By the late nineteenth century certain rules of sportsmanship were accepted, which defined the gentleman from the mere slaughterer of wildlife. Whereas an earlier generation had blasted away wantonly at almost anything that moved, the unwritten code made some things obligatory, and others completely unacceptable.
1) A good, single shot is better than a dozen fired into a target.
Adult males of most species were the legitimate target, with females being permitted only if they were threatening the hunter. Pregnant or nursing females were an especial no-no, as were youngsters. Lionesses and female leopards were at least partially exempt from this, as potential maneaters.
It is considered poor form to let African servants do the shooting, except to assist i times of great danger. Letting them shoot and then counting their kills as part of your 'bag'is especially unsporting.
Moderation is a good thing.
There is a hierarchy of animals worthy of the hunter. Lion and elephant stand at the top, with leopards, and buffalo next, then rhino (but remember the white rhino is really scarce, Mr Rooseveldt, oh, you've shot five --). Antelope etc are shot as trophies, and 'for the pot'- but this isn't a game about trophies or lunch, but about danger - shooting hippos; is not considered very sporting, though perhaps necessary, and nobody wants to be known as a great crocodile hunter. Hyena get you no credit whatsoever as a sporting thing.
Wounded animals must be tracked, at whatever cost, and finished off. This was considered not only humane to the animal, but also to anyone else that might meet an angry injured creature with a grudge to settle later on.
SOME HUNTERS OF NOTE
The earliest European hunters in Africa, such as William Cornwallis Harris, William Cotton Oswell and the deranged and scoundrelly Scot, Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, hunted from horseback using muzzle loading weapons. As the century progressed, the hunting frontier moved beyond the high grasslands of southern Africa - since the herds had been comprehensively massacred in much of the south - into the tsetse-fly belt of central and east Africa, where it was necessary to hunt on foot, often in dense bush. Some of the best-known hunters of the period 1870-1930 are as follows,
Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1916) hunted in the south African bush country from 1871, making a reputation not only as a hunter but as a naturalist. A brave, resilient and much respected figure, he wrote a number of successful books and was an early advocate of wildlife conservation. Though in his sixties, he volunteered to serve in East Africa in WWI, where he was killed by a sniper while leading his company.
William Finaughty (1843-?) made a living as an ivory hunter in Matabeleland in the 1860s-70s. He killed 53 elephants in a five-month period, including 10 in one day. He later settled as a farmer in Rhodesia. Finaughty considered buffalo far more dangerous than elephants.
Arthur Neumann (1850-1907) went out to Africa at 18. He served in the Zulu War and with the Swaziland police, but elephant hunting was his forte - first in the Transvaal and then in Kenya. Solitary, shy and depressive, Neumann considered his shooting an economic concern rather than a sporting activity, yet could say of his prey, , --- him I worship --- nothing else thrills me, but the spell of the elephant is as potent as ever." He killed hundreds. Eventually, depressed, he shot himself.
Chauncey Hugh Stigand (1875-1919) was a fearless, hearty, perhaps somewhat unimaginative soldier who hunted in East Africa from 1900 until his death while leading a punitive expedition against a Dinka clan. He wrote several books on hunting, including a 'how-to' guide with Dennis Lyell.
James Sutherland (1876-1932) was a physical fitness enthusiast and prizefighter who fought in the Boer War, the Maji Maji Rebellion (where he received an Iron Cross), then on the other side as an intelligence agent in WWI. His real love was elephant hunting, and he followed the herds into his fifties, through failing eyesight and falling ivory prices.
Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell, known as 'Karamoio' (1880-1951) was perhaps the finest marksmen of all the African hunters. A born adventurer, he spent time in the klondyke gold fields, served in the Boer War, before taking off for Uganda to become an ivory hunter. From 1902-7 he hunted in the wild Karamojo country, perfecting a technique of single shot killing with a light rifle aimed precisely according to his field studies of elephant bone structure. Later he poached elephants in the Lado Enclave area claimed by the Belgians. he served in WWI as a pilot. In later life he retired to Scotland to write and illustrate.
Cecily and Agnes Herbert were two English cousins who - against the social mores of the time - undertook their own four month shooting safari in Somaliland in 1907. Finding themselves in competition with a rival expedition of Indian army officers, the two women consistently outperformed the male opposition. When the Somali butler absconded with a valuable rifle, Agnes took after him on a camel and halted his flight with a warning shot, bringing him back chastened.
There were many others worthy of note, some sympathetic, others simply psychopathic; the writer Dennis Lyell, the quiet Scot J.A. Hunter, the 'Out of Africa' characters Denys Finch-Hatton and Bror Blixen, the famous clients such as Teddy Rooseveldt and later Ernest Hemingway. Many wrote of their experiences. Some wished they'd never killed an animal.
ON SPORTING GUNS
Hunting literature is full of references to the weapons being used. Much of this is confusing to those of us who aren't expecting a subscription to Guns and Ammo magazine for our birthday. First of all, while settlers, traders, Boer farmers and others did use ordinary military and civilian rifles of the common-or-garden variety to hunt game, the professional hunters and the wealthy sportsman types employed incredibly expensive, hand-made weapons made by a small group of custom gunmakers. These weapons were beautifully balanced, exquisitely designed and engineered pieces with precisely accurate sights. They cost the earth, and still do; a .577 Nitro Express by Rigby, which cost 64 pounds sterling in 1901, cost about the same as one of the less ostentatious Porsches ninety years later. Indeed, seeing these sporting guns as exotic sports cars compared with the Fords and Volkswagens of the military issue rifles - practical, inexpensive and reliable but not designed for high performance - is probably a reasonable way of looking at it.
From the mid-century, the classic hunting rifle was the breech-loading Double Express rifle, with twin locks and barrels set side-by-side, looking to most of us like a shotgun. These came in a variety of sizes, measured either by 'bore' (weight of shot to the pound, so that a 10 bore fired a 1.6 oz ball and a 4 bore a massive 4 ounce ball) or by diameter of the bullet. Using black powder, they were heavy things - a big elephant gun like a .577 Westley Richards double weighed 13 lbs, while the bigger .600 came in at 16 lbs. Smaller rifles used for lion etc were still pretty big - .450 or so. The bestknown British gunmakers were Holland & Holland of London, Purdey, Rigby, Fraser of Edinburgh and Gibbs of Bristol. Some hunters had their own preferences; Selous, who had begun with some fearful 4 bore elephant guns known as 'Roers', which damaged his shoulder permanently, later had his choice of the best, and particularly liked a Henry .450 Express.
The invention of smokeless propellants c. 1890 brought in lighter weapons and smaller calibres - .256,275-303 etc. Sporting versions of military magazine rifles were made, often reworked as custom items by the elite gunmakers. Neumann used a .256 Mannlicher as his 'light rifle', for everything except elephants, for which he had a .577 Gibbs, a Holland & Holland 10 bore, and later a .450 Rigby. Sutherland used a .577 Nitro Express by Westley- Richards, with a .318 light rifle. Karamojo Bell received a Mann I icher-S choena uer .256, reworked by Danile Fraser in Scotland, which weighed only 5 lbs.
Light rifles were considered more accurate at a distance, but most shooters considered 200 yards to be pretty long range for the kind of accurate marksmanship they were after; Oswell had believed in close shots at 20-30 yards, and Teddy Roosevelt's wild long-distance shooting on his African safari of 1909 caused a certain amount of sniffiness. You were supposed to get close.
Shotguns might be used on light targets, including leopard, but were considered useless against anything with heavy bones or tough hide. Foran tells one story about using a shotgun with birdshot against a rhino, barely tickling it, but surprising it with the noise.
HOW TO ACT LIKE A WILD ANIMAL
Basic, stuff: African wildlife took some time to work out that men with load firesticks ought to be avoided as much as possible, but by the high Victorian period, almost all animals had decided that the scent of man was a very bad aroma. At the same time, the more dangerous animals came to the conclusion that an aggressive response to threats- was. the best policy-, and by 1900 or so, hunters were observing that elephants were more inclined to charge on sight, and lions more likely to stalk the humans rather than ignore them. Wounded animals are always dangerous - even the kind that were generally very passive - and, of course, females are obsessive about the safety of their young; anyone foolish enough to get between the mother and offspring can expect really bad things to happen.
Lions are cautious predators, usually hunting after dark and lying up in cover during daylight hours. They are wary of hunters, and will avoid them by stealth if at all possible. Lions may be found
- 1) as solitary animals, usually males
2) female prides, often with cubs;
3) 'bachelor' prides of males.
Prides consist of 3-8 animals for our purposes. A wounded lion is very dangerous; it may attack instantly, or slink away to dense cover, from which it will attack any pursuers . Lions tend to make a grunt prior to a charge, which may help locate them. The charge is often very low to the ground rather than a leap, and almost impossible to stop once launched.
Elephants are huge, intelligent creatures with excellent hearing and sense of smell, but somewhat poor eyesight. They might be found as 1) solitary males,2) female-led family groups, 3) family groups led by an old bull, or 4) bachelor herds. Of these, the first and last are most likely to become 'rogue', belligerent for no obvious reason. In general, elephants would respond to the smell and sound of man by drifting downwind, but an aggressive elephant, once wounded, would charge, and quite possibly his friends would join in. Indeed, while a direct kill might not upset a herd, the wounding of a member might bring all adult elephants - cows as well as bulls- into violent attack. Elephants kill less with their tusks than by stomping and by picking up the hapless human in their trunks and using them as a drumstick or one-way boomerang.
Rhinos are ancient creatures, very short-sighted and unintelligent, whose attack usually when wounded or otherwise provoked - is ferocious but easily avoided by the wary human. They just keep on going -
Hippos are also prehistoric animals, very dangerous in the water. Not carnivorous, but very touchy about territorial issues, hippos may attack boats that get too close, taking tremendous bites out of, well, anything. Hippos often feed at night some distance from water, and see anything obstructing their path back to the river / lake etc as a threat to be dealt with. Nothing personal.
Crocodiles are in many ways the most dangerous of African predators. Primeval, crafty, slow until they pounce, they do not kill with the jaws, but grip the prey and drag it down until it drowns - very nasty. Then they let it get good and mushy before dining. Yum. You've seen the old Tarzan films. May work in groups, but inclined to eat wounded friends rather than help them. Can't find that endearing.
Leopards are smaller than lion, very crafty, who kill for the sheer joy of it all. Often solitary, their attack is less likely to be instantly deadly than larger animals, but they are more than happy to tussle until they win. A wounded leopard is widely considered the most lethal of opponents. They seem to think of humans as just another kind of tasty monkey.
Cheetahs are immensely fast carnivores, like leopard but considerably smaller, and not generally dangerous to man because, well, we are too damned big to bother. Still, no reason we shouldn't have a particularly aggressive one to deal with --
Buffalo are widely regarded as more dangerous than elephant, owing to several factors. Immensely strong and ornery, able to keep going after serious wounds with heavy artillery, and very prone to seek out those who are bothering them. They will pummel you and roll you into a spot on the ground. So I'm told.
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