Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [61]
It was all an illusion. The reality, concealed beneath the veils of beguiling disinformation, was that the colony was struggling to stay alive. Between 1717 and 1720, of the thousands that made the arduous journey to Louisiana, over half perished en route or returned exhausted and disenchanted with what they found. Hundreds more perished from disease or starvation. No sizable deposits of silver or gold, let alone emeralds, had been found, and according to the report of de Bienville, the colony’s governor, to the company in 1719, New Orleans consisted only of four modest houses, where the immigrants survived entirely by trading with the natives.
The glossy reports and alluring songs had been master-minded by Law more as a marketing ploy than a deliberate deception. He was adamant that given enough time and money, the colony would become the valuable territory everyone believed it to be. But he was hampered by innate French reluctance to emigrate: there were too few willing pioneers. Yet having realized that, along with the predictable profits of the other rights acquired, much of the pyramid of speculation depended on public belief in the colony’s prosperity and their expectation that this was sure to increase, he had no alternative but to conceal the facts until more potential settlers came forward.
To tempt them he offered attractive incentives. Colonists’ expenses would be met by the company from the time they took up residence until they were established, and they would be provided with land, livestock, and thirty pounds of flour a head until their first harvest. But however successfully in the past he had manipulated the public’s opinion, he could not persuade them willingly to leave France for an unknown, undeveloped wilderness, even though much of the nation’s money was staked on it.
Undaunted, and in the expectation that where he led others would follow, Law acquired a concession of his own in 1719. In partnership with the Irish émigré Richard Cantillon, one of Paris’s most successful private bankers, and the English speculator Joseph Gage, he acquired the rights to a plot of 16 square leagues bordering the Ouachita River to the west of the Mississippi, in what is now the state of Arkansas. While Law and his partners observed operations from the comfortable security of their Paris mansions, around a hundred settlers—including carpenters, mine workers, and gardeners—were enlisted to prospect for minerals and to grow tobacco. The party, supervised by Cantillon’s brother Bernard, left La Rochelle on the slave ship St. Louis in March 1719. Three months later it dropped anchor in the brave new world of Louisiana. By one account, Law’s expedition was unusually well equipped, with “such a large quantity of merchandise and other effects that they filled three boats to get to their concession.”
As he had hoped, his example inspired similar partnerships. A handful of aristocrats, several successful speculators in Mississippi stock, including the widow Chaumont, and several of his English, Irish, and Scottish émigré friends, including the glamorous Fanny Oglethorpe, joined in ventures aimed at farming tobacco, rice, and silk or prospecting for minerals.
Within months of hearing of his expedition’s safe arrival Law was trumpeting its success. Rumors eddied through salon society of the silver deposits discovered on his land, and of a mine already yielding five ounces of silver for every hundred-weight of ore. Few suspected that the whispers emanated from Law’s imagination rather than the correspondence of his settlers,