Capitaine Pamphile
is an awkwardly assembled comic novel, which began as
a pair of short stories (James I and James II) and was subsequently
expanded by Dumas into a cross between a travel adventure (à la
Madame Giovanni or
Gil Blas) and perhaps fanciful animal memoir (like
Histoires de mes bêtes).
The two James of the original short stories were small old world monkeys.
Dumas begins his narration in Paris in 1831 with an account of how he
rescued a turtle (which he named "Gazelle") from a culinary fate, and
conveyed it to the home of his friend, the painter Descamps, who already
possessed a menagerie which included a monkey (James I), a bear (Tom), and
a frog (Mme. Camargo).
The story then begins to alternate between accounts of the sad and
grotesque fates of the various members of the menagerie, set in Paris, and
Dumas' imaginings of the circumstances under which the animals were
brought to France, captured in Africa or North America by Capitaine
Pamphile, an ethically challenged Provençal sea captain. However, Dumas
apparently enjoyed writing about his creation, and Captain Pamphile has
soon hijacked the narrative.
Captain Pamphile, on a trading voyage to Africa, begins by hunting big
game, and captures an orphaned monkey (James I), goes on to hijack the
cargo of a Chinese merchant ship, which he sells with a great profit, and
then departs on a second voyage to North America, where he hijacks the
cargo of several fishing boats, before his crew mutinies and throws him
overboard. Pamphile washes up on Prince Edward Island, in the Gulf of
Saint Lawrence, where he is taken as a slave by the Iroquois Indian chief,
Black Snake, who seems to have been borrowed from James Fenimore Cooper.
Black Snake and his captive sail a canoe up the Saint Lawrence River past
Quebec and Montreal, and Pamphile escapes when the canoe upsets. Pamphile
walks for three days through trackless wilderness to arrive in Philadelphia(!),
having first captured an escaped performing bear (Tom's mother).
Pamphile finds his ship docked in Philadelphia, and sneaks aboard, throws
the mutinous first mate to the sharks, and one morning reappears on deck in
his accustomed place, to the horror of his cowed crew.
In his next voyage, to South Africa, Pamphile forms a military alliance
with an African tribe, and seizes the captives resulting from the war as
slaves, which he crams into the hold, only 30 or 40 dying en route, and
sells the survivors profitably (the slave trade having been legally
abolished) in Martinique. He then sails for Nicaragua, where he finds
Black Snake, deported from Canada by the British, ruling over the local
population.
In Pamphile's final adventure, he arrives in Britain in the guise of Black
Snake's Ambassador, a raises a loan of 12 million sterling, and recruits a
shipload of emigrants who have paid for the right to hold various
monopolies in Nicaragua. The emigrants are dumped on the Mosquito Coast,
where many succumb to disease and starvation before the swindled survivors
make their way back to England.
Much of the humour in Pamphile derives from the deadpan tone with which
Dumas relates Pamphile's various crimes, without affecting to notice
anything odd about his behavior. While F. W. Reed describes Capitaine
Pamphile as a children's book, it would be an incautious parent who would
offer this story to a child.
