Yves captures sea people

Yves de la Croix’s capture of sea people becomes a dispute over both what happened during the hunt and what kind of beings were captured. The dissection of a dead sea person gives the court evidence of bodily resemblance, while Marie-Josèphe’s account reveals the killing and consumption that Yves’s version had concealed.

The Hunt Reconsidered

At a dissection before the King’s philosophers, Yves presented the dead companion of the sea woman as evidence that sea monsters were natural creatures, comparing them with dugongs and sea-cows. He had reserved an arm for examination by the gentlemen of the French Academy and exposed its sinews, bones, and joints. Marie-Josèphe documented the work; seeing the body with her newly acquired understanding, she recognized its human features and noticed that the dead man’s long, fine finger bones recalled Count Lucien’s hands.

Later, Marie-Josèphe confronted Yves with the sea woman’s account of the hunt. She said that three sea people had been captured, not two, and that the sailors had killed one. Yves told her to be quiet and insisted that he had already told her the story. When she accused him of eating the dead sea person’s flesh, he defended the act by classifying the victim as an animal. The disagreement exposes the stakes of his language: Yves could describe sea people as natural creatures for the purposes of learned inquiry while denying the moral force of Marie-Josèphe’s claim that the dead and the living were human.

The Dispute Over Personhood

The capture’s meaning was contested before the King as well as among the people who took part in it. When the sea woman surfaced, Louis XIV asked Marie-Josèphe de la Croix what she was; Marie-Josèphe maintained that the woman was intelligent and human, while Yves de la Croix dismissed her as no more than an animal. Marie-Josèphe appealed not only to the woman’s speech but to the dead companion’s skull, bones, and hands, making the evidence of the dissection an argument against treating the captives as specimens without human claims.

Lucien de Barenton, Count de Chrétien, urged Louis XIV to let Marie-Josèphe establish her case: the sea woman’s demonstrated understanding was evidence, but the question of whether she spoke a human language remained to be tested. His appeal to proof turned the classification into a matter for inquiry rather than settled doctrine. Pope Innocent raised a different test, asking whether the sea woman had discussed Christian faith or been converted; Marie-Josèphe acknowledged that she had not. The competing standards exposed what was at stake in Yves’s capture: whether the sea people’s intelligence and communication would count as evidence of personhood, or whether authority could still define them as animals and thereby limit what was owed to them.

Captivity and Its Afterlife

The capture did not end with the court’s arguments over the sea people’s nature: Sherzad remained under threat of renewed restraint, while those tasked with following her feared what she might do. As sailors rowed after her, they worried about deception and ambush; Sherzad, in turn, feared nets, guns, and explosive charges that could stun her back into captivity. She stayed near the mouth of a cove, ready to flee at any sign of danger. Marie-Josèphe understood why Sherzad might answer that danger with force, a recognition that set her apart from the sailors’ fearful pursuit.

When the skiff reached dangerous water among submerged fingers of stone, Marie-Josèphe stopped it. Sherzad leapt from the water, flicked her tails above the surface, dove, and disappeared. Her escape gives the capture an unresolved ending: the men’s earlier power to seize sea people has not made Sherzad securely theirs, and the court’s dispute over her status remains bound to the practical question of whether she can be held.

The Limits of Recognition

After acknowledging that the sea woman understood Marie-Josèphe, Louis XIV compared that understanding to the way Marie-Josèphe’s cat understood her, joking that he might as well give the cat a place at court. The exchange sets a limit on what the evidence of communication could accomplish: recognition of understanding did not, by itself, secure recognition as human. By making the comparison before his courtiers, the King turned a question about the sea woman’s capacities into a question of status, leaving the distinction between an intelligent animal and a person unsettled.