Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  “So your interest in this gentleman is not an ordinary one,” said the perceptive Mrs. Fulton.

  “Yes,” came the reply. “It was ail my fault.” Then, as Farini put a finger to his lips, she became silent.

  But Mrs. Fulton would not be put off and soon winkled out the story. “She has plenty of good in her,” she told Farini after the two women held a private tête-à-tête. “The poor thing was too confiding and was betrayed by a wolf in sheep’s clothing.… When I have gone, she will explain all.”

  The explanation has all the heart-rending atmosphere of East Lynne, the Victorian novel that Mrs. Henry Wood was about to publish. “The terrible girl, who must have been the means of bringing the two scoundrels into the house, had not been there a month.… I lived there as a respectable married woman with a man who had promised to make me his wife but who never kept his word. For his sake I ran away from a happy home and kind parents and I believed his vows and protestations of love and attachment until a few days ago when I discovered that my lover, he for whom I sacrificed home, parents, reputation, and all that a woman should value most, was a married man with two children. It was on the same night that the perfidy of my destroyer was revealed to me that I returned home, only to find you nearly killed. Oh, it was horrible. My punishment seemed to come all at once and I went almost mad. But I must bear everything, the shame, the disgrace, the scorn, and the contempt while he the author of my misery holds his head high and is considered an honourable man.” At that she sobbed uncontrollably.

  The entire story, reminiscent of the old music-hall favourite “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” was as full of holes as a worn stocking, but Farini accepted it with great gallantry. He was able to report that some time later mother and daughter had been reconciled and that after returning home, “she married a man who really loved her and is now a happy wife and mother.”

  After several more performances at the Falls, Farini moved on later that same year to neighbouring fairs and carnivals. His amorous adventures, however, were by no means over. At Springfield, Illinois, “the landlord’s daughter, who was a highly cultured young lady, somewhat of a blue stocking and a contributor to G.D. Printess’s Louisville Journal, fell in love with me. I was very much flattered and paid her considerable attention, but not being a covetous man, nor wishing to monopolize so much beauty and genius, I unselfishly left her to shed the bright rays of her talents on more deserving mortals.”

  Or, at least, that was the way he told it.

  4

  The legacy of Niagara

  Although he sometimes drew larger crowds and performed greater feats of daring – letting his taut rope go slack, for instance, so that it swayed alarmingly in the gusts – Farini never achieved the immortality that was Blondin’s.

  Before Farini completed his series of bi-weekly performances at Niagara, the Prince of Wales arrived on September 15. The two rival funambulists laid plans to outdo each other with new and greater feats. But it was Blondin who got the attention. Of course Farini offered to take the prince across the gorge, riding in a wheelbarrow on the slack rope, and of course he was refused. In his autobiography he told how he performed before the royal party, dropping from a dangling rope and swimming to safety, then trotting across without the security of a balancing pole. But the press paid only cursory attention. Blondin, on the other hand, drew columns of print – the best part of a page in The Times of London.

  When Blondin once again carried Harry Colcord across the gorge, and later made his way out onto the tightrope wearing stilts (a feat Farini did not duplicate), thousands came to watch the exhibition – and to gawk at the heavy-lidded heir to the throne. Blondin offered to carry the prince across on his back, and the prince again refused. “I will not endanger your life,” he said, “and I will not expose mine.” The reporter for The Times declared that “one thing is certain … if you do go to see Blondin, when he once begins his feats, you can never take your eyes off him, unless you shut them from a very sickness of terror, till he is safe back again on land.”

  “Thank God it’s over,” said the prince when Blondin descended.

  It was the Frenchman’s feats against which all future performances were measured and it was Blondin’s name and memory that provided the magic. Harry Leslie, who crossed the gorge in 1865, advertised himself as “the American Blondin.” Professor J.F. Jenkins, in 1871, was “the Canadian Blondin.” Signor Henry Bellini, in 1873, was “the Australian Blondin.” Marie Spelterina, in 1876, the only woman ever to attempt a rope crossing of the Niagara, was said to “out Blondin Blondin.” She crossed backwards, blindfolded, wearing peach baskets on her feet.

  In spite of the apparent danger, none of the fifteen or more performers who crossed the gorge on the tightrope was killed unless one counts the unfortunate Stephen Peer, a Canadian assistant to Bellini, who in 1887, probably intoxicated after a late party, tried to walk out onto his employer’s three-quarter-inch cable wearing ordinary street shoes and immediately plunged to his death.

  As time wore on and funambulism became almost commonplace, performers tried to outdo one another by narrowing the rope and increasing their speed. By 1893, after Clifford Calverly established a new record by running across on his cable in a fraction over two minutes and forty-five seconds, tightrope walking at the Falls had begun to pall. One man, Oscar Williams, tried to drum up business in 1910 by repeating Blondin’s performance. To his chagrin, only a small crowd turned out to watch him.

  For Blondin, the triumph never ended. He performed all his Niagara stunts at the Crystal Palace in London before a huge backdrop of the Falls. He was showered with medals, gifts, money, and jewels. A Blondin March was composed in his honour. The press called him the King of the Tight Rope, the Lord of the Hempen Realm, the Emperor of Manila (a promotion from prince). He toured the globe, performing all his old feats, including that of cooking an omelet high above the heads of the applauding throng. He returned to America and performed them all over again, as women continued to gasp and strong men to turn pale. One young man challenged him to a contest on the high wire, but Blondin gently declined, remarking that he had justly won his prestige and could rightfully claim that he was the greatest performer in the world. He gave his final performance at the age of seventy-two and died the following year on February 28, 1897, of diabetes.

  For Farini the Great, the tightrope was only an adventurous way station on a roller-coaster journey through life. During his long career he was many things – strong man, inventor, explorer, writer, painter, sculptor, horticulturist. Nor were his years free from tragedy. In 1862 he performed on the high rope at the Havana bull ring carrying on his back a female partner, identified in one report as his wife. In his unpublished autobiography he makes no mention of her or of the tragedy that followed; undoubtedly Farini did not care to evoke what must have been a dreadful experience. At the high point of the performance in Havana, the unfortunate woman made the grievous error of reaching back to wave at the crowd and toppled off the rope. Hanging by one foot, Farini seized her by the hem of her dress; but it tore away, and she fell headlong into the crowd. She died a few days later leaving a child, who, so the news services reported, was cared for by the women of Havana.

  When the Civil War was in its second year, Farini’s uncle, who had enlisted in the Union army, asked his nephew to join his staff. Years later Farini told Charles Currelly, the curator of the Royal Ontario Museum, that he had volunteered for the secret service, gone south, and enlisted in the Confederate army. It was his function to ferret out military plans, desert, turn in his information, then head south again and join a different unit. He claimed later to have invented a method of transporting armed men across rivers using pontoons for shoes. The president himself, it is said, watched a demonstration. Farini liked to quote Lincoln’s remark at that time: “Young man, don’t be afraid, for if you should topple over and get in head down, I’m tall enough to wade you out.”

  Farini returned to Niagara in 1864, and
there he attempted another death-defying feat. He proposed to wade to the very lip of the American Falls wearing iron stilts especially made for the purpose. He succeeded in getting to a point in the shallows halfway between the Goat Island bridge and the brink of the cascade when one of the stilts broke and he found himself struggling in the rapids. With one leg badly injured as a result of his tumble, he managed to reach Robinson’s Island, a tiny, wooded bit of rock not far from the Luna Falls. There he sat, marooned and outwardly calm, massaging his injured limb, while a curious crowd gathered. No one attempted to rescue him because it was widely believed that Farini had concocted the entire accident. Hours passed before he was finally taken ashore.

  His career in the decade that followed was peripatetic. He took his tightrope act again to Latin America, then in 1866 turned up in England with an adopted child, a young orphan boy he called El Niño. Was this the child his former partner had left in Havana in 1862? Certainly the two were inseparable for the rest of Farini’s life. (El Niño eventually married Farini’s younger sister.) Farini trained El Niño as a trapeze artist, and soon the Flying Farinis were dazzling spectators at the Cremorne Gardens and the Alhambra Palace in London, the nimble boy playing a snare drum high above the crowd as his adoptive father held him by the nape of the neck.

  Farini vanished from public view for more than a year. This was undoubtedly the period when, as he told Currelly, he organized a small circus and took it to the Black Sea, Cairo, and the capitals of Europe. When he returned in 1871, he had put together a new act involving a young woman of spectacular beauty whom he called “Mademoiselle Lulu.” He also that year married an Englishwoman named Alice Carpenter; they had no children.

  Lulu quickly became the toast of London and Paris, performing the spectacular “Lulu leap” in which she defied gravity by jumping twenty-five feet from the stage to her trapeze bar, executing a triple somersault en route. The crowds were mystified, not realizing that Farini had invented an elasticized catapult that fitted into the stage and propelled her to the bar. Lulu appeared before royalty and was eulogized in Punch. Stagedoor johnnies tried to meet her, men of high position sent gifts and offers of marriage; but Lulu remained a recluse until it was revealed in 1878, to the embarrassment of many, that she was actually a man – none other than Farini’s adopted son, El Niño.

  Meanwhile, Farini had been hired to resuscitate the failing fortunes of the Royal Westminster Aquarium. He quickly made it pay again by introducing a series of startling acts, the most spectacular of which featured another female protégé, Rossa Matilda Richter, billed as “Zazel, the Beautiful Human Cannonball.” Farini had combined his catapult device with a large mortar, complete with flash powder, to send Zazel hurtling from its mouth and through the air into a net. Farini also exhibited a series of human oddities including Krao, the Missing Link, the Man with the Iron Skull, the Hypnotized Horse, Captain Constentenus, the world’s most tattooed man, and a group of natives from the Kalahari Desert whom he called “earth-men.”

  The Kalahari interpreter told him so many stories of diamonds littering the desert that Farini decided to see for himself. Divorced from his wife, he set off in 1884 to America to pick up Lulu (El Niño), now a photographer in Connecticut. Then the two adventurers headed for Africa and the Kalahari, where Farini claimed to have discovered the ruins of a lost city. His explorations brought him some academic notice. His subsequent book about his adventures in the Kalahari was described by the Era as “a standard work on its subject.”

  Farini also brought back a collection of bulbs and seeds that he presented to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. By now he was achieving a reputation as a horticulturist. He had already written Ferns That Grow in New Zealand, and now, after cultivating sixty thousand flowering tubers on his estate at Forest Hill, he published his best-selling work, How to Grow Begonias. That led to a fellowship in the Royal Horticultural Society. In his spare time, Farini amused himself by writing poems, short stories, and even the lyrics for a song that Anna Mueller, his new wife, had composed.

  For this extraordinary man had selected for himself an extraordinary mate – in the Kaiser’s court, of all places. She was a prominent and aristocratic German pianist with impeccable credentials – a former student of Franz Liszt, a niece of Richard Wagner, a daughter of the Kaiser’s aide-de-camp. Though he was fifteen years her senior, she easily succumbed to his well-honed charms. A seasoned gallant who spoke seven languages, he had a quick and agile mind that few women could resist.

  His many activities included that of inventor – at a time when inventors were the folk heroes of the age. The Ontario Archives has three files stuffed with descriptions of Farini’s inventions, including a sliding theatrical chair, a new telegraphic apparatus, and a more efficient watering can (for begonias, no doubt). In the old days he had been front and centre on tightrope and trapeze. Now he was a shadowy impresario, lurking in the background, manipulating the careers of such luminaries as Lily Langtry and Sandow the Strong Man. Who could resist him? George Du Maurier is said to have based his sinister character, Svengali, on Farini. Certainly, with his long, jet-black, forked beard, he looked the part.

  Farini and his wife returned to Canada in 1899. Madame Farini taught music in Toronto while her husband took up oil painting, a new hobby, exhibiting with such Canadian masters as C.W. Jefferys and J.E.H. MacDonald. He continued to study art after he and his wife returned to Germany. They were caught there in the Great War, detained but not interned, thanks no doubt to his wife’s background and influence at the German court. Farini passed the time by writing a thirty-volume account of all the Great War battles from the German point of view. It was never published.

  Back in Canada, Farini returned with his wife to his old home town, Port Hope, and there, well past the age of eighty, he continued to paint and to exercise. He walked his tightrope for fun, took five-mile bicycle trips, and exhibited at the Canadian National Exhibition, where in 1923 one of his paintings won an award. He died in January 1929 in his ninety-first year, doomed by a formidable constitution to outlive his own fame and to expire all but forgotten, surrounded by his paintings, his African mementos, his circus posters, and, of course, his fading memories of the golden summer nearly seventy years before when he had challenged the great Blondin on the tightrope at Niagara and basked in the wide-eyed approbation of “the wives and daughters of some of the most prominent men in America.”

  5

  Into the maelstrom

  For decades the rapids of Niagara were overshadowed by the presence of the thundering cataract. Above the Falls, for almost a mile, the river raged and swirled around Goat Island. A mile and half below, the six-foot whitecaps of the Whirlpool Rapids fascinated and repelled those spectators who viewed them from the safe perch of Roebling’s railway suspension bridge.

  The rapids, indeed, were almost as spectacular as the Falls themselves, but it took Charles Blondin and his imitators to focus attention on what Nicholas Woods, The Times correspondent, called “a perfect hell of waters.” Woods confessed to “a horrible yearning in your heart to plunge in and join the mad whirl,” but even with this thought uppermost in his mind, he admitted, “you shrink instinctively from the dreadful brink.”

  Woods stood in the enclosure with the Prince of Wales’s party in 1860, watching in “a very sickness of terror” as the rope dancer, who had chosen an even more perilous site for his rope walk, more than two hundred feet high above where the “waters boil and roar and plunge on in massive waves at the rate of some twenty miles an hour.” William Dean Howells, then a rising literary figure, was also present and marvelled at “their mighty march … their gigantic leaps and lunges, when they break ranks and their procession becomes a mere onward tumult without form or order.” Viewing the rapids was an unexpected bonus to the Niagara experience. He “had not counted on the Rapids taking me by the throat, as it were, and making my heart stop.”

  The following year, one man, Joel Robinson, did what all had considere
d impossible. He took a small and fragile steamboat successfully through the raging waters, a feat so terrible that it made him old before his time and was not repeated until 1980, when it became the centrepiece of a motion picture. Robinson was a riverman – a bland designation that disguised the feats of derring-do for which this small but exclusive breed has become famous. Joel Robinson was the first.

  He was already famous for his successful rescue and salvage efforts. In 1838, a man named Chapin fell off the Goat Island bridge and into the rapids and was marooned on a tiny islet in the heart of the torrent. Robinson took off from nearby Bath Island and in his red skiff threaded his way to the site and rescued the victim. Three years later he repeated the deed when a man named Allen broke one oar of his rowboat and was marooned on the farthest out of the tiny Three Sisters islands in the perilous rapids on the southwest side of Goat Island. Robinson, using lengths of strong, light cord, managed to haul Allen free.

  Until that time, the little islets in the rapids just above the brink of the Falls had all been considered inaccessible. But some time later, in 1855, Robinson was able to salvage the contents of a canal boat trapped precariously on another rocky pinpoint. These exploits took place a stone’s throw from the lip of the cascade and called for daring, skill, and iron nerves. A single unwise manoeuvre would have sent Robinson and his skiff plunging over the precipice.

  The riverman was tall, fair, and blue eyed, cool and deliberate, easy going, kindly, “gentle as a girl.” There was a calmness about him, a serenity that made him a stranger to fear. A first-rate swimmer and skilful oarsman, he loved the river as another might love a turbulent and demanding woman. The rapids delighted him. It was said that he was almost glad when he heard that someone was trapped in them, for it gave him an excuse to plunge in and help.