Henry de Monfreid

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 known 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 Royal Navy coast-guard cutters).

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.

He made enough profit through trafficking (the sale of hashish in Egypt in particular) to buy a flour mill and build a power plant in Dire Dawa, a boomtown that had emerged at the foot of Harar during the construction of the first section of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa road.

Between 1912 and 1940 he ran guns through the area, dived for pearls and sea cucumbers, and smuggled hashish and morphine, which he bought from a famous German laboratory, into Egypt, earning several stays in prison.

During World War II, Monfreid, who was now more than sixty years old, was captured by the British and deported to Kenya as he had served the Italians and his wife, born Armgart Freudenfeld, was daughter to the former German governor of Alsace-Lorraine.

There he played piano, wrote, painted, and quietly raised in his garden a plantation of opium poppies, and adopted the habit of using the local grocer's scales to weigh his crop and divide it into daily portions.

Eventually Monfreid was betrayed to the local gendarmerie, but he escaped prosecution; at that time opium was used only by unconventional artists, like his friend Jean Cocteau.