Chapter 19 — Surinam, the slave, the swindle

The first day out of El Dorado is pleasant. They have more treasure than all of Asia, Europe, and Africa combined. Then disasters begin. Two sheep plunge into a swamp with their cargo. Two more die of exhaustion. Seven or eight perish in a desert. Others fall from precipices. After a hundred days of travel only two sheep remain.

Approaching Surinam, they see a Black man on the ground, dressed in his only garment, blue linen drawers. His left leg is gone. His right hand is gone. Candide asks in horror what has happened. The man answers calmly: he is waiting for his master, Mynheer Vanderdendur. The hand was lost at the sugar-mill. The leg, when he tried to run away. "That's the price at which you eat sugar in Europe." Candide weeps. He turns to Cacambo. "Oh, Pangloss! You hadn't guessed at this abomination. This is the end. I will have to renounce your optimism at last." Cacambo asks what optimism is. "It's the madness of insisting that everything is well when it is wrong."

In town, a Spanish captain refuses to take Candide to Buenos Aires for Cunégonde. Candide sends Cacambo with diamonds enough to ransom her, and arranges his own passage to Venice to wait. Candide books his own passage with Vanderdendur, the Dutch captain. The skipper asks ten thousand piastres; Candide agrees without blinking; the skipper, suspicious, leaves and returns asking twenty; thirty. Vanderdendur orders the two sheep brought aboard, slips the cable, and sails without him. Candide goes to the Dutch magistrate, who fines him ten thousand piastres for making a disturbance and ten thousand more for the cost of the hearing. He decides he must select a traveling companion. He advertises for the most justly miserable man in the province. He picks Martin, an old man of letters who has been robbed by his wife, beaten by his son, abandoned by his daughter, and just deprived of a small government post. Martin is a Manichaean.