August 2017

The dust specks of the Empire

Here is the second part of the article I have written for the French magazine Valeurs Actuelles.

I wish you a pleasant reading, and a wonderful month of August.

Antoine

---

The dust specks of the Empire

And then, of course, there are the "dust specks of the Empire"; The hazards of history have preserved, in what remains of "France d'Outremer", a succession of islands regularly, harmoniously arranged around the world, and French circumnavigators, who follow the wake of famous French sailors Alain Gerbault and Bernard Moitessier, know that after a year or two of vagrancy in the preserved islands, when their funds reach a dangerously low level, they will be able to assert their French diploma : nurse, teacher or Mechanic in one of these departments, territories or overseas countries, where they will find their native language and national eating habits; In the Caribbean, in Martinique, in Guadeloupe (and in Guyana, in Cayenne or Kourou, not to be missed, just opposite Devil's Island, where the penitentiary administration had "put hell in paradise"). A Panama Canal and an ocean farther on, French Polynesia, (I shall return to it shortly), stretches on a sea territory vaster than Europe.

At the end of the Pacific, New Caledonia, the land of "Custom". On the Indian Ocean, more French-speaking (Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar) than French, a year or two on Reunion island have bailed out more than one penniless Ulysses!

For me, since my departure, more than forty years have passed, and I still love the freedom (and constraints) that life on a small vagabond sailboat brings. Since the turn of the millennium, I have refocused on the Pacific; although I frequently leave the catamaran to film Burma, the American Parks, Southern Africa or Cuba, my sailings on board our catamaran Banana Split are now done on the Pacific - 3600 miles, for example, from Tahiti to Australia, and the country of the koalas, like that of the kiwis, offer enough diversity to harmoniously complete our stays in our favourite archipelago, the Tuamotu islands...

I must admit that for nearly thirty years I have missed this archipelago; On my first visit on my schooner, Om, I had seen only Mururoa and Hao, where the Entertainment Association of the Pacific Nuclear Test Center had invited me to sing for the bomb workers. On my second visit to the Tuamotu, I had, on the contrary, been denied access to Hao because the spies who had sunk the Rainbow Warrior had been were confined there; I had nevertheless ventured the bow of my second boat, the sloop Voyage in an atoll that had been praised to me, but I had only taken take - without realizing the Paradise I had Under my eyes - a photo that appeared a few years later on the back cover of my first photo album published by Gallimard, Îles ... était une fois. A third, a fourth time, I had turned a deaf ear to the song of the "white schooners"...(also called paradise tern) and of the o-o, the doves of the Tuamotu..

And then one day, almost by accident, we encountered, my partner Francette and I, that tiny islet, desert, which bears no name on the maps, and which we have photographed from all angles ( recently with the help of a friendly little drone). We spend only a few months a year, but it is in our hearts throughout the rest of the year; We have not built anything there, we live so comfortably on our little catamaran, what would we have to do with a house? We have not, like Robinson Crusoe, transformed the island, our planting attempts (papaya, basil, mint) have not given much; We do not pretend to live in autarky, we refuel once a month in one of the "developed" atolls in the neighbourhood, Makemo, Fakarava: a few hundred inhabitants, a few Air Tahiti flights a week ; a Papeete wholesaler sends us a few boxes of fruits and vegetables, with which Francette will do wonders; there we meet for a time with a few friends, we use the spot's staggering internet connection to advance our projects, editing the film in progress and, this year, realizing for French publisher Gallimard, who last year published our photo album "Stopovers In Polynesia ", a weekly agenda, gathering fifty two dream destinations" where you could be this week! ".



In Fakarava last year a journalist from famous French diary Le Monde had come to interview me, and the vision she had had of me, "a 72-year-old kid", did not displease me; In these "urban" islands, the desire to return soon overtakes us; our tanks and pantry full, filled with warm encounters and friendship too, we then leave for one of our deserted islands; Who was it who said "A deserted island, is the waterproof packaging that protects from humanity... Maybe it was I!


Antoine