Henry de Monfreid (1879–1974)

This is a bit of romantic adventure fiction — if anything, more like an opera libretto than a novel — in which Monfried figures mostly as narrator, with only a couple of encounters with the characters as passengers on his ship to bring him into the story, set on the coast of the Red Sea ca. 1914. The plot is loosely based on Schiller's Robbers — a young Somali blacksmith is in love with a beautiful girl, but he needs Rs. 1000 to pay off her mother. By enlisting as an askari in the French army he will get a premium of Rs. 500, which is enough to put down a deposit on his fiancée, but his evil brother is also scheming to get hold of the girl (and his brother's money). We get a delightful tale of desertion, shipwreck, identity-theft, slaving, murder, a thrilling prison escape, and much, much more.

Had this actually been written in the times when it was set, we might have been impressed with Monfried's enlightened attitude to his African characters. They are treated very straightforwardly as human beings with all the normal positive and negative qualities of human beings, who simply happen to have grown up in a different cultural, geographic and economic setting from the (presumably) European reader. Monfried knows the people he is writing about and broadly understands how they come to have certain attitudes and ways of behaving that might be quite different from "ours", and he manages to present them as people whose problems we can identify with. But of course he's writing in 1969, and by that time European writers couldn't take their right to speak on behalf of non-European characters for granted any more, so we look a bit more critically, and realise that despite his obvious affection and sympathy, he's a product of the times he grew up in, and can't help being crass and patronising from time to time. And that's before we even start on his female characters...… (more)

This book continues Monfreid's Red Sea adventures when he returns to the region after a brief period fighting in Europe. He's apparently been declared unfit for military service because of a lung problem: it's interesting that he's still able to do some terrifying long-distance swims despite this (and the malaria and Spanish 'flu that strike him down at various points in this book...).

He describes continuing his business of transporting French arms and other unspecified contraband across the Red Sea (he always denied being involved in slaving, but he seems suspiciously well-informed about the mechanics of the trade in "luxury" slaves — eunuchs and young girls — that continued well into the thirties).

We're also told about his project to build a bigger ship, including a catastrophic trip to Ethiopia to buy timber, during which he comes close to death from 'flu and one of his men is mistaken for a horse-thief and killed by a poisoned arrow. The new ship is not a success, but Monfried (literally) picks up the pieces and starts again.

However, the biggest story in this book is really the one about Monfried being caught up in the war, which — from his perspective — was essentially a conflict between Britain and France to determine who would control the oil-fields after the collapse of Ottoman power. He is arrested by the British on two occasions, both times getting away by a mixture of guile, luck, and the faithful assistance of his crew-members. When he's confined on a British warship for a few days he confesses how much more he likes the British, as individuals, than the French authorities, despite his strong resentment for the results of Britain's devious colonial policy, which hurts the local people as much as it does France. He reserves particular contempt for T E Lawrence, whom he accuses of genocide by the "classic" British method of giving guns to both sides in a regional conflict and standing back to let them wipe each other out. Still, his time in the wardroom of the destroyer must have been quite amusing to watch, given that only one of the British officers could speak French and none of them Arabic, and Monfried of course was a true Frenchman of his time without a word of English...… (more)

Henry de Monfreid came from an artistic French family and grew up on the Mediterranean coast doing a lot of sailing with his parents. He studied engineering and worked in the dairy industry for a while: after the collapse of one of his business enterprises he moved to Djibouti in 1911, working as a coffee-buyer travelling around Ethiopia. Eventually, in 1913, he made the career-move that he's most famous for, buying a sailing dhow in Djibouti and using it to trade in the southern Red Sea. In the 1930s, he moved back to France and started to make a name for himself as a writer of adventure stories. Like many adventure-writers of the time, he was captivated by fascist ideas and became very close to Mussolini and Pétain, although this didn't seem to do his long-term career any harm: in old age he was still scheming with friends like Cocteau (who bought drugs from him) to get himself elected to the Académie Française.

In this first volume of memoirs, he describes his adventures during his first year as a skipper, pearl-fishing, trying to set up a cultured-pearl farm, and doing a bit of light espionage and gun-running. There's a lot of fascinating, detailed description of the natural hazards of sailing on the Red Sea, with its many reefs and hidden rocks, powerful tidal currents, and sometimes very dangerous local winds. But he also writes a lot about the people he's working with, their jobs — especially the hazards of the pearl-divers' lives — their families, the communities they come from, and so on.

Being a European adventurer of the time, of course it almost goes without saying that he speaks fluent Arabic and Somali, dresses in local style, and has converted to Islam. But despite all that, the colonial authorities still find it a nuisance, in the prickly political situation of 1913-14, to have a rogue Frenchman going around doing all the illegal things you have to do to make money out of running a dhow. So, eventually, goaded by British complaints about the number of people shooting at their troops with French-made guns, the authorities in Djibouti decide to get him out from under their feet by (as he tells it) framing him for something he didn't do and then allowing him to volunteer for the trenches instead of going to jail.

I don't think Monfreid really expects us to take everything here as literal truth — there are some very Tintin-esque moments, like the one where he sinks a pirate dhow by tossing a lit stick of dynamite on its deck at just the right moment. But it's a great story, if a little rambling, and it's obviously told with a great deal of affection for the region and its culture and people.… (more)

This is a memoir by French adventurer Henry de Monfried detailing the history of one of his more high risk business enterprises. He was a French nobleman in the 1920s who had all sorts of misadventures trying various get rich quick schemes while dragging his poor wife and child around to some of the most disagreeable spots on the planet. Who knew there was money to be made if you could corner the market on top shells from the Indian Ocean? Or how badly they could stink? Then he got the bright idea of dealing in the subject of his title and many trials ensue. He manages to survive, else how would he have written this autobiography? His observations of people and the attitudes of these declining colonial times were entertaining and enlightening. His honesty concerning his own behavior is surprising. He had no shame about his schemes and thoughts and shares them with the reader, such as mentioning how he snuck around his Greek host's house in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to get to the pretty servant girl or how to circumvent customs officials. He's a cad, but a charming one.… (more)