Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia

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.

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