Henry de Monfreid

Henry de Monfreid (14 November 1879 in Leucate – 13 December 1974) was a French adventurer and author. Born in Leucate, Aude, France, he was the son of artist painter Georges-Daniel de Monfreid and knew Paul Gauguin as a child.

Monfreid was famous for his travels in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa coast from Tanzania to Aden, Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula and Suez, that he sailed in his various expeditions as adventurer, smuggler and gunrunner (during which he said he more than once escaped the Royal Navy coast-guards cutters).

In 1911, following in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud, Monfreid went to Djibouti, then a French colony, in order to trade coffee. He built a dhow for himself and used it to traverse the Red Sea. He had many adventures, eventually prospered, bought a house near the shore in Obock cove, and had a big dhow, the Altair ("Soaring Eagle"), built by a local shipyard. Towards the end of the war, he settled with his family in Obock, away from prying eyes and other colonial governors of Djibouti. His house is near the shore, which allows his wife to have the lights on the terrace if the coastguard spotlight is on the lookout. Completely absorbed in his projects, Monfreid is almost always absent and his wife suffers from his long absences and the overpowering heat of the place. She and the children often take refuge in the Mabla Mountains in the hinterland of Obock Region, which offer a little freshness. In the early twenties, he built a small house Araoué near Harar in Ethiopia, and it passes the hot season there with his family. With traffic, in particular the sale of hashish in Egypt, he made enough profit to buy a flour mill and build a power plant in Dire Dawa, boomtown emerged at the foot of Harar during the construction of the first section of the road Djibouti-Addis Ababa. Between 1912 and 1940 he ran guns through the area, dived for pearls & sea cucumbers, and smuggled hashish and morphine, which he bought from a famous German laboratory, into Egypt, earning several stays in prison. Monfreid always denied having taken part in the slave trade from Africa to Arabia.

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