A life changing event
In 1902, Victor Depaz was in Bordeaux, France, to complete his education. At the end of May, he learned the news of a series of devastating volcanic eruptions on Mount Pelee on the island of Martinique. He received a telegram from a family friend in Fort-de-France, that the first eruption of May 8, 1902 had claimed his entire family! The family home, the distillery, and the entire estate were also gone. The words of that telegram stopped the course of his life. He was no longer a beloved young man of promise and privilege. It had no purpose. Alone and destitute, Victor was orphaned at sixteen.
Human life is a gift that comes to us with no guarantee of happiness or success. In an instant, our luck can change through no fault of our own or despite our best efforts. A child who has grown up to expect safety and love from his family is less prepared to lose love and care in the blink of an eye. Most people who experience such a calamity feel helpless and see no choice but to accept that happiness has been replaced by despair. People and animals around the world often capitulate or accept the cruelty of fate. Not doing that is an exception, a word that means weird. One is exceptional if he deviates from the norm. Victor loved his family and his life. He wept for them. He prayed for them. So, he decided to be exceptional. Victor became a man the day he received a telegram. As a sixteen-year-old man, Víctor Depaz resolved to stay with the purpose that his family had destined for him.
The path to a purpose
Victor struggled with the urgent need to return home to St. Pierre. The human need for closure during death in the family is horrible, yet it could not succeed in its purpose if it gave in to that. He would honor his family by completing his education, which was now doubly difficult because he had to find his own money to do it. His life became one day at a time, one week at a time. He devoted himself to reading, becoming a voracious reader. He read about industrial techniques and linked what he learned about it with his memory of how agriculture worked and the process of distilling rum. Victor, who suffered financially, read about banking techniques. He used his story, which was compelling, to reach out to the French for influence and media. This is how he financed his trip to return to Martinique. One day at a time, one week at a time, and years passed before he mustered the means to go home. In 1917, at the age of thirty-one, Víctor Depaz returned to Martininque. In St. Pierre, he cried again. He lamented the cradle of his childhood, in the land that buried the anonymous graves of his family. So, he decided once again to be exceptional!
The strength to lead others
St Pierre was left in ruins. The 1902 volcanic eruption was a deadly horizontal protocol explosion. His family was part of more than 29,000 who were killed! Mercilessly, Mount Pelee had sent a second subsequent blast to carry two thousand first responders. The volcano was silent now, and so was St. Pierre. Very few people had come to clean up the ruins to make their lives there. But Victor Depaz was at home! He found a Catholic priest who fought to restore the city’s cathedral, the moral symbol of hope. Victor devoted himself to the priest’s purpose, pledging to share in the reward of his property, which he said he would restore. Encouraged by this man of hope, the priest set about sending help to Victor. Remembering the importance of details and how perseverance had brought him home, Victor applied what he had learned from what he had read. Blue sugar cane was the heart of the family business. From being able to not being able, from being able to see (sunrise) to not being able to see (sunset), Víctor and those who helped him returned to cultivate the land of the Depaz farm. Then he built a windmill to spin the rollers that would squeeze the juice out of the cane. Using his father’s exact technique, he distilled rum from pure cane juice. But he found that other distillers were now adding sugar or molasses to boost production and cut costs. Depaz rum would be limited in quantity and more expensive unless it incorporated those changes as well. However, if I did that, it would be against purpose. Victor had a lot of justification for doing whatever it took to survive. However, he had decided to reclaim his family’s legacy. By recreating his father’s exceptional product, he had achieved his resolve. Now, he decided to make France recognize and honor that product!
A continuous story
Through tenacious determination, Victor succeeded in establishing the agricultural process of using only cane juice in the distillation of rum as a distinctive standard. The French Appellation d’Origine Controlee (AOC) adheres to that standard to this day, and rum distilled from blue sugar cane juice grown on the Depaz estate wins AOC approval year after year. Victor got married. He rebuilt his family home exactly as he remembered it. He and his wife filled that home with eleven children, with love and hope. Through his children, Victor set the course for the continuing saga of the Depaz family. They say that the cream rises to the top, no matter how much it is stirred. An exceptional person is always a winner because he does not stop trying no matter how much he is knocked down or how many times he is knocked down. Victor Depaz’s legacy is complete and endures in a superb and growing family, estate and rum distillery, exactly where it was supposed to be in St. Pierre, Martinique. Victor Depaz was a world shaper.