Niagara: A History of the Falls (20 page)

Farini vanished from public view for more than a year. This was undoubtedly the period when, as he told Currelly, he organized a small circus and took it to the Black Sea, Cairo, and the capitals of Europe. When he returned in 1871, he had put together a new act involving a young woman of spectacular beauty whom he called “Mademoiselle Lulu.” He also that year married an Englishwoman named Alice Carpenter; they had no children.

Lulu quickly became the toast of London and Paris, performing the spectacular “Lulu leap” in which she defied gravity by jumping twenty-five feet from the stage to her trapeze bar, executing a triple somersault en route. The crowds were mystified, not realizing that Farini had invented an elasticized catapult that fitted into the stage and propelled her to the bar. Lulu appeared before royalty and was eulogized in
Punch
. Stagedoor johnnies tried to meet her, men of high position sent gifts and offers of marriage; but Lulu remained a recluse until it was revealed in 1878, to the embarrassment of many, that she was actually a man – none other than Farini’s adopted son, El Niño.

Meanwhile, Farini had been hired to resuscitate the failing fortunes of the Royal Westminster Aquarium. He quickly made it pay again by introducing a series of startling acts, the most spectacular of which featured another female protégé, Rossa Matilda Richter, billed as “Zazel, the Beautiful Human Cannonball.” Farini had combined his catapult device with a large mortar, complete with flash powder, to send Zazel hurtling from its mouth and through the air into a net. Farini also exhibited a series of human oddities including Krao, the Missing Link, the Man with the Iron Skull, the Hypnotized Horse, Captain Constentenus, the world’s most tattooed man, and a group of natives from the Kalahari Desert whom he called “earth-men.”

The Kalahari interpreter told him so many stories of diamonds littering the desert that Farini decided to see for himself. Divorced from his wife, he set off in 1884 to America to pick up Lulu (El Niño), now a photographer in Connecticut. Then the two adventurers headed for Africa and the Kalahari, where Farini claimed to have discovered the ruins of a lost city. His explorations brought him some academic notice. His subsequent book about his adventures in the Kalahari was described by the
Era
as “a standard work on its subject.”

Farini also brought back a collection of bulbs and seeds that he presented to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. By now he was achieving a reputation as a horticulturist. He had already written
Ferns That Grow in New Zealand
, and now, after cultivating sixty thousand flowering tubers on his estate at Forest Hill, he published his best-selling work,
How to Grow Begonias
. That led to a fellowship in the Royal Horticultural Society. In his spare time, Farini amused himself by writing poems, short stories, and even the lyrics for a song that Anna Mueller, his new wife, had composed.

For this extraordinary man had selected for himself an extraordinary mate – in the Kaiser’s court, of all places. She was a prominent and aristocratic German pianist with impeccable credentials – a former student of Franz Liszt, a niece of Richard Wagner, a daughter of the Kaiser’s aide-de-camp. Though he was fifteen years her senior, she easily succumbed to his well-honed charms. A seasoned gallant who spoke seven languages, he had a quick and agile mind that few women could resist.

His many activities included that of inventor – at a time when inventors were the folk heroes of the age. The Ontario Archives has three files stuffed with descriptions of Farini’s inventions, including a sliding theatrical chair, a new telegraphic apparatus, and a more efficient watering can (for begonias, no doubt). In the old days he had been front and centre on tightrope and trapeze. Now he was a shadowy impresario, lurking in the background, manipulating the careers of such luminaries as Lily Langtry and Sandow the Strong Man. Who could resist him? George Du Maurier is said to have based his sinister character, Svengali, on Farini. Certainly, with his long, jet-black, forked beard, he looked the part.

Farini and his wife returned to Canada in 1899. Madame Farini taught music in Toronto while her husband took up oil painting, a new hobby, exhibiting with such Canadian masters as C.W. Jefferys and J.E.H. MacDonald. He continued to study art after he and his wife returned to Germany. They were caught there in the Great War, detained but not interned, thanks no doubt to his wife’s background and influence at the German court. Farini passed the time by writing a thirty-volume account of all the Great War battles from the German point of view. It was never published.

Back in Canada, Farini returned with his wife to his old home town, Port Hope, and there, well past the age of eighty, he continued to paint and to exercise. He walked his tightrope for fun, took five-mile bicycle trips, and exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition, where in 1923 one of his paintings won an award. He died in January 1929 in his ninety-first year, doomed by a formidable constitution to outlive his own fame and to expire all but forgotten, surrounded by his paintings, his African mementos, his circus posters, and, of course, his fading memories of the golden summer nearly seventy years before when he had challenged the great Blondin on the tightrope at Niagara and basked in the wide-eyed approbation of “the wives and daughters of some of the most prominent men in America.”

5
Into the maelstrom

For decades the rapids of Niagara were overshadowed by the presence of the thundering cataract. Above the Falls, for almost a mile, the river raged and swirled around Goat Island. A mile and half below, the six-foot whitecaps of the Whirlpool Rapids fascinated and repelled those spectators who viewed them from the safe perch of Roebling’s railway suspension bridge.

The rapids, indeed, were almost as spectacular as the Falls themselves, but it took Charles Blondin and his imitators to focus attention on what Nicholas Woods,
The Times
correspondent, called “a perfect hell of waters.” Woods confessed to “a horrible yearning in your heart to plunge in and join the mad whirl,” but even with this thought uppermost in his mind, he admitted, “you shrink instinctively from the dreadful brink.”

Woods stood in the enclosure with the Prince of Wales’s party in 1860, watching in “a very sickness of terror” as the rope dancer, who had chosen an even more perilous site for his rope walk, more than two hundred feet high above where the “waters boil and roar and plunge on in massive waves at the rate of some twenty miles an hour.” William Dean Howells, then a rising literary figure, was also present and marvelled at “their mighty march … their gigantic leaps and lunges, when they break ranks and their procession becomes a mere onward tumult without form or order.” Viewing the rapids was an unexpected bonus to the Niagara experience. He “had not counted on the Rapids taking me by the throat, as it were, and making my heart stop.”

The following year, one man, Joel Robinson, did what all had considered impossible. He took a small and fragile steamboat successfully through the raging waters, a feat so terrible that it made him old before his time and was not repeated until 1980, when it became the centrepiece of a motion picture. Robinson was a riverman – a bland designation that disguised the feats of derring-do for which this small but exclusive breed has become famous. Joel Robinson was the first.

He was already famous for his successful rescue and salvage efforts. In 1838, a man named Chapin fell off the Goat Island bridge and into the rapids and was marooned on a tiny islet in the heart of the torrent. Robinson took off from nearby Bath Island and in his red skiff threaded his way to the site and rescued the victim. Three years later he repeated the deed when a man named Allen broke one oar of his rowboat and was marooned on the farthest out of the tiny Three Sisters islands in the perilous rapids on the southwest side of Goat Island. Robinson, using lengths of strong, light cord, managed to haul Allen free.

Until that time, the little islets in the rapids just above the brink of the Falls had all been considered inaccessible. But some time later, in 1855, Robinson was able to salvage the contents of a canal boat trapped precariously on another rocky pinpoint. These exploits took place a stone’s throw from the lip of the cascade and called for daring, skill, and iron nerves. A single unwise manoeuvre would have sent Robinson and his skiff plunging over the precipice.

The riverman was tall, fair, and blue eyed, cool and deliberate, easy going, kindly, “gentle as a girl.” There was a calmness about him, a serenity that made him a stranger to fear. A first-rate swimmer and skilful oarsman, he loved the river as another might love a turbulent and demanding woman. The rapids delighted him. It was said that he was almost glad when he heard that someone was trapped in them, for it gave him an excuse to plunge in and help.

He was no boaster, but after one of his exploits he enjoyed playing to the crowd. When he rescued Chapin, he climbed up on one of the taller cedars on the little island and waved a green branch to the spectators. When he returned, he distributed a boatload of green boughs to the crowd, who replaced them with coins thrown into the boat and then carried him on their shoulders into the village. Fishing and sailing parties found his presence reassuring. To some, he was indispensable.

When Blondin and Farini were cavorting high above the gorge, Robinson was piloting the little steamer
Maid of the Mist
, which had in 1854 replaced an earlier vessel of the same name. The
Maid
had been built as a tourist excursion craft, shuttling back and forth across the river so close to the Falls that the passengers, dressed in oilskins, were drenched by the spray. George W. Holley, a longtime Niagara resident and chronicler, reported that the journey aboard the
Maid
beneath the spray of the cataract was so impressive that many were not content with a single trip but returned time after time to enjoy the experience. “The admiration which the visitor felt as he passed quietly along near the American Fall was changed into awe when he began to feel the mighty pulse of the great deep just below the tower, then swung round into the white foam directly in front of the Horseshoe, and saw the sky of waters falling toward him. And he seemed to be lifted on wings as he sailed swiftly down the rushing stream through a baptism of spray.”

Now, having lost her U.S. landing rights, the
Maid
had become unprofitable, and her owners proposed to sell her as she lay at the Canadian dock. But the only offer received for the vessel was conditional on her being delivered at Queenston. That would mean the unthinkable – a trip downriver, through the rapids and the Whirlpool and then into the gorge below, a journey no one had ever made. But Robinson agreed to make it as captain and pilot and managed to secure two other volunteers, an engineer, James H. Jones, and a mechanic, James Mclntyre, as crew.

The vessel was a single-stack paddlewheel steamer, seventy-two feet long with a draught of eight feet, powered by a one-hundred-horsepower engine. When she set off on the afternoon of June 15, 1861, from the dock just above the Niagara Suspension Bridge, few of the crowd that saw her depart expected to see Robinson and his crew again alive. One hundred yards below the eddy in which the
Maid
was safely tethered, the river plunged sharply into the rapids that led directly to the Whirlpool. From there to Queenston, it was “one wild, turbulent rush and whirl of water, without a square foot of smooth surface in the whole distance.”

At three o’clock, Robinson took his place at the wheel and jangled the starting bell. With a shriek from her whistle, the little craft swung out into midstream and shot into the rapids under the bridge. Robinson and Mclntyre both gripped the wheel with all the strength at their command, only to find themselves impotent in the raging water. Robinson struggled vainly to wrestle the ship into the inside curve of the rapids, but she was swept directly by a fierce crosscurrent toward the outer curve. A jet of water struck the rudder, and he felt her heel over. Another column dashed up her starboard side and carried off her smokestack. The vessel trembled so violently that Robinson thought she would crumble to pieces. Another shock flung him on his back, while Mclntyre was thrown against the starboard side of the open wheelhouse.

As she plunged into the Whirlpool, Robinson scrambled to his feet and placed one boot firmly on Mclntyre’s prostrate body to prevent his rolling overboard. Below the hatches, Jones was on his knees uttering a prayer that he later believed was his salvation. Now, for a moment, the
Maid
rode at even keel. Robinson, seizing the wheel, managed to turn her through the neck of the vortex while receiving another drenching from the towering waves. The rest of the trip was very much as he had imagined it – like the swift sailing of a large bird in downward flight.

Robinson never really recovered his sangfroid. His wife declared that he “was twenty years older when he came home that day than when he went out.” He sank wearily into his chair, determined to abandon the river forever. In his neighbour’s words, “his manner and appearance were changed. Calm and deliberate before, he became thoughtful and serious afterward. He had been borne, as it were, in the arms of a power so mighty that its impress was stamped on his features and on his mind. Through a slightly opened door he had seen a vision which awed and subdued him. He became reverent in a moment. He grew venerable in an hour.”

Chapter Six

1
The cave of the forty thieves
2
Private greed
3
A ramble on Goat Island
4
Saving Niagara from itself
5
Casimir Gzowski to the rescue