III
THE VANISHED ARCHDUKE
One of the most engrossing of modern mysteries is that which hides the final destination of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, better known to a generation of newspaper readers as John Orth. In the dawn of July 13, 1890, the bark Santa Margarita,[2] flying the flag of an Austrian merchantman, though her owner and skipper was none other than this wandering scion of the imperial Hapsburgs, set sail from Ensenada, on the southern shore of the great estuary of the Plata, below Buenos Aires, and forthwith vanished from the earth. With her went Johann Salvator, his variety-girl wife and a crew of twenty-six. Though search has been made in every thinkable port, through the distant archipelagoes of the Pacific, in ten thousand outcast towns, and though emissaries have visited all the fabled refuges of missing men, from time to time, over a period of nearly forty years, no sight of any one connected with the lost ship has ever been got, and no man knows with certainty what fate befell her and her princely master.
[2] Sometimes written Sainte Marguerite.
The enigma of his passing is not the only circumstance of curious doubt and romantic coloration that hedges the career of this imperial adventurer. His story, from the beginning, is one marked with dramatic incidents. As much of it as bears upon the final episode will have to be related.
The Archduke Johann Salvator was born at Florence on the twenty-fifth day of November, 1852, the youngest son of Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany, and Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies. He was, accordingly, a second cousin of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. At the baptismal font young Johann received enough names to carry any man blissfully through life, his full array having been Johann Nepomuk Salvator Marie Josef Jean Ferdinand Balthazar Louis Gonzaga Peter Alexander Zenobius Antonin.
Archduke Johann was still a child when the Italian revolutionists drove out his father and later united Tuscany to the growing kingdom of Victor Emanuel. So the hero of this account was reared in Austria and educated for the army. Commissioned as a stripling, he rose rapidly in rank for reasons quite other than his family connections. The young prince was endowed with a good mind and notable for independence of thought. He felt, as he expressed it, that he ought to earn his pay, an opinion which led to indefatigable military studies and some well-intentioned, but ill-advised writings. First, the young archduke discovered what he considered faults in the artillery, and he wrote a brochure on the subject. The older heads didn’t like it and had him disciplined. Later on, Johann made a study of military organization and wrote a well-known pamphlet called “Education or Drill,” wherein he attacked the old method of training soldiers as automatons and advised the mental development of the rank and file, in line with policies now generally adopted. But such advanced ideas struck the military masters of fifty years ago as bits of heresy and anarchy. Archduke Johann was disciplined by removal from the army and the withdrawal of his commission. At thirty-five he had reached next to the highest possible rank and been cashiered from it. This in 1887.
Johann Salvator had, however, been much more than a progressive soldier man. He was an accomplished musician, composer of popular waltzes, an oratorio and the operetta “Les Assassins.” He was an historian and publicist, of eminent official standing at least, having collaborated with Crown Prince Rudolf in the widely distributed work, “The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture,” which was published in 1886. He was also a distinguished investigator of psychic phenomena, his library on this subject having been the most complete in Europe—a fact suggestive of something abnormal.
Personally the man was both handsome and charming. He was, in spite of imperial rank and military habitude, democratic, simple, friendly, and unaffected. He liked to live the life of a gentleman, with diverse interests in life, now playing the gallant in Vienna—to the high world of the court and the half world of the theater by turns; again retiring to his library and his studies, sometimes vegetating at his country estates and working on his farms. Official trammels and the rigid etiquette of the ancient court seemed to irk him. Still, he seems to have suffered keen chagrin over his dismissal from the army.
Johann Salvator had, from adolescence, been a close personal friend of the Austrian crown prince. This intimacy had extended even to participation in some of the personal and sentimental escapades for which the ill-starred Rudolf was remarkable. Apparently the two men hardly held an opinion apart, and it was accepted that, with the death of the aging emperor and the accession of his son, Johann Salvator would be a most powerful personage.