The Albert was not a comfortable passenger ship. It was a small, square-rigged two-master brig, the speediest type of merchant ship of its time. Captains of such ships were set in a perpetual circular race against each other to be first to deliver their cargoes before their perishable goods perished, or rival captains beat them to it and spoiled the market for the stuff they were hoping to sell. While the captain of the Albert was running his commercial race, Gauguin’s father Clovis saw the voyage as something quite else, something idealistic and beautiful. He was taking his family back to a pre-industrial country, to a new dawn in whose light he might fight for modern democratic values. That his compassionate fight would be financed by his wife’s family’s immense riches derived from slave labour–the pre-industrial equivalent of machine-led profitability–does not seem to have been a worry.
The atmosphere on board became thicker and thicker with antagonism between Clovis and the captain, who lusted after Aline. She was an extraordinarily direct and appealing person, as we see from Gauguin’s portrait. Slightly built, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Aline never lost a sense of self-worth and self-determination, despite being abused by her father and having spent her childhood parked in institutions. While her mother had been out saving the world, Aline had been left in the guardianship of the novelist George Sand, who didn’t much like Flora but took her duties towards the child Aline sufficiently seriously to keep an eye on her development from a distance. A fiercely independent spirit, Aline’s qualities of candour, receptiveness and optimism made her devastatingly attractive to the rough, tough sea captain, who pursued Aline openly, to the impotent fury of Clovis. They could hardly settle the matter in the usual way: a duel on board guaranteed awkward consequences.
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