As Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” is to the Somerton Man, Cheri Farnsworth’s all-too-brief “The Adirondack Enigma” is (though densely informative) self-avowedly far from the last word on the mystery surrounding Henry Debosnys. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that many doors in her book remain swinging wide open, waiting for determined readers (perhaps with access to different sets of historical resources) to march through them into the darkness beyond, wearing their well-used +10 Night Goggles of Historical Truth.
Which is, of course, exactly what a fair few Cipher Mysteries readers love to do.
For all of us, though, the central challenge with Henry Debosnys is simply this: that while it seems that a portion of what he told reporters (and while in jail he spoke to them a lot, all the while he wasn’t trying to engineer his own escape) was basically true, a second portion was misspelled or misremembered, and a third portion was outright fabricated. (“Self-serving baloney” wouldn’t be a great exaggeration). And so our difficulty is knowing where each portion starts and finishes.
For example, he wrote in a margin that he changed his name to “Henry Deletnack Debosnys” in October 1870 [Adirondack Enigma p.71] (though without any explanation); and he claimed that he travelled from Havre de Grace to New York aboard the Cimbria in June 1871 with his [presumably first] wife Judith (he says she then died in July 1871, whereupon her body was sent back to France).
Debosnys elsewhere writes that his children were (as of 1883) being brought up by a brother in England: so it is not obvious whether the children he claimed to have were with them on the Cimbria.
However, Farnsworth flags that she could find no archival trace at all of Judith Debosnys’ life or indeed death: which I for one find highly suspicious.
And My Current Hypothesis Is…
Personally, I suspect that what is happening here is that we’re being spun a great big line – a complicated, tangled line, for sure, but a line nonetheless.
I must be clear: there seems no obvious reason to conclude that Debosnys, for all his linguistic brio, was anything more than a manipulative, lazy, grotesquely egotistical sociopath, if not actually an outright psychopath. We cannot directly trust any detail of his claimed life that we cannot verify.
So… might it be that Henry Debosnys had already killed his first wife (who was perhaps called Judith, or perhaps not) back in France (perhaps in or around October 1870), and hence the primary purpose of changing his name was to evade justice? This seems the simplest explanation of all, absent any evidence either way.
Was Debosnys On The S.S.Cimbria?
…and if so, what name was he using? It may well be that the only thing we can trust to be moderately accurate is his age (and possibly his nationality): so perhaps we can produce a list of candidates of the right sort of age who all boarded the Cimbria at Havre Le Grace circa June 1871, and then use other cross-referencing means to try to whittle that down to a small handful.
As a result, I think these are certainly questions that we might be able to answer, if (and only if) Debosnys was moderately truthful about arriving on this ship at around this date.
From this (cached) history of the Cimbria, we can see that it crossed the Atlantic to New York 72 times between 1870 and 1882, before sinking in January 1883. (More pictures here.)
During the year 1871, the Cimbria arrived eight times in New York (according to this): here’s a link to a transcribed list of the passengers on board the ship when it landed in NY on 10th April 1871. According to this page, one person died of smallpox and one was hospitalized on the 21st May 1871 arrival, while two were hospitalized on the 2nd July 1871 arrival. So it would initially seem probable we should be looking at the 2nd July 1871 arrival, right?
The Cimbria’s arrival and passenger list is indeed noted on pp.141-153 of Roll 345. But here’s a mystery for you: apart from a few Swiss and a handful of Dutch, it seems that every non-American passenger on this arrival was actually German. So there would seem to be no reason to think this steamer stopped at Havre le Grace on its way over.
Similarly, Roll 343 covers Cimbria’s 21st May 1871 arrival on pp.118-139: and (again) apart from some Russians, some Dutch, some Belgians and a Mexican, every non-American passenger was German: not a single French person either. Did this stop at Havre le Grace? It wouldn’t seem so.
All in all, it seems probable to me that if Debosnys did arrive on the Cimbria from Havre le Grace, it wasn’t in May, June, or July 1871. The Cimbria definitely did call at Havre Le Grace on other crossings (e.g. 25th October 1871), but apparently not these ones.
Can someone who is tolerably good at reading 19th century American handwriting please have a look at these two passenger lists and see if I’m missing something really obvious?
My prediction would be that Debosnys arrived in New York after October 1870 but before 1872: and that there is a reasonable chance (though far from certain) he travelled on the Cimbria. But until I see anything verified by proper archival evidence, I’m really not sure what to believe about this man: and I strongly recommend that anyone else trying to make sense of this tale should do much the same.
Here is a manifest for the Cimbria dated July 1871. I’m not sure if this date is arrival or departure:
http://interactive.ancestry.ca/7488/NYM237_345-0142?pid=15638414&backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.ca%2f%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3fgss%3dangs-c%26new%3d1%26rank%3d1%26msadm%3d6%26msady%3d1871%26gskw%3dCimbria%26cp%3d0%26MSAV%3d1%26uidh%3dmd5%26pcat%3dIMG_PASSLISTS%26h%3d15638414%26db%3dnypl%26indiv%3d1%26ml_rpos%3d1&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true#?imageId=nym237_345-0138
Here is the manifest for the Cimbria dated June 1870:
http://interactive.ancestry.ca/7488/NYM237_330-0160?pid=16649542&backurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ancestry.ca%2f%2fcgi-bin%2fsse.dll%3fgss%3dangs-c%26new%3d1%26rank%3d1%26msadm%3d6%26msady%3d1870%26gskw%3dCimbria%26cp%3d0%26MSAV%3d1%26uidh%3dmd5%26pcat%3dIMG_PASSLISTS%26h%3d16649542%26db%3dnypl%26indiv%3d1%26ml_rpos%3d1&treeid=&personid=&hintid=&usePUB=true#?imageId=nym237_330-0149
Sorry for the long links Nick. I don’t know how else to share this information.
On a separate note, on page 104 Of Cheri Farnsworth’s book, she mentions the possibility of a certain Joseph Lehagaret potentially being Henry’s brother….
Joseph is VERY difficult to find but, he is there! His last name often misspelled but he shows up. He applied for naturalization as Joseph Lehegarat in Essex, New York (Elisabethtown, NY) and was naturalized on October 22, 1880. He lists his country of allegiance as France and his age as 40 years old. His witness is Terence McFarland (Essex NY).
In another listing (1880 census), he appears as Joseph Legerat (born in France). Married to Jane (born in Canada) with a son Charlie (16, born in New York).
Jane pops up in a 1905 census as Jane Lehejrat. She is 65, born in Canada, in the US for 49 years.
On a message board on ancestry, Charles is listed as being the son of a John Porter. (Jane’s first husband.) Her second husband is listed as Joseple Le’Hegarat and they are living in Essex, New York.
I think his name was most likely Joseph Le Hegarat. He applied for a passport as such and his name got mangled (once again) as follows:
Name: Joseen Le Hegarat
Birth Date: 20 Feb 1841
Birth Place: Or Near Paimport, France
Age: 49
Passport Issue Date: 18 Dec 1890
Passport Includes a Photo: No
Residence: Epes, Epes County, New York
Misca: unfortunately your ancestry.com links are behind a paywall. 🙁
Very well done for digging the Joseph Lehagaret details, though (I was planning to address that strand in a follow-up post, this was already borderline TL;DR)! I’m guessing his birthplace would be Paimpont in Brittany (rather than “Pairpont” per se).
Misca: also… I just found out that, according to http://chronicle.uspcs.org/pdf/Chronicle_105/17343.pdf , the Cimbria did not (as I suspected) call at Le Havre on either of those two sailings.
Misca: “either of the two sailings I listed in the blog post“, that is.
My 2c of poking around:
I’m afraid that Nick’s assumption of a psychopath is quite likely to be true; I can’t find a hint of H.D.D. insisting on his innocence or the drunken scotsman story after his trial. In the opposite, he seemed to have accepted his verdict. Instead of showing protest or despair “(…) the man’s savoir faire extended so far as cannily inspecting the apparatus of his own execution a few hours before hanging on it, and offering the hangman a few engineering tips (De Bosnys thought the rope needed more soaping).” (http://www.executedtoday.com/tag/henry-de-bosnys/).
All the stories were spun up by him during his prison time, so this might as well have been his “15’ of fame”.
If a psychic affliction was the case with H.D.D., alas, we cannot take ANYTHING he said or wrote as truthful account. The newspaper accounts do not help at all, being “freely narrated” and simply picking up seemingly interesting stuff from him.. like newspapers do.
Taking into account the way justice worked around that era, it would be interesting if the first two “missing” wives can be tracked down, after all.
Sorry for triple-posting. OTOH the names are not conclusive, so the possibilty does exist, imho.
Something seems to have gotten lost in the digital mist. The last paragraph of my first post was:
“Another note: The mention of his brother is interesting; it opens up the possibility of H.D.D being Joseph Lehagaret after all, if no later references to this name are to be found.”
Then I saw the later passport issue date and meant to discard that notion. So my second post here is actually the third one.. Conclusion: Better have your Shi-Sha ready before posting.. Sorry 🙂
I believe that Debosnys saw his wife Elizabeth as his ” OLUMP ” or his ” Motherly Rock “. She was his deity that he worshiped, but made a sacrifice of. He wrote the word ” OLUMP ” on the left shoulder of the drawing of the woman.
Gert: I deleted that last paragraph when I moderated it, having read (and deleted) your second comment saying that you had changed your mind about it. 🙂
Nick: It thawed on me, a little later.. That was an indecisive evening on my part :/
Thank you for putting so much effort into your website!
Other possible spellings : Duboce, Dubois, Des Moines…..
On your other postings in re Debosnys: I double checked his name (as he spelled it) :
De bos nos tya
?
bd
Nick, have you or any of your long-time correspondents done any research about the North American Civil War period (and possibly some fairly new immigrants having to decide pro/con enlistment). Believe it or not, several glass-plate photographers were active upon the battlefields which dead soldiers had not yet been identified before being removed and buried in the nearby cemetery.