But the unhappy termination of the young man’s military career was only a minor factor in an almost desperate state of mind that possessed him at this time. He had fallen in love with his cousin, Kate Doughty, afterward Lady Radcliffe, and she had found herself unable to reciprocate. After many pleadings and storms the young heir of the Tichbornes set sail from Havre in March, 1853, and reached Valparaiso, Chile, about three months later, evidently determined to seek forgetfulness in stranger latitudes. In the course of the southern summer he crossed the Andes to Brazil and reached Rio in March or early April. Here he embarked on the Bella for New York, as recited, his further plans remaining unknown. In letters to his mother he had, however, spoken vaguely of an intention to go to Australia, a hint upon which much of the following romance was erected.
When, in the following year, the insurance was paid, and the will proved, the Tichbornes accepted the death of the traveler as practically beyond question. But not so his mother. She began, after an interval, to advertise in many parts of the world for trace of her son. Such notices appeared in the leading British, American, Continental, and Australian journals without effect. Only one thing is to be learned from them, the appearance of the lost heir. He is described as being rather undersized, delicate, with sharp features, dark eyes, and straight black hair. These personal specifications will prove of importance later on.
In 1862 Roger Tichborne’s father died, and a younger son succeeded to the baronetcy and estates. This event stirred the dowager Lady Tichborne to fresh activities, and her advertisements began to appear again in newspapers and shipping journals over half the world. As a result of these injudicious clamorings for information, many a seaspawned adventurer was received by the grieving mother at Tichborne House, and many a common liar imposed on her for money and other favors. Repeated misadventures of this sort might have been considered sufficient experience to cause the dowager to desist from her folly, but nothing seemed to move her from her fixed idea, and the fantastic reports and rumors brought her by every wandering sharper had the effect of strengthening her in her fond belief.
Lady Tichborne’s pertinacity, while it had failed to restore her son, had not been without its collateral effects. Among them was the wide dissemination of a romantic story and the enlistment of public sympathy. A large part of the newspaper-reading British populace soon came to look upon the lady as a high example of motherly devotion, to sympathize with her point of view, and gradually to conclude that she was right, and that Roger Tichborne was indeed alive, somewhere in the antipodes. This belief was not entirely confined to emotional strangers, as appears from the fact that Kate Doughty, the object of the young nobleman’s bootless love, refused various offers of marriage and steadfastly remained single, pending a termination of all doubt as to the fate of her hapless lover.
Thus, in one way and another, a great legend grew up. The Tichborne case came to be looked upon in some quarters as another of the great mysteries of disappearance. In various distant lands volunteer seekers took up the quest for Roger Tichborne, impelled sometimes by the fascinating powers of mystery, but more often by the hope of reward.
In 1865 a man named Cubitt started a missing friends’ bureau in Sydney, New South Wales, a fact which he advertised in the London newspapers. Lady Tichborne, still far from satisfied of her son’s death, saw the notice in The Times and communicated with Cubitt. As a result of this contact, Lady Tichborne was notified, in November, 1865, that a man had been discovered who answered the description of her missing “boy.” This fellow had been found keeping a small butcher shop in the town of Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and was there known by the name of Thomas Castro, which he admitted to be assumed.
Lady Tichborne, excited and elated, communicated at once and did not fail to give the impression that the discovery and return of her eldest son would be a feat to earn a very high reward, since he was the heir to a large property, and since she was herself “most anxious to hear.” Australia was then, to be sure, much farther away than to-day. There were no cables and only occasional steamers. It often took months for a letter to pass back and forth. Thus, after painful delays, Lady Tichborne received a second communication in which she was told that there could be little doubt about the identification, as the butcher of Wagga Wagga had owned to several persons that he was indeed not Thomas Castro, but a British “nobleman” in disguise, and to at least one person that he was none other than Roger Tichborne.
Not long afterward Lady Tichborne received her first letter from her missing “son”. He addressed her as “Dear Mama,” misspelled the Tichborne name by inserting a “t” after the “i,” spelled common words abominably, and handled the English language with a fine show of ignorance. Finally he referred to a birthmark and an incident at Brighton, of which Lady Tichborne had not the slightest recollection. At first she was considerably damped by these discrepancies and mistakes of the claimant, as the man in Wagga Wagga came shortly to be termed. But Lady Tichborne soon rallied from her doubts and asserted her absolute confidence in the genuineness of the far-away pretender to the baronetcy.
Her stand in the matter was not inexplicable, even when it is recalled that subsequent letters from Australia revealed the claimant to be ignorant of common family traditions and totally confused about himself, even going so far as to say that he had been a common soldier in the carabineers, when Roger Tichborne had been an officer, and referring to his schooling at Winchester, whereas the Roman Catholic Tichbornes had, of course, sent their son to Stonyhurst. Lady Tichborne apparently ascribed such lapses to the “terrible ordeal” her boy had suffered, and she was not the only one to recognize that Roger Tichborne had himself, because of his early French training and the meagerness of his subsequent education, misspelled just such words as appeared incorrectly in the letters, and he had misused his English in a very similar fashion.
These details are interesting rather than important. Whatever their final significance, Lady Tichborne sent money to Australia to pay for the claimant’s passage home. He arrived in England, unannounced, in the last month of 1866, and visited several localities, among them Wapping, a London district which played a vital part in what was to come. He also visited the vicinity of Tichborne Park and made numerous inquiries there. Only after these preliminaries did he cross to Paris, where he summoned Lady Tichborne to meet him. When she called at his hotel she found him in bed complaining of a bad cold. The room was dimly lighted, and she recounted afterward that he kept his face turned to the wall most of the time she spent with him.