Bardamu is sold aboard a galley at San Tapeta while feverish, delirious, and too weak to understand his circumstances. The people who had carried him through the jungle leave him in a presbytery; taking advantage of his confused state, they sell him to the captain of the Infanta Combitta. He recovers enough to row, and the vessel carries him west across the Atlantic toward New York. In this reversal, a journey away from colonial hardship becomes enslavement: movement continues, but only under someone else’s command.

Causes and Background

The sale follows a punishing passage through the jungle. Bardamu has been carried in a litter made of sacks sewn end to end, while fever and diarrhea leave him unable to see clearly; after several days, he can no longer distinguish the world from the fever images in his mind. His carriers could have abandoned him in a stream or eaten him, he reflects, but instead they bring him onward. Their apparent care therefore precedes a betrayal made possible by his physical helplessness.

The party reaches the Spanish colony of Rio del Rio after meeting a solitary Spanish sergeant whose shack is overrun by migrating red ants. The sergeant gives Bardamu a passport on grainy paper bearing the arms of Castile, and Bardamu follows the road toward San Tapeta. By the time he arrives, he is too sick to remember the journey. The town appears lush from the roadstead, but at close range Bardamu sees people sweating and pustulating, as he had in Fort-Gono. He dismisses his exhausted carriers, who say they fear for their lives on the return journey; he has suffered too much to summon sympathy for them.

San Tapeta’s presbytery offers shelter without meaningful communication or security. The priest fills Bardamu with herbal infusions while curious townspeople crowd around his bed, treating the bedridden stranger as a rare diversion. A gilded crucifix hangs over the priest’s belly, and coins clink inside his cassock when he approaches. Bardamu is so depleted that even attempting a few words exhausts him. The attendants’ presence does not prevent his exploitation: while he lies incapacitated, they make the decision that will determine his next passage.

The Sale and Recovery

Bardamu regains consciousness to the repeated jolting and rocking of a vessel. He is still lying down, beneath an open porthole, in a cramped place that smells of ropes and tar. The movement and the sounds of footsteps overhead, voices, and waves tell him that his journey is continuing, though he does not yet know where he is. The physical sensations of the ship emerge before an explanation of the transaction that put him aboard.

He learns that the people of San Tapeta, exploiting his befuddlement, sold him to the captain of a galley. The Infanta Combitta is presented with grotesque magnificence: it has a high hull, oars, purple sails, a gilded figurehead, and officers’ quarters upholstered in luxury. On its prow is a painting of the Infanta Combitta, the ship’s royal sponsor. The ornament does nothing to alter the vessel’s function. Its splendor frames a system in which a sick man can be purchased and put to work.

Bardamu retrospectively weighs the sale against the alternatives he imagines. He believes he might have died in the presbytery, while a return to Fort-Gono could have exposed him to a lengthy punishment over his accounts. The captain, meanwhile, has taken a financial risk by buying him before the ship weighs anchor: Bardamu might have died before the investment paid off. The captain bets that sea air will revive him, and Bardamu’s gradual recovery appears to vindicate the wager. Survival here takes the form of an asset’s return to usefulness, not release from control.

Forced Labor at Sea

When Bardamu is strong enough to rise, the captain mocks his attempts to sit up and tells him he will soon row with the others. He laughs and taps Bardamu on the back of the neck with his whip, describing the blows as friendly. The gesture makes the arrangement plain: the captain’s amusement and supposed kindness coexist with the whip and with Bardamu’s expected labor. The episode’s coercion does not require a formal declaration; the oars supply its practical meaning.

Bardamu recovers enough to join the rowers, although his fever still distorts what he sees: where there are ten oarsmen, he sees a hundred. The crossing is made mostly under sail, and he judges the conditions between decks no worse than those of ordinary third-class passengers on a Sunday excursion train—and less perilous than his earlier passage aboard the Admiral Bragueton. This comparison registers a relative improvement in his immediate conditions without making him free. The voyage is long, the temperature drops, and Bardamu has had enough of both jungle landscapes and sea views to last him an eternity.

Once Bardamu is definitely recovering, the captain loses interest in him. Bardamu sees him only at a distance, like a boss, and remains too muddled to question him about the trip’s purpose. The captain’s initial attention had been tied to the gamble of acquiring a sick man; as Bardamu becomes a functioning oarsman, the need for close attention recedes. His recovery thus changes his position aboard the ship without changing the fact that he is being compelled to work.

Absence, Arrival, and Significance

Bardamu searches among the galley slaves for Léon Robinson and repeatedly calls for him at night. The only response is insults and threats from the other rowers. Thinking back over what happened in San Tapeta, Bardamu suspects that Léon Robinson may have been sold too, though to another galley. He has no confirmation: the thought is an inference prompted by Bardamu’s own fate, not a reunion or established account of Léon Robinson’s whereabouts.

The people who brought Bardamu through the jungle had seemed comparatively kind, but he comes to attribute that kindness to sordid motives: they may have sold what they could not eat immediately. The conclusion turns hospitality into a form of exposure. Bardamu had been carried, given shelter, and treated while sick; none of those acts guaranteed protection once he could be exchanged for money. The episode extends the book’s pattern of survival through institutions and relationships that offer help only in compromised forms.

After weeks of alternating fever and seasickness, the ship anchors and its passengers discover New York through the fog. The city’s upright, rigid appearance astonishes them: unlike the cities Bardamu knows, which seem to lie along the coast or river, it stands stiffly before the sea. The galley slaves laugh at the sight, though the cold wind blows through the vessel and the city streets engulf the mist. Their arrival marks the consequence of the sale as well as a change of setting: Bardamu has crossed the Atlantic, but reaches the new city as an enslaved rower rather than a free traveler. The journey advances geographically while leaving his freedom behind.