Savage Lands (53 page)

Meanwhile the colony was struggling to stay afloat. By the end of 1717, only five hundred prospective colonists had set sail for America. At least one nobleman, like Vincente’s dead husband-to-be, wrote imperiously to the Ministry of the Marine to send him a wife, but enthusiasm for such emigration was already on the wane. Though Bienville banned colonists from returning to France without his express permission, rumours of the miseries in America inevitably found their way back to the motherland.

As the stream of voluntary colonists dried to a trickle, Law was obliged to fulfil his obligations to the colony through force. Prisons were emptied; gangs of
bandoliers
scoured the country for beggars and vagabonds, receiving a bounty from the Company for each one arrested. Louisiana became a dumping ground for undesirables, smugglers, criminals and prostitutes. When the Mississippi Company finally crashed in 1719, Louisiana had become in the French imagination a kind of hell on earth, a vast pestilential swamp where the midday sun struck men dead, the natives were all cannibals, and the frogs were so big they ate children whole.

In 1720 the Banque Royale folded, and Law fled France. In a bid to straighten out its affairs and to appease its impoverished shareholders, the Mississippi Company implemented drastic cuts. The remaining settlers of Louisiana suffered dreadfully. Law’s paper money had penetrated the colony, and when his bank collapsed, it lost 80 per cent of its value. Supplies were in pitifully short supply. A pair of stockings in poor repair, for example, which in France would have cost six
sols
, in Louisiana cost six
livres
– one hundred times as much.

Famine and fever continued to devastate the colony. Then, in 1723, a terrible hurricane devastated the new capital of New Orleans. Crops were ravaged, farms blown away and three ships in port completely wrecked. For a period of months there were two deaths a day in the settlement. As the colonists sought to drown their sorrows, drunkenness and gambling became so excessive that Bienville was obliged to outlaw gaming altogether.

But the colonists rallied. By the end of 1724, they had rebuilt the town, this time partly in brick. Though Law’s legacy was hardly the one he had hoped for, his Mississippi Company had transformed Louisiana. Between 1717 and 1720, of the thousands that undertook the perilous voyage to Louisiana, more than half died en route and hundreds more on arrival from disease or starvation, but the population had grown from four hundred to nearly five thousand. Slaves had been introduced by the hundred and the establishment of sizeable plantations had begun the vital process towards self-sufficiency.

The French Crown was to cling on to her American colony, through war with the Natchez and other Native American nations, until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ceded the territories to the east of the Mississippi to England, those on the western side to Spain. France would not regain control of the colony until 1800, and her triumph was brief. In 1803 Napoleon sold Louisiana to President Jefferson for $15 million, or four cents an acre, doubling at a stroke the size of the United States. Upon completion of the agreement, Napoleon declared that ‘this accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride’. Though divorced from their newly acquired compatriots by their religion, customs, law, governance and language, the descendants of those first French colonists, by now known familiarly as Creoles, would surely have derived some comfort from that.