Fraudsters and Charlatans (29 page)

Curiously, though his native language was French, he chose to teach Yamba English. Food was plentiful; he dined on kangaroo, emu, snakes, rats, fish and a kind of worm, which he ate grilled. Having already astonished the natives with his clothing, his boat and mirror, he felt it was important that he should excel in everything he did. Using a tomahawk and a harpoon that he had salvaged from the ship and whose cold metal fascinated the natives, he took up hunting dugong (a large sea-mammal) and dried the flesh to use in later expeditions. Readers interested in tribal customs must have thrilled to read about the nightly corroborees, when, decorating their bodies with paint and feathers, the tribesmen danced or chanted songs, and the hunting parties, when they stalked kangaroos, speared fish or trapped emus, and which were followed by great gorging feasts.

By now, de Rougemont's claims were coming under the close scrutiny of Australians living in Great Britain. In September one of these, calling himself ‘an Australian', wrote to the
Daily Chronicle
. This first serious published criticism asked if Drs Keltie and Mill were absolutely satisfied of the truth of the story, for ‘the pearl-sheller, the Australian explorer, and the man acquainted with the Australian blacks will not be so convinced'.
¹⁰
The £50,000 worth of pearls was, he said, an unheard of amount, and added that he had never seen an octopus weighting more than 15lb in the shallow waters where pearlers work. As for the turtle riding, a feature that had captured the popular imagination and was to become one of the most controversial aspects of de Rougemont's story, ‘I have caught and handled some thousands of turtles, both afloat and ashore, and I never yet saw one which when afloat and touched anywhere on its body, did not sink almost vertically. Furthermore, if a turtle's eye is touched, even when he is on land, he contracts his neck and turns his head downwards and won't go for a spin even if you use spurs.' On hearing of the as yet unpublished story of the two rescued white girls, ‘Australian' asked: ‘who are they, where are they now, why has no-one in Australia heard of them?'
¹¹

De Rougemont's talks were awaited in Bristol with great anticipation. On 9 September the demand for seats for his address to the anthropology section was so great that the venue was moved from the Catholic Schoolroom in Park Place to the 2,100-seat Prince's Theatre, where the stalls, pit and two tiers of the gallery were packed with a keenly attentive audience. The press criticisms had provoked considerable comment, but de Rougemont, who had looked nervous and unwell, nevertheless made a favourable impression, with his excellent command of English: ‘it suited the temper of the meeting to enthrone for the moment a traveller whose singular experiences in Central Australia promised the possibility of sensation,'
¹²
reported the
Daily Chronicle
. Towards the end of the lecture, Edward Tylor, the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University, asked for the local names of a number of words such as man, woman, sun, moon, fire, water and common objects, so that he could identify the tribes. De Rougemont obliged him with some words, but to Tylor's disappointment they sounded unfamiliar, and he sat down ‘as one on whom the spirit of enquiry had set its imprint'.
¹³

On 12 September de Rougemont's talk to the geographical section was also given to a packed house. Here he revealed that in the Australian desert he had encountered four white men whom he later realised were members of the Giles expedition of 1874. He rushed up to them excitedly, not recalling that his tanned skin coated in the traditional aboriginal dress of black greasy clay made him look like a native. They fired upon him, and he despaired of making himself known. (William Tietkins, the only surviving member of that expedition, was later to deny this account with some heat, saying that they never fired on unarmed men.) Shortly afterwards he discovered a lost explorer wandering in a state of imbecility, who lived with him for two years before expiring, only to reveal in a moment of deathbed lucidity that his name was Gibson. (Alfred Gibson had been lost in the desert in April 1874. His body was never found and the Gibson Desert was named in his memory.) De Rougemont had also found a tree marked ‘Forrest', presumably inscribed by John Forrest, another noted explorer. His fluency in English was explained by the fact that he had returned to civilisation three years earlier, arriving in Melbourne in 1895.

At the end of the talk, Dr Keltie gave a vote of thanks to the speaker, whose information ‘was of considerable value'.
¹⁴
Six months ago, he told the meeting, he and Dr Mill had had two or three interviews at which they had questioned him and ‘were thoroughly convinced of the
bona fides
of M de Rougemont'.
¹⁵
Dr Mill concurred. While there were many at the lecture who wholeheartedly believed in de Rougemont, some were left with a few minor quibbles they wanted to clarify, others felt that the claims were an exaggeration of the truth, and others still, while believing in the good faith of the speaker, had doubts about the sensational treatment of the story in print. It was left to the
Chronicle
to point out the ‘singular coincidence'
¹⁶
of finding traces of two expeditions in the mighty deserts, and indeed de Rougemont, never afraid to egg the pudding a little more, later claimed to have found traces of the lost German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt.

This was Louis de Rougemont's finest hour, and he returned to London to the acclaim of his believers.
The Times
commented that de Rougemont's appearance had been ‘the most striking event of the meeting . . . The general impression is that M de Rougemont is telling the simple truth; that he has come to the Bristol meeting somewhat reluctantly; that some of this ethnographical information is of considerable scientific value; and that he is hardly to blame for the sensational style in which his adventures have been served up to the public.'
¹⁷
In the
Home News
de Rougemont was the ‘lion' of the meeting ‘with his wondrous story. . . . in dramatic interest there can be no doubt that his narrative wholly eclipses that of Selkirk [the real-life castaway whose adventures were to inspire the novel
Robinson Crusoe
]. It is probably the most remarkable story ever told of personal experience.'
¹⁸

Even the normally cynical
Times
gushed ‘we claim the privilege of endeavouring to believe him', enchanted by the notion that all the best virtues of human nature were ‘actually existing and in full working order among tribes whose refinement has not yet arrived at the use of clothing', nor could any heroine of fact or fiction have ‘displayed more of the tenderness and self-devotion of her sex than the native wife'.
¹⁹
A
Daily Chronicle
reporter was less susceptible and found the atmosphere of the stories reminiscent of
Boy's Own Magazine
, in which everyone was full of noble sentiments. All was ‘vague ideal and emotionally effective'.
²⁰

The new sensation soon acquired an agent, Monsieur André, who booked public lectures at St James Hall, Piccadilly and St George's Hall, Langham Place, to commence in October, with tickets ranging between 2
s
6
d
and 7
s
6
d
apiece. As overseas cablegrams poured into the offices of the
Wide World Magazine
enquiring about translation rights, George Newnes Ltd took full-page advertisements in the newspapers claiming that Louis de Rougemont was ‘The Lion of the British Association Meeting'.
²¹
The Marquess of Dufferin and Ava had, it was claimed, ‘greeted the Cannibal King as a fellow-ruler of the Empire' and ‘startling and sensational developments' were promised ‘which will assuredly bring conviction to millions' and were ‘considered by scientists to be unparalleled in the history of the world'.
²²

Others were not so convinced. The letter from ‘an Australian' had sparked off intense interest at the
Daily Chronicle
offices, unmatched by any other newspaper. On 12 September the paper published two critical letters, one from a correspondent who thought that ‘The Adventures' sounded very similar to publications by previous writers, while an experienced yachtsman, commenting that ‘to pretend that a man could keep a vessel of 40 tons and carrying 30 tons of oyster-shells, off rocks in a tide race with an oar is really too
outré
', concluded that the single-handed voyage, ‘far from convincing the nautical reader, tempts him into doubt at every turn'.
²³
On the same day the paper also published a long and passionately partisan letter from William Fitzgerald, who proposed that a committee of experts should be appointed to examine his protégé. He claimed that de Rougemont was organising an expedition to verify the truth of his adventures, and offered £500 of his own money, which he said he could ill afford, to anyone who could prove that he was an impostor who had faked the whole story. Fitzgerald's enthusiasm may have had something to do with an element of the story alluded to in the talk to the British Association, yet to be published. De Rougemont's experiences were of more than just scientific value. During his wanderings he had, he claimed, discovered a fortune in gold, rubies, opals and tin, just waiting to be picked up. Fitzgerald answered one of the searching questions already posed – the two girls de Rougemont had rescued were called Gladys and Blanche Rogers, and he believed they came from Sunderland, having sailed from there with their father in 1869, 1870 or 1871 and were never heard of again. Reporters, none of whom commented on the similarity between the names ‘Rogers' and ‘Rougemont', were at once dispatched to Sunderland, where weeks of enquiries found no trace of the supposed voyage.

Naturalist Professor Henry Forbes wrote to the
Daily Chronicle
with eighteen detailed queries about the speeches to the British Association, which he said were only a few of the points that had puzzled him, and the explorer and writer Arnold Henry Savage Landor wrote to
The Times
to state that, when he had heard that Louis de Rougemont was going to address the Association, he had withdrawn his name and declined to appear.

As criticisms multiplied, so de Rougemont's champions hurried to his defence, pointing out that he had never claimed to have any scientific training or special knowledge of the geography or wildlife of the areas he had explored, that he had been thrown into the adventures against his will, had existed for years without any means to check or record facts and had told his stories entirely from memory. If errors and embellishments had been thrown into the mix, this was the fault of his editor and need not necessarily detract from the underlying truth. The artist Alfred Pearse declared: ‘No-one who is in daily contact with him can doubt the truth of his thrilling narrative.'
²⁴
Admiral John Moresby wrote to support fully the account of riding a turtle, and an Australian named M.P. Cosgrove wrote to say he had met a Captain Peter Jensen in New Guinea in 1897, who had spoken of losing some valuable pearls in a wreck some thirty years before. Cosgrove said he had met and spoken to de Rougemont and was ‘convinced of his absolute honesty and truthfulness'.
²⁵

While the
Chronicle
declared its attitude to be that of the ‘open minded sceptic',
²⁶
there was no doubt that the editor had thoroughly taken up the cudgels. A correspondent of the paper met the famous man in an Italian restaurant, finding his face more furrowed and his hair coarser than in his photographs. A lady was heard to remark ‘no wonder the cannibals did not eat him'.
²⁷
The reporter looked at de Rougemont's hands, expecting to see some sign of the hard physical life he claimed to have led, but saw instead long clean nails, delicate tapering fingers and soft white skin. His long thin face, emphasised by a short beard, was, said the reporter, that of ‘a man who has been misunderstood, who has met severe mental disappointments; of a man who has dreamt dreams, never to be realised, who has never been able to march in step with his fellows, who has throughout life been his own enemy'.
²⁸
His manner of speaking was

not without certain impressiveness . . . . when justifying himself, his tones become singularly persuasive – one might almost say sweet. Strangely enough he speaks like a man who has been accustomed to holding forth to great or small audiences. . . . He gives every word its full meaning. He uses too considerable variety of tone, and even at times throws out a sentence in that humorously exaggerated colloquial manner which the best French comedians employ with such admirable effect.
²⁹

The reporter observed de Rougemont's ‘extraordinary powers of, possibly unconscious, assimilation. This shows itself at once in the way he takes suggestions.'
³⁰
De Rougemont, sipping a glass of lager and daintily touching a cigarette to his lips, was relaxed in the company of his questioners, and seemed unaware he was being tested. He was asked if the soles of his feet had become thickened in the years he had gone without shoes. It appeared that this idea had not struck him before, but he agreed that his soles had changed. Someone remarked that the sole would swell and form a thick soft pad like India rubber, and he readily agreed that this was what had happened to his feet. Another person suggested that the sole might become covered with a horny growth like a corn. De Rougemont, seeing nothing incompatible with these two concepts, agreed that the soles of his feet were like an enormous corn. De Rougemont spoke of the effects he meant to produce on his audiences. He intended to tell them that his wife had killed and eaten their first child. She had done it to save her husband's life, as he had been ill at the time and she was giving him suck. He thought that would make a certain sensation. Asked what disease he had been suffering from, he hesitated. Fever was suggested, and he agreed.