The treasure of Rackham the Red

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Tim.

Red Rackham's Treasure ( French title: Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge ) is a comic from the series Tintin the Belgian cartoonist Hergé , the first time on 19 February 1943 to 23 September 1943 in the newspaper Le Soir published .

action

In the previous volume, The Secret of the “Unicorns” , Tim and Captain Haddock discover the location of the wreck of the Einhorn , a pirate- hijacked ship that was blown up in the Caribbean in 1676 by its captain Frantz Ritter von Hadoque, an ancestor of Haddock . After the ship was destroyed, Hadoque fled to a nearby island. Tim and Captain Haddock are of the opinion that the pirate treasure is in the remains of the sunken unicorn .

Tim and the captain rent a ship, the Sirius , to find this treasure . As the crew prepares for the voyage, their plans are discovered and published in the press, so that Tim and Haddock are harassed by numerous strangers who count themselves among Rackham's descendants and claim part of the treasure. They are quickly evicted through Haddock.

Another visitor is Professor Bienlein , an eccentric and largely hard of hearing inventor, who offers the use of his special shark-shaped , electrically operated one-man submarine to search for the sunken ship with which one does not face the danger of the numerous sharks in the water suspends. The treasure hunters renounce him and his idea and continue preparing for the journey.

Before Tintin and Struppi leave the harbor, their friends Schulze and Schultze arrive on the ship with the task of protecting the crew from the possible threat from Maximus Vogel-Faull , a rival of the treasure hunters who has escaped from prison. (Ultimately, Vogel-Faull is never seen or mentioned again, so he's a MacGuffin to get the detectives on board the ship). Shortly after departure, Tim and Haddock notice that Professor Bienlein is on board as a stowaway in a lifeboat . The professor stowed loose parts of his submarine in boxes that previously held Haddock's whiskey. Although he initially threatens to throw the professor overboard, he reluctantly decides to keep him on the ship.

The coordinates on the parchment indicate an island in the Caribbean, in the north of the island of Hispaniola . At first the island is not found at the coordinates (20 ° 37 '42 "North, 70 ° 52' 15" West), but then Tim hypothesizes that Frantz of Hadoque used the Parisian meridian instead of the Greenwich meridian , so that the coordinates are 20 ° 37 '42 "North, 68 ° 32' 1" West. In fact, the ship reaches an unknown and uninhabited island, as Tim and his friends suspect. As they are about to explore, the captain's toes stumble upon a piece of wood protruding from the sand, which is what remains of Hadoque's rowboat. When they get to the interior of the island, they notice numerous skulls that Tim takes to be the remains of the island's former cannibalists . There is also a beautiful pagan statue of the Knight of Hadoque and numerous parrots repeating Haddock's curses. That amuses Tim, as they kept the behavior for generations.

Bienlein's submarine proves to be very useful in finding the sunken unicorn, while the actual investigation of the wreck is done with a helmet diving device . Schulze and Schultze soon regret their decision to take part in the treasure hunt because they have to operate the huge pumps for air supply when Tim and later the captain explore the wreck. Despite complications such as shark attacks, they discover a gold-studded cross, a chest with old documents, the ship's figurehead and, to Haddock's delight, a large inventory of rum from Jamaica .

When the crew spies a large wooden cross on the island, Tim believes that, referring to their map, "The Eagle's Cross" reveals the location of the treasure. The team begins to dig under the cross, but after a while Tim realizes that it is a wrong track, that Frantz would not have left the treasure on an island that he no longer wanted to go to. So they return to Sirius.

There are more dives to the wreck, but the treasure is not found and the team goes back home disappointed. There, further examinations of the parchments from the box by Professor Bienlein show that Haddock is the heir to Mühlenhof Castle - it was bequeathed to the knight Hadoque by the French king for his services. After this discovery, Tim insists that the heir buy back the property that is up for auction , but the captain declines, citing that he had recently used his funds on their unsuccessful treasure hunt. However, Bienlein received a lot of money from the government for the sale of the patent on his submarine and with this he is helping the captain as a thank you for successfully testing the submarine.

After buying the castle, Tintin, Struppi and Captain Haddock explore the basement of the main house. Among the antiques that the Vogel-Faull brothers (the former owners of the complex) had hoarded is a statue of the evangelist Johannes and Tim remembers that he was named after the island on which he lived in exile, "The Eagle of Patmos "and that he is often represented with this bird.

A globe belongs to the statue and Tim finds the island on which they suspected Frantz Hadoque's treasure. He accidentally discovered that it was a button to open the globe. The treasure was hidden in the globe - and the statue holds a cross over it, as indicated on the map.

Emergence

The work was created as a direct continuation of the previous one. Hergé tried to further improve his fidelity to reality, because although he had studied various pictures of ships from the 17th and 18th centuries in order to draw his unicorn and the sea battle, the critics did not fall silent - the aurora from The Mysterious Star, for example, became criticized not seaworthy, the sailing ships in the previous volume were at an unfavorable angle to the wind .

So in order to finally silence the critics, Hergé had a model of the trawler John 0.33 made for the Sirius . This technique proved to be a stroke of luck for him and he then used it again and again, for example with the moon rocket in Destination Moon . Hergé's art of drawing based on real models also reached its climax in this volume. His archive overflows with images of underwater worlds, fish, diving suits and the shark-like diving boat that Bienlein constructed for the trip.

Despite the raging war in Europe, the two volumes contain hardly any references to this or the occupiers. The work is also not tied to a specific location.

The success of the double volume The Secret of the Unicorn and Rackham's Treasure of the Red led Hergé to plan an international edition together with his publisher Casterman. The two books appeared in English and German in 1952. While the two volumes remained the only ones available in English for a long time, twelve stories were printed in German by 1963.

Trivia

Literature / sources