The Red Sea Sharks
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| Tintin: The Red Sea Sharks (Coke en stock) |
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The Red Sea Sharks (Coke en stock), is the nineteenth of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums written and illustrated by Hergé, featuring young reporter Tintin as a hero.
The Red Sea Sharks is the first Tintin adventure to bring together a large number of previously seen characters: General Alcazar (The Broken Ear) the characters from Khemed (Land of Black Gold), Rastapopoulos (Cigars of the Pharaoh), Dawson (The Blue Lotus), and Allan (The Crab with the Golden Claws).
[edit] The storyline
The Red Sea Sharks is an adventure in which Tintin finds who is behind Sheik Bab el Ehr's overthrow of Mohammed ben Kalish Ezab, the emir of Khemed.
After watching a movie, Tintin and Captain Haddock round a corner and bump into General Alcazar, who drops his wallet. Tintin attempts to return it, but the hotel he claimed to be staying at never heard of him, and when Tintin calls a phone number found in his wallet, the man refuses to talk to him. When Tintin and Haddock return home, they discover that the Emir's bratty, impossibly spoiled son Abdullah has been sent there for safekeeping, along with a colorful entourage of servants and dignitaries who have just set up a bedouin-bivouac in the great hall of Marlinspike Hall.
Thomson and Thompson inform Tintin that they known about Alcazar due to their investigation of a man called Dawson. They then tell him the name of the real hotel where the General is staying. At the hotel Tintin and Haddock see Alcazar talking with Dawson whom Tintin recognises as an enemy he met in The Blue Lotus.
Haddock returns the wallet to Alcazar, while Tintin follows Dawson and overhears him discussing how successful his sale of De Havilland Mosquitoes were in starting a coup d'état in Khemed. Tintin decides to go to Khmed and rescue the emir; reluctantly, as usual, the Captain agrees to go along, partly because he knows it's his only chance of getting rid of Abdullah, whose practical jokes are getting too much for him.
Realising that Tintin is again meddling in his affairs, Dawson resolves to take desperate measures.
At Wadesdah Airport Tintin and Haddock are turned back by customs, while someone plants a bomb on the plane to "take care of them". The bombing is foiled by an engine fire, which forces the plane to crash-land minutes before the bomb goes off. Tintin and Haddock walk away from the crash site and slip in unobserved into Wadesdah. There they meet another old friend, the talkative Portuguese merchant Oliveira da Figueira. He helps them escape the city by dressing up as veil-wearing women. Once outside they meet a guide with horses and ride to the Emir's hideout.
Their escape is reported however and a leading figure in the new regime sends out a squad of armoured cars and Mosquitos to intercept them. Giving the order is Mull Pasha who is in fact Doctor Müller, an old enemy whom Tintin met in The Black Island and Land of Black Gold. Thanks to a garbled military order, the Mosquitos attack the armoured cars instead of Tintin and his friends.
The Emir tells them about the ongoing slave trade run by the Marquis di Gorgonzola. Tintin and Haddock leave for the coast and board a boat for Mecca to investigate. They are attacked by the Mosquitos again, Tintin manages to down one with a German StG-44 but meanwhile their schooner receives critical damage and ends shipwrecked along with Piotr Skut, the pilot of the downed plane. They are then picked up by di Gorgonzola's yacht and offloaded the next night to the SS Ramona, a tramp steamer. Unbeknownst to Tintin and Haddock, the Ramona is one of di Gorgonzola's own ships, used in the slave trade.
That night they are locked into their cabin by Allan, Haddock's former first mate, while the Ramona's crew attempts to light fire to the ship. The prisoners force the door and manage to put out the fire, not realizing that the front of the ship was loaded by explosives. They then free a number of black African men from a rear hold who had paid for voyage to Mecca, but were intended to be sold as slaves instead. Haddock attempts to explain the situation to them (who speak Yoruba). Initially, many of them don't understand, or refuse to, thinking Haddock is lying. After some discussion, the men come around; an older member group recalls how some men from his village never returned from the Hajj. The Africans agree to help Haddock sail the ship to neutral territory in Djibouti, while Tintin and Skut attempt to fix the radios, which had been smashed.
Tintin finds a slip of paper in the radio room with an order to deliver "coke", and is puzzled. In shipping, "coke" would normally refer to a coal-derived fuel, but none is being carried (this is prior to the use of "coke" to mean "cocaine"). They are then approached by a dhow and take aboard an Arab who wishes to inspect the coke, puzzling Haddock who claims they have none. The man then turns about and starts examining one of the Africans. With the nature of the term coke, a cover term for slaves, clear to them, Haddock throws him off the ship, and one of the black Africans manages to thwart the Arab's attempt to stab the Captain.
DiGorgonzola (who is actually Rastapopoulos, the leader of the international drug smugglers from Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus) finds out that Haddock has taken control of the ship from the Arab, and sends a submarine to attack them. Tintin spots the sub by accident just prior to attack. Haddock manages to outmaneuver a number of torpedoes, but all appears lost when the engines of the ship are stuck in full reverse. At this point the Ramona is saved by the arrival of aircraft from a nearby US cruiser, the USS Los Angeles, whose crew had been radioed by Tintin. The submarine makes one more attempt to destroy the Ramona by attaching a limpet mine to the front of the boat beside the explosives, but this is foiled when the diver is hit by the Ramona's anchor being dropped. A shark swallows the mine and swims away. When the Los Angeles attempts to arrest di Gorgonzola afterwards, he fakes his own death by allowing a motorboat which he steers to the cruiser to sink while he escapes with an inbuilt mini-submarine, but Tintin, Haddock and Skut return to Europe for a hero's welcome.
[edit] Racism
The Red Sea Sharks has been criticised for its stereotypical portrayal of Africans, both in appearance and behaviour; although obviously good-hearted, the black characters are shown as being somewhat childish and simple. At one point Captain Haddock rails at their obduracy, calling them "addle-pated lumps of anthracite", although he is arguably being his colorful self rather than exhibiting deep-seated racism. In the author's defence, Herge obviously had contempt for slavery, as evidenced by the scene in which Captain Haddock hurls obscenities at an Arab trying to buy a slave.
[edit] Trivia
When Haddock falls asleep in the desert and won't wake up, Tintin takes a flask of rum from out of his bag. This wakes Haddock up and he agrees to press on. Tintin remarks that the rum is for "emergencies". Is this the attitude of a former boy scout who has alcohol for medicinal purposes, or "emergencies" as in getting Haddock to co-operate? (Tintin does use alcohol to bring Haddock round to his way of thinking in The Shooting Star and Tintin in Tibet.)
The submarine commander is named Kurt, which implies that he was a u-boat officer in the German navy during World War Two.
| The Adventures of Tintin | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin | ||||
| Characters: | Supporting · Minor · Complete list | |||
| Miscellany: | Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations | |||
