“A Particular History” explores the picturesque life of a Vendée moss adopted by a tribe in Papua New Guinea. True and thrilling, an adventure to follow on February 20 and 21.
“If I had wanted to invent an incredible marine story, I couldn’t have done better”, says cartoonist Chanouga, author of a comic strip on the life of Narcisse Pelletier. This Vendée moss has fascinated more than one – as can be seen from the number of speakers gathered on France Culture by Yves Aumont to retrace his extraordinary life. It all starts in Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie. In the 1850s, a rascal made the four hundred knocks between the small houses of the clog makers. Excluded from his school at 10, he dreams of the open sea. The following year, he embarked as a boy – so far, nothing extraordinary. “The moss was often used as a servant, recalls Captain Roland Mornet, himself a boy at 14, a kitchen attendant. In Narcissus’ day, you had to be smart not to take a beating. Some were killed with hoofs. We did not talk about it, it was the omerta of the sea. “
Our hero will not die on board; a destiny worthy of an adventure novel awaits him. In 1858, she ran aground at the tip of Papua New Guinea. Wounded, abandoned by the crew, he is adopted by the aboriginal tribe of Wanthaala. He gives up his clothes and takes on a new name: Amglo. “This seesaw has no return. He does not become an aboriginal like an anthropologist, he becomes one because now, it is his life ”, underlines author Thomas Duranteau.
An efficient realization
When Narcisse became Amglo, he was 14 years old. Seventeen years later, the thirty-something is kidnapped by a passing English crew, persuaded to save the life of this white, naked man, scarified in Aboriginal fashion. New uprooting. The succession of traumatic ruptures experienced by the young man makes you dizzy. Upon his return home, he is expected to reintegrate a culture that is supposed to be his. Stupor: around the Vendée bonfire, he does not dance the quadrille, but a dance learned in his family from the antipodes.
From the first seconds of this good documentary, the sound atmospheres, very beautiful, catch the ear: the song of a bird, the creaking of the three-master, the roaring of the waves. Added to this is an effective setting to music: strings, accordions and piano mark the adventures of this astonishing life, from which we remember these moving words: “Daddy, Mummy, I’m not dead, I’m alive!” […]. The savage gives food and drink, he did not kill me. “
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