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Adventures Around the World
Verlaine was arrested and charged with attempted murder, but the charges were reduced to wounding with a firearm after Rimbaud, who had underwent a surgery to remove the bullet by then, withdrew his complaint. Verlaine was eventually sentenced to two years behind bars. He spent them locked up in Mons, where he underwent a reconversion to Roman Catholicism. That provoked sharp criticism from Rimbaud, who held it against his former lover even more than he did the shooting incident.
In 1875, Rimbaud announced that he was done writing poetry. After working a variety of short-term gigs, including cashier at a circus in Hamburg, he decided he wanted to see the world beyond Europe. So in May of 1876, he enlisted in the Dutch Colonial Army. He was shipped to the Dutch East Indies, in a voyage that took four months at sea. However, less than two weeks after arriving in Sumatra, Rimbaud decided that the strictures of military life were not for him. Unfortunately, “I changed my mind” is seldom an acceptable justification for getting out of military enlistment. So Rimbaud deserted, and struck off into the jungle on his own.
In so doing, he took his life into his own hands in more ways than one: if caught by the Dutch, the penalty for desertion was death by firing squad, and if he came across hostile tribesmen, death by firing squad would seem like mercy. Luckily for Rimbaud, he made it, and upon reaching a port, he assumed a fake identity and managed to return to France, incognito. He then traveled to Cyprus, where he worked as a foreman in a stone quarry, but was forced to return to France after catching typhoid fever.
In 1880, he got a job as a coffee merchant in Yemen, and his employer sent him to Harar, in Ethiopia. He was the first white man to journey to that part of Africa, and his reports of the expedition were published in 1884, to wide acclaim. However, while in Ethiopia, Rimbaud got it in his head that he would make a good mercenary and arms dealer. So he launched a venture, and invested heavily in buying thousands of obsolescent rifles in Europe, in the hopes of reselling them for five times their purchase price in Ethiopia.
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Rimbaud’s career as an arms dealer ended in catastrophe, as everything that could go wrong did. The purchase took longer than expected, his two main partners died, and the poet found himself stuck in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, for nearly a year while awaiting permission to transport his cache of weapons to Ethiopia. Finally, he embarked on a four-month-long dangerous trek to deliver the weapons, only to be greeted upon arrival at the delivery point by his partners’ creditors, who promptly seized the bulk of the sale’s proceeds. Broke, Rimbaud eventually returned to France, where he died of bone cancer in 1891, at age 37.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading
Encyclopedia Britannica – Arthur Rimbaud, French Poet
Facts and Details – Rimbaud and His Brief Mysterious Trip to Java
Poem Hunter – Arthur Rimbaud Poems
Vintage News – Arthur Rimbaud: a Sensitive 19th Century Turned Mercenary and Gun Runner in Ethiopia