John Keay - Mad About the Mekong - Exploration and Empire in South East Asia

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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