Day 84. Rochefort. Oct 29 2001.

Today was a very busy day and I faced it in exhaustion. The problem with living by the sunlight is the unnatural hours it imposes. How strange that sounds! But last night, for example, we went to bed no later than 7PM. Even considering that we got up no later than 8AM this morning we still lay in bed for 13 hours. Despite occasional accusations that I am lazy, even I found this to be too much. But what can I do? After dark all our activity stops. It's impossible to write, to read, even going for a walk is an insecure activity at best. I'd thought to reserve activities that don't need sunlight, like showering, until dark but by then it's too cold and such a mist rises off the river that I don't dry until midway thought the next day. Anyway, an upshot of this is the fact that I spent half the night lying awake and staring at the ceiling of our tent. By the time the sun rose I was about as exhausted as I was just before climbing into bed.

We rose, dressed in warm clothes, because the misty morning was chill, and rode into town. We had a few goals. We had read a brief book on the Corderie Royale and the old arsenal, so that was on our list and we had seen advertisements for Rochefort’s ancient transborder bridge. Great. The only problem was that we had no idea how to find them. We set out blindly, almost randomly choosing directions, always trying to follow the river and head towards the centre of town. Soon we found ourselves on a major road between the town and marshland, a great concrete crescent of a bridge rising before us, a military airfield at our side. We turned aside just before the bridge and followed a well worn path into the marshes, stagnant canals so thick with algae that they looked paved flat, that paralleled us on either side. A swan sat in one, seeming frozen in by the stagnant waters, perfect white feathers stopping abruptly at the algae line.

Ahead of us loomed a massive structure of girders, cantilevers and cables that covered the river. At first we couldn't make it out, then it seemed like an enormous industrial crane, and then we were there. The structure was in fact the bridge. An enormous iron temple. Two metal pylons rose on either side of the river supporting a track high above the highest ships. The "bridge" was in fact a flat open aired cable car with a deck for carriages and seats for people. Completed in 1901,it was a centennial celebration mirroring the structure of the Eiffel tower. It was a modern celebration of steel and cable and girders.

We eventually followed the bike path around to the streets, found the municipal campground, conveniently left out of my Michelin guide, and eventually found Rochefort's docks.




I must admit to disappointment. The first artifact we encountered at the docks was the Napoleon III drydocks. It was famous as a Floating Entrance Drydock. The entrance would be blocked by the hull of a ship. When the tide came in the ship floated out of the way, whichever ship was to be repaired sailed in, the blockade ship was returned to a set of grooved tracks, tide went out, the blockade sank and was ballasted down to block in the entrance. Simple and elegant, tried for the first time at this drydock. But all that remained was a huge ship-shaped hole in the ground, bottom filled with slime and water, sides overgrowing with moss. The floating barricade was a rusting hulk scarcely identifiable as a ship. The only thing keeping water out was a new earthen embankment cutting the drydock off from the river.

Next to the dock a great white plastic hutment covering the entire waterfront, looking distincly unimpressive. We walked to the front. This was the site of the reconstruction of the French frigate Hermione.




We walked into the huge plastic hutment and things changed. Great wooden ribs rosed from the floor to the ceiling and the overwhelming sensation of creation filled the air. The presence of a ship being birthed by human hands was palpable. The ship had a form so obviously feminine that questions about why ships are called "she" or her" were relegated to the bin of obsolescence.



Planking rose from the floor to the heights like the desiccated ribs of a mammoth sea creature but unlike the decay of death, flesh flowed onto the ribs, building almost through the force of human will, a living thing. There was no pall of death before this skeletal figure, but the energy of an idea that flowed and crackled between dried wooden planks. The Hermione was unborn, a schrodingers box of potential more than anything else, but already it seemed to strain at invisible moorings.



The Hermione, the original, had served to ferry the French Lafayette to the American George Washington to discuss French support for the American revolution, making this version a palpable symbol of French-American friendship. We walked slowly through the site, enjoying the smell of fresh cut wood and the sight of a ship being born. Plans call for the Hermione to sail to Boston in 2007. Perhaps we can meet it there.
From the Hermione we walked the old arsenal, reentering the Port of the Sun. The centerpiece of the old shipyards was the Corderie Royale, the massive structure built for the purpose of spinning the millions of miles of rope for the French Navy.



The building was unique,. It was an H that spanned an entire meadow, the crosspiece almost ten times longer than the sides. Curving buttresses held up the long two storey high wall. The entrance was through the sides. and again we walked into another world.
During the age of fighting sail rope was needed in such abundance that it dwarfed the need for trained men or good wood. Spun from hemp and soaked in the tar made from the resin of burned pine trees rope was the lifeblood of the sailing navies. We learned a history that we had not even considered in the long half of the rope factory. The walls were decorated with twisted cords of rope in the hundreds of different sized required and to the centre was a huge beastly machine of black iron that spun rope in ways that even after a dozen demonstrations seems bizarre to me.



But the corderie also had displays of ship building and recreated a fascinating world new to us from our landlocked home. That ships were always buildt in drydocks facing north - south so that the sun beat on both sides equal seems an obscure but logical enough fact, but that every two or three years the navy would haul out the heaviest ships, push them on to their sides on dry land and burn off all the barnacles, old tar and caulking with enormous fires seemed truly bizarre.

Rochefort it seems had been a perfect shipyard for the French. Far enough inland to be protected from assault by the sea, at a crossroads for food, wood, rope, it rebuilt a navy that had been in serious decline since Richelieu.

The previous owner of the area, a Protestant lord with little support at court in a time of Catholic extremism, had disappeared completely after protesting against the building of the shipyards. He was avenged, in the end, by the Nazi's, who torched the entire complex when they were forced out by the allies less than sixty years ago.

Next Entry: Day 85. Rochefort
Previous Entry: Day 83. Rochefort