What Became of the White Savage (33 page)

In the days that followed, a group of six sturdy, well-armed stalwarts set out in every direction to explore the area. The principal difficulty – besides the unrelenting heat and the insects, which the Australians are used to – was the lack, or I should say, total absence of water. Not one river, not a single water hole was discovered. Every man had to carry his own water supply at all times, a burden that limited any incursion to a maximum of four days. Maps were drawn up, of ever greater accuracy. A food cache was established, a pennant hoisted to identify it, and a few glass beads left to lure the savages, but still none came. After one month the explorers returned to Sydney, as I had instructed. Mr. Wilton-Smith sent me a brief report, followed three weeks later by a meticulously detailed account of all expenses. He had also offered, at his own expense, a handsome reward for any useful information. This thoughtful addition resulted in the appearance of many a fraud and necessitated much scrupulous cross-checking all of which yielded nothing.

Further searches were undertaken in October 1864, August 1865 and February 1866, leaving either from Pelletier Beach or from other docking points further north or south. The entire region has now been thoroughly explored: an area of about fifty leagues along the coast and fifteen leagues inland is no longer unknown territory. Until now, only the coastline of this arid region had been charted: now its dunes, forests and its few patches of mangrove hold no mysteries. Some modest seams of coal and a few prospects for iron ore have been identified. It seems to me that this methodical work qualifies my friend Wilton-Smith to become an associate member of our Society; I believe that he would be greatly honoured to receive this distinction.

A few tribes have been found and questioned with the aid of a savage from the north who speaks a little English and whose presence the expedition leader had requested. But no information was obtained about a white savage, or of half-caste children – although Wilton-Smith himself has expressed reservations about the competence and indeed the reliability of the translator.

I am not discouraged by the lack of results, nor do I regard this as a failure. My search continues. These children must be somewhere in the Australian desert. They are now thirteen and ten years of age. We will find them eventually.

Nor does their father’s disregard shock me. I have spoken several times to Narcisse and have informed him of the efforts I am making on his behalf. I have told him of my sincere wish that he should find his son and daughter. He looks at me, smiles and does not answer. I know him too well to be deceived by this show of indifference. Australia renders him mute, this is the explanation. But if I were to arrive at the Île de Ré, with his children, if he could take them in his arms, what conversations I would witness! And how much the progress of these two young half-castes would say about the path their father had followed before them!

And yet, in spite of all my endeavours and my genuine concern for them, Narcisse Pelletier’s children remained indistinct to me, blurred and faceless, as if veiled by a mist of sand. I finally perceived that these children were without names – their father resolutely refused to utter the names he had given them in the language of the savages. It fell to me therefore to once again act on his behalf and, if not to baptise them, at least to give them an identity.

Selecting a name for the little girl was straightforward: she would be called Eugénie. For the boy, I was at a loss, until the name Charles – in homage to Charles Darwin, an English scholar whose revolutionary ideas I have recently discovered – came into my head. The second part of their names will be those of my dear brother and sister, who I hope will one day become their godparents.

They also needed a date of birth. Narcisse had suggested their ages, the age they must have been when he was separated from them. I calculated the years of their birth to be 1853 and 1857. The actual dates were chosen at random. For Charles-Louis it will be the 2nd December, to honour the day in 1852 upon which our Emperor, his namesake, was proclaimed Emperor of France. I chose for his sister the date of my first encounter with their father in Sydney: 1st March 1861.

Charles-Louis Pelletier, born in north-east Australia on the 2nd December 1853, and Eugénie-Charlotte Pelletier, also born in north-east Australia, on the 1st March 1857, are the children of Narcisse Pelletier, born in Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie on the 13th May 1825 and an unnamed Australian savage. I drew up a letter to the Imperial Prosecutor in La Rochelle, which their father signed with a cross, requesting that his two children be entered in the official register of births.

Narcisse Pelletier has been back in the world of the white man for six years. Not a day has gone by when I have not thought of this matter. I no longer pity him, although I have not ceased to feel compassion for him. He has endured terrible ordeals, of this there can be no doubt. But of what use are emotions such as sympathy or horror in the face of suffering? I am a scholar, a man of science and I cannot be satisfied with mere sentiment.

It is my fervent wish that he will find some happiness. In saying this, I confess that he must often have been unhappy since his return. And for all the privations and suffering he endured in Australia, I find myself wondering if he had perhaps managed to find happiness among the savages. An astounding notion indeed, but one which I now can entertain.

We will never know how Narcisse Pelletier, the eighteen year old sailor, became a savage. I have tried to understand the process by which Narcisse Pelletier, the thirty-six year old savage became a white man once more: how he learnt our language and customs again; how the various elements of his character came together to form his personality today; why he almost never speaks of his life in Australia.

For a long time, my reflections led nowhere. I could not find a way to order my thoughts, to find meaning in his reactions. What did I have other than mere anecdote to rely on? Only chaos.

Gradually, I began to see that I needed to distance myself from Narcisse Pelletier in order to gain a clearer perspective. And since science provided me with no key to understand this tale, I would have to construct such a tool myself – and perhaps, in so doing, lay the foundations for a new science.

I imagine your surprise at reading this Promethean declaration, and I beg you to grant me a little more of your time.

In truth, only an all-encompassing science can bring together the heretofore scattered fragments of understanding in the study of mankind. New terms have appeared of late: sociology, ethnology, psychology, anthropology. These disciplines are of great value and hold much promise for the future. They complement all that we learn from geography, ethics, pedagogy, grammar, politics and even medicine. They all address the question of man in relation to his fellow beings. But each of these disciplines exists in isolation, insensible to the discoveries of the other sciences: they do not listen to each other and refuse to learn from the discoveries of their counterparts.

I see them now as a series of chapels that together form a vast cathedral, whose architecture I can sense. After much reflection, I have chosen a name for this universal study of man, and of all mankind: Adamology.

I am currently sketching the following theory: all sciences that study man follow the same fundamental principles and have exactly the same structure. These points of convergence must be found and developed in order to make of them a harmonious ensemble. What one might call Vallombrun’s theory came to me gradually during the long winter of 1866. Like Pythagoras, Aristotle and Fermat, I seek no glory beyond that of giving my name to a fundamental principle.

Allow me to explain by analogy. Since ancient times, the links between medicine and zoology, or medicine and botany have been understood. Each of these sciences has its own domain, but all obey the same fundamental principles of general biology. In the same way, astronomy and mechanics have shown themselves, since the time of Newton, to be sister sciences; with their cousins, electricity and optics, they make up the domain of general physics. Similarly, the science of Adamology would lay claim to unifying status.

The sciences that form its branches are not books of knowledge stacked next to each other on the shelves of an infinite library; rather they are bodies of knowledge that have much to say to one another. They enrich each other. They all flow from the same principles and belong to a greater family; they are governed by the same laws.

But here the similarities end. If a blade of grass and a cow are governed to a certain extent by the same laws, we can study one while ignoring the other. All branches of Adamology are concerned exclusively with the human brain; it is here that they must inevitably overlap or at least influence one another. Who could refute the links between education and grammar? Between sociology and ethics, ethnology and politics? Surely we must henceforth search for these multiple resonances in a systematic manner. Are those resonances not as important as the bodies of knowledge they link? More important perhaps?

You will discern, I trust, the contribution that Adamology will make – and the magnitude of the task that awaits me. I am conscious of its ambitious nature and do not know if I will be equal to the task of conducting such a study. I am more inclined to travel than to bookishness, and shrink from the thought of shutting myself away in Vallombrun, labouring for many years to substantiate this theory.

I trust you will understand why this ambition renders it absolutely impossible for me to accept the nomination for the Vice-Presidency of the Geographical Society.

There is an architecture to the cathedral of which I have spoken, but the architect’s plans are as yet only sketches. My task will be to provide the solid foundations. What I envisage is an entirely new set of annotations, a system of commonly accepted abbreviations and symbols, a compendium of signs that will enable every idea, in every branch of study to be identified and linked across the disciplines. Adamology studies will be printed in columns, with two columns on each page: one for the text and the other for the stars, triangles, capital letters and oblique lines. New type will be developed to enable the printers to typeset the symbols.

A musical score is made up of different staves, with staffs for the voice and piano, and a line of text for the words. If one element is removed from the score, the music makes no sense. In the same way, Adamology will set out in one column the linear progression of an idea within one branch of science, and in the other column, the network of links to the same idea in sister sciences. My contribution will not be to present the ideas as such, but to present them within a network of correspondences, parallels and resonances – which in turn spark further links. And in this structure, the only system that allows us to fully understand the richness of an idea, do we not see a mirror image of the functioning of our own brains?

An adventure that began on a faraway beach in Australia has led us to fundamentally rethink our conception of Man.

I remain your faithful servant…

For two days Narcisse has been thinking about death.

It started with the old woman killing a snake. She’d grabbed it by the tail as it was sleeping under a stone near the camp. Holding it at arm’s length, she beat it with a stick before crushing its head with a rock. One minute, the creature was wriggling around all over the place trying to break free, baring its fangs and spitting. And the next, it was nothing but a lifeless object, thrown aside ready to be served up for the evening meal. Whatever its life may have been in the dumb world of reptiles, it all came to an end there, its skull ground into the dust. That was it, the end.

Narcisse had thought again of the cabin boy, the lad from Quimper, and how he’d suffered in his last days. Becalmed in the Indian Ocean, the ship drifted, deserted by the winds. Lying at the foot of the mainmast, the boy had wept and prayed, groaned and vomited all week long. One Sunday at noon he stopped breathing. And that was it. Two hours later they said a hasty prayer, cast his body into the sea and left it at that. What more could they have said? That they wished he’d been kept alive for longer by the second mate’s potions? That his agony had been prolonged? He would never have made it as far as Australia. There was nothing more to be said.

Is he any better off than that boy? What difference is there between his fate and the cabin boy’s? Their parents would all be sent the same letter, share the same pain. The boy’s body lies at the bottom of the ocean, but until Narcisse finds a way to get back to civilisation, he might just as well be buried in the desert sands. He is alive, but somehow, in a way he cannot quite understand, he knows he is dead. And death no longer seems strange to him. He is less afraid of it now.

He is dead too on the night of the new moon, when Chief and the old woman spend what seems like hours chanting and blowing smoke at him before Quartermaster and Scarface signal to him to come over to the fire. The whole tribe looks on attentively as Scarface takes a long thorn that has been coated with a blackish substance and passed through the fire. Quartermaster chants, his voice rising on the night air, intoning a refrain three times. He points to Narcisse’s left shoulder and Scarface pierces the skin several times with the spike to form a line of dots.

He grits his teeth and makes no sound. The pain is bearable, so too is the smoke in his nose from the old woman’s fumigations. His tattoo is just a simple design, like Waiakh’s and the other children’s. The older boys have tattoos covering their arms and thighs, the men over most of their bodies.

It seems right that he too should be tattooed. Not for him the tattoos of a sailor. It is not his flesh being pierced with this thorn; he is beyond the reach of Quartermaster, Scarface and all these savages. He is dead. He must be. Sitting there among them in the dust and sand of this never-ending forest, he can only be dead.

He thinks about death in the evening, when the sun disappears behind the trees, sinking fast, as it does only in the tropics. The sun, his name in their language, the sun that melts away to be replaced by fear and nothingness. He has a dim memory of the bosun telling him that the sun rises on the other side of the world in Saint-Gilles just as it is setting here. But he cannot fly across the sky with the sun as if it were a hot air balloon. All he can do is gaze as it disappears from sight every evening, its abrupt demise leaving him so unsettled. Nor does he find solace in the knowledge that just as surely, another day will dawn. The evening colours will soon fade and only the improbable red glow of the fire will linger in the shadows. He wonders what kind of beacon shines on in death.