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