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Check to Your King

Chapter Six — A Crown for Ulysses

Chapter Six
A Crown for Ulysses

A young lady is seated in a swing, beneath an elm in a Baltimore garden. She is attended by a youth of about ten years old, with large red ears, and that patience shown only by dumb animals, or by young men suddenly infatuated with little Titania. The young lady's eyes are shut, but between her lashes she can see a glory of shattered sunrays, crimson, orange, delicate green… the most exciting colours. Her head is thrown back in ecstasy, her brown legs dangle bare and shoeless. This is perhaps out of place in a princess, and provides an unseemly moment for her introduction to the public. Moreover, it may be argued that the Princess is callous, since her good papa is barely recovered from the cholera at present devastating the Southern States of America, whilst her good mamma and her brothers Frederick and George are still in the grip of the malady. Later, indeed – when Margaret Neilsen is brushing her hair at night, and pulls so hard that all the tangles, indignant, make it a tug-of-war – the Princess remembers her family misfortunes, and weeps so loudly that she has to be given strawberries and cream in a bowl decorated with three pigs.

But at the moment the swing swoops gorgeously downwards, and the Princess, kicking her legs in the air, shouts “Whoosh!” Can I help it? It is just so, with bare feet, and the airs tender and delicious about her brown face, that Isabel de Thierry's ghost may sometimes hunt up streets and down streets for the Baltimore garden.

It is nowadays fairly easy for an American lady to become a princess. She has only to drop the little slipper – not glass, but diamond of a reasonable carat – and from Europe Prince Charming will arrive on the run. But Isabel, five years old when her red-eared cavalier pushed the wooden swing, arranged things differently. She became, at ten, a princess in her own right, and without any business of matrimony, which may or may not turn out page 47 well. Her father, having by perhaps unconventional methods achieved the Kingship of Nukahiva and the Sovereign Chieftaincy of his little demesne in New Zealand, was insistent about only one thing. It is incorrect to say that he took a crown with him; those who hold out for a throne and sceptre are, believe me, just liars, enamoured of the picturesque, like golfers and bigamists. But he did enjoin those who linked their destinies with the de Thierry expedition to call his daughter Princess Isabel.

It was a dignity she wore charmingly, no doubt… she with the black curls and the serious dark eyes. Yet in her case, as in that of her papa, the King, you might seek in vain for the grave of the only American-born princess who ever leaned from the side of a ship, and, as the vessel drew away from Panama, heard the guns of a city thunder out the royal salute.

* * * *

Exactly how Charles de Thierry fared during his eight American years is somewhat obscure. We have already mentioned the known facts, that in 1826 he departed thither from England, not merely sickened with disappointment, but very anxious to come into contact with “a gentleman who owed me a very large sum of money”. Whether he ever grasped the coat-tails of this person is doubtful. The de Thierrys had their ups and downs in the States. It is certain that they were often happy, often befriended. They made no settled home. There was no restraining Charles from new assaults upon his colonising project. Up and down he travelled, lecturing here, scribbling another pamphlet there, leaving a trail of more or less unwanted information about New Zealand clear across America. He scatters his leaflets as a broom-pod scatters its little brown seeds to the winds; and, though no American had the honour of accompanying him to New Zealand in the long run, for the first few years after he actually arrived at the Canaan of his descriptions he got shoals of letters from the States, all with Royalist superscriptions on their envelopes.

Among his papers is a draft of a novel, The Emigrants: A Story of America. Perhaps he meant it to be funny. In either case, it is. Our Charles was anything but a literary expert. But in later years, when his children were as much cut off from ordinary social recreations as so many young Crusoes and Fridays, he used to gather them round the fire and read aloud what he had written in the course of the day. The Emigrants has for its hero a benevolent old Dutchman, of a huge income. He changes all his T's into D's, and R's into W's, but, just the same, he's always popping up to page 48 advance the needy another hundred dollars or so. At this stage of the game, Charles must have felt the need of a fairy godfather.

“Ten years of adversity should certainly do something to mellow a man's feelings. What I lost on the one side, I seemed to gain on the other, and the Blind Goddess appeared intent on the equitable adjustment of her scales. I got rid of some of the vanities of the world.… However, I had not now at my command the amount of means which I had formerly possessed. Those means were not great, but I had other available resources, and the fund thus disposable might have done much, had I been otherwise treated.”

He seems to have lost some money and gained a little philosophy. Then there was the better reason for happiness. She arrived on January 3rd, 1828. Charles tried very hard not to be quite so proud of her. But they were allies, conspirators from the first. The boys were fair, firm-thinking, slow-spoken little fellows. Isabel, when first her puckered face, its mouth screwed up like a button rosebud, was uncovered, appeared dark and impish. She looked at him straightly for a moment, then she winked.

There was a hand curled in his own, and to resist going where it urged was quite beyond thinking. A baron is a baron, but still he can play at horses. Can one imagine Charles as sly? However, he desperately wished to name his daughter after “my lost love, Eliza”, and hadn't quite the pluck, for, as he frankly admits, his wife would have been jealous. Nothing could have been more reasonable on her part. Is one to go to the expense and trouble of producing a daughter as incessantly demanded by Charles, simply that another woman may get all the sentimental credit? Charles, however, discovered in an old dictionary of names that Isabel is simply another version of Eliza, Isabel, the dark lady, came back from the christening-font.

Another Isabella, from the day of the baby's birth, steps into the de Thierry fold, to remain there as a permanent fixture. But instantly, that la petite might have no rival, Charles induced the new-comer to let them employ her second name, Margaret – Margaret Neilsen.

Here is the Faithful Nurse, the essential we have lacked all along. One wonders however we did without her until the Baroness de Thierry's fourth accouchment. Margaret Neilsen is ideal of her kind – Scotch, and a little body, with mouse-coloured hair screwed into a bun at the top of her skull and affixed with steel pins like daggers. At some time she has been married, and is either widowed or (can it be?) divorced. But any allusion to this she puts page 49 aside with the grim sentence, “Don't talk to me about Neilsen,” and nobody ever does. She says her prayers with regularity, is not above taking a hair-brush to the seats of the mighty if they need it, and yet spoils them to distraction. At the moment, having seen the Baron himself in and out of the cholera, she is torn between the ailing Baroness and the two sick boys, and the feeling that the others, especially Baby Will, can't possibly survive without her She quarters them safely in a disinfectant-reeking Baltimore house, weeps and prays a great deal, but never burns the porridge.…

Baby Will? Certainly. In long-clothes, and not six months old. He is, however, the last of the de Thierry series. “Not before it was time,” sniffs Margaret Neilsen, not greatly impressed with nineteenth century fecundity, which she considers plays into the hands of “the men”. She likes, pampers, and admires men, but disapproves of them on principle.

A gentleman in reduced circumstances, and very seldom of fixed abode, falls sick with the cholera in 1833 Other members of his household follow suit, but all survive. Upon their recovery, seeing the pest still raging throughout the whole of the southern States, and having, besides, remained a long time without profit in the land of the free, the gentleman decides that he is tired of America. His failures in Europe are too bitter for him to consider returning there. Somehow he must get to New Zealand, where, as he never tires of telling anyone who will lend him even half an ear, he is a landed proprietor to the tune of 40,000 acres. An ark is at hand, in the shape of a little vessel bound for the West Indies. The gentleman steps aboard, accompanied by the following entourage: a wife, one; sons, four, including the squalling bundle done up in wool and napkins; a daughter, one–handle her like glass, she is to be a princess; a faithful servant, one, with an incredible bit of straw millinery perched like a second Babel on her bun of brown hair.

This is at least rational. But the gentleman who goes to the West Indies comes out at the other end of his journey a king. A recognised government – not much of a government, certainly – turns a serious ear to his proposals, and, by acclamation, grants him a concession of enormous importance. And he has real money in his pocket.

It is unbelievable, but it happened.

In Jamaica, every one of the laughing negroes burned a candle at night before his pile of melons and delicious tropical fruits. It was like some dusky Feast of All Souls, the little flames fluttering unleashed in soft wind from a black-and-ivory sea. There were old page 50 houses, colour-washed yellow and pale blue, in Martinique, narrow alleys, trees touching hands across white squares, and everywhere the stiff, dry sabre-rattling of palms. Hundreds of French émigré families were scattered through the Indies, and with many of them Charles had ties of mutual acquaintance.

This does not explain how the de Thierrys, after their exodus from the States, continued to support existence on their reduced income. The indefatigable M. Maurice Besson claims to have discovered that the Baron de Thierry lent himself to the tuning of spinets whilst in the West Indies. At first I was inclined to sneer at this; Charles had a touchy pride. Occasionally, when the tide has turned against him, he records haughtily, “I did as better men have done: I had recourse to the use of my talents.” Is the tuning of spinets to be reckoned as a talent? After all, why not? To rid from their asthma and catarrh all those light, laughing, breezy little spinet voices, no doubt to demonstrate to amateurish owners how they should be played… possibly it was talented.

I once knew an old shoemaker who was talented. He was also, as it happens, a lunatic, and I met him one morning shambling up from the lunatic asylum. He was harmless, and permitted to prowl. He walked around me in a circle, grinning and pointing at my shoes. At first he could manage to say nothing at all, but finally the words came stumbling out:

“Blue shoes… You've got blue shoes on.”

The magnificence of my blue shoes had evidently burst like a couple of blue moons into the darkened attic of his mind. In this one may perceive that complete intimacy with a subject which is in itself a very high order of talent, whether it relates to shoeleather or spinets.

At all events, at Pointe-à-Pitre the Baron de Thierry gave a concert “de harpe”. And the harp which had pleased Vienna, including an Imperial lady, cleared a profit of 400 francs for the musician.

It was at this same Pointe-à-Pitre – though one wouldn't expect a place which puts only 400 francs in the bag for the Arts to be much of a hunting-ground – that the climax of his career was reached; that great affairs were mooted, and a crown offered Ulysses.

Through the West Indies they progressed on brief and charming journeys. At this time Charles must have been in funds again, for he chartered his own little schooner. From Martinique they went to Guadeloupe, then to Dominica, where they put in to visit French friends who had been their hosts during their visit to Paris in 1824.

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They bore a charmed life, these de Thierrys. Far out on the horizon, that day, showed an ugly white snout of foam, and Charles was warned by his skipper that if he wanted his cockleshell out of the tail of dirty weather, he must put off immediately. So there was kissing and compliment, and from shore bright scarves and kerchiefs were waved as the schooner stood out to sea. An hour later they were rolling sickly in long furrows. Their boat was out of the line of danger, but over Dominica the sky had turned dark green, with a curious coppery glare. The skipper, very nearly the same shade, and with his eyes popping out of his head, continued to cross himself and solicit the attentions of the Virgin. They had missed a hurricane by an hour. Meanwhile, like a great leaden fist from the clouds, down smashed the storm on Dominica. It kept a narrow, twirling path, but where it passed, hundreds of the light houses lay in ruins, and not a ship at anchor in the harbour escaped. The de Thierrys' friends, like hundreds of others, lay dead under the ruins of their home. France and the West Indies went into mourning. Charles, a little white about the gills, felt that Providence must after all have a sneaking regard for him.

“I set out from Martinique without an idea that at Guadeloupe the conversations so often indulged with a dear good friend should have been productive of great developments. I was, as it were, the parent of a settled scheme, which appealed to others, who had at their disposal the means I no longer possessed, as sufficiently promising to justify the expenditure of their capital.”

At Pointe-à-Pitre, July 23rd, 1834, the French brig-o'-war, the Momus, under Commandant d'Orsay, came from Bafre-Terre, its captain having the express purpose of visiting the Baron de Thierry and plunging with him into majestic plans. In the cabin of the Momus were first discussed the projects which raised the de Thierry New Zealand colony to undreamed-of glamour, and a risk of real importance.

A moment. Did I mention it? Charles, perhaps finding that he was not much of a success with the lower middle classes, developed in middle life a habit of ennobling the friends who did the decent thing by him. One finds his record full of barons and comtes; the grain of salt is recommended. This Captain d'Orsay of the Momus is the first of them. Invariably, so far as Charles is concerned, the gentleman appears as Comte d'Orsay, a touch which for a moment threw me into a wild confusion of ideas, making it seem possible that Byron's friend, the dandy of the age, was leading a double life on the Atlantic Ocean, hobnobbing with colonists page 52 and king-makers. It would have been pleasant, but it cannot stand the light of day. The real truth is inescapable. If a man showed a noble frankness in his dealings, Charles simply couldn't bear that the poor fellow should not be either a baron or a comte. He exercised what is, after all, an immemorial prerogative of kings, and filled his records with nobles quite unknown to history. An alternative appellation, used once, was “the excellent Captain d'Orsay”. We had better lean to this if we must keep to facts.

According to himself, Charles began to dream of the Panama Canal's possibility years before, when in Paris. But at the time he said little, knowing nothing of the conditions and government prevailing over Panama. Evenings of long conversation with the rovers who knocked about the Indies shaped his project more plainly.

“It was no longer merely the colonisation of New Zealand that was planned, but the founding of a new state, the cutting of the Isthmus of Darien, a new highway across the globe, for the benefit of all nations and the emancipation and civilisation of the New Zealand aborigines.”

This, of course, was not the first Panama Canal scheme. The Spanish had long dreamed of the enterprise, more than once had half-heartedly taken it in hand. But difficulties seemed insuperable. Political intrigue, corruption, lassitude, disease, were the joint governors of that area through which the canal must pierce, until on the Pacific coast it emerged to bring new wealth to the old Spanish city of Panama, the treasure-stronghold upon which for centuries pirates and filibusters had cast envious looks. The fortifications of the city had kept those crows off. Panama City remained Spanish in architecture, in listless resignation to a diminished destiny. Spanish most of all in its decay.

Less than fifty years before, the territories of Panama, isthmus and cities, had come under the sway of New Granada, and now looked to the Congress of Bogota for its legislature. It was a step towards progress, though Bogota also was festivals and fevers for the most part.

Meet, then, the men of affairs, crowding into d'Orsay's cabin: M. Auguste Salomon, a man, according to Charles, of remarkable business capacity and large capital. (The first is doubtful, the second a moral certainty. M. Salomon advanced Charles 12,000 francs.) Birds of brighter plumage, if less financial importance, arrive from the Governor's residence at Guadeloupe: M. Vigneti, formerly private secretary to his Excellency, and Major Edward Fergus, the Governor's long-legged aide-de-camp. Then there are page 53 Bertholini and Morel… both of them, not to mince matters, straight-out blackguards. Morel, in fact, turns out to be a notorious smuggler from the Demarara coast, at which Charles is indignant when he finds it out. But both are sitting in Salomon's pocket, and consequently are voted unanimously into the Syndicate.

Who can tell how brightly the phoenix displayed its new plumes? The Governor's residence at Guadeloupe lost two of its ornaments. Major Fergus and Vigneti both decided to cast in their fortunes with that of the Baron de Thierry. “The Canal was to be cut from Navy Bay to the River Chagres, and from Cruzes on the Chagres to the Rio Grande on the Pacific Ocean.” The Canal once opened – with the assent of the Congress of Bogota – a quick linking-up of distant places was planned, a packet service from England to Chagres, via the West Indies, from Panama, thence to New Zealand. From New Zealand the service would be kept open with Sydney and the East Indies as ports of call, the packets passing through Torres Straits. Sailings were planned for at least once a month, cutting in half the time and space between Europe, America, and the Antipodes.

“How near all these plans were to success might be made plain were I to show to Your Excellency the official documents I received then from Paris. But the French have long been remarkable for being too late in these eventful affairs.” (This extract is from a letter written by Charles de Thierry in 1840 to Captain Hobson, then Lieutenant-Governor of the new British colony, New Zealand.)

At the other end of this “new highway across the globe”, no British colony, not even a French one, was to welcome the packet-ships. Here, on the mouth of the Hokianga, would flourish the tiny independent state ruled over by Charles; the state with its own sovereignty, its unlimited brotherhood between white and brown men, its astounding productivity. (As a matter of fact, before ever he sailed for his state, Charles had accomplished detailed arrangements for selling its produce to reputable merchant houses in Pointe-à-Pitre, Panama, Paris, and London. And the full ground plans of Utopia were drawn to the very inch, as you will hear.)

The tiny state – that's more likely to appeal to the Congress of Bogota than to put them off. They're a bit afraid of the Big Stick… England, France, America – once let them in, and we all know the merry time a poor republic will have persuading them to go out again. Utopia… the Sovereign Chieftaincy… is different. There are other reasons in favour of the declaration of Utopia's independence.

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“Could a public loan be negotiated in London for the Baron de Thierry, or for M. Salomon? Certainly not,” writes Charles, with truth. He goes on to say, “Either an Act of Parliament must incorporate a company, or it must treat with some foreign state.… Everyone but myself was of the opinion that I must take the title of King, but this I refused.”

A meeting in Guadeloupe. M. Salomon, M. Vigneti, Major Fergus, Bertholini, Morel, one and all offer to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Baron de Thierry, future ruler of the little kingdom to be founded on his 40,000 acres. However much the project may have appealed to him, he had his doubts as to whether 40,000 acres was quite the same thing as the whole of New Zealand, and so rejected both Oath and Crown. It was settled that he should assume instead the title of Sovereign Chief of New Zealand, a title more likely to place him at one with the natives. It's a dignified title, perhaps a little misleading, but it should be understood that he only referred to his beloved 40,000 acres, and was not, as some say, trying to grab the whole country.

Offices were then settled among the others. Salomon was to remain at Pointe-à-Pitre, acting as treasurer, general agent, and deputy for negotiation of the loan necessary for the Panama Canal project. (The 12,000 francs advanced by Salomon was for the New Zealand end of the scheme.) Vigneti became “Secretary for the Foreign Department”; Major Fergus came as soldier and free lance, to take on what service he might find. The capacities of Bertholini and Morel were from the first doubtful. Only one thing seemed certain about them. They steadfastly refused to pay their own expenses.

It has been said that M. Salomon was the Baron de Thierry's dupe, the Panama Canal project a cover for a pickpocket. But, unfortunately for this theory, M. Salomon's own letter to Charles, written long after the little state had crumbled to ruins and the ghost of the crown been whisked away, remains to testify otherwise. Does the wronged man write to the thief, “We were both of us deceived by others. Do not think that I meant to abandon you”?

Salomon, Vigneti, Fergus, Bertholini, Morel… dark faces, lost in the old gallery. Perhaps at times Charles would have drawn back from his grandiose schemes. In his old age, he knew that when he had turned away to star-gazing he had made mistakes. Yes, he had made serious mistakes. He was humiliated to think of them.

The year drew into summer heat and ripeness. Round their house poinsettias burst into vivid flame, the coral trees pricked up page 55 goblin ears. They seemed to be living in the heart of a bonfire. Up from the sea at night swung the red lantern of the moon.

On December 1st, 1834, the brigantine Momus was by command of the Governor of Guadeloupe sent to transport the Baron de Thierry and his party to St. Thomas, where they would make preparations for their New Zealand expedition, arrange for the Panama Canal concession, and themselves cross by land the Isthmus of Darien.

It is odd, that. Emily, lying on the borderland of sleep, and thinking in a confused way of crowns, which have never seemed very serious to her, reflects how this one and that will speak of a great triumph, a romance, and say, “This was the crown of my life.” Her husband has a crown, or the next thing to it, and this doesn't matter. It falls off and trundles away into the shadows, like a hoop. But what will be remembered always is the moon's edge, dipping into velvet water, the fragile scent of flowers in this garden. She feels that these might come back to her in the instant of death, and say, “We were the crown of your life.” Not success, not the little triumphs. She would forget these; they would go past like the fleet waves breaking under the moon.