DE ROUGEMONT.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XLV, Issue 12016, 4 March 1920, Page 6

DE ROUGEMONT.

A MAlf OF ADVENTURES. STOKIES THAT NEEDED SALT. ■MM T's* la connection with the recent cable messages stating that “Lotus de Rougemont” was ill in a London Hospital, the Sydney San says •■— A man who subsequently described himself as the ‘"hero of the most remarkable adventures that a man ever lived to tell,” stepped ashore at London early in March, 1898, from a vessel that came from Wellington, New Zealand. He said his name was Louis de Eougemont, and he was born in France. Eat It wasn’t, and he wasn’t. His name was Henri Louis Grien, and he was a Swiss, born near Yverdon, a town in the Canton Vaud, on the borders of Lake Neuchatol.

Still, that didn’t matter much. The main point was his story. That mattered. He said it was true. It wasn’t. At any rate, it was generally conceded now that the striking points in it were nothing more than fiction.

It was a most extraordinary narrative. He wrote it all for the Wide World Magazine, and that periodical puolished it in serial form. At first they took the author’s word for its veracity, but later thov made inquiries, and although they continued printing the yarn, they advised their readers to put some salt with it.

The alleged adventures of this Louis de Eougemont, as he called himself, were really amazing. First of all, his story said, he set out from Switzerland to travel to the East, but at Singapore in 1863—he was 19 years old then—he was introduced to a pearlfisther, and agreed to join him in an expedition to “untouched pearling grounds about New Guinea. So they set out in a 40-ton schooner, Louis de Eougemont went on to tell of the huge fortunes that came from oysters, and of. the immense octopus that “rose from the sea, to the horror of the spectators,' and, extending its flexible tentacles, enveloped an entire boat, with a pearl fisher in it, and dragged the whola down to the depths.” He described, too, while bathing in the sea, how he miraculously escaped from “a monstrous fish, 30ft long, with an enormous hairy head, and a fierce fantastic moustache.” It reared right out of the water at him, he said, hut somehow he reached the schooner safely. RIDING TURTLES AND WHALES

Then came enormous seas, a tidal wave, and the wreck. The adventurer was cast on to a small sandbank in the middle of the ocean, where he cultivated a crop of maize by mixing sand and turtles’ blood in turtles’ shells, and planting a few stra3 r seeds. There was a lagoon on the sandbank, and in the Jagoon were huge turtles. Those two facts provided Louis de Rougemont with much entertainment. Wading out to where the turtles were, he caught a big 600-pounder and calmly sitting astride of it, made joy-rides round the lagoon in great style. A kick in the turtle’s left eye turned him to the right, and a kick in the right eye to the left. It was easy. But later in the story he rode ashore fsom the ocean on a whale’s head, and thought nothing of jumping aboard a shark. £Then he was captured by cannibals, who took him away to wild Australia, and gave him more thrills, t There were blood-curdling descriptions of terrible slaughter, of his exciting battles with alligators myriads of rats, and Hsnakes, and leeches,'and enormous clouds of locusts and mosquitoes, and all sorts of things. Finally, he became a great chief, and married Yamba, a “beautiful aboriginal. ” So the story runs, but it cannot be described breifly.

Some years ago, de Rougemont came to Australia to fulfil a vaudeville engagement, but when he made his first appearance on the stage of the Melbourne Opera House the audience gave him “the bird, ” and his engagement was curtailed.