I Married Adventure

by Osa Johnson

  This was one of many long and earnest talks with Mr. Akeley, and through him our plans for the future took shape. He suggested British East Africa as the best place in the world for our film studies of wild-animal life, and so this became our next goal.

  The following few months were very busy ones for my husband. There was the editing of our Borneo film, trips home to Kansas—and the problem of raising the money for a properly equipped journey into Africa. While I was busy making the most of my brief stay in Kansas, visiting my family and seeing my old friends—among them Gail Hamilton and her babies—Martin decided that the best and most businesslike method of raising money would be to form a company and sell stock. His father was the first to buy. Not only did his father buy stock, he encouraged Martin to sell stock in Independence. And with the financing of our trip secured, I returned to New York to gather together the things that would insure us more comfort and efficiency on the trip. I likewise engaged in one amusing episode with Bessie.

  Mrs. Allan, chairman of the Humane Society, who lived in the apartment below us, was very much interested in our strangely assorted pets and asked one day if I would be willing to appear with Bessie on the steps of the library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, to assist in a drive for funds. Readily enough, I said yes. The day of the fund drive was very hot. I combed and brushed Bessie and washed her face and hands, then hurried into a white blouse and skirt, pulled a tam over my hair, and called a taxi. Bessie weighed more than I did, and carrying her was quite a job, but being an orangutan, she was built to use her arms rather than her legs, and having once been carried she was utterly spoiled. The taxi driver, of the sort chronically disgusted and impervious to surprise, set us down at the library, and logically enough charged two fares. Bessie, troubled by the sight of so many people, hugged me a little closer than was altogether necessary, and, with her sturdy chest and thick, furry arms cutting off breath and vision, I climbed with considerable awkwardness and difficulty to the platform at the top of the stately stairs—also with complete unawareness that the spectacle of a small woman in the apparent stranglehold of a big ape had stopped the Fifth Avenue traffic.

  At all events, Bessie attracted quite a crowd and shook hands nicely with as many ladies as cared to shake hands with her, and, according to Mrs. Allan, the fund, thanks to her, was swelled considerably.

  Bessie became quite warm after a while with both sun and excitement, so I decided to take her home. She rubbed the top of her head and, I’ve no doubt, had a headache, so I gave her my handkerchief and she spread it on, but to her disgust it blew off. There’s no doubt that she wanted a hat, because when we slowed at the Thirty-fourth Street intersection, she reached out and with perfect timing appropriated the cap of the traffic officer.

  A good Irishman, intent on his duty, he swung around shouting something about the “dignity of the law,” and looked into the face of an orangutan. His visored cap was on her head. Bessie’s loud protests against parting with the cap snarled traffic on Fifth Avenue for the second time that day as well as working considerable damage to the cap itself. We were ordered by the judge to buy the officer a new one, which Martin thought was reasonable enough.

  As the time approached for us to start traveling again, it became more and more apparent that we simply could not continue indefinitely to fashion our lives around a menagerie. As it was, they—and Bessie in particular—had made us virtual prisoners from the moment we acquired them, and so, with mingled tears and sighs of relief at parting, we placed them in the Central Park Zoo.

  All but Kalowatt. Neither of us could bring ourselves either to part with her or mention her. We gave her tenderer care than ever and put off the wretched day as long as possible. Then, finally, after a sleepless night, my mind was made up. I would promise to take complete care of her and to keep her at all times from being a bother—in short, I’d beg Martin to let me take her with us.

  We had sat down to our last breakfast in town and neither of us ate a bite. Kalowatt, with her little fork and nothing to impair her appetite, did all the honors.

  “Martin—” I began.

  “About Kalowatt,” he broke in. “I’ve been thinking about her. She’d just about die in a zoo with strangers staring at her all day, and besides that, she’s used to us, and—” He scowled at me. “What do you think?”

  I became very intent on whatever I was doing.

  “But, of course, we couldn’t possibly take her with us,” I said.

  My husband glared. “And why not? There’s no law against it, is there?”

  Martin had a beautiful little cage made for her, but even so, several steamship companies refused to take her as a passenger, and we were delayed by the rearranging of our schedule.

  And we had reason to be grateful for this delay, because it gave Martin’s father just the little extra time he needed to make up his mind to go with us to Africa. He had been weighing the idea for some weeks, it seemed.

  “If you’d gone last Friday,” he said, “I’d have been on the shore waving good-bye. But I’ve made up my mind, and the shore can wave good-bye to me!”

  I don’t know when I’ve seen Martin so happy.

  “I’ll just take a little peek at Africa,” the elder Johnson said, “maybe get a look at a lion, then go around home and compare notes with that one hanging in the Booth Hotel.”

  Chapter 16

  The preparations for our first trip to Africa had tired us all more than we knew, so I took advantage of the leisurely weeks aboard ship to rest and store up energy for whatever might lie ahead. Martin, however, was up early every morning pacing the deck. There was a new restlessness in him, a new anxiety. His father usually joined him, and I contented myself with sitting, Kalowatt perched on my knee, and watching them. Their companionship was a fine thing to see. Martin hadn’t told me in so many words what was troubling him, but then it was rarely necessary for us to talk of things that touched us both closely, and I knew I could best help him by being cheerful and confident.

  “Now, you stop worrying, son,” Mr. Johnson said. They had paused and were leaning on the rail near me. It was just a few days before we sighted the East African coast. “Sure it’s a responsibility, other people’s money, but—”

  “Your money too, don’t forget!” Martin put in with a wry smile.

  “Yes, and one of the best investments I ever made, or I miss my guess,” the elder Johnson replied firmly. “The way I see it,” he went on, “there’ll be time enough to worry about lighting problems and whether you can get close enough to the animals to photograph them when you’ve got African soil under your feet and a lion or something out there looking at you.”

  “You’re an optimist, Dad, that’s all I’ve got to say. If they’re anything like the animals in Borneo, all we’ll see will be their tails.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that, son. What about those elephants? Didn’t you and Osa have to climb a tree?”

  Martin grinned briefly. “We just happened to be lucky that day.” He was thoughtful again. “One thing sure,” he said, “Osa and I aren’t going to do any trapping or faking. We’re going to get the animals the way they live in their natural environment or we aren’t going to get them at all.”

  “Absolutely!” Father Johnson was emphatic. “You’re going to get them honest.” Then, after a moment, “You know, son, there’s one thing you overlook and that’s you and Osa.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t failed yet in anything you’ve set out to do, and as far as I can see, you’re a combination that just can’t be beat.”

  Martin flashed a smile at me and winked.

  “And me,” Father Johnson laughed, “I didn’t tell you this, but along with my Kodak, I brought a little twenty-two popgun, just in case some of these critters down here don’t like the smell of Kansas!”

  Nairobi, principal city in British East Africa as well as
the government seat, was our destination, and there, following Carl Akeley’s suggestion, we were planning to make our headquarters.

  Arriving at Mombasa, the seaport to British East Africa, we immediately noticed the thick and humid heat that lies on this country’s lower lands along the Indian Ocean coast. It took three days to get our eighty-five trunks, boxes, and crates through customs and to arrange for their shipment by rail to Nairobi, though one bright spot in the apparently endless confusion and swelter was the discovery that refrigerator cars were available. My husband had our film put in one of these as speedily as possible, and from that moment on he seemed not to mind the heat at all. I was at first worried about Father Johnson, but he declared that it was no worse than summers in Kansas. He bought a pith helmet and trailed cheerfully around with Martin from docks to train shed, pencil and pad in hand, doing all the things I usually did to help check our equipment.

  “The boss of an outfit never works,” he’d say to me. “You sit there.” If no other shade was available, he’d hire a native to hold an umbrella over me. The fact that this cost only a few cents for an entire day had him properly astonished.

  “Why, with a few thousand dollars, a man could live like a millionaire around here,” he said delightedly. When he learned, however, that it was costing us more to ship our things from Mombasa to Nairobi, a distance of about three hundred and thirty miles, than it had cost to come from the United States to Africa, and that our railroad tickets were costing us eighteen cents a mile, he was frankly bewildered.

  On the evening of the third day, with our stuffy hotel rooms and the heat and confusion of Mombasa left behind, we started our journey to Nairobi on the Uganda railroad. Among the pleasant incongruities of travel in this part of the world was finding ourselves in a modern compartment car drawn by a wood-burning engine. The engine, I remember, had a preposterously feminine-sounding whistle which screeched incessantly. The engineer, a bearded, beturbaned Sikh, and the fireman, a black, both with very engaging grins, told us they kept the whistle going all the time to frighten wild animals off the tracks, all of which seemed very silly for the first hour or two out of Mombasa. Cultivated groves of coconuts, mangoes, papayas, and bananas met the railroad bed on either side, and the only animals visible were the monkeys, lively and impudent, that swung through the treetops and chattered at us as we chugged and tooted by. Kalowatt, for lack of treetops, leaped from Father Johnson’s shoulder to Martin’s and then to mine and, shaking with excitement, pressed her nose against the window.

  We decided with some impatience that this certainly was not an express train, for we stopped at every little station along the way. Natives in sketchy and usually untidy costumes swarmed to the train platforms and did a large, if not very profitable, business with the passengers in the third- and fourth-class compartments. Father Johnson was out at every stop and reported that the most popular commodity was milk, sold in every imaginable container ranging from gourds to gin bottles. Other food offered for sale, he found, was some greasy, sticky lumps of stuff with a most revolting smell. He bought some thinking that perhaps Martin or I could identify it. When we failed, he started to put a little of it in his mouth, but Martin seized it and tossed it out the window.

  “You’re as bad as Jack London,” he grinned, not without admiration. “He ate everything too and got a bug they never did figure out.”

  Thanks to Carl Akeley, we were prepared for the fact that the Uganda railroad did not supply the comforts or the bedding usually found in American Pullman sleeping cars. So when night came I got pillows, sheets, and blankets from our own luggage to make things fairly comfortable. It was ten o’clock when I awoke the next morning, but Martin and his father, both too excited to sleep, had been up since daybreak and said the wild bush through which we were now traveling was alive with animals.

  “Looks as if Noah’s Ark might have been spilled out right here,” Father Johnson cried, his nose, like Kalowatt’s, glued to the windowpane.

  We stopped for breakfast at a little village called Voi. The eating house was of galvanized iron, and the inside was surprisingly reminiscent of the Harvey restaurants on the Santa Fe line. Even the gong which sounded the call for meals and train-time had a familiar ring. Here the similarity ended, however, for instead of Indians, we saw black Africans wearing only skins and decorated with the most fantastic ornaments, and the shacks huddled around the station had walls of flattened gasoline cans and roofs of grass.

  Leaving Voi, the train began the hard, slow pull to the highlands. Here the character of the country changed again, and soon we were out of the bush and traveling through great rolling plains. The air grew fresher and more invigorating, and every now and then we caught glimpses of the snow-covered peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  The train paused at Kiu, a village very like Voi, where we had lunch. We also took on wood and water. Despite the frequent, necessary stops for fuel and water, the train finally, on schedule, pulled into Nairobi.

  Had it not been for the black porters in long-tailed khaki shirts, I could easily have imagined myself in any one of a number of Middle West railroad stations. People in more or less conventional garb hurried to and fro. There was a newsstand and a restaurant, both lively and attractive, and, to my astonishment, a string of taxis stood at the street entrance. These, however, were only the beginning of the surprises Nairobi held for me. For no reason I can think of I had expected to see a somewhat squalid tropical village such as we found in the South Seas, and I was totally unprepared for the clean, white, modern city it proved to be. Our taxi took us smoothly over paved streets flanked by office buildings and department stores and let us out at a hotel which provided all the comforts of up-to-date civilization. Situated nearly six thousand feet above sea level, with a population of more than two thousand whites, Nairobi was the healthful and pleasant seat of the British East African government.

  I had pictured all Englishmen in Africa as wearing pith sun helmets and khaki shorts, but here in Nairobi they dressed exactly as they might have done in London, in good, well-cut, tailored woolens. That this was Africa, however, was made sharply evident by the crowds of blacks. There were askaris, the husky native soldiers, proud in their bright-red fezzes; there were house servants in white konzas, a flowing garment that had the look of a nightshirt and is the house servant’s livery; and there were market women dressed in skins and carrying flat trays of vegetables on their heads.

  The business section of town swarmed with traffic that was at once thick, noisy, and conglomerate. There were dilapidated wagons drawn by mules, rickshaws drawn by blacks, lively bicyclists, slow pushcarts, and impatient automobiles—the latter often of American make—that honked petulantly but without avail. Martin and I were astonished to see this mass move at all, and yet move it did and even with a semblance of order, thanks to the police officer directing it. He was fun to watch. With his air of importance he might have been in the very heart of Piccadilly Circus.

  While Martin busied himself with plans for our first safari, his father and I searched for living quarters and had the good luck to find a lovely eight-room bungalow just twenty minutes from town. It was set in the heart of a beautiful garden, of perhaps an acre in extent, that fostered with equal hospitality the flowers familiar to our western eyes, as well as the brilliant, unfamiliar blooms of the tropics; and tall, straight evergreens stood sentinel on all four sides. At the back of the house we found an oblong patch of fine pineapples, together with a large square plot, freshly spaded, that clearly was the kitchen garden.

  Delighted with our find, Father Johnson and I hurried back to town, searched out Martin, who was deep in figures that had to do with safari Fords, ox carts, porters, and the like, and rushed to the little real estate office just a block up from the hotel, where we signed a lease.

  “And you’ve no idea how beautifully arranged the house is, Martin,” I said excitedly on our way back to the hotel. “Why, one servant i
n the house and another to take care of the garden will be all in the world I’ll need.”

  That I wound up with ten servants never has ceased to amuse me. It began the next morning. Martin had left early with his father, and I was packing our things, eager to get out to the bungalow, when there was a tap at the door. I said “Come,” and in walked a big, fine-looking black in spotless white konza and skullcap. He carried a breakfast tray which, with utmost respect and deftness, he set before me.

  I said, “Who are you?”

  He replied, “Aloni, your room-boy.”

  I said, “Oh, you belong to the hotel?”

  He replied, “No. Aloni belong to you.”

  As simply as that he hired himself to us, which, as we afterwards realized, was our good luck, for together with his small, neat wife he proved invaluable, and before we ourselves had moved into the bungalow, he had set up housekeeping in a grass hut in a corner of our garden.

  The rest attached themselves to us with almost equal directness. On the morning of my first encounter with Aloni, I discovered a score of natives squatting outside our hotel and watching our windows. By this time I was ready to leave for the bungalow, and I thought that if their intentions were similar to Aloni’s, I would simply ignore them. No sooner had I set foot outside the door of the hotel, however, than they swarmed about me, each thrusting anywhere from six to fifty letters of recommendation under my nose. Most of them were written in neat enough script, but their contents were little short of astonishing. “Mohammed is a fairly good cook,” read one. “I never saw him stealing.” “Kimani was my houseboy for three months,” said another. “He does as well as he can.”

  Bewildered by all this ambiguity, I shook my head and ran for a rickshaw, but I wound up, as I’ve said, with ten servants. Two or three at most would have done very nicely, but I found that they had an undeclared code of division of work, as effective as any trade union, and that the cost of all ten was less than the wage of one servant at home.