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control. I knew Dicuil’s account (in De mensera orbis terrae ) of St. Brendan’s voyage to the Fortunate Isles, with his Irish monks in their peculiar round boats, carrying their books, bells and croziers. I had dreamed of the Northmen’s Thule, the Isles of the Blest written of by the ancients, Anthilia, Saluaga and the Isle of the Seven Cities, Satanaxes. I had seen five savages from Brazil in Paris, looking like Tartars with their fierce tattoos and empty faces.
    When the letter came, I saw my chance and begged my father to send me to the New World, whatever it cost him. What do you do with a headstrong girl? he asked himself. I think hewas relieved. He looked to the family’s coat of arms, two bears rampant over a field of waves quartered with three lions couchant, an exceedingly ancient insignia the meaning of which had been lost by our etiolate and retiring ancestors (the high-born courtiers call us petite maison ). He was sure he would never see me again. Wild beasts would eat me, or I would be trampled to death by the famous one-footed savages of the antipodes, or we would simply sink along the way.
    I took Bastienne, my nurse, a retired whore, pander, pornographer and abortionist who came into the family on the strongest possible recommendation from the village priest, who was somewhat in her debt. And Richard, the so-called Comte d’Epirgny (who claimed to have played the King himself once on a clay court in Paris on the feast day of St. Chrysostom), begged his way aboard at the last minute, offering his tennis arm for the defence of the Cross and the domestication of the native inhabitants.
Iphigenia in Canada
    I have sufficient education to be aware of certain fore-shadowings, signs, omens, parallels, prognostications and analogies. Classical literature teems with stories of extreme child-rearing practices: young single girls left on rocks or deserted islands or thrust into dark tunnels as punishments or sacrifices or tribute or simply for their nutrient value vis-à-vis whatever slavering monster happens by.
    I am particularly reminded of the Greek princess Iphigenia, whose father Agamemnon put her to death on a lonely beach on the shaky theory that this act would ensure decent sailing over to Troy, where he hoped to win back his brother’s runaway wife Helen (another woman led astray by her heart in a world of men). It’s a male thing, I suppose, not to be persuaded from murder by the threat of revenge, pangs of conscience, pity, justice, the tug of family affection, not to mention the purely unscientific basis of the premise that killing a virgin will cause sunshine and warm, westerly breezes. Surely Agamemnon must have known this would come back to haunt him.
    Surely the General must know this will come back to haunt him, I think, as I observe preparations for my disposal. I watch with a certain objectivity, having reached that natural human state of disbelief in the face of disasters soon to fall about one’s ears. I have heard of false executions staged to punish mischievous nobility, and I imagine that my so-called uncle wishes to break my spirit with a show of cruelty and animus. I watch the crew struggle to lower a leaky clinker-built rowboat over the side. Someone has neglected to measure the ropes fore and aft, and the rope aft, being short, drags Jehan de Nantes overboard. He strikes his head on the stern of the boat and sinks but is rescued moments later by his lover, a large, buoyant woman everyone calls Petite Pitou. She has only one eye and a slash of pure white hair in the middle of her head from a sword blow during a peasant riot, and most of the ship’s company is afraid of her temper.
    The rowboat being righted and supplied with six oarsmen and a bailing bucket, it is loaded with things I will need on my new estate: a barrel of salt fish and my trunk of gowns, hose and underclothes (books concealed under the false bottom). It doesnot seem like much. It does