The man really exhibited an unusual acquaintance with wild beasts, and he summed up the picturesque argument for the bill when he said: “If there is vegetation in a river, the hippopotamus will never leave the river. If you had the hippopotamus in Louisiana and it ate up all your water plants you would be quite willing to let the hippo live down there. You see the water plants have to live on a certain amount of air, and the fish live on a certain amount of air. Neither the plant nor the fish can live on air that is not there. As the plant is the stronger, and is able to take the air from above, it will draw it at the bottom and draw it from the top, and the fish is suffocated in the water. Then when a storm comes and blows the water plants, which are floating, all to one side, the fish are netted up against them and kept in one place until they die. These plants exhaust the air in the water that is passing through the fishes’ gills and that destroys the fish.” I wish there were space here to reproduce all the proceedings of that hearing—it is historic vaudeville: a German spy teaching a class of American congressmen about the hippo, and suggesting subtly that when they purchase a fleet of the great beasts for the Louisiana bayous, they let him round them up. He would have done it if there had been American money in it.
1. Fritz Duquesne as a War Correspondent 2. Duquesne as a Boer Soldier
3. From Duquesne’s Press Notices 4. As a British Prisoner of War
5. A Prisoner’s Bank Note Found in Duquesne’s Effects
American money appeared from another source, however, in 1911. Duquesne had been working in a desultory way for the moving pictures, and he interested one Hite, a functionary in the Thanhouser Film Company, in a plan to explore Central America with a moving-picture camera. Ashton said he also obtained financial support from Frank Seiberling of the Goodyear Rubber Company of Akron, a great patron of sports, and the financier of the ill-fated balloon “Akron” in which Walter Wellman once tried to cross the Atlantic. He set sail in 1911 for Jamaica, where he enlisted the finances of his father-in-law, Wortley, in the project, and then moved on to Guatemala. There he was suspected of revolutionary activities, and after cabling Washington and receiving a satisfactory report from the state department, he was released, and made his way through Honduras to Nicaragua. There he spent some time, and saw something of O’Connell, the railroad man—enough to receive a pass over all lines of the Nicaraguan railroad.
In 1913 he returned to the United States. Among the papers which we discovered was a record of an insurance policy for a maximum of $80,000 worth of moving picture film at $4 a foot, which Duquesne took out with the Mannheim Insurance Company in New York on December 17. He was setting out on another expedition, and he wished to insure his reels of film on shipboard from
“seas, fires, pirates, rovers, assailing thieves, jettison, barratry of the master and mariners, and all other perils, losses and misfortunes that have or shall come to the hurt, detriment or damage of the said goods and merchandise or any part thereof.”
By a separate certificate the company also insured Duquesne against further risk, thus:
“It is agreed that this insurance covers only the risk of capture, seizure or destruction by men-of-war, by letters of marque, by taking at sea, arrests, restraints, detainments or acts of kings, princes and people authorized by and in prosecution of hostilities between belligerent nations....”
and off to the Spanish Main and the pirates and the assailing thieves sailed Fritz Duquesne.
His migrations during the years of 1914 and 1915 are not clear. This much is certain: that on June 16, 1915, Sir C. Mallet, the British minister at Panama, wrote to the foreign office in London the following note, setting forth an observation he had made that day in the Zone: