‘The tides in the Gulf of Siam’, he begins, ‘present peculiarities which are at first very confusing to the observer.’ These peculiarities ‘originate in the China Sea’ and are detectable, in varying degrees, all down the coast from Hong Kong to Saigon and on round into the Gulf of Thailand and Bangkok. At certain times of the year, just after a full or new moon, and most noticeably in the estuarine approaches of rivers which are in flood, alternate tides vary markedly in size and duration. Thus it happens, continues this paragon of memorialists, that the flow of the lesser tide, usually that in the morning, may be overwhelmed, indeed completely obliterated, by the ebb of the greater, usually that in the evening.
Warington Smyth follows this with complicated notes on how the lesser tide, over a twenty-eight-day period, gradually swells as it gets later in the day until eventually it usurps both the dimensions and the hour of the last great tide. Sadly he ventures no opinion as to why this phenomenon occurs. Even today the workings of the attractive mechanism by which the moon and sun control the action of the tides are not widely understood. But he does note that ‘the highest tides are much influenced by the wind’ and that a brisk easterly can ‘add another half a foot’ even in the Gulf of Thailand, which is a more sheltered shore than that of south Vietnam.
This diurnal mother-of-a-tide ought, of course, to spell disaster to the Delta. A salty inundation, albeit only once a day, would soon sour the world’s most productive ricebowl and turn the green dazzle of paddy into maudlin thickets of mangrove like those along the Donnai below Saigon. What prevents such a disaster is the power of the mighty Mekong. The inrushing tide meets the outrushing river, and in the best traditions of ecological equilibrium they compromise. The river rises, its progress barred by the tide. The backing-up of the river by a big ‘diurnal’ is measurable as far upstream as Phnom Penh and beyond. But there and throughout the three to four hundred kilometres down to the sea, salination is barely detectable. The floodwaters surging through My-tho and Can-tho leave no salty sensation and are, in a manner of speaking, fresh. The river thus defends the Delta from its deadliest foe since the rising waters are overwhelming its own, not the China Sea’s.
So too is the silt. For their major export crop the Vietnamese have to provide only seed and labour. The rest is down to the river. The farmers of the Delta plunge their rice seedlings into Mekong water and then anchor them in Mekong mud. In general, facts about the river are disputed. Is it the world’s fourteenth longest or its twelfth? Is its discharge the fifth largest or the sixth? No two books agree; even the river-mad Garnier never hazards a guess on such matters. But that it reigns supreme as the world’s most industrious earthmover seems highly likely. The Mekong in spate discharges not muddy water but runny mud. A cup of Turkish coffee, heavily sugared, has less sediment per cubic centimetre. In its suspended grit, modern propeller screws get so quickly blunted that riverside repair shops offer a regrinding and replacement service.
To offload this sediment – a sludge of mica and minerals from Tibet, Yunnanese phosphates, nitrogenous Burmese clays and leafy loams from Laos – the river waits until the plains of Cambodia and the Delta. There, as those capricious ‘diurnals’ halt its flow, and as its level drops after the monsoon floods, it deposits its burden in a silk-glistening tilth of prime growing potential.
Admittedly, when the Mekong Exploration Commission headed upriver in 1866, the diurnal tides may not have been very evident. From Saigon the expedition took three days to reach Cambodia. At night they moored by the banks of the Hau Giang and slept in the boats. Otherwise they stopped only at My-tho to load coal for the canonnières’ boilers. It was early June, and according to both Garnier and Louis de Carné (who also wrote a personal narrative of the expedition), the monsoon rains were then just beginning. The river would have been rising but not yet in flood; and if the moon was also unfavourable, the effect of the tides might have been negligible.
But if June is a bad month for observing tidal variation, it is the best of times for observing a still stranger phenomenon. Possibly unique to the Mekong and certainly germane to would-be empire-builders, this second fluvial aberration is as much the sine qua non of Cambodia as the ‘diurnal’ tides are of the Delta. Yet it too would elude the savants of the Commission. Perhaps they felt that until they ventured into what French maps called territoires peu connus they were off-duty so far as science was concerned. Measuring Angkor’s great wat was by way of an exercise. Likewise, their speculation on how such a jungle kingdom could have produced the world’s most monumental city was something of a formality and still rates high on the conversational bill-of-fare of every tourist. It never seems to have occurred to Lagrée and Garnier that between the mysterious river they were engaged to explore and the inexplicable splendours amid which they first congregated there lay a simple, if bizarre, cause-and-effect connection.
The Mekon [in Cambodia] is a vast melancholy-looking river, three miles broad, covered with islands, and flowing with the rapidity of a torrent.’
LORD ASHBURTON,
President of the Royal Geographical Society, 1862
LIKE THE IMPETUOUS GARNIER, his young colleague Louis de Carné, the author of what would be the first account of the expedition to be published, allows just a paragraph for transporting the Commission’s personnel from Saigon to Angkor. The farewells had been fond, says de Carné. Some shook his hand ‘as if we were doomed’, more predicted ‘a speedy return after an abortive attempt’. Otherwise there was little to report. Six enervating months into his first Eastern posting, de Carné insists that he personally felt nothing, no excitement, no trepidation, just ‘a worldly indifference’. More a superior ennui, it would permeate his narrative and stay with him for the rest of his pathetically brief life. The climate showed him no favours; but in the light of later disagreements this early reserve smacks of pique. Like an unwanted playfellow scuffing a stone with studied indifference, Louis de Carné nursed the heavy heart of a misfit.
In the group photo de Carné is the one at the back dressed in black and with the thickest of spade-like beards; sunk in reverie, he looks to be slightly out of it already. At twenty-two he was the youngest of the party, and as a junior official in the French Ministry of External Affairs he was the only civilian, all the others being naval officers. Additionally he seems to have taken instant exception to the bullish and undiplomatic Francis Garnier. In the pecking order he rated ‘Mademoiselle Buonaparte’ as just another naval scientist, one among several and with no greater claim to the direction of the expedition than the rest. Only le Commandant could command; and it was thus to the more soft-spoken and dignified Lagrée that de Carné attached himself.
Like Lagrée, de Carné had aristocratic connections. His father was a comte and a member of the Académie Française, and his uncle was the self-same Admiral de Lagrandière who was governor of the colony. Young Louis de Carné owed his appointment entirely to this connection, a fact of which Garnier would miss no opportunity to remind him. As the expedition’s political officer reporting directly to the Quai d’Orsay, de Carné’s position was potentially influential; yet it was prejudiced by his inexperience and fraught with ambivalence. Unaccustomed to naval discipline, he was expected to submit to it. Untutored in any relevant science, he was liable to be treated as a dogsbody by his more qualified companions. And as one unknown to the colony’s naval establishment, he was widely suspected of being an informer for the civil authorities and the government of the day in Paris.
The government in Paris was that of the high-handed Louis Napoleon, otherwise Napoleon III. A nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon had been chosen as French president in 1848 and had successfully installed himself as emperor in 1852. The next two decades were therefore those of the ‘Second Empire’, a period of ambitious national reconstruction well exemplified by Baron Haussmann’s proud grey boulevards in Paris and by a succession of sometimes quixotic enterprises overseas. An attempt to foist the francophile