15 extraordinary days on board the three-masted La Boudeuse, and here are my experiences with the crew! And this all happened thanks to the La Boudeuse competition held from the end of January to early March.

Our mission:

-  to contribute to the identification of endangered species

-  to analyze the evolution of aquatic insects

-  to create a photographic record of the geography

-  to fish and to dissect the fish to analyze the presence of metal pollutants

For us, this was more than a journey; it was an experience, and a true lesson in life.

Tuesday 23 February

We wake up in the middle of the Oyapock.

Up at 4 am to stand watch until 8 o’clock; I have the privilege of observing the magic lights of the dawn.

As I watch this fabulous horizon, the sky turns orange, the clouds depart, and the sun recovers its strength and quickly warms the boat, which awakens each of us to the immediacy of our mission and to the tasks that must be performed.

The changing tide once again enables us to cross the reefs, and we wait for it to carry us onward, this time to Saint-Georges de l’Oyapock, where we will drop anchor this afternoon.

Just as the task of navigating is becoming difficult and the navigators are growing strained, a roof-top aerial appears in the distance, then a few houses on the starboard bank, then more and more, until the point when a small town appears, seemingly unchanged for two centuries, as if frozen in time. We can see low buildings, arranged around a small square with a war memorial for the soldiers who died for their country; several jetties whose degree of rust indicates their respective ages, from the oldest to the more recent, with the latter having been entirely financed by the ERDF. French and Europeans flags are displayed outside the town hall, which is the nerve centre of St. George, with the ASSEDIC (the French unemployment office) and drinking bars on each side. Facing us, in Brazil, many houses have been constructed, and the concept of a border remains, here as elsewhere, a term that awaits a clear definition…

Wednesday 24

After a day of sailing and our arrival in St. George, our cleaning chores duly performed, the night passes at the pace of the dugout canoes that cross the Oyapock in both directions.

At dawn, everyone goes about their duties: laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning the deck and hull, launching the zodiacs …

I’m going to St. George with Marie Chenet, a geographer at the Sorbonne, who handles the geo-photographic mission. The goal is to create a photographic database of the human settlements in Guyana so that, in future, we will be able to trace the evolution of the spaces occupied by man and mankind’s influence on these spaces, as well as the differences in the level of occupation of territories depending on the type of space, especially in border regions such as we see here.

This also requires the collection of human accounts of local customs and membership of different communities (mixed, Brazilian, Indian, French, Asian, and so on). It’s slow work and not always easy, as contact with local people is sometimes difficult given the language barrier, but also because of the time constraints imposed on the mission, which can make it challenging to collect sufficient, meaningful data.

The mayor of Saint Georges, who was interviewed by Marie Chenet, mentioned the fact that 60% of the population receives RSA benefits (Revenu de Solidarité Active – French unemployment benefits) and that demographic growth breaks records every year, due more to natural increases rather than to immigration, contrary to what one might believe.

We’re in France! Not long after, they came looking for us: the mayor had received complaints that our presence was disturbing the mestizo population, who speak little French, and who, all smiles, tried to sell us necklaces. It’s not hard to believe that the presence of a camera there is not welcome; they don’t want it to be seen that today, in one of our territories, there are people who live like this …

Thursday 25

After standing watch from midnight to 2am, we got up at 6 to leave at 6:30 for a trip upriver to study, with the biologist Ariadna Burgos, the gradient of the mangrove – in other words, the evolution of the distribution of plant species on the banks of the estuary according to the distance from the sea.

We avoid the “humanised” areas, unlike yesterday, in order to get an idea of the development of shoreline vegetation. And yet Ariadna’s specialty is ethnobotany, i.e. the study of traditional knowledge related to plants. But here, time is lacking and this knowledge been long forgotten. We must travel much further into the forest to find places where people have not forgotten these traditions and customs concerning the use of plants to heal, but also to live (shamanism, rituals, “drugs”, etc).

For that matter, today they do not hesitate to destroy, pollute and abuse this forest, as we witnessed on the banks of a tributary to the Oyapock, where traditional houses are surrounded by empty spaces.

The survival mode chosen by man is to live in society, just as social insects do. The main difference is that each of us adopts our own individual survival strategy.

It is always amazing to see that even in a crew that works in a hierarchy to advance the ship’s progress, everyone adopts a unique position, detached from the others; everyone has their own opinion on what is and what should be. Is this an advantage, an asset, or a weakness?

What is wonderful to see is the unity in performing manoeuvres and tasks, which makes it possible for the crew to carry out our stated objectives and to live on board the ship as if each individual had put aside his or her personality, opinions and objections for the benefit of all; and this is true even when life is hard and when each person is profoundly aware of our distance from home and the difficulty of the tasks at hand.