Hemingway and his obsession with his Goan saviour’s hairy ears

By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar Panaji: Seven years before Ernest Hemingway shot himself with his favourite shotgun at his home in Idaho, a Goan boat commander may have saved the legendary writer from possible death or at least a near-deadly misadventure in the African wilds. However, the Nobel Prize winner’s almost racist description of his Indian saviour, the late Edwiges Abreo, and the writer’s unusually strong fixation with the boatman’s hairy ears, continues to bemuse Abreo’s son even 59 years later. [caption id=“attachment_974741” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] A file photo of American writer Ernest Hemingway. AFP[/caption] For Hemingway perhaps, Edwiges was one of the lesser bookmarks in a life which had seen war, conflict, bull fights, elephant and lion hunts. All of these, in copious quantities. That he still remembers Edwiges and made an effort to write about him, sympathetically, and about his hair-growth, delectably, is still a tribute to the Goan expat who died early, at 44. “The commander of the ship was an Asiatic and had long hairs growing out of both ears. For some reason, possibly tribal, which we always respect, he had never cut these hairs and they had attained a length which was, if not inevitable, certainly extraordinary. One might even say they bristled like a hedge and gave him, possibly, his only true distinction,” writes an amused Hemingway in his book ‘By-Line Ernst Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades’ of his saviour. Gino Abreo says the man Hemingway refers to is his father, who migrated to Africa from Goa just before the Second World War. Edwiges and his crew had rescued the writer, who was stranded in the middle of nowhere in east central African wilds, exposed to heat, cold, angry elephants and crocodiles nearby. Now living a life of a retiree in Nicosia, Cyprus, Gino, in lighter vein admits that his “father has generously handed down the genetics of long hairs, around the ear lobes to me and my older son”. And while calling Hemigway’s description of his father derogatory, chooses to let it by. “My father passed away at a very young age of 44, and to the best of my knowledge, I do not think he was aware of the write up of the hairs on his ears. I would certainly say that the write up is a bit derogatory, but one could interpret it in different ways. The family has taken no offence to Hemingway’s description of my father,” he says. In fact, Hemingway even took up for Edwiges, after the original charterer of the love boat-turned-rescue ship, a surgeon named McAdam who was on a honeymoon, protested the charge the captain had levied on the writer for picking him up. “Being conversant with maritime law, and knowing that the master of the ship was well within his rights even though an exaggerated amount of hair protruded from his ears, I paid this charge and Mr. McAdam made formal protest in writing,” writes Hemingway. Here’s what Gino has to say about the fee: “It is my understanding that my dad charged a fee of 100 Kenyan shillings which was a charge levied on any passenger boarding the ship which was operated under the authority of East African Railways and Harbours”. Recalling his father’s rendition of the Hemingway-rescue story, Gino tells Firstpost: “He received a signal from his head-office to check the area as my father’s ship was very close to the location of the crash near Murchison falls in Uganda.” The writer, his fourth wife Mary, and a pilot had crash-landed in some tall brush near the picturesque Murchison falls. Injured, badgered by a herd of irate wild elephants and cut off by a crocodile-filled river, the trio was down to their last food and alcohol rations, when Edwiges who skippered a luxury boat SS Murchison had sailed towards them. While he does not name Edwiges, Hemingway describes the moment when the boat first came into view after nearly two days of scavenging in the African brush and sending Mayday messages from their radio in the bust-up Cessna 180. “During the course of this safari, we had many times seen mirages when the sun got high, and at the sight of this launch I thought first that I much check my eyesight. I called Miss Mary and told her that a launch was coming up the river,” writes Hemingway in the book. Once onboard, Hemingway, over a few bottles of Tusker beer, also narrates the joy of sailing down the fauna-filled African river. “On both sides of the river, you could see large male hippo and female hippo with their young and there were many crocodiles. We were also able, as we descended the river on the left bank, to observe various elephants which I had come to know personally,” he says. Edwiges’ vessel dropped the threesome off at a river pier in Butiaba. Incidentally, only a day later Hemingway met with another aero plane accident, which he also survived, albeit with cut, burns and a concussion. But that’s another story.