French Port is dying. Modern medicine has doubled its population. The island's farmers have harvested its trees to bring more land under cultivation. The sun dries out the top soil and the wind takes it out to sea. The island's disaster is not only ecological. French Port once exported modest quantities of timber and some potatoes. Now it must import fertilizers, which it can't afford, just to produce enough food. French Port is going broke. Few people can afford a ticket off the island and most don't want to go anyway. French Port is home. Edward Warren is a retired, disenchanted, and once removed native son who comes to the island looking for something meaningful to fill an empty life. On property once belonging to his grandmother he discovers an artesian pool capable of solving many of the island's problems and of making Warren as rich and as important as an island resident can be. Soon he meets an alluring, lonely woman with an ugly past who permits him to board platonically in her home. The American could for once feel socially productive and, for once, he might achieve personal happiness. But, as a newly acquired, cynical friend points out, "people will fight over a turd" They will certainly fight over the water Warren has discovered and owns but, surprising, Warren increasingly finds himself enjoying their conflict. French Port cautions that all associations of people are charged with suppressed hatreds and that nothing triggers violence like an outsider with a little power who means well.

FRENCH PORT

By Charles Baldwin

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2011 Charles Baldwin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-2470-2

Chapter One

In August of 1573, the crew of a Portuguese caravel exploring the South Atlantic discovered a tall, partially overgrown, apparently uninhabited island roughly twenty by thirty miles in size. The captain ordered a circuit to find ingress, but a sleepy lookout failed to notice the narrow beach at the island's southeastern tip. The Portuguese skipper accurately drew the island's strawberry shape on his charts but overestimated its size by more than 100 percent. He drew cliff birds, a strong stream tumbling down the island's eastern face, and a forest of scraggly conifers. He named the place Ilha Fazenda, Cloth Isle, because the island's yellow sides, long sculpted by the wind and water, resembled draped fabric that seemed to flutter as one departed.

In the winter of 1600, the caravel broke up against Brest. Two adolescent beach scavengers extracted its watertight chest from the sand and traded the charts inside to a French merchant for three drawings of a lovely young woman in immodest poses. The excited merchant attempted to present the charts to the king through a jealous prefect, then through a dim cardinal, and finally through a procrastinating general who, unfortunately, fell to his death from a windowsill during a brandy chugging contest before delivery could be achieved. The general's replacement wouldn't deign to speak to someone in trade. Disgusted, the merchant disposed of the charts cheaply to a local collector, an English wine merchant's son who resided in France to be near the vineyards and away from the demands of his young wife.

In his study in the evenings, the Englishman dreamily fingered the contours of the distant world. He touched the Portuguese captain's drawing of the stubby island. In a tavern, he found a bleary scholar who translated Ilha Fazenda as "Island of Merchandise."

"Merchandise?" asked the confused Englishman.

"No ... no...," hyperbolized the thirsty scholar. "Enterprise. Not merchandise."

Island of Enterprise. Enterprise? wondered the Englishman. Timber, a cataract for a mill, and wildlife for food. Had the Portuguese or the French built a great manufacturing concern in the South Atlantic by the capture of which the Englishman might make for himself a tremendous fortune?

The Englishman hired a carrack and crew and circled the island in January of 1603. He discovered the little beach that the Portuguese had overlooked. The absence of a pier surprised him, as did the absence of a road up the limestone cliffs which rose beyond. He went ashore with five well-armed horsemen. The men climbed the cliffs and entered the dense forest of short, slender evergreens which covered the southern island, constantly fearing ambush by French musketeers or Portuguese pikemen. Though relieved to enter the open land north of the forest, the Englishman found only a muddy-bottomed, exhausted stream rather than a driving river. Further north, he found only stunted brown grasses, which the horsemen tried unsuccessfully to prevent their animals from eating. Consequently, one horse died of colic on the return journey.

The Englishman recognized that wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn, and rice wouldn't produce well enough in such mediocre soil to feed lumberjacks and that tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane wouldn't germinate at all. Having achieved the sort of glorious failure which his countrymen relish, the Englishman went home to die young, his life's work behind him. Thirty years later, childless and on his deathbed, he asked his second wife to bring him his charts. He touched each tenderly. He thought of the birds hovering beautifully in the updrafts among the folds of his island's stone facets. He asked for ink. He blotted out "Ilha Fazenda" and, after some merry speculation, wrote "French Port." Slyly, he handed back the pages and never touched them again.

In 1750, Jeremiah Hall, a shipping clerk and unrepentant homosexual, duped an anguished; equally homosexual nobleman into granting funds for a mission to bring Christ to French Port's unbaptized. Hall had intended to abscond to America and to live in Appalachian obscurely with his longtime lover, a retired sergeant of marines but unfortunately, the nobleman insisted on providing Hall transport to the location of his new parish. Their ship's captain caught on to Hall and his boyfriend's profane love and perfunctorily deposited both onto French Port's beach, along with lecterns, vestments, assorted songbooks, sacred texts, ten casks of water, two bottles of whiskey, and twenty thirty-pound bags of potatoes. Watching the vessel depart, Hall's lover asked, "Now what?"

They gained nothing by remaining on the beach. Over the course of several days, they carried all the food and drink to the top of the cliffs. After several more days, they had carried all through the thickening woods to the expanse of open land. The sergeant discovered the sparkling stream which traversed the island. Hall sectioned some of the potatoes around their eyes and planted each piece. The potatoes grew—and even flourished.

Five years later, a second ship anchored off the little beach and a landing party ascended, prepared to inflict vengeance if the locals had eaten the missionaries. They found Hall and his companion living comfortably in a cabin of tree trunks felled with a large crucifix, the arms of which they had sharpened against stones. They had secured the cottage timbers with strips of bark and filled the drafty spaces between with wood chips and mud. And they had taught themselves more than fifty ways to prepare potatoes, including fermentation. The lovers stared at the unreal visitors, happy of new faces. But it dawned to Hall that some of these arrivals didn't intend to leave and that they would consider his love for his retired sergeant obscene. Worse, the man who'd shared his bed each night while French Port's seasons broke against their little cabin now avoided his eyes and talked hunting with the other marines. Hall departed alone on the ship, expecting no farewell and receiving none. No further record of him exists.

Colonists arrived, cut roads, built a small pier, and exported modest quantities of lumber and potatoes. Many of the lumberjacks and their families stayed only long enough to avoid bailiffs, but a few fell in love with the island's open quiet. Many never expected to own land, poor land, but nevertheless theirs. Near the stream, the new arrivals built a few houses, a school, a hospital, and a church. In two generations seventy people considered themselves natives of French Port.

In 1851, Parliament, adhering to the illogic of empire, ordered the establishment of a grand Government House on French Port that would require the Crown's defense while contributing nothing to the Crown's well-being. Planners found plenty of limestone on the southeastern tip of the island. Over the course of the next eleven years, a troop of British military engineers and an army of imported, mostly brown-skinned laborers erected a four-story building measuring 165 feet per side and 75 feet high. The building contained one hundred windows, each almost large enough for an upright man to leap through either to his death or, if from the lower floors, to a pretty nasty bruising. The architect ordered the masons to only rough cut the island's limestone, so as to give the building's exterior an apparent softness. The carpenters worked a strawberry blonde local wood called rimu that the designer found so beautiful he would not darken it, even...