Bardamu arrives in New York

Bardamu arrives in New York aboard the galley Infanta Combitta after weeks at sea, his passage from fever and forced rowing ending not in freedom but in quarantine. The city appears to him as a startlingly upright, almost forbidding presence; reaching it is a decisive change of setting, yet the ship’s confinement delays the escape he has planned.

The Crossing and Its Delays

The Atlantic voyage proceeds mostly under sail, so the crossing is less exhausting than Bardamu’s earlier passage aboard the Admiral Bragueton. Conditions below deck seem to him comparable to those of third-class passengers on a Sunday excursion train, and the voyage is less dangerous than what he had endured coming out. The weather grows colder, but no one complains about the temperature. What weighs on Bardamu is the duration: after the jungle and the sea, he feels he has seen enough landscapes to last forever.

By the time the galley reaches the American side, Bardamu has recovered enough strength to join the other rowers. His vision, however, remains unsettled: where there are ten oarsmen, he sees a hundred. Fever and recovery thus accompany his physical return to labor, rather than marking a clean release from the conditions that have carried him across the ocean.

New York in the Fog

After weeks of fever and seasickness, the ship reaches its destination. When the passengers open the portholes the next morning, New York emerges through the fog. Bardamu describes it as a city standing straight up: unlike the cities he knows, which lie along coasts or rivers and seem to await the traveler, this one is rigid and imposing. The sight is so unexpected that the galley slaves initially laugh at it.

The laughter does not make the landing carefree. The gray-pink mist, the wind coming off the sea, and the city’s streets taking in the clouds shape a scene in which the new place seems both astonishing and inhospitable. The galley traces a narrow wake outside the docks, at the edge of a dirty-colored bay crowded with rowboats and tugboats. New York is visible, but Bardamu and the other men have not yet reached the freedom of its streets.

A Plan for Escape

Bardamu expects that Americans may value the technical skill he has acquired aboard the galley: counting fleas, catching them, and compiling statistics. He intends to offer his services, believing that a country appreciative of technique will find this unusual expertise useful. The plan gives him a practical means of imagining a life beyond the ship, in contrast to the galley slaves’ acceptance of their current position.

That plan is interrupted when the galley is ordered to a quarantine station in a sheltered cove near a small village, two miles east of New York. Bardamu and the other men remain under observation for weeks. The ship’s proximity to the destination only sharpens the difference between arrival and entry: New York is near enough to see, yet quarantine keeps the passengers from going freely ashore.

Quarantine and Departure

During quarantine, the water squad goes ashore each evening to reach the village. Bardamu needs to accompany them if he is to pursue his plan, but his shipmates do not want to escape with him. They regard life aboard as bearable: the food is acceptable, punishment is limited, and the king has promised a small pension at sixty-two. Their Sunday voting games also give them a feeling of freedom. Bardamu’s hoped-for future in America cannot overcome their attachment to the modest security they already have.

The other galley slaves are also hostile toward the United States, the very country Bardamu is eager to reach. He tells them that he knows people there, including Lola and Robinson, and imagines that they may have prospered; they remain unmoved. One day, when the men set out for the village water tap, Bardamu joins them and then refuses to return to the galley. His arrival in New York is therefore completed not by a welcome or a successful job offer, but by his decision to leave the ship during a routine shore excursion.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes arrival an unstable promise. New York first appears as a dramatic contrast to the landscapes Bardamu has crossed, then as a place whose port rules keep him at a distance. His scheme to turn flea-counting into employment offers a resourceful response to that uncertainty, while the galley slaves’ pension and routines reveal why escape does not appeal to everyone. The city becomes available to Bardamu only when he acts on his own, and even then the scene records departure from the galley rather than the outcome of his attempt to establish himself ashore.