Bardamu is sold aboard a galley

Bardamu is sold aboard a galley while gravely ill in San Tapeta, converting his attempted flight from Africa into a passage under coercive control. He wakes at sea without knowing how he got there, then learns that people in San Tapeta sold him to the captain while he was too confused to protect himself. His recovery brings not release but the expectation that he will join the rowers: movement continues, yet his freedom has narrowed into another imposed form of labor.

From Illness to the Sea

Bardamu’s transfer is first registered through his body and surroundings rather than through a clear account of departure. After stretches of sleep and disorientation, he feels jolts and rocking, vomits, and wakes again to find himself aboard a ship. The cool air and the smell of ropes and tar contrast with the African environment he remembers, but the new setting offers no assurance that he has chosen to leave. He is lying beneath an open porthole, with footsteps on the deck and waves against the hull; the journey has resumed without his understanding how.

Only after recognizing that he is at sea does Bardamu reconstruct the transaction. In San Tapeta, people took advantage of his befuddled state and sold him to the captain of a galley. He had been so ill that, in his account, he might have died in the presbytery where he had been left. The sale therefore appears to him as both an act of exploitation and a dubious alternative to death: he has been moved, but not by his own decision, and his survival depends on the interests of the person who bought him.

The Captain’s Purchase

The vessel’s polished appearance sharpens the irony of the sale. Bardamu describes a high-hulled galley fitted with oars and purple sails, its prow bearing a painted image of the Infanta Combitta, the ship’s sponsor. Its display of royal dignity and elaborate comfort coexists with the fact that Bardamu has been acquired as a person to be put to work. The captain bought him cheaply from a priest before weighing anchor, making the crossing an investment whose success depends on Bardamu recovering.

The captain watches that investment with cheerful self-interest. When Bardamu tries to raise himself from his pallet despite his fever, the captain jokes that he will soon be able to row with the others. He treats the prospect as amusing and gives Bardamu small strokes with his whip in a supposedly friendly manner, expecting him to share his satisfaction at the purchase. The casual tone does not alter the power relation: the captain can anticipate Bardamu’s labor while Bardamu is still too ill to take part in a conversation about his circumstances.

Recovery and Imposed Labor

Bardamu eventually recovers enough strength to join the men at the oars, as the captain had expected. His vision remains distorted: where there are ten rowers, he sees a hundred. This detail places his return to physical activity alongside the lingering effects of illness, rather than presenting recovery as a clean restoration. The food seems acceptable to him, and the voyage is often carried by sail, but these relative comforts do not undo the fact that his labor is compelled.

The crossing proceeds from east to west across the Atlantic. Bardamu finds the conditions between decks less nauseating than those on the Admiral Bragueton, and the breeze and cooler temperature make the journey more bearable; its slowness, however, becomes another burden. Once he is well enough to work, the captain loses interest in him. Bardamu sees the captain from a distance, “like a real boss,” and, unable to get an explanation of the voyage’s purpose, calls for Robinson among the galley slaves. No answer comes, only insults and threats from the other rowers.

Escape Replaced by Confinement

The episode’s central reversal is that survival and motion do not amount to freedom. Bardamu initially takes the fact that he is moving as grounds for hope: returning to Fort-Gono would expose him to consequences for the accounts, while staying in San Tapeta might have meant dying. Yet the route out of those dangers is a sale into an arrangement where the captain determines his destination and expects his labor. The ship carries him onward, but the direction of travel is not his choice.

That reversal belongs to the novel’s recurring pattern of escape producing another enclosure. The galley changes the form of Bardamu’s vulnerability without ending it: illness makes him saleable, recovery makes him useful, and his eventual capacity to row confirms the captain’s calculation. The episode thus links colonial exploitation to enslavement aboard a galley and makes the apparent promise of travel inseparable from coercion. Its ending offers no reunion with Robinson or account of the voyage’s destination; it leaves Bardamu working among the galley slaves, still carried toward an unknown future.