Grove Koger

Today’s post is an updated entry from my book When the Going Was Good about a remarkable French adventurer who died on December 13, 1974.

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Henri de Monfreid: Secrets of the Red Sea (Les secrets de la mer Rouge. Paris: Grasset, 1931); Sea Adventures (Aventures de mer) Paris: Grasset, 1932); and Hashish: Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler (La croisière du hachich. Paris: Grasset, 1933)

Son of an artist who had settled in the south of France, Henri de Monfreid fell in love with the sea as a child, refitting a beached boat and sailing during his summer vacations with the region’s fishing fleet. Despite a forced apprenticeship in business, he was drawn to the bohemian lifestyle of his father, and in 1910 he attempted to bridge the gulf between these two worlds by taking a position with a trading firm operating in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia and Eritrea) and the tiny colony of French Somaliland (Djibouti) at the southern end of the Red Sea.

Yet even in the Horn of Africa, de Monfreid felt stifled by the “terrible yoke” of conventional trading and the bourgeois atmosphere of the European settlements. Buying his own boat, he began dealing in pearls, eventually branching out into firearms and hashish, goods legal or illegal depending on the year, the country, and (seemingly) the direction of the wind. At one point he spied on the Turks for the French, soon to be official enemies with the onset of World War I, but the latter eventually grew tired of his independent ways and imprisoned him for smuggling arms. The British, who admired him no more than did the French, called him the Sea Wolf. As one observer put it, he was “the most remarkable figure from Suez to Bombay.”

De Monfreid was approached in the late 1920s by admiring writer Ida Treat, who took down his life story and published it in 1930 as Pearls, Arms and Hashish. Soon afterward, de Monfreid began writing his own books, eventually turning out dozens of vivid volumes of memoirs and fiction and attaining cult status in his native country. Three of the first of these—Secrets of the Red Sea, Sea Adventures, and Hashish—form a natural unit describing his exploits up and down the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. As he explained near the end of his life, de Monfreid had “isolated” himself among “primitive people—or, more accurately, men joined with Nature in an immutable and perfect equilibrium—in order that [he] could consciously remain her creature.” The man who emerges from these event-charged pages is impulsive and in love with freedom and the sea, a renegade who excites the envy of some and the hatred of others but who cares little for the opinion of either.

There’s no biography of de Monfreid in English, but the 1974 Hillstone edition of Hashish  published as Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler includes a preface by philosopher/novelist Colin Wilson. You’ll find quite a bit of information online, including several book reviews from the Journal of the British-Yemeni Society at https://al-bab.com/albab-orig/albab/bys/journal.htm. A small museum has been opened at de Monfreid’s final home in Ingrandes, France, and Le Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales in Sana’a, Yemen, changed its name a few years ago to Le Centre Culturel Henry de Monfreid in honor of the adventurer, although its current status in that war-torn country is unclear. A video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyCKJmyZ_VI&t=1s shows de Monfreid’s crew apparently stealing a pile of mangrove timber, although no context for the escapade is provided.

The top image is the cover of my 1973 Stonehill edition of Hashish and features an illustration by Ted Bernstein and a design by Nancy Greenberg. The photograph of de Monfreid and an unidentified crewman aboard ship is reproduced from the site of the British-Yemeni Society. The covers of the 1930 Coward-McCann edition of Pearls, Arms and Hashish(with de Monfreid’s name misspelled) and the 1946 Penguin edition of Sea Adventures are scanned from my own collection, while the fourth cover image is a photograph of a later Grasset printing of Les secrets de la mer Rouge. The map of the Red Sea is by H.W. Mardon and was printed by George Philip & Son for the London Geographical Institute about 1903.

I mention de Monfreid along with several other louche characters in my story “That Burton MS,” which appeared in La Piccioletta Barca in 2019. See https://www.picciolettabarca.com/posts/burton-ms.