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an old letter from a man who wrote a letter to his mother
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Estimate €1,000 - €1,200
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MERMOZ Jean L.A.S. ‘Ton Jean’, Buenos Aires, 26 September 1928, to his ‘Beloved Mum’; 4 pages, in-4 format, on Aeroposta Argentina letterhead. Account of his accident during the flight to Bolivia. …‘From Bolivia, I was due to fly on to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. Five hours after taking off from Puerto Suárez, the engine failed due to poor-quality oil. I managed to land in a clearing in the middle of a palm forest without, fortunately, causing any damage. My passengers were my Director and my mechanic. I set off with the Director to explore the area. After hours of walking through the forest with water up to our knees and grass over our heads, we came across an indigenous estancia, where, fortunately, we were not greeted with gunfire. Had we gone just 10 km further inland, we would have come across marauding Indians, who are rife in the Paraguayan ‘Prairie’. We returned to the aircraft with a prehistoric ox-drawn cart, loaded our luggage onto it and set off with one of our indigenous guides towards a settlement 25 km away, on the Rio Paraguay. We arrived there in the dead of night. There was a tannin factory run by Germans and protected by a Paraguayan fort. The commander of the fort wanted to put us in prison, mistaking us for Bolivian spies who’d arrived by aeroplane, as there is currently almost a state of war between Bolivia and Paraguay. All the checkpoints had reported us as passing through from Bolivia!! So they wouldn’t listen to a word we said; we negotiated, explaining that we were French’… The factory manager vouched for them, so they were allowed to leave by boat for Asunción: ‘We telegraphed Buenos Aires to send us an engine and a mechanic. He arrived three days later. We loaded it onto a sort of mixed-use barge’. After seven days, they arrived: ‘We unloaded the engine, transported it by ox-drawn cart to the breakdown site, and whilst my two mechanics fitted the engine, I spent five days living the life of a trapper. On horseback all day, with a revolver on my belt and a rifle slung over my shoulder, I rode about with the ‘peones’ from the estancia, shooting parrots, monkeys, hunting panthers (I have two very fine skins) and wild boar, fishing, eating the meat we’d killed on the spot and drinking water from the ditches – in short, almost the life of a Fenimore Cooper hero! In the evening, for example, I’d be devoured by mosquitoes—veritable clouds of them—as we slept out in the open. With the engine fitted, I left the place—which, all things considered, was quite delightful, and with a small wild boar and some parrots as passengers to boot—not without regret; I managed to make my way through the grass and trees and reach Asunción, then Buenos Aires. Three days later, I returned to Asunción to fly non-stop to Rio. I managed to reach Santos, where I landed in the midst of a storm, and I returned to Buenos Aires the day before yesterday. So, in forty days, I spent just three days at home – and what adventures there were!”… He is due to leave for Chile “to undertake a study and promotional trip for a new route. And in December or January, I’m off to the West Indies, also on a study trip. We’d like to go as far as Panama to link up with the North American route”. He recounts the discussions regarding his “transatlantic flight project” with Mr de Sieyès; Bouilloux-Lafont would subsidise it, “either for Paris–New York or for Paris–Buenos Aires non-stop. […] my flight will be good publicity for the company’. He will come to France to fine-tune the aircraft, in particular ‘to improve safety in the event of a breakdown’, and for test flights. He intends to ask Le Brix to be his navigator… Correspondence, no. 148. Provenance: - Jean Mermoz (1901–1936); - Gabrielle Gillet-Mermoz (1880–1955); - Then passed down through the family
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Auction time 11/03/2026 at 11:00 AM
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