Who was "German Harry"?

" ............. we reached the welcome shelter of Deliverance Island. Perhaps half a mile or so in circumference, ringed with a beach of white coral sand, crowned with coconut palms dancing in the breeze, and surrounded by a wide fringing reef, it resembled an island such as might be imagined in a boyhood adventure book ........"

Deliverance Island, the island in Torres Strait where German Harry lived for many years, is the nearest part of Australia to Indonesia. Although it is about 100 miles from the Australian mainland, it is only 25 miles from the coast of Papua. It is about 35 miles from the mouth of the Bensbach River which forms the southern part of the border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The island was so named by Captain William W. Bampton of the ship "Shah Hormuzear", who spent 73 nerve-wracked days trying to find his way through reef-studded Torres Strait in 1793 in company with the whaler "Chesterfield". It was at Deliverance Island that the two ships finally reached clear water.

 

The story "German Harry" was one of W. Somerset Maugham's briefer efforts. After Maugham's visit to the Torres Strait, it first appeared in the "American Cosmopolitan" for January 1924 and was republished in the book "Cosmopolitans".

Maugham gathered the material for the story in 1922 when he was making a leisurely journey from Indonesia to Torres Strait and back. He had heard about German Harry - he was really a Dane called Henry Evolt - when he visited Thursday Island, off the northern tip of Australia. He was so intrigued by what he learned that he resolved to pay Harry a visit.

German Harry was a hermit and the last of New Guinea's beachcombers. For almost forty years he had lived on Deliverance Island, a small cay, some thirty miles from the mouth of the Bensbach River which divides West New Guinea from the then Australian territory of Papua.

Born at Helsingfors, Denmark, in 1848 (or 1849 or 1854), he shipped before the mast as a lad of 16 and for many years sailed the oceans of the world. Coming to Newcastle, New South Wales, in the eighteen-eighties, he joined the Austrian ship Gibraud bound for Batavia (now Jakarta). The ship was wrecked on Woppa Reef in the Torres Strait and German Harry finished up in Thursday Island.

There he met an old shipmate, Louis the Greek, bought a half-share in his beche-de-mer boat, and fished and traded off the New Guinea coast for the next six years. The partnership prospered. By 1890 they had established their headquarters in Deliverance Island, to where they could retire from the pest- and fever-ridden coast, and also be safe from the fierce Tugeri headhunters who made periodic forays along the coast from West New Guinea.

It was to be out of reach of wild New guinea natives such as these that German Harry and his friend Louis the Greek settled on Deliverance Island in 1890. John Earnshaw took the photograph on the Koembe River, west of Merauke, in 1927 when he spent some time with Dick Roche, a bird of paradise hunter.

For another nine years all went well until another adventurer came to the island to work for them. This was "Joe Austen", or Joseph Augustin de Paoli, also known as "French Joe". He was a Corsican soldier of fortune who had fought in the Crimean and Franco-Prussian Wars, had joined the Communist uprising in Paris in 1871, and had been arrested and exiled to New Caledonia. However, on the voyage to New Caledonia, he escaped from the transport at Melbourne, and from there began a wandering life in the Pacific which eventually took him to Deliverance Island.

His arrival at Deliverance Island broke up the partnership between German Harry and Louis the Greek, for one night he decamped with their boat loaded with turtle shell and other trade, and sold the lot in Thursday Island. After this bitter blow Louis the Greek drifted away and German Harry was left alone on the island.

This ramshackle building was German Harry's dining hut. Outside, where he cooked his meals, was a mound of turtle-flipper bones several feet high - the midden of half a life of solitary meals

Except for a few months spent in Thursday Island in 1912, his solitude was almost unbroken for the twenty-eight years. In later years his greatest fear was that authority might wrest him from his little island and send him to the frightening care of a home for the aged near Brisbane. He was therefore always sour and suspicious when strangers arrived at Deliverance, and it was thus that Maugham found him when he reached the island in 1922 in a lugger that he had chartered in Thursday Island to carry him across the island-studded waters of Torres Strait to the Dutch settlement of Merauke.

In writing of his encounter with the old hermit, Maugham also prophesied his end. He wrote, "And then I foresaw the end. One day a pearl fisher would land on the island and German Harry would not be waiting for him, silent and suspicious, at the water's edge. He would go up to the hut and there, lying on the bed, unrecognizable, he would see all that remained of what had once been a man."

In March 1928, some four years after Maugham's story was published, John Earnshaw and Dick Roche called at Deliverance Island. The time of their arrival was just right for them to play the final role in the German Harry story a la Maugham:

 

"German Harry" Henry Evoldt or Henrik Enevoldsen, born on 14 October 1848, his remains found on 24 March 1928
Published January 1943 in PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY

 

"Deliverance Harry" Johannes Henrik Enevoldsen, born in 1854, died on 27 January 1928 which was the last date marked on his "calendar"
Published June 1946 in PACIFIC ISLANDS MONTHLY

 

I let John Earnshaw have the last word:

 

Indeed, German Harry's end is a story in itself.

 

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

So as not to spoil a good story, I am adding this as a postscript because the "real" German Harry was another Dane by the name of Soren Christensen (or Jep - or Jeppe - Soren Christiansen) who was a(n) (in-)famous man in North Australian waters and who lived in Australia, New Guinea and different island and died in Sydney in 1912 or 1913. A well-known Danish author, Mr. B. Rosenkilde Nielsen, wrote a book, "Danish Pioneers in the Pacific Ocean" which was published in Copenhagen in 1944 (in Danish, of course). In it he mentions both German Harries, Maugham's "Deliverance Harry" who died on his island in 1928, and the "German Harry" who died in Sydney in 1912 or 1913. A Swedish book about the latter, "The Last South Sea Trader" (Swedish title "Den Sidste Sydhavstrader"), was mentioned to me by Patrick Lindahl in 2013 - click here. A blog about the "real" German Harry, Soren Christensen, may be the story for another blog for another day.