out the monsoon.

More bamboo poles of much larger diameter were lashed to the gunwales in bundles to form a semi-submerged platform which ran the length of both sides and met at either end in a poop. Bamboo trunks being hollow, these side projections acted as flotation chambers, adding some much-needed buoyancy and stability to the overloaded canoes and acting, in effect, like the outriggers of a trimaran. The poop aft was where the helmsman rigged his steering sweep, that where the bamboos met at the bow was where the lookout sat. More importantly, the whole platform arrangement served as a walkway for the six to eight circulating boatmen. Down one side they punted, following their poles from stem to stern, and up the other side they panted, poles aloft, to start all over again.

More correctly this was not in fact punting but ‘piking’. Since the current in open water was far too strong for heavily laden craft to be paddled against, propulsion on the middle Mekong depended entirely on purchase. The poles were strictly pikes, because they were tipped with a piece of ironmongery which combined a boathook with a sharp spike. Progression entailed warping along the most convenient bank, either by spiking rocky interstices and tree trunks or by hooking onto roots and branches, then pushing or hauling on the pikes as the boat slid forward beneath the retreating feet of the pikers. Handling the pikes required the skills of heavy-duty crochet and involved reading the bank as much as the water. Locomotion, in other words, owed more to jungle craft than to nautical skills. They were literally climbing the stream. From one point of purchase to the next the men pulled and shoved the boats upward as if the current were gravity and the river a hill.

This rotational system [says Garnier of the piking] can impart to the pirogue the speed of a walking man provided that the pikers are capable and the bank to be followed is straight and unimpeded. The skipper must devote his full attention to keeping the boat’s helm into the current, or rather, slightly inclined towards the bank. Should he let the stream catch the other side, the boat will come across and he must make a full circuit before he can hope to bring it back into the bank again.

De Carné, less nautically inclined, took a more human view of this unconventional form of propulsion. For eight hours a day, he writes, the ‘unhappy Cambodgians [sic] revolved around us with the docility of those blinkered horses used for turning wheels’. Any slackening brought threats of a beating from the skipper. Yet the boatmen, who had been snatched from their fields and their families to work unpaid under their corvée obligations to the king, showed no signs of resentment. On the contrary, they remained ‘good-natured, resigned and often almost cheerful’ – which was more than could be said for de Carné himself.

I was leaving civilisation behind and entering on a savage country; I had passed at one step from a steamship to a canoe. The roof being too low to let me sit up, I had to stay half lying down; and the rainwater accumulating in the bottom of the boat continually invaded my person.

The skipper fussed over him whenever he could, ‘for I was a great lord in his eyes’. But the roof continued to leak and the only baler was a scoop formed from a banana leaf sewn together with rattan. Technology, like civilisation, was becoming a thing of the past. All that remained of the nineteenth century was packed away in their luggage or their heads. Otherwise they were adrift in a deep green version of the dark ages.

To most of them the scenery was the great consolation. There were no villages and no sign of man, but the trees were truly magnificent and the river was again studded with islands between which the current dashed through dozens of channels and rocky defiles. These formed a series of treacherous cascades which Garnier dutifully recorded as the Sombor, Somboc and Preatapang rapids. Each made ‘a great thundering sound’, says de Carné, but progress proved possible thanks to the trees and shrubs whose roots clawed to every visible surface and whose branches waved excitedly in midstream. The latter reminded de Carné of drowning sailors. As the only landlubber he greeted terra firma at each day’s end with undisguised relief.

Come evening we cut down trees, cleared the soaking under-growth, and finally got fires going. Everyone exerted himself and dinner began. It was usually a frugal affair – but sometimes sumptuous if the hunters had been successful – and always very cheerful. For dining room we had the forest; herds of wild boar had often to make way for us. Our bedroom was the damp and narrow jail of our canoes. A cicada followed us relentlessly from campsite to campsite and at the same hour emitted its single, long-drawn note, as if to set the pitch for all the local musicians of these sombre palaces of verdure.

Garnier was less enraptured. The rain and the mosquitoes made sleep impossible and, more worryingly, his well-laid plans for the river were being dashed to bits by every cascade. At Kratie he had been bitterly disappointed when the captain of the canonnière had refused to go any further. Steam-powered or not, the little gunboat was reckoned too old to take on the rapids and too precious to be risked. That meant a postponement of the titanic contest between technology and nature which he anticipated; but it did not constitute a defeat. Around the Sombor rapids he was cheered to find ‘an easy passage’ by which steamboats might indeed, when the river was in spate, progress – provided their engines were up to it. The navigability of the river, which at the beginning of the journey was the most important point to research, had been ascertained up to this point without fear,’ he crowed.

But the Somboc rapids proved much more challenging. Here the current was estimated at eight kilometres an hour, the sounding lead gave a depth of only three metres in the main channels, and all of these were choked by submerged rocks and trees which would be fatal to a steamship. By following the east bank closely and by dint of a week of Herculean labours, they somehow surmounted these hazards and entered the broader, calmer waters of the river’s confluence with its Se Kong tributary just below Stung Treng. Evidently the main current followed the opposite bank through the even more dangerous Preatapang rapids. Garnier reasoned that the river there must be deeper and, however impetuous, therefore more practical for steam-powered vessels with greater draught than a pirogue. To investigate he crossed to the west bank to return alone downstream and take another look.

The river was here five kilometres across and, where it was not interrupted by islands, ‘as wide as if not wider than the great rivers of America’. On the other hand it was considerably faster. They were racing along even when the paddlers (downstream it was easier to paddle) paused to consider the approaching cloud of spray. This heralded the dreaded rapids of Preatapang. Garnier ordered the paddlers to shoot through them. They refused. A bribe was offered and willingly accepted but still they veered away from the main flood. Garnier expostulated, swore, then pulled a pistol on them. It was 25 July, his twenty-seventh birthday, perhaps he felt lucky. His courage would never be questioned but his reputation as a far-seeing navigator was in serious jeopardy.

As is the way with solitary excursions, the hair’s-breadth escapes now came thick and fast. At gunpoint they entered the raging flood. It was here running at an irrésistible ten kilometres an hour and his paddlers were gibbering with fear, though whether from the gun-toting antics of their diminutive master or from the rapids themselves is unclear. They dodged floating tree trunks the size of whales, rode the white waters in a cloud of spray – ‘the noise was deafening, the spectacle hypnotic, [but] it was too late to turn back’ – and then slalomed through a flooded forest with the river running at what Garnier now estimated to be an incroyable seventeen kilometres an hour.

It was altogether an unmissable experience. In a single day he had shot downriver a distance which it had taken the expedition six days to ascend. But so what? He would rather have been flushed with triumph. Excitement merely signified failure. For Preatapang, however spectacular, spelled death to navigation. As he now despairingly conceded, ‘the future of rapid commercial relations (of which I had happily dreamed the previous evening) by way of this vast river, the natural route from China to Saigon, seemed to me seriously compromised from this moment on’.

It was not quite the end of the dream. Perhaps a channel could be cleared round the rapids; and perhaps, although Sombor looked most practicable when the river was high, Preatapang would be navigable when it was low. There was always hope. Nemesis was being deferred, fended off with the push of a pike like another arboreal torpedo. But not for long. And not, as it would appear, unexpectedly.

Although accounts of the expedition are reticent on the subject, no forensic skills are needed to deduce that the Mekong above Phnom Penh was neither as mysterious nor as navigationally promising as Garnier, especially, had made out. After all, the French, including Lagrée, had been in Cambodia for three years. They can hardly have failed to notice that precious little trade came downriver, and that none of what did (principally forest produce) originated from further up than Stung Treng. Nor can they have been ignorant as to the cause. Several French prospectors and traders had already been to Stung Treng. Some had probably been beyond. And in the previous year Lagrée himself had been as far as the Sombor rapids.

It had been soon after this excursion that, on meeting Admiral de Lagrandière in Saigon, the question of the Mekong Exploration Commission had come up ‘out of the blue’ and le Commandant had accepted the leadership with that conspiratorial laugh. Knowing perfectly well what to expect – namely that the river was almost certainly unnavigable for anything but pirogues, and that even they could force the rapids only when it was in flood – his ‘Why not?’ began to make sense. The whole thing was indeed a joke. Garnier might be obsessed with the Mekong’s hydrography – that was his job – but the more cynical Lagrée had long since acknowledged that the river itself was a canard. As elsewhere in the world, geographical enquiry was being used to lend scientific respectability to what was essentially a political reconnaissance.

Hence, too, the otherwise inexplicable decision to launch the expedition at the height of the monsoon. Everything had been timed to place the party in the vicinity of the well-attested rapids when the river was at its highest and the rapids, hopefully, deep enough to be negotiable. The two weeks wasted at Angkor and on the Tonle Sap had been by way of marking time while the river rose. Not without interest, Garnier had been recording its further rise ever since. And the three weeks that they now spent at Stung Treng were because the river was still rising, a vital consideration when, by all report, their only hope of progressing further lay in cresting the next obstacle on a veritable tsunami.

What they knew of the river above Stung Treng in Laos may have been less credible than what they knew of it in Cambodia. But it was not inconsiderable. In the 1670s Geritt von Wuystorff, an agent of the Netherlands East Indies Company, had travelled upstream from Cambodia to the Lao capital of Vientiane. He had later written a brief account of his odyssey, and this was known to the members of the expedition. It told of astounding cities in the midst of endless forest, of barbaric tribes and impenetrable mountains, and of colossal waterfalls and all-devouring whirlpools. That was the sort of thing one expected of seventeenth-century travelogues. But it was not necessarily a fabrication; and rereading it in the light of their own discoveries, de Carné would ask, not unreasonably, ‘how anyone who had read the Dutchman’s report could ever have held out any hope of the river proving navigable’. The ‘anyone’ he had in mind was, needless to say, Francis Garnier.