The blue-eyed rebel Arthur Rimbaud was 21 years old when he signed a six-year contract as a mercenary in the Dutch colonial army in 1876 and went with it to present-day Indonesia. However, after only two weeks he deserted, fleeing into the jungle, leaving everything he owned to be sold for the benefit of the local population.
What happened next, from the middle of August to the end of December of the same year, when he returned to France, remained a big secret. Unlike other journeys about which he left a trace in his letters, Rimbaud never wrote about Java.
More than 130 years later, the American writer Jamie James follows the tracks of the poet Rimbaud to try to solve the mystery, France Press reports.
"It's like a Sherlock Holmes story," James said, alluding to the detective work required to solve the wandering enigma of the poet, who was born in 1854 and died at age 37. There are very few details about his departure to the island of Java and what happened in Indonesia when he joined the Dutch colonial army.
"He never wrote about Java, because he was a fugitive. He could have been arrested by the Dutch army because he escaped from it," said this writer who has been interested in the poet since childhood. The only thing known about Rimbaud's journey to the East is that it started on June 10, 1876, when he was 21 years old, and that he went to the Dutch East Indies or present-day Indonesia. It's a typically capricious decision by Rimbaud, who signed a six-year stint in the Dutch colonial army.
The author of "The Drunken Ship" and a big fan of alcohol
Rimbaud must have been very happy that gin was not only allowed as a drink, but was seen as a way of instilling courage in the soldiers. However, he stayed only two weeks in the garrison. In August he deserted leaving everything he owned to be sold for the benefit of the local population. He returned to northern France with his mother on December 31, 1876. Between the date of his disappearance (August 15) and his reappearance (December 31) there is a mystery of four and a half months, which has set off a series of speculations.
Paterne Berricon, who never met the poet but called himself his biographer after marrying his sister, claimed that his son-in-law hid in the jungle and was taught to survive by orangutans - despite the fact that the ape species had disappeared from Java two centuries ago.
"No, Rambo wasn't Tarzan," James said.
Some experts who studied the life and work of this poet claimed that he sailed back to Europe, while others believe that he boarded a Scottish ship that sailed from Java on August 30 and arrived in Ireland on December 1876, XNUMX.
“It's possible that's true,” James said, although there's no evidence that Rambo was on board. James traveled several times to Java to find evidence of Rimbaud's whereabouts for four and a half months and despite the lack of new information his book attempts to interpret the troubled poet's state of mind. James said the poet had not been the subject of much research, so the chances of finding out what happened during that period were very slim.
"The odds of that are like snow in Bali," he said.
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