Relation du naufrage de l'Eole sur la cote de la Cafrerie en avril 1829

Abstract

D. J. Culpin has salvaged from the depths of literary history a hitherto unexplored account of a nineteenth-century French shipwreck. En route from India via La Réunion, the Eole was wrecked on the south-eastern coast of Africa in April 1829. Her eight surviving crew members and passengers subsequently journeyed overland to Cape Town through the region then known as ‘Cafrerie’, a hinterland between the southern frontier of Portuguese Mozambique and the northern frontier of the English-administered Cape Colony. The account of their experiences was written by Charles Étienne Boniface, a journalist, author, and playwright then living in Cape Town, whom the survivors encountered on their arrival. Boniface figures in the text as the aptly named ‘Monsieur Mordant’, who gives the group a tour of Cape Town in order to engage in a biting satire of the colony's society and institutions. Boniface claims to have based his account on first-hand reports of the survivors' experiences, and Culpin speculates in his Introduction as to which member of the crew might have been the original author. He opts for Charles Lafitte, a passenger on the Eole who was designated ‘le mentor de la bande’ (p. 21) and on whose perspective much of the narration is centred. Opening with a preface from the current French consul in Cape Town, this edition presents the work as a foundational text in Franco-South African relations. Boniface's account was the first French-language text published in Cape Town, and it also reveals much about French attitudes towards British and Dutch colonization of the Horn of Africa in the early nineteenth century. The work's publication by subscription (a list of the subscribers who financed the first edition is included here) also, arguably, makes it an important document in terms of the Cape's social and intellectual history. Boniface's text is introduced as being of twofold interest to the modern reader. First, in anthropological terms, Culpin connects the author's descriptions of the manners and customs of southern African tribal populations with Diderot's descriptions of Tahiti or Charlevoix's work on Native Canadians. However, Boniface's account appears to belie these Enlightenment antecedents. The native peoples are referred to as ‘barbares’ (p. 31) and ‘animaux à figure humaine’ (p. 69), while the survivors' journey is summed up as ‘un séjour où la nature humaine s’était offerte à notre vue dans son dernier degré d'abrutissement' (p. 76). Culpin also stresses the work's literary merit and connections with Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Rousseau; but in fact Boniface here demonstrates a marked preference for the colonizing ‘hommes civilisés’ (p. 39) over any notional ‘natural man’. Culpin is right, however, to emphasize Boniface's fascinating intertextual references to a range of French works, including plays by Molière. Lafitte's use of honey as a magic elixir to cure a sickly African child is, for instance, likened to the actions of Sganarelle in Le Médecin malgré lui. The attitude of manipulative superiority implied here, as elsewhere in the text, makes this newly discovered work ripe for exploration by postcolonial theorists, literary historians, and scholars of the colonial period.