Word: monfreid
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...Like all the best drug yarns, Hashish has a whiff of incredibility without being any less enjoyable for it. The schema is plausible enough. Failure to sell 300 tons of trocas (or sea-snail shells), which De Monfreid had fished from the reefs of Eritrea, leaves him desperate for cash. One night, he overhears a midshipman talk about the lucrative market for hashish in Egypt, and De Monfreid resolves to head for Greece - where the "bringer of dreams" was cultivated and packaged for sale - then grease some palms and have 1,300 lbs. (600 kg) shipped to Djibouti, whence...
...details, however, De Monfreid is as unreliable as a $20 gram of weed. He claims, for instance, never to have heard of hashish prior to commencing his trade in it. This is nonsense. It was the stuff of daily social intercourse in North Africa at the time. And how could an erudite, well-traveled Frenchman who alludes throughout his book to canonical authors and works - from Homer to Boccaccio to fellow French writers like Dumas and Molière - not have been familiar with Baudelaire's 19th century writings about drugs, hashish in particular? One can only speculate that...
...Modern readers will also be obliged to overlook De Monfreid's unabashed racism and brusque, culturally superior attitude, which were both products of their time. On a ship from Marseilles to Greece, for example, De Monfreid scowls at a throng of Russian peasants, whom he finds "as uncouth and primitive as the Somali Bedouins." And the book is further marred by the same sort of excessive nautical argot (starboard this, lateen that) that makes Moby Dick such a tough sea of words to oar through. But whenever De Monfreid reaches land and begins to describe the gallery of rogues...
...Monfreid meets, among others, an imprisoned spy (a "venomous reptile") whose escape he enables and later regrets; a Chinese trepang trader on a deserted island; a metrosexual polyglot butler; a Bedouin shouldering a Remington; a priest who manufactures hashish; and a hashish distributor who operates from an undertaker's office. He sketches all the misfits he encounters with anthropological and sartorial precision, colorfully and poetically noting the red tarboosh of a Tigrean guard; the "sublime crease" of a servant's "beautiful putty trousers"; and a Greek engineer's soiled celluloid collar, "yellow and clouded as a clay pipe...
...complex De Monfreid who steals the show, of course. His voice - shifting easily from waggishness to bristling sarcasm to weighty understatement - is so dynamic that it ultimately doesn't matter whether he is using it in the service of fact or fiction. De Monfreid was at once a wild man and a philosophe, whose tender soliloquies on the joys of an unfettered life at sea, with nothing but the naked stars above, retain an immense power to seduce. While Hashish may be an acutely self-conscious literary artifact, it is also a singular self-portrait of a defiant spirit...