Glyn Hughes' SQUASHED WRITERS ALL THE BOOKS YOU THINK YOU OUGHT TO HAVE READ In their own words... but magically Squashed into half-hour short stories...

The Squashed version of
A Voyage to the Isle of France
by
Bernardin De Saint Pierre
1773

I: MISERIES OF SLAVERY
Port Louis, August 6, 1768. The Isle of France was discovered by a Portuguese, and taken over by the Dutch; but they abandoned it in 1712, and settled at the Cape of Good Hope, and the French then took possession of it. The island was a desert when we occupied it, and the first settlers were a few honest, simple farmers from our colony of Bourbon, who lived together very happily until 1760, when the English drove us out of India. Then, like a Hood, all the scoundrels, rogues and broken men hunted from our Indian possessions invaded the island and threw everything into disorder and ruin.

Everybody is envious and discontented; everybody wishes to make a fortune at once and depart. And this in an island with no commerce and scarcely any agriculture, where the only money found is paper money! Yet they all say they will be rich enough to return to France in a year's time. They have been saying this for many years. Everything is in a state of squalid neglect. The streets are neither paved nor planted with trees; the houses are merely tents of wood; the windows have no glass and no curtains, and it is rare that one finds within even a few poor pieces of furniture.

There are only four hundred farmers. The rest of the white population are mainly idlers, who gather together in the square from noon till evening and pass away the time in gambling and scandalmongering. The work of agriculture is carried on by black slaves imported from Madagascar. They can be got in exchange for a gun or a roll of cloth, and the dearest does not cost more than seven pounds. They are compelled to work from sunrise to sunset, and they are given nothing to eat but mashed maize boiled in water and tapioca bread. At the least negligence the skin is scourged from their body. The women are punished in the same manner. Sometimes when they are old they are left to starve to death.

Every day during my sojourn in the Isle of France I have seen black men and black women lashed hands and feet to a ladder and flogged for forgetting to shut a door or for breaking a bit of pottery. I have seen them bleeding all over, and having their wounded bodies rubbed with vinegar and salt. I have seen them speechless with excess of pain; I have seen some of them bite the iron cannon on which they have been bound.

I do not know if coffee and sugar are necessary to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two vegetables are a source of misery to the inhabitants of two continents of the world. We are dispeopling America in order to have a land to grow them; we are dispeopling Africa in order to have a nation to cultivate them. There are twenty thousand slaves on the Isle of France, but they die so fast that, to keep up their number, twelve hundred have to be imported every year.

I am very sorry that our philosophers who attack abuses with so much courage have hardly spoken of the slavery of the black races, except to make a jest of it. They have eyes only for things very remote. They speak of St. Bartholomew, of the massacre of the Mexicans by the Spaniards, as if this crime was not one committed now by the half of Europe.

Oh, ye men who dream of republics, see how your own people misuse the authority entrusted to them! See your colonies streaming with human blood! The men who shed it are men of your stamp; like you, they talk of humanity, they read the books of our philosophers, and they exclaim against despotism; but when they get any power they show that they are really brutes. In a country of so corrupt a morality an absolute government is necessary. The excesses of a single tyrant are preferable to the crimes of a whole people.

II: A LAND OF BEAUTY AND ABOMINATIONS
Port Louis, September 13, 1769. An officer proposed to make a walking tour around the island with me, but when the time came to set out he excused himself, so I resolved to go alone. But knowing that I should often have to camp out in the woods alone, I took two negroes with me to carry provisions, and I armed myself with a double-barrel gun and a couple of pistols, for fear I should encounter some of the many runaway slaves that hide in the desert part of the island.

Striking out through the plains of Saint Pierre, we walked for four days along the seashore, with the dense and silent forest on our left hand. On crossing the Black River I came to the last farm on this part of the coast. It was a long hut, formed of stakes and covered with palm leaves. There was only one room. In the middle of it was the kitchen; at one extremity were the stores and the sleeping places of the eight black slaves; at the other end was the farmer's bed; a hen was sitting on some eggs on the counterpane, and some ducks were living beneath the bed, and around the leafy wall pigeons had made their nests.

In this miserable hut I was surprised to find a very beautiful woman. She was a young Frenchwoman, born, like her husband, of a good family. They had come to the island some years ago in the hope of making a fortune; they had left their parents, their friends and their native land to pass their lives in this wild and lonely place, from which one could see only the empty sea and the grim precipices of a desolate mountain. But the air of contentment and goodness of the young and lovely mother of a growing family seemed to make everybody around her happy. When evening came she invited me to share a simple but neatly served supper.

I was given as a bedroom a little tent built of wood, about a hundred steps away from the log cabin. As the door had not been put up, I closed the opening with planks, and loaded my gun and pistols; for the forest all around is full of runaway slaves. A few years ago forty of them began to make a plantation on the mountain close by; the white settlers surrounded them, but rather than return to captivity all the slaves straightway threw themselves into the sea. I stayed with the farmer and his wife until three o'clock the next afternoon.

The farmer walked with me as far as Coral Point. He was a remarkably robust man, and his face and arms and legs were burnt by the sun. Unlike the ordinary settler, he worked himself in tilling the land and felling and carting trees. The only thing that worried him, he said to me, was the unnecessary trouble that his wife took in bringing up her family. Not content with looking after her own five children, she had recently burdened herself with the care of a little orphan girl. The honest farmer merely told me of his little worries, for he saw that I was aware of all his happiness. When we took farewell of each other, we did so with a cordial embrace.

The country beyond his farm was charming in its verdure and freshness; it is a rich prairie stretching between the splendid sea and the magnificent forest.

The murmur of the fountains, the beautiful colour of the waves, the soft movement of the scented air, filled me with joy and peace. I was sorry that I was alone; I formed all kinds of plans. From all the outside world I only wanted a few loved objects to enable me to pass my life in this paradise. And great was my regret when I turned away from this beautiful and yet deserted place.

I had scarcely gone two hundred feet when a band of blacks, armed with guns, came towards me. Advancing to them, I saw that they were a detachment of the black police. One of them carried two little dogs; another pulled a negress along by means of a cord around her neck. She was part of the loot they had got in attacking and dispersing a camp of runaway slaves. The negress was broken with grief. On her back she carried a large gaping bag. I looked in it. Alas! it contained a man's head. The natural beauty of the country disappeared. I saw it as it really was- a land of abominations.

III: BOURBON, THE PIRATES' ISLAND
Port Louis, December 21, 1770. Having obtained permission to return to France, I embarked on November 9, 1770, on the Indien. It took us twelve days to cover the forty leagues between the Isle of France and Bourbon. This was due to the calm weather; but on landing at Bourbon, we encountered a hurricane.

Out of the calm sea there suddenly came a monstrous wave, which broke so violently on the shore that everybody fled. The foam rose fifty feet into the air. Behind it came three waves of the same height and force, like three long, rolling hills. The air was heavy, the sky dark with motionless clouds, and vast flocks of whimbrels and drivers came in from the open sea and scattered along the coast. Even men felt a secret terror at the sight of a frightful tempest in the midst of calm weather.

On the second day the wind completely dropped, and the sea grew wilder. The billows were more numerous and swept in from the ocean with great force. Here I gathered something of the history of the island of Bourbon. It was first inhabited by a band of pirates, who brought with them some negresses from Madagascar. This happened in 1657.

Some time afterwards our Indian company set up a factory in the island, and the governor managed to keep on good terms with his dangerous neighbours. One day the Portuguese viceroy of Goa anchored off the island and came to dine with the governor. He had scarcely landed when a pirate ship of fifty guns entered the harbour and captured the Portuguese vessel. The captain of the pirates then landed, and was also invited to dinner by the governor. The buccaneer sat down at the table by the side of the viceroy, and told the Portuguese that he was now a prisoner. When the wine and the good cheer had put the man in a good humour, M. Desforges (that was the name of our governor) asked him how much he fixed the ransom of the viceroy.

"I want a thousand piastres," said the pirate.

"That's too little," replied M. Desforges, "for a brave man like you and a great lord like him. Ask more, or ask nothing."

"Very well," said the generous corsair, "he can go free."

The viceroy at once re-embarked, vastly content at having escaped so cheaply.

The pirate afterwards settled in the island with all his followers, and was hanged after an amnesty had been published in favour of himself and his men.

He had forgotten to have his name included in it, and a counsellor who wished to appropriate his spoils profited by this mistake and had him put to death. One of the pirates, who lived to the age of one hundred and four years, died only a little time ago. His companions soon grew more peaceful in their manners on adopting more peaceful occupations, and though their descendants are still distinguished by a certain spirit of independence, this is now softened by the society of the worthy farmers who have settled at Bourbon.

There are five thousand Europeans on the island and sixty thousand blacks. The land is three times more peopled than that of the Isle of France, and it is very much better cultivated.

The manners of the old settlers of Bourbon were very simple. Most of the houses were never shut, and a lock was an object of curiosity. The people kept their savings in a shell above their door.

They went barefooted, and fed on rice and coffee; they imported scarcely anything from Europe, being content to live without luxury provided they lived without trouble. When a stranger landed, they came without knowing him and offered him their house to live in.

IV: DUTCH CONTENTMENT
Port Louis, January 20, 1771. I have landed among the Dutch at the extremity of Africa, without money, without linen and without friends. Learning of my position, M. de Tolback, the governor of Cape Colony, has invited me to dinner; and happily, the secretary of the j council has provided me with money, having allowed me to use his credit in buying whatever I need. The streets of the Cape are well set out; some are watered by canals, and most of them are planted with oak trees. The fronts of the houses are shadowed by their foliage; every door has seats on both sides in brick or turf.

There is no gambling at the Cape, no play-acting or novel reading. The people are content with the domestic happiness that virtue carries in its train. Every day brings the same duties and pleasures. There are no spectacles at the Cape and no one wants any; every man has in his own home all that he desires. A quiet life of this sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk every much. They are a rather melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue.

So little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the tender emotions of nature can move it without being excited by artifice or constrained by a false decorum? It was with much regret that I left these worthy people, but I am not sorry to return to France. How many voyagers return and yet find no place of retreat.

Of their friends, some are dead, others are gone away; but life is only a brief voyage and the age of man a rapid day. I wish to forget the storms of it, and remember only in these letters the goodness, the virtue and the constancy that I have met with.

Perhaps this humble work may make your names, O virtuous settlers at the Cape, survive when I am in the grave! For thee, O ill-fated negro! that weepest on the rocks of the Isle of France, if my hand, which cannot wipe away thy tears, can but bring thy tyrants to weep in sorrow and repentance, I shall want nothing more from the Indies; I shall have won the only fortune I require.