For this scheme he did not find a backer.
One spring morning, unannounced to anyone, Charley got out of a hansom cab at the Company’s offices in Leadenhall Street. Henri, the Frenchman, was standing on the pavement.
‘Well, Capitaine, was I right? Was there trouble to eastward?’
Charley took no notice and dashed up the steps.
‘How long’s that man been standing there?’ he asked Mortimer, the head porter.
‘About ten minutes, Sir.’
‘I don’t mean today. I mean how long’s he been hanging around?’
‘This morning, Sir. First time I ever saw him.’
Charley took Henri by the throat and shook him.
‘How did you know I was coming to England today?’
‘Same as what told me there was trouble to eastward—the Spirits.’
‘I do not attempt to explain this,’ Charley wrote. ‘I only state what happened. I left the office after an interview with the manager that lasted a few minutes, sacked—sacked after twenty years service, on account of my engine breaking down.’
He also reported to a Mr Lawrie of the London Salvage Association and asked for £3 reimbursement for his bill at the Hotel Kosmos.
‘Captain, I think you’ve made enough from your wreck to pay your hotel bill.’
Now he understood what José Menéndez meant.
‘I nearly told the man I could have made £2,000 but I was honest. Then I saw it was useless to speak to a man like that of honesty. He wouldn’t know the meaning of the word.’
81
CHARLEY SULKED in Shrewsbury that summer but in August had a letter from a Mr William Fitzgerald of Wide World Magazine, offering to pay his first-class rail fare to London. At the office he looked round for someone to present his card and then rapped on the door marked Editor and walked in. Henri Grien, in a smart suit, was pacing the floor, while a young man dictated to a secretary.
‘Hello, Henri, and how are you?’
‘I not know you.’
The young man jumped up from his desk.
‘What the Devil do you mean, Sir, coming into my room without knocking and addressing this gentleman as Henri when his name is Louis de Rougemont.’
‘Keep your hair on, young fellow. There was no one to bring my card in. I knocked twice. I addressed Henri Grien by his proper name. And as you yourself, Sir, asked me to come, I expected a different reception, but since you have so few manners I wish you a good morning.’
Charley made for the door but the Frenchman threw his arms round his neck and kissed him.
‘Oh! It is my little Capitaine. Forgive me. I did no recognize you. You ’ave shave your beard.’
Charley was still nettled and strode out. The Frenchman followed.
‘You can’t go now, Mr de Rougemont,’ the editor called. ‘We have to prepare your speech for the British Association on Friday.’
‘I don’t care nothing for no speech. I am going with my little Capitaine.’
Neither of them cared for strong waters and went to an A.B.C. eating house in the Strand. For the first time Mr Fitzgerald had heard the name, Henri Grien:
82
HENRI GRIEN was the son of an irritable and slovenly Swiss peasant of Grasset on Lake Neuchâtel. At sixteen he ran away from his ancestral muck-cart into the arms of the ageing actress Fanny Kemble, who employed him as her footman and, for seven years, carried him into the world of footlights and greasepaint. His talent for acting went unnoticed and, in 1870, he followed that other destiny of theatrical failures: domestic service, as butler to Sir William Cleaver Robinson, the appointed Governor of Western Australia. The Governor’s tastes were musical and poetic; among his friends was a French savant, M. Louis de Rougemont, the author of a treatise on virginity.
Henri left the governor and assumed the career of a drifter. He was cook on a pearling schooner and was wrecked. He was hotel dishwasher, and street-photographer in a gold-rush town. In 1882, he married a beautiful young wife who gave him four children. He became a landscape painter, working from photographs, a salesman of apocryphal mining shares, and waiter in a Sydney restaurant. One of his customers was the explorer of the Cambridge Gulf region, whose diaries Henri borrowed and copied out. Next he experimented with the diving suit that asphyxiated the Dane.
He skipped from Australia, away from the police and his wife’s maintenance order, and in Wellington, New Zealand, took up with some spiritualists who found him an excellent medium. He told his life story to a journalist, who said it would make a best-seller as fiction, but Henri would not hear of this; by now dream and reality had fused into one. One summer evening he borrowed a black tie and wormed his way into the Drill Hall, where he met Captain Charles Amherst Milward.
He did come to England aboard the Waikato— and seems to have cursed her as well. (Shortly after, her propeller shaft broke off the Cape of Good Hope, and she was sucked south by the Agulhas Current, drifting for four months, the longest steamer drift on record. Conrad used it for his story Falk.) In the late spring he appeared at Wide World, dressed shabbily, but with a letter from a Conservative M.P. which said: ‘This man has a story which, if true, will stagger the world.’
Henri told Fitzgerald he was the son of a rich Parisian merchant called de Rougemont. As a boy his mother took him to Switzerland, where he developed an aptitude for geology and trick wrestling. To avoid returning to a military career in France, he went travelling in the East; sailed with a Dutch pearler from Batavia, and was the only survivor when their schooner sank. Stranded on a coral reef, de Rougemont rode turtles for amusement, built a house of pearl shells, and made a canoe (which, like Robinson Crusoe’s, was too heavy to haul to the beach).
After a number of trials, he reached the Australian mainland at Cambridge Gulf, married a coal-black woman called Yamba, and lived thirty years among the Aborigines, eating yams, snakes and witchety grubs (but never human flesh); sharing their treks, hunts, battles and corroborees. His skill in wrestling made him a tribal hero and he rose to the rank of chief. Only when Yamba died did he strike out for White civilization. At Kimberley he ran in with some gold-miners.
Mr Fitzgerald prided himself on his nose for a fake. He heard de Rougemont tell his story ‘as a man might describe a bus ride’ and was convinced of its veracity. That summer a team of journalists and stenographers hacked it together for publication. The key witness, Captain Milward, held his tongue: he knew what happened last time he crossed Henri Grien.
The first instalment of The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont appeared in July and there was an immediate run on the magazine. The book was in press. Cables flew round the world arguing the price of syndication. Hostesses pressed invitations on the Frenchman. Madame Tussaud’s pressed a wax mask over his face, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science invited him to give two lectures to its annual congress at Bristol.
At the first lecture the audience was bored. He tried to liven up the second with cannibalistic details of his married life with Yamba, but the same day saw the eclipse of his reputation. The Daily Chronicle, sensing a scoop, carried a leader calling de Rougemont a fraud. More denunciations followed and a chorus of academics joined in. Throughout the autumn, as the British Empire rose to its zenith, the de Rougemont fraud held the headlines with the Battle of Omdurman, the Fashoda Incident, and the reopening of the Dreyfus Case. The Daily Chronicle found his old mother at Grasset, and on October 21st a Mrs Henri Grien of Newtown, Sydney, identified de Rougemont as the man who owed her maintenance of twenty shillings and five pence a week.
The traveller withstood the attacks with unblushing calm and resumed the theatrical career of Henri Grien. The London Hippodrome imported some turtles and rigged up a rubber tank on stage, but either the climate or the rider had a discouraging effect on them, for they were overcome with drowsiness. He then took his show The Greatest Liar on Earth to Durban and Melbourne. The audiences howled him to silence.
On June 9th 1921 Louis Re
dmond, as he was now called, died in the Infirmary of the Kensington Workhouse.
83
AS THE journalists were debunking de Rougemont, Charley sailed back to Punta Arenas. The wildness was not yet burned out in him.
The course of his second career is clouded by time and distance. I have had to reconstruct it from faded sepia photographs, purple carbons, a few relics and memories in the very old. The first impressions are of an energetic pioneer, confident in his new handlebar moustache; hunting elephant seals in South Georgia; salvaging for Lloyd’s; helping a German gold-panner dynamite the Mylodon Cave; or striding round the foundry with his German partner, Herr Lion, inspecting the water turbines or the lathes they imported from Dortmund and Göppingen. Lion was a methodical man, who ran the place while Charley chatted up clients. Panama was not yet cut through and the business was good.
The second set of images are of the British Empire’s southernmost Consul, a senior citizen of Punta Arenas and director of its bank. He was making money all right (but never quite enough), stiffening with lumbago and ‘wearying for news’ of home. Old members of the British Club still remember him. And I sat in the tall rooms, painted an under-sea green and hung with sporting prints and lithographs of Edward VII. Listening to the chink of whisky glasses and billiard balls, I could picture him on one of the buttoned wash-leather sofas, stretching out his bad leg and talking of the sea.
Among his letters from these years I found one to my grandfather hoping the Titanic disaster hadn’t put him off yachting; a note to the Hon. Walter Rothschild about a shipment of Darwin’s Rheas; and a report, on consular notepaper, to the employer of a dead Scot: ‘He has been a disgrace to the name of Britisher ever since he came here . . . He used his basin as a W.C. His room was an insult to any animal and his box contained fifteen empty whisky bottles. I am sorry but the truth is best.’
A mood of despair gradually creeps into these letters. None of his schemes ever quite turned out as planned. He drilled for oil in Tierra del Fuego, but the drill broke. The land at Valle Huemeules promised big returns, but there were sheep-thieves, pumas, squatters and an unscrupulous land-shark: ‘We are having the devil of a hitch with our land in the Argentine. The Government has given it away to a Jew who has kindly sworn that all my sheep and buildings are his.’ Rather than lose all, he asked the Brauns and Menéndezes for help and they soon whittled his share down to 15 per cent.
In 1913 he brought his son out, fresh from school in England, as part of his scheme for toughening him up. Harry Milward stuck out one long snowbound winter at Valle Huemeules, loathed the farm, the farm-manager, and at this point his father. Not surprising with letters that ended: ‘Now goodbye, my lad, and don’t forget that God, although you are so very far from any means of grace, still he is just as near you there as here. Your ever loving father . . .’ The rest of Harry’s career was predictable. He went to the war, joined a fast set, married three times and ended up in England, the secretary of a golf club.
In Charley’s album I found photos of the new house under construction, a Victorian parsonage translated to the Strait of Magellan. He gave half the plot for St James’s Anglican Church and was its warden and principal benefactor. Proudly he unpacked the font given by Queen Alexandra. Proudly he welcomed the Bishop of the Falklands for the consecration. But the church was yet another source of trouble. He accused the vicar of choosing obscure hymns so as to show off his own voice solo. The congregation, he insisted, had a right to ‘Abide with Me’ or ‘Oft in Danger, Oft in Woe’. The Rev. Cater whispered round that Captain Milward was a secret drinker.
The war caught him off his guard, in a Buenos Aires hospital, having an intestinal operation. But the war was soon upon him. Admiral Craddock’s visiting card, still pinned to the green baize board in the British Club, is a reminder that the southernmost Consul was the last civilian to see him alive. Charley dined aboard the Good Hope two hours before the British fleet sailed for its disastrous encounter with the Germans off Coronel. In a memorandum he records the Admiral’s gallant but weary acceptance of Churchill’s orders: ‘I am going to look for von Spee and if I find him, my number is hoisted.’
Charley hated the war: ‘So many people cutting each others throats and not knowing why.’ He wasn’t going to stoop to war hysteria. Nor would he break with his German partner. ‘Lion is not one of the war-party,’ he wrote, ‘but a dear, good, honest white man.’ The British community hated him for this and put it round that the Consul was politically unreliable. An anonymous letter appeared in the Buenos Aires Herald, referring to ‘the British Consulate, as its consul is pleased to call it’.
Another relic of the war years is a gold watch presented for loyal services by the British Admiralty. After Admiral Sturdee sank von Spee’s squadron off the Falklands, the cruiser Dresden got away and hid at the western end of the Beagle Channel, camouflaged by trees and provisioned by Germans from Punta Arenas. (British residents noticed the dwindling number of dogs in the town and joked about the doggy flavour of the German crew’s sausages.) Charley found out where she was and cabled London. But, instead of acting on his advice, the Navy did the exact opposite.
The reason was simple: the ‘true Britishers’ had convinced the Admiralty that the Consul was a German agent and managed to get him sacked. Only when they realized their mistake did Charley get an apology. The watch was to compensate for the calumnies heaped upon him. It took a long time coming. ‘I’ll be in my grave,’ he wrote, ‘before I hear anything about that watch.’
The third exhibit from this time is a coloured print by Cecil Aldin, of dogs at a feeding bowl. It conjures up the image of Sir Ernest Shackleton, pacing round Charley’s living-room, haranguing the newspaper editor, Mr Charles Riesco, about the plight of his men trapped on Elephant Island. From the article in the Magellan Times—‘the deep set grey eyes’ ‘greatness equated by modesty’ ‘the best of our race’ etc.—you would never guess what happened:
Charley was pretending to doze off in a wing chair while the explorer waved his revolver about to emphasize important points. The first bullet whizzed past Charley’s ear and hit the wall. He got up, disarmed his guest and put the weapon on the mantelpiece. Shackleton was quite shaken, apologized and mumbled about the last bullet in the chamber. Charley sat down again, but Shackleton’s flow was inseparable from his gun. The second bullet missed again, but hit the print. The hole is in the lower right margin.
Meanwhile the ex-consul’s life had taken a new direction. He had met a young Scotswoman called Isabel, who had got stranded, penniless, in Punta Arenas, after working on an estancia in Santa Cruz. Charley looked after her and paid her fare back to Scotland. He was lonely again once she had gone. They wrote to each other: one of his letters contained a proposal.
Belle came back and they started a family. In 1919 Charley calculated his assets at £30,000, enough to retire on and provide for all his children. He sold the Fundición Milward to a Frenchman, M. Lescornez, and his partner Senor Cortéz, agreeing they should defer payments until business recovered from the post-war slump. The family packed, sailed for England, and bought a country house, ‘The Elms’, near Paignton.
Charley the Sailor home from sea. Charley the Pioneer with the restlessness gone; pottering round his garden; taking prizes at the Taunton Flower Show; growing old with his young wife in the English countryside; teaching the boy or playing with his two daughters, one showing signs of beauty, the other of his forthright personality—I am sad to report that this harmonious and symmetrical picture was not to be.
Panama was now cut through. Punta Arenas was again on the way to nowhere. Wool slumped. There was revolution in Santa Cruz. And the foundry failed.
Encouraged by two or more of the ‘true Britishers’, acting out of spite, the new owners milked the business, ran up debts, signed cheques in the Milward name, and ran.
Charley was ruined.
He kissed the children. He kissed Belle. He said goodbye for ever to the green fields of Eng
land. He bought a ticket to Punta Arenas, one way, third class. Friends in the first-class saw him gazing sorrowfully at the sea. They offered to pay the difference, but he had his pride. No deck games for him this voyage. He preferred to bunk with shepherds.
Belle sold ‘The Elms’ and followed, and for six years they picked up the pieces. Photos show a stooping old man in a homburg with huge whiskers and wounded eyes. He would hobble down to the foundry and growl at the men and laugh when they laughed. Belle kept the books; she would carry on for nearly forty years. Without her thrift they would have gone under, and, one by one, they paid off the debts.
I have one last image of Charley, dated around 1928, sitting in the tower with his telescope, straining to catch the last of the steamer that carried the boy to school in England. As she headed up eastward and was swallowed into the night, he said: ‘I’ll never see the lad again.’
84
I WAS in Punta Arenas on a Sunday and went to Matins at St James’s. I sat in Charley’s pew, knowing it was his by the brass ferrule screwed on for his walking stick. An American Baptist minister took the service. His sermon explained the technical difficulties of building the Verranzano Narrows Bridge, veered off among ‘Bridges to God’, and ended with a thundering call: ‘Ye shall be that Bridge!’ He asked us to pray for Pinochet but we were uncertain of the spirit in which our prayers were offered. In the congregation was an old Highland shepherd called Black Bob MacDonald who had worked for the Red Pig. ‘Grand man!’ he said.
I also met an American lady ornithologist, down here to study the fighting behaviour of Darwin’s Rheas. She said the two males locked necks and whirled round in circles: the one who got dizzy first was the loser.
85
AN ENGLISHMAN suggested I take the air-taxi over to Porvenir on Tierra del Fuego and visit the old farm of one of Charley’s contemporaries.