Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
covered the 'Revolution Isles' just a few weeks before Marchand ar-
rived.
These were cruel blows but Marchand was resilient. As soon
as possible, he made sail for IÎle de France. He had arranged for
money to be deposited there for further mercantile ventures. But all
he found waiting for him when he arrived on 30 January 1792 was
news of the confused state of affairs in France. There was no money
and, therefore, no possibility of returning to the Orient to salvage
something from the commercial ruins of the voyage. There was noth-
ing to be done but to return to France. The
Solide
reached Toulon on
14 August.
But there were, of course, the furs. They should fetch a good
price in European markets. Alas, Marchand's precious cargo was the
final victim of his genius for bad timing. The skins were sent to Ly-
ons. Now Lyons was a royalist centre and not a safe place to be. With-
in months the city was besieged by government forces. When it fell,
in October 1793, it was decided to make an example of the place.
Many of its buildings were razed and 2,000 citizens were executed.
As for the furs, they were confiscated, thrown into a warehouse and
forgotten. After a long struggle with the revolutionary bureaucracy,
the owners eventually established title to their property. It was too
late. The cargo that Etienne Marchand had brought two-thirds of
the way round the world had been almost completely destroyed by
worms.
War and ideological ferment preoccupied the nations of Europe
for many years. The political climate was not congenial to adventur-
ous ocean voyages. Yet, paradoxically, one of the oddest circumnav-
igations sprang directly from the clash of ideas which so much en-
gaged men's minds in the dying years of the eighteenth century.
Thomas Muir was a young Scottish lawyer and an advocate of
parliamentary reform. In the revolutionary 1790s the views he ex-
pressed could only be alarming to the government. In 1793 he sur-
