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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). ==Life== 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. 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. He converted to Islam during this period, which included undergoing a circumcision and taking a Muslim name: ''Abd-el-Haï'' ("Slave of The Living One"). During the 1930s, Monfreid was persuaded by Joseph Kessel to write about his adventures, and the stories became bestsellers. 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. After the war Monfreid retired to a mansion in a small village of ''la France profonde'', in Ingrandes (département of the Indre), France. There he played piano, wrote, painted, and quietly raised in his garden a plantation of opium poppies, and took the habit of using the local grocer's scales to weigh his crop and divide it into daily portions. The grocer's paid no heed, since Monfreid's household were good customers, and Monfreid himself bought huge amounts of honey, which he took to drive off the costive effects of opium. Eventually Monfreid was given away to the local gendarmerie, but he escaped prosecution; at that time opium was used only by unconventional artists, like his friend Jean Cocteau. Monfreid boasted in his books about his ability to manipulate and divert prying law enforcers through clever speech. Monfreid settled down to a life of writing, turning out around 70 books over the next 30 years. Only a handful of his books have been translated into English and are difficult to find. His daughter Gisèle de Monfreid wrote ''Mes secrets de la Mer Rouge'', describing what life was like with her father and the dangerous life he led. During barren periods, when writing was not bringing in enough money, Monfreid relied upon mortgaging the family collection of Gauguin paintings. Only after his death were these discovered to be fake. "I have lived a rich, restless, magnificent life", Monfreid declared a few days before dying in 1974 at the age of 95. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Henry de Monfreid」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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