As he retired, Patterson had time to pry the carbine out of Mahina’s hands and get off another shot. To what must have been his surprise, the cat fell in a heap and appeared to be dead. Appearances can be deceiving. Patterson jumped from the tree and, like the greenest Bwana in Nairobi’s growing cemetery, ran up to the lion. To his consternation, it jumped back up at very close range and came for him again. This time, however, the ninth bullet Patterson had put into the man-eater coincided with the last of his lives, a carbine slug in the boiler room putting him back down while a final tenth shot kept him there as he chewed a stick to shreds, thrashing out his last moments. At bloody, long last, the Man-eaters of Tsavo were dead.
Of course it was hero time again, with a definite sense of finality now. The second lion was even bigger than the first; although two inches less in length, it was two and a half inches taller at the shoulder and much heavier. The much-scarred hide, cut by the thorn bomas, was full of bullet holes, as well as the double dose of shotgun slug from the platform ten days before. For some odd reason, the slugs had not penetrated deeply enough to kill, even though they had knocked the cat down.
One of the most practical immediate dividends to accrue from the death of the second man-eater, besides the fact that people weren’t getting eaten any more, was the return of the deserted coolie force and resumption of the bridge work that had been stopped three weeks before. If Patterson’s timing, with general respect to the lions, hadn’t exactly been unerring, at least he did get lucky now. The bridge was finished just before the first heavy rains, and, as the river rose in angry flood, all the temporary spanning was carried away within a few days of the bridge’s completion. Had the schedule been even a bit behind, the whole project might have been ruined and all the lives taken by the lions for nothing.
Although the actual number of kills of the Tsavo Man-eaters was relatively modest compared with such heavy hitters as the Njombe Lions, the impact of the depredations of these two incredible animals was certainly not limited to Africa. In fact, at least to that date, they are believed to hold the distinction of being the only wild animals ever considered worthy of recognition by the British House of Lords. Speaking of the Tsavo Lions and their effect upon the Uganda Railroad, Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, made the following statement:
“The whole of the works were put a stop to for three weeks because a party of man-eating lions appeared and conceived a most unfortunate taste for our porters. At last the laborers entirely declined to go on unless they were guarded by an iron entrenchment. Of course it is difficult to work a railway under these conditions, and until we found an enthusiastic sportsman to get rid of these lions our enterprise was seriously hindered.”
As for Patterson, the “enthusiastic sportsman,” he stayed on in Africa until April of 1900, returning in 1907 to make several safaris into the Kenyan nyika, where he discovered the Patterson’s Eland. He also had the misfortune to have one of his companions commit suicide by blowing his brains out with a pistol while suffering from a bout of malaria. Before leaving for England in 1900, Patterson was to find that his association with lions was not quite over. Although he had killed the two most famous simbas in the Tsavo area, that by no means meant that there were not others. One in particular caused an unforgettable night of tragedy just twenty miles down the track from Tsavo, at Voi, in 1899, when Patterson was visiting his old buddy, Dr. Rose, the medical officer. At dinner one evening, Rose told J.H. of the building of a new branch line through the Kilima N‘jaro District under the charge of an engineer named O’Hara.
The very next morning, while out for a few francolin, or guinea fowl, with his shotgun, Patterson noticed four Swahili bearers carrying a makeshift stretcher along the new road from the line under construction. He shouted, asking who was being carried, and the Swahilis yelled back, “Bwana.” Patterson asked again which Bwana and was told that it was O‘Hara. Some distance behind the porters staggered the saddest little group imaginable, the grief-stricken Mrs. O’Hara with a small child in her tired arms and another tiny girl so exhausted that she hung onto her mother’s skirt to keep up. Patterson helped them to Rose’s tent, where the doctor did what he could and sedated Mrs. O’Hara. The most they had been able to learn from the Swahilis was that her husband had been killed by a lion the night before. Late in the afternoon, when the new widow was able to speak coherently, she told the following story. These are her own words as recorded by Patterson:
“We were all asleep in the tent, my husband and I in one bed and my two children in another. The baby was feverish and restless, so I got up to give her something to drink; and as I was doing so, I heard what I thought was a lion walking around the tent. I at once woke my husband and told him I felt sure there was a lion about. He jumped up and went out, taking his gun with him. He looked round the outside of the tent and spoke to the Swahili askari [a native guard or armed soldier] who was on sentry by the camp fire a little distance off. The askari said he had seen nothing except a donkey, so my husband came in again, telling me not to worry as it was only a donkey that I had heard.
“The night being very hot, my husband threw back the tent door and lay down again beside me. After a while I dozed off, but was suddenly roused by a feeling as if the pillow were being pulled away from under my head. On looking round I found that my husband was gone. I jumped up and called him loudly, but got no answer. Just then I heard a noise among the boxes outside the door and saw my poor husband lying between the boxes. I ran up to him and tried to lift him, but found I could not do so. I then called to the askari to come and help me, but he refused, saying that there was a lion standing beside me. I looked up and saw the huge beast glowering at me, not more than two yards away. At this moment the askari fired his rifle, and this fortunately frightened the lion, for it at once jumped off into the bush.
“All four askaris then came forward and lifted my husband back on to the bed. He was quite dead. We had hardly got back into the tent before the lion returned and prowled about in front of the door, showing every intention of springing in to recover his prey. The askaris fired at him, but did no damage beyond frightening him away again for a moment or two. He soon came back and continued to walk round the tent until daylight, growling and purring, and it was only by firing through the tent every now and then that we kept him out. At daybreak he disappeared and I had my husband’s body carried here, while I followed with the children until I met you.”
The most comfort Patterson and Rose were able to give the distracted Mrs. O‘Hara was the assurance, after the postmortem by Rose, that her husband had not suffered. Rose determined that O’Hara had been lying on his back at the time of the lion’s attack and had been bitten once through the temples, the teeth actually meeting in the brain. This is classic killing behavior for a man-eating lion, silent, instantly fatal, no chance of a struggle. This particular cat had undoubtedly been active for some time, but the sketchy records of the period, in especial relationship to Africans eaten, give us no more information, except to say that the Voi Man-eater was killed a few weeks later by a poisoned arrow shot from a treetop by a WaTaita tribesman.
It’s a long time now since Patterson spent his nine months of terror, and almost as much of that clear water has passed beneath the fateful bridge since O’Hara was nailed at Voi. But don’t get the idea that lions have quit eating people along the Uganda Railroad. Hunter Robert Foran killed an incredible four man-eaters in a single day after they had run up a score of more than fifty kills in only three months in the late 1940s, right in this same area. In 1955, a telegram was sent from Tsavo to Nairobi with all the nostalgia of the bad old days:
“Odeke narrowly escaped being caught by lion … . All staff unwilling to do night duty. Afford protection.”
The last reference I can find handily to a man-eater operating in the Tsavo range is the one describing a lion killed in 1965 by the well-known professional hunter, John Kingsley-Heath. It was emaciated and weighed only 380 pounds. Kingsley-Heath discov
ered a porcupine quill festering in one of its nostrils, a good probability of why it turned man-eater.
The two Man-eaters of Tsavo were subsequently mounted by Rowland Ward of London and were presented to the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, where they reside to this day in Hall Twenty-two. An interesting sidelight between the Tsavo Bridge and the Field Museum is found in the fact that John Henry Patterson’s son, Bryan Patterson, served on the staff of the museum as a distinguished paleontologist from 1926 to 1955. Aware that he was scheduled to return in 1979 as a visiting curator, I attempted to contact him to verify some personal details of his father’s life. Telephoning in the spring of 1980, I was too late. Bryan Patterson had died the previous autumn.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Patterson, J. H., Lieutenant Colonel, D.S.O. The Man-eaters of Tsavo. London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1907.
————. In the Grip of the Nyika. London: Macmillan and Company, Ltd., 1910.
————. “The Lions That Stopped a Railroad,” The World’s Work, three parts, pp. 10897-11158, privately bound article, circa 1907.
C. H. Stigand
IT’S VERY EARLY FOR VULTURES to be flying, the dew still glimmering in the low sun on emerald stalks of long Nile grass, dense as an endless, towering hedge and resilient from last month’s short rains. Through it, in classic British Army box formation, weaves the Equatorial Battalion, the khaki column two miles west of Kor Raby, a place of remarkable remoteness, even for Sudan’s southernmost province. The heat is building, swelling in the oppressive stillness even at this hour, 7:10 A.M. on December 8, 1919, the silence tainted only by the slither of grass across puttees and the muffled metallic clink of weapons, the furtive marching song of war in savage lands. The porters of the punitive expedition, protected by troops on both flanks as well as by an advance and rear guard, sweat freely under their loads of food, tentage and ammunition, while dark splotches begin to seep through the dull, cotton uniforms of the soldiers. Ahead, and off to their right, members of the right flank catch an occasional glimpse of an officer through the few gaps in the grass and shake their heads at the deadly risk of his lone exposure in this thick cover. They glance upward to where the big griffon vultures hang and slide against the bleached denim sky. They know. The bloody birds always know. Death is out there this fine morning. Perhaps to the front, maybe the sides. Behind? Only the birds know, the birds and the enemy. But this morning he’s there, all right, maybe thousands of him. Warriors of the Aliab branch of the Dinka tribe—tough, utterly wild and fearless, mostly naked but for a coating of wood ash, a thick, strong shield and, blimey, those great long spears sharp as the regimental surgeon’s scalpel.
But the officer hasn’t missed the vultures or anything else around him, although he looks to be a suicidal, green fool so far from the main body, making notes and sketches and taking bearings for a future map of the area, which has never been charted. He damned well ought to know what he’s doing. He’s been out here frying and freezing, fever-racked and footsore, for the better part of twenty years, quietly doing things that would give Tarzan second thoughts. He’s written a trunkful of papers and nine full books on African matters as diverse as the protective coloration of insects, to how to govern your own province, to updated and revised KiSwahili dictionaries. He speaks a dozen languages, several of them well enough to be a certified translator. He’s killed a hell of a lot of people and captured many more. He is one of the most talented hunters, scouts and administrators of his day, unquestionably a genius with a multifaceted intellect that makes him appear one moment a cross between John Wayne and the Scarlet Pimpernel, the next a mixture of Margaret Mead and a zoo curator. He is Major Chauncey Hugh Stigand, Order of the British Empire, Order of the Nile, War Medal, Victory Medal. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical and Zoological Societies. He is Stigand Bey, Governor of the Anglo-Sudanese Province of Mongalla. He is also the most important man on the African continent.
Perhaps the birds know that he has approximately seven more minutes to live, although these last few moments of sparring with death will be as extraordinary as the rest of his career in Africa has been. He was forty-two years old the previous October.
How C. H. Stigand ever managed to reach the age of forty-two is in itself a minor miracle, considering how close he came to getting his terminal leave at least three times before his big day in the long grass of Kor Raby. Yet, an even more amazing aspect of Stigand and his deeds is that he never reached the household-word status of some of his contemporaries, such as T. E. “Lawrence of Arabia” whom, in an uncanny number of ways, Stigand resembled in breadth and depth of talent. Both British officers were linguists, able to immerse themselves into cultures almost totally dissimilar to their own. So, too, were they both adventurer-philosophers, capable of the gentlest thought and the bloodiest deed, if the latter needed doing in the call of duty. The big difference and probable cause of Stigand’s relative anonymity is directly connected to his colossal over-modesty. Despite the wealth of information his books have left us, he constantly and consistently refused to refer to any of his hair-raising adventures in any but the mildest of terms; he often omitted them entirely! Most of his more interesting episodes—and Stigand attracted danger the way a dead horse draws flies—are best reconstructed with the help of his fellow officers, in particular a Colonel Thorp, who was Stigand’s good friend, and General Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of Sudan, the man who assembled Stigand’s material for his posthumous book. When Stigand was dead and not able to object, Wingate and Thorp wrote a memoir of Stigand and included it in Equatoria, the book published in 1923 which throws a good deal of welcome light on the modest major, without which people like me, trying to research Stigand, would have years ago thrown up their hands in despair and wandered off to open an artery.
Before I turn the incredible Chauncey loose on you, you ought to know a little about his background. Born in 1877, the son of the British consul in France at a city that doesn’t make the slightest difference, he was locked into a liberal arts education despite a mighty yearning for the blood-and-thunder of the army. After he almost destroyed the chemistry lab at one school in an attempt to make explosives—apparently he succeeded—his family relented and permitted him to study for a commission. At this point, around age sixteen, some 200-pound bully must have kicked sand in his face at Brighton Beach because, picturing himself as a “lank, overgrown youth,” he dove headlong into physical fitness. For two solid years he boxed, tumbled, lifted weights and especially studied the then-famous Sandow exercises, named for the Charles Atlas of his day. The Great Sandow must have known what he was doing; by Stigand’s eighteenth birthday, he was no longer a gawky kid but 182 pounds of chiseled muscle sought after for charity events, at which he would tear packs of playing cards in half, bend iron bars and perform other feats of strength. Even Sandow personally presented him with a medal as being one of his best students.
His military career began with the receipt of his commission as a lieutenant in the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment early in January of 1899. He shipped out for Burma and his first dose of lifelong malaria. Still, he was fit and continued to wow the chaps with his strength until it was conceded that he was probably the strongest man in the British Army. Burma was also his first chance to foray into the jungles, and the regimental gazette of his outfit calls his quarters a veritable museum of dead and live critters. His prize specimen was a huge hamadryad, or king cobra, which he would force-feed with a penholder across the jaws as his mates looked on from a very prudent distance. It was also in Burma that he began studying “native” languages, hiring a tutor to learn Burmese. An officer pal of his reports visiting his bungalow at the hottest hour of the day, to find him hard at work with his Burmese instructor while surrounded with the four baskets of his “tame” cobras.
When, shortly thereafter, his regiment was transferred to Aden, British territory on the coast of southern Arabia, just across the mouth of the Red Sea from pot
entially cantankerous Somaliland, Stigand decided that he wouldn’t be speaking much Burmese and switched to Somali and Arabic, shortly mastering them both despite their dissimilarity to the English tongue. (He might as well have chosen Sanskrit and Quechua for degree of difficulty.) Within a year, Colonel Thorp recalls that a walk through the native bazaar with Chauncey conclusively proved that he knew the native name, value, place of origin and use of every item he saw. Very different sort, this guy Stigand, especially if you remember that in 1901, British colonial powers were largely of the mentality that, rather than learn native customs and languages, the way to communicate with the “wogs” was to shout loudly and clearly in English.
While in Aden, we begin to get an idea of Stigand’s sense of adventure. Just after he got settled, he bought a first-class riding camel named Tari. When he had enough Arabic under his belt to be able to brazen out any possible situations that might eventuate a collection of blue-edged rifle bullet holes through his new Arab robes, he began a personal and highly unofficial series of after-dark reconnaissances of the area around Aden, incredibly not yet explored by the British. Stigand isn’t very helpful with the escapades, but he did discuss his one-man forays with Thorp the following year during long marches together.
Death in the Silent Places Page 5