Crazy daredevils and madcap missions — wild feats at Augrabies with the Great Farini

The 19th century, the Golden Age of Queen Victoria, was a truly weird time to be alive. This was the era of freak show attractions and bearded ladies, Wild West shows, crass entertainment, shysters, fraudsters and hucksters, the circus legend PT Barnum and tightrope walkers like the Great Blondin and the Great Farini.

South Africa saw comparatively little of it, although in 1903, Texas Jack Jnr and Mexican Bill did come out to the Eastern Cape town of Nxuba (formerly Cradock) with a troupe of circus riders, and managed to shock and amaze the locals by lassoing and riding a wild mountain zebra. But that’s a story for another day.

Nearly 20 years earlier, the Great Farini had visited southern Africa with his protégé Lulu, on a quest to find the mythical Lost City of the Kalahari.  

Mad stunts over Niagara

Farini, who started his life as William Leonard Hunt, became famous because of a fierce and somewhat demented rivalry with tightrope artist the Great Blondin (aka Jean-François Gravelet). In 1859, Blondin had become the first man to tightrope-walk across the Niagara Falls. Months later, Hunt, a trapeze artist from a small town in Ontario, renamed himself Signor Antonio Farini and embarked on a series of mad stunts to upstage Blondin.

He tightrope-walked across the Niagara Falls blindfolded, then did it with his feet in baskets. 

The photograph of G Antonio Farini published as the author’s picture in his book about his travels in the Kalahari. (Photo: Supplied)

One of Farini’s publicity posters, dated 1859. (Photo: Earl W Brydges Public Library, Niagara Falls)

The “daredevils” section of the Niagara Falls information website enumerates his other wild feats. Farini balanced on his head, hung from the tightrope by his toes and crossed while piggy-backing someone. 

When the Great Blondin took a little stove and cooked an omelette on the tightrope, the Great Farini took a washtub, lowered a bucket by rope into the water 60m below and proceeded to wash some handkerchiefs.

The weirdness did not stop there. After a near-fatal incident in which Farini had to be rescued after trying to cross the Niagara with stilts on a tightrope, he left his obsession behind and began to travel. Along the way, he encountered a young boy with the name Samuel Wasgate, and they started a dual act. Some say Farini adopted the boy.

A cross-dressing human cannonball

Young Samuel (now called El Niño Farini) was able to hang from a high wire by the nape of his neck and play the drums. Then El Niño faded from public view, and instead, Farini began performing with a beautiful, long-haired young girl called Mademoiselle Lulu, agile and highly skilled on the trapeze, often called the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Many became besotted with her and begged for Lulu’s hand in marriage.

Lulu Farini, aka El Niño. (Photo: Napoleon Sarony / Wikimedia Commons)

After a few years and an accident on the high wire, Lulu was exposed as a boy. It had been Samuel Wasgate all along. But he continued with the name Lulu, and became even more famous for becoming the first human cannonball, still dressed in women’s clothing. 

In 1869, at the age of 31, Farini decided to stop his trapeze acts and became more of an impresario, circus promoter and showman. He was somehow involved in an exhibition in London of the “Dwarf Earthmen from the Interior of Africa”. In 1886, he published a book, Through the Kalahari Desert: A narrative of a journey with gun, camera and notebook to Lake N’gami and back.

In it, Farini credits his encounter with these “Earthmen from the Kalahari” for his interest in this region. The “Earthmen” were accompanied by an old “half-breed hunter, Kert by name”, wrote Farini. “Kert’s account of the grass-covered plains and fertile savannas and forests, teeming with game of all sorts, gave the Kalahari the character of a hunter’s paradise, instead of the barren desert which it has always been represented to me.”

It is important to note that Farini’s depictions of the people he encountered, particularly the so-called “Earthmen” and Kert, are deeply steeped in the racist language and colonial attitudes of his time, reducing individuals to stereotypes and spectacles.

It was Kert’s mention of large diamonds in the Kalahari that really caught Farini’s attention. 

He adds candidly: “At first I did not quite credit this statement, but later on, going through some of the Earthmen’s things, looking for poison, I found several diamonds.” 

The top half of the Augrabies, which drops 56m into the chasm below. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Antonio (aka William Hunt) and Lulu Farini descended this slippery and treacherous canyon carved by the Orange River below the Augrabies Falls. (Photo: Chris Marais)

The top of the Augrabies Falls, looking westward. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Hunting treasure and a Lost City

Farini and Lulu (who had become a keen photographer and artist) started their journey to the Kalahari by train from Cape Town. When he entered the Great Karroo, he wrote: “Such was the Karroo, when I saw it first, after a two years’ drought: the most terrible, arid, parched-up, kiln-dried, scorched, baked, burnt and God-forsaken district the sun ever streamed down upon.”

Their stated mission was to find the mythical Lost City of the Kalahari, and they did find some interestingly shaped rocks, which they took to be ancient ruins.

Hunt, who authored his book under the name G Antonio Farini, described the Lost City of the Kalahari to the Royal Geographic Society as follows:

“A half-buried ruin – a huge wreck of stones
On a lone and desolate spot;
A temple – or a tomb for human bones
Left by men to decay and rot.”

No one has ever corroborated his claim that a lost civilisation once existed in the Kalahari. But the rest of his account, detailing Kimberley’s diamond fields and the geography of the Augrabies Falls, seems credible.

Klipspringers in what is today the Augrabies Falls National Park. (Photo: Chris Marais)

Augrabies – the madcap mission

On the way back from their epic journey into the dry hinterland (in which Farini had also acquired a large cattle ranch in the Kalahari), Lulu decided he simply had to have a photograph of the front of the Augrabies Falls. 

Lulu Farini’s image of the Augrabies Falls, taken halfway down the extremely slippery granite rocks of the canyon. The Farinis wanted to dub the Augrabies Falls the ‘Hercules Falls’ after Cape governor Hercules Robinson. (Photo: Lulu Farini, National Archives, UK)

Another image by Lulu Farini, titled Gorilla Rock and Hercules Falls. (Photo: Lulu Farini)

He and his Farini tied together kudu and ox-hide thongs, along with some manila rope. They made a raft of willow logs to carry the photographic equipment. Everyone present thought this was a mad scheme, certain to end in disaster. 

But the intrepid Farinis descended safely, then set about sketching and photographing what they saw. Over the course of several days they explored the canyon, with a German companion simply called Fritz, clambering over massive, slippery rocks. 

It was Fritz who hunted and prepared meals for them – including rock pigeons, so-called wild pheasants and a baboon for breakfast. Lulu drew the line at that. The simian smell reminded him too much of his years in zoological gardens and menageries, he said.

The Farinis mapped no fewer than 100 cascades along a 25km extent of the gorge, and named them. Some of these included Farini’s Falls, Lulu Falls, as well as granite formations like Book Rock and Gorilla Rock. They tried to name the main cataract the “Hercules Falls” after Cape Colony governor Hercules Robinson, but that didn’t stick. 

Then they shimmied back up the sheer rocks of the canyon and headed off downstream to hunt some hippo. DM

In later years, Farini pursued his interest in horticulture and eventually wrote another book in 1897, How to Grow Begonias. He also wrote an unpublished series of books on the history of World War 1. He died of influenza in 1929. Lulu died 10 years later, at the age of 83. 



For an insider’s view of life in the South African Heartland, get the Karoo Quartet set of books (Karoo Roads I-IV with black-and-white photographs) for only R960, including taxes and courier costs in South Africa. For more details, contact Julie at [email protected]