Kickstarter project now kickstopped… :-(

Oh well! A great big thank-you-very-much-indeed to all those fabulous, brave, generous people who pledged their hard-earned money towards my proposed Mauritian pirate treasure documentary project: but – alas! – it was not to be. Cue oversized sad smiley:

I might try again in the future (and having experienced the whole Kickstarter ecosystem first-hand, I would of course do just about everything differently). But then again, solving the whole Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang pirate treasure mystery by my normal slow means could easily prove more practical than trying to fast-forward to the distant chequered flag of Historical Truth via crowdfunding a documentary.

As a result, I doubt anyone would be surprised if I were now to take my family on holiday to Mauritius and leave them on the beach while I just happen to accidentally sneak off to various historical archives for a day. (Or ten.) 🙂 And on the bright side, given that there can’t be many books on the topic left for me to throw scads of money at, I might now actually be able to start to afford it. 😉

Also: what emerged from the surfeit of Nageon de l’Estang posts here was that many of the relevant archives are actually in France rather than Mauritius. For example, details about Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s family are very likely to be in the archives in Lorient: while I would be utterly unsurprised if the Missing Corsair’s life story is to be found scattered through various French marine archives. So I may well have to engineer some way to get myself over to La Belle France for a few days too. 😉

I don’t know: the historical mysteries I try to cover are all genuinely fascinating stories that have ended up wrapped up in layer upon layer of misperception and mythology. And so initially the whole point of the Kickstarter project was to devise a way to try to sidestep the all-too-familiar walking-through-treacle research feeling for just one of these historical mysteries.

But as the project took better shape, what I came to understand was that pirate treasure has an unbelievably powerful resonance within Mauritius, something that people outside the island rarely grasp. Treasure hunting is something that has deeply permeated Mauritian culture over the last century, and even – I suspect – Mauritians’ idea of self.

And so what I ended up hoping to do with the documentary was something far closer to using pirate treasure as a mirror to hold up to Mauritius itself, to reflect back Mauritians’ collective idea of their own history. In many ways, I wanted to try to interview an entire country, something that has never been attempted (and may well never be attempted). But how can you sell that as an idea for a film?

Was I aiming to make a documentary about an actual pirate treasure; about the hopeful dream of finding pirate treasure that an entire country shared; or about how such dreams define a nation? In part, I couldn’t help but want to do all of them at the same time. As a result, it felt as though I finished the whole Kickstarter cycle with too grandly epic a conceptual narrative to squeeze into any small margin.

As a parallel, single-topic historical books have been in vogue for years – telling the history of sugar, of salt, of bananas, of wood, in fact of any damn thing you can name. The reason they’re interesting isn’t that general book readers suddenly want to become experts in what salt meant for Florentines in the Quattrocento (even though this is a genuinely interesting question), but because they open an interesting window onto a whole range of different (and apparently unlinked) histories. That is, these books offer up a kind of synthetic physical narrative that modern historians tend to eschew: and so they are innately romantic and old-fashioned, harking back to the days when historians were often closer to novelists than was genuinely comfortable.

This is just as true for difficult and contested objects such as the Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang papers: there, you have to engage with whole swathes of history in order to put one apparently small thing into its correct set of contexts – the sinking of the St-Géran, the attack on Madras by La Bourdonnais’ fleet, the naval war between the British Navy and Napoleon’s fleet, the Légion d’Honneur and so forth.

So in many ways, you can’t tell a story about this kind of cipher mystery without telling a vastly bigger story about everything that it cuts across that gave it shape, or gave it external meaning: and that’s something that’s arguably beyond the reach of a blog, an article, a crowdfunded documentary, or even a book.

Really: for all the historical grind that I put into researching historical mysteries, I guess what I’m perpetually reaching towards are things that are implicitly romantic and yet forensically rigorous; that touch on deeper truths that even literature cannot reach, and yet require deft scientific precision; and that require off-the-scale intuition and logic to deal effectively with, yet perpetually sit just the wrong side of the limits of what we can know.

Ultimately, what I’m describing is neither a narrative nor a microcosm, but an eternal battle against the gods, against thermodynamics, against Time itself. Maybe I should learn not to be so damned impatient… 😉