Henry de Monfreid came from an artistic French family and grew up on the Mediterranean coast doing a lot of sailing with his parents. He studied engineering and worked in the dairy industry for a while: after the collapse of one of his business enterprises he moved to Djibouti in 1911, working as a coffee-buyer travelling around Ethiopia. Eventually, in 1913, he made the career-move that he's most famous for, buying a sailing dhow in Djibouti and using it to trade in the southern Red Sea. In the 1930s, he moved back to France and started to make a name for himself as a writer of adventure stories. Like many adventure-writers of the time, he was captivated by fascist ideas and became very close to Mussolini and Pétain, although this didn't seem to do his long-term career any harm: in old age he was still scheming with friends like Cocteau (who bought drugs from him) to get himself elected to the Académie Française.

In this first volume of memoirs, he describes his adventures during his first year as a skipper, pearl-fishing, trying to set up a cultured-pearl farm, and doing a bit of light espionage and gun-running. There's a lot of fascinating, detailed description of the natural hazards of sailing on the Red Sea, with its many reefs and hidden rocks, powerful tidal currents, and sometimes very dangerous local winds. But he also writes a lot about the people he's working with, their jobs — especially the hazards of the pearl-divers' lives — their families, the communities they come from, and so on.

Being a European adventurer of the time, of course it almost goes without saying that he speaks fluent Arabic and Somali, dresses in local style, and has converted to Islam. But despite all that, the colonial authorities still find it a nuisance, in the prickly political situation of 1913-14, to have a rogue Frenchman going around doing all the illegal things you have to do to make money out of running a dhow. So, eventually, goaded by British complaints about the number of people shooting at their troops with French-made guns, the authorities in Djibouti decide to get him out from under their feet by (as he tells it) framing him for something he didn't do and then allowing him to volunteer for the trenches instead of going to jail.

I don't think Monfreid really expects us to take everything here as literal truth — there are some very Tintin-esque moments, like the one where he sinks a pirate dhow by tossing a lit stick of dynamite on its deck at just the right moment. But it's a great story, if a little rambling, and it's obviously told with a great deal of affection for the region and its culture and people. ( )

Une vie d'aventure à faire rêver les plus blasés. On ne se lasse pas des ces sorties en mer et des dangers traversés dans une langue vivante. ( )

De l'aventure brute sans fioriture. ( )