Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Jackson had come armed with a strange double-barreled weapon that he’d had specially made for the trip. One barrel shot rifle bullets; the other, bird shot. The weapons added forty pounds of shot and ten pounds of Maynard bullets to their gear. This immense adventure kit, bursting with anticipation, was packed into a huge wooden crate specially built by carpenters at Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. On the afternoon of January 21, 1876, the two swashbucklers and their crate boarded a train for New York City to catch a boat bound for Barbados and the rest of their lives. In his journal, Jackson later captured the emotion of this departure:

  Our feelings cannot be described—we were just intensely happy. Yet there was a shade of apprehension (we might never come back)—there was our faith in the success of the expedition—there was a wild freedom in it that made our pulses throb—we saw expeditions rich in conquests—and terrible animals—awful snakes—gorgeous birds—we saw ourselves swinging in our hammocks in the depths of the great woods—campfires—Indians—or paddling up the deep, dark rivers—we saw our safe return to home and friends wise in experience and chock-full of yarns of adventure—We were happy—we leaned back in our car seat and talked and talked while the cars flitted through the villages carrying us swiftly to N.Y.7

  Once they arrived in Manhattan, they got a shoebox of a hotel room and wandered down to the East River, where they admired the soaring, half-finished steel girders and struts of what would become the Brooklyn Bridge a few years later. They spotted their ship in the harbor, a dreadful, dirty-looking little three-masted bark, preposterously named the Golden Fleece, which was being loaded with corn, beans, and hay. The deck was crowded with piles of lumber, bundles of barrel staves, and horses, all bound for plantations in Barbados. The next day, they stopped at the Astor Library, silent as a mausoleum, to read up about the Orinoco and the Demerara, another river delta in British Guiana where Professor Ward wanted them to go. As if to demonstrate how ill prepared they were, they also stopped at a bookshop and bought a copy of a little book called Spanish Made Easy.

  To the young men’s delight, Professor Ward took the train down from Rochester and showed up at the harbor to see them off. He handed them a big bag of oranges, and just as the ship pulled away from the dock, shouted out, in a rare burst of feeling:

  “I’d give one of my fingers to go with you!”

  Even so, the trip did not get off to an auspicious start. As Jackson wrote in his journal, the morning of their departure was “a cold disagreeable day—chilly—cloudy—disheartening.” When the Golden Fleece got out to sea, things got worse. The ship ran into a freezing North Atlantic gale, and the two would-be adventurers were driven below deck to their tiny quarters, where a small coal stove filled the air with noxious fumes and the ship pitched and heaved for days. Both of them got violently ill. Hornaday tried to nibble the tasteless crackers the sailors called hardtack, but he had no appetite. The winter gale was unrelenting and did not break for three days. Jackson wrote:

  [H]ow the wind howled through the rigging—weird and awful—sometimes it would shriek through the blocks like a very maniac—the waves dashed over the sides—and made the ship stagger and groan beneath the great burden of water—in our berth we could feel the mighty sea gathering force—could hear it come rolling on—we held on to the edge of the berth to keep from being hurled to the floor—how our bones ached from being rolled backward and forward—the sailors ran on the deck to the hoarse cries of the captain—often we could hear the men at the pump—we might be leaking badly—we might be sinking—yet morning came at last—and oh! how grateful we were to see it.8

  Four days out from the port of New York, the weather broke, the Golden Fleece plunged into the great, broad, blue avenue of the Gulf Stream, and the intrepid adventurers emerged from their seasick torture chamber down below. They stripped down to their shirtsleeves and basked in the neotropical sun. Ten days later, with moonlight on a still sea and the town clock booming midnight, the ship sailed into the harbor at Bridgetown, Barbados.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Will and Chester made their way up the Orinoco and into other steamy river deltas. Hornaday later chronicled this trip in installments for a long travelogue called “Canoe and Rifle on the Orinoco,” for a popular magazine called Youth’s Companion, among whose other contributors included Jack London, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emily Dickinson.9

  The great Orinoco River basin, the eighth-longest river in the world, was a muddy torrent more than three miles wide in places, crowded on both sides with nearly impenetrable jungle and swamp. It was overrun with life. Thousands of sea turtles, loggerheads, greens, hawksbills, and ridleys, some weighing 1,000 pounds, swam upriver at nesting season and swarmed onto the muddy beaches. There were flamboyant tropical birds in the trees—toucans and macaws—and wading birds on the shore, along with howler monkeys and the strange capybara, or water-hog, the world’s largest rodent, as well as the Western hemisphere’s biggest snake, the thirty-foot anaconda.10 They rode the steamboat all the way up to Ciudad Bolivar, where they ventured out on hunting expeditions, at one point shooting a nearly twelve-foot crocodile which, though wounded, began slithering away into the river. Hornaday, afraid the beast would escape, grabbed the thing by the tail and it turned on him “with a deep gutteral snarl like a dog” and lunged at him before Chester stilled its life with a well-placed bullet.11

  “Bill, you fool! What in the name of heaven are you thinking?” Jackson yelled at him.

  Hornaday was just thinking that he didn’t want it to get away.

  They continued on to the Demerara River delta, in Guyana, where they finally procured a manatee skeleton, though a whole specimen, skin and all, eluded them. They had been adventuring for more than six months and were both deeply tanned, and their clothes in tatters, when they boarded a steamship in Barbados in July 1876 and headed home. The trip had been wonderful fun, and the two vagabonds returned with an amazing array of specimens—crocodiles, electric eels, howler monkeys, sloth and puma, bats, birds, fish, and armadillos—but Hornaday was not satisfied. Years later, perhaps as a boast, he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt that South America was “the poorest country that I ever struck,” and “the most unsatisfactory on Earth for a hunter-naturalist!”12 Life was young, and he intended to do better in even more exotic places.

  But now he was turning homeward, and his thoughts returned not to the adventures just past, but to the young woman from Battle Creek, Michigan, the Empress Josephine, whom he had mailed letters to from whatever port seemed civilized enough to get them to her. He wondered what she thought of him now, or if he was in her thoughts at all. He knew for certain that she was in his. In fact, by now he knew as surely as he’d ever known anything: he was giddily, utterly in love. In a letter to a friend filled with advice and confessions about his newfound joy, Hornaday later wrote:

  Old fellow, I do wish you would fall dead in love with Miss ___ for you would immediately find yourself in another world entirely. There is absolutely nothing like it! For my part, I feel a calm and happy tranquillity all the while, all tasks are play, and I seem to tread on air. Because I know she’s true. Well now, don’t be afraid to love the girl for fear she can’t be lassooed. My pard, that’s the very way to win her. My word for it: only love her enough and she’s yours. Like begets like, and if she won’t capitulate without a seige, just lay siege, and sooner or later she must surrender.13

  CHAPTER 11

  Man-Eaters of the Animallai Hills

  One humid afternoon in late September 1877, the man the “coolies” called sahib came striding back into the expedition’s hunting camp in the high-elevation teak forest of South India’s Animallai Hills.1 Sahib—a word variously translated as “trusted friend” or “owner”—had a .40-caliber Maynard rifle tucked into the crook of his arm and was wearing a tattered Norfolk jacket of rough outdoor fabric, with paired box pleats over the chest and back. Like many upper-class sportsmen of his day, he tended to dress up for shooting. Trailing
behind him were his best man, Nangen, and his “half-caste” tracker, Pera Vera, whose skin was the color of ebony and who was wearing nothing but a loincloth, with his long, matted, jet-black hair drawn back and tied in a coil behind his head. In this wild country, especially with man-eaters afoot, it was foolhardy to go anywhere alone or unarmed.2

  Suspended from a pole stretched between Pera Vera and Nangen’s shoulders was a freshly killed axis deer, spotted as a fawn and with barrel-shaped antlers hanging almost to the ground. A murmur of excitement arose from the camp as the men approached; several women whooped with joy. Although axis deer, or “chital,” were not uncommon on the Indian subcontinent, the expedition was—once again—running low on food, especially fresh meat. There was a woman in camp, the wife of one of the trackers, who had actually begun to cry with hunger for meat. In remote places, this cry of hunger had a name—in Africa, Du Chaillu reported, it was called gouamba. It was the longing of flesh for flesh, a hunger nothing else but meat would satisfy.3

  As Pera Vera and Nangen unloaded the fat buck on the ground near the cooking fire, the sahib sat down on a camp stool and handed off his rifle, cartridge belt, and bag to Nangen. Then he began gingerly unfastening his boots. His feet and ankles were killing him. The warm, soggy air of the monsoon season, continuously wet feet, and all this walking had resulted in a half-dozen raw sores on each of his ankles. He had to dress them daily with court-plaster and cotton before he could even put on his hunting boots. Getting out of these boots, and getting a little heat from the fire, would help the burning and swelling go down.

  Even so, despite these minor inconveniences, sahib Hornaday loved what he was doing with his life. Sometimes he found it hard to believe that Professor Ward had agreed to fund an expedition of two to three years in length, to some of the most delicious places on the planet. And to hunt, no less! Hunting and collecting were his favorite things in the world. One night a few months earlier, in a remote jungle camp in north India, lying in his hammock listening to his Hindi coolies chattering around the fire after spending the day skinning out an elephant, he wrote, “This is the jolliest life that ever was led.”

  On this perilous trek, Hornaday had spent the past year living in rough hunting camps like this one, sleeping on a cot, cooking over open fires, never going anywhere without his gun. By now, he barely remembered what a proper bed or the inside of a house even felt like. In addition to his earlier expeditions, on this trip he’d journeyed throughout India, from Benares to Bombay, hunting crocodiles in the Ganges and elephants along the Jumna, and soon he would depart for Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo, among the remotest places on the planet. He was by now Professor Ward’s most competent and experienced hunter and specimen-collector, and likely one of the most experienced in the world. His natural temperament, brimming with bravado and an unassailable self-confidence, now was only magnified by the daily habit of ordering about trackers, cooks, porters, guides, and coolies. He had developed what military men called “command presence”—the bearing of a man to be reckoned with, a man to be taken seriously, a man to be feared. Given the fact that he wore a beard that was so thick and black it was more like fur than hair, and that his dark eyes were so fierce and combative that they tended to make other people look down, it was sometimes hard to believe William Temple Hornaday was only twenty-three years old.

  For the previous seven weeks, Hornaday and his party had been hunting and collecting in the hill country of the province of Tamil Nadu, in the Western Ghats of South India. Owing to the elevation, which ranged from 2,000 feet to the 8,800-foot Anamudi, the highest peak in India south of the Himalayas, the days were warm but the nights cool, unlike the sweltering, malarial heat of the lowlands. Even so, it was monsoon season, and the air was always slightly damp.

  “The Animallai Hills! How my nerves tingle and my pulse quickens as I write the name!” Hornaday wrote later, in the book he called Two Years in the Jungle: The Experiences of a Hunter and Naturalist in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo. Embedded in the title was one of the grinding contradictions of Hornaday’s life: he was both a prominent conservationist and a professional killer. These hills, he went on, were a “Hunter’s Paradise,” and “no other locality in all the East Indies can boast of possessing such splendid open forests for hunting, and such a genial climate, combined with such a variety and abundance of large game.”4

  What he failed to mention in this rapturous passage was that when he’d arrived in India, a terrible famine was sweeping across the country like darkness at noon. During the two years of 1876 and 1877, it was later estimated that 10 million people died of starvation.5 But it wasn’t only the people who were perishing. The creatures of the forest were also on the grim edge of starvation. As if the people of India needed anything else to compound their misery, there was now something besides famine that stalked them in the darkness of the night, something that eyed them out of the shadows at twilight and at dawn. It was one of the most fearsome and pitiless predators on the planet, now grown desperate with hunger: the Bengal tiger. The big males, who could weigh over 500 pounds and whose terrifying roars could be heard from two miles away, could leap as much as thirty feet at a single bound and were so powerful they could drag the body of a young water buffalo weighing 500 pounds a quarter of a mile. Hunting alone along game trails and streambeds, they could kill and consume fifty pounds of meat a day. And now, emboldened by hunger, the tiger would pick up the scent of a human, perhaps a lone woman who had foolishly ventured too far afield in search of firewood. Then the tiger would begin to hunt her.

  In India, the local people said there were three different kinds of tigers, Hornaday explained in his book.6 First were the “game-killers”—animals who lived in the wild and hunted wild game, as nature intended. They were what Hornaday called “bold, honest hunters.” Next were the “cattle-lifters”—tigers who had grown lazy and indolent after discovering that killing a dumb, slow hog or a bullock was much easier than taking down a nimble-footed axis deer or gazelle in the forest. The losses to poor farmers from these scavengers were staggering.

  But by far the most frightening kind of tiger was one who had discovered the taste of human blood. There were various theories about what caused a tiger to “cross over” and become a man-eater. Hunters said that many of these animals were too old to hunt in the forest, or they had a painful wound, like a mouthful of infected porcupine quills or badly decaying teeth. Others said that it was because there was no longer enough game in the bush. Still others said the man-eaters were evil spirits, sent by the gods to exact retribution for some sin in this or a previous life.

  But whatever the cause, a single man-eating tiger or tigress was enough to instill abject terror in a whole district. Generally, a man-eater would prowl through one area of several square miles, snatching a woman hanging clothes to dry one day, slipping into a village at dusk and making off with a child sitting on a doorstep the next, perhaps leaving nothing but a sad, tipped-over basket, an upended toy, or a bit of splintered bone. Other times, there would be a sighting of a huge, famous man-eater in one place, and by nightfall that same day, it would snatch a child out of a village five miles away.

  In one case, in central India, a ravenous tigress caused the complete emptying of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation fifteen square miles of farmland. The great Indian-born British big-game hunter Jim Corbett once killed a famous man-eating tigress called the Champawat Tigress, which alone was responsible for the deaths of 436 men, women, and children. “There is no more terrible thing,” he wrote, “than to live and have one’s being under the shadow of a man-eater.”7 The Champawat Tigress, who never killed in the same village twice and never revisited a kill, terrorized a region hundreds of square miles in size. She would carry off her victims at any time of day or night and consume them whole, eating their heads, hands, and sometimes even their clothing.

  Most people, of course, were desperately frightened of tigers. But for Hornaday’s pu
rposes—that of securing specimens for Professor Ward, and by extension for museums throughout the United States and Europe—he would have dearly loved to see a tiger. Unlike the farmers and villagers of India, William Temple Hornaday wanted to encounter a tiger, man-eating or otherwise—meet it face to face, at close range, with nothing but his trusty little .40-caliber Maynard rifle between them. “I had enough faith in the accuracy of my little Maynard rifle, and my own steadiness, to believe that between us we could floor a tiger if we ever got a fair chance,” he wrote, with serene self-confidence.

  It was quite a boast: the .40-caliber Maynard fired such small bullets that it took twenty-nine of them to make a pound. Four-bore big-game rifles could throw a four-ounce ball, eight times as heavy. And Henry Stanley, when he left for Africa to find Dr. David Livingstone a few years earlier in 1869, had reported taking with him “two muzzle-loading Holland half-pounders that carried an iron lead-coated explosive shell, containing a bursting charge of half an ounce of fine grain powder”8—armaments of almost preposterous destructiveness, meant to knock down an elephant, or perhaps two. By contrast, the Maynard rifle was practically a toy. The only way to stop a charging tiger with a weapon like the Maynard would be to hit a dead-on bulls-eye on the very first shot. A shot that wounded but did not kill would create an enraged 500-pound monster, a supreme carnivore, exploding out of the bush with its jaws wide open.9

  In the midst of all this, there was one thing that brought William Hornaday almost unalloyed joy. It was that, just before he had left on this trip, he had returned to Battle Creek, Michigan, gone down on one knee, and asked the Empress Josephine to be his wife. She agreed, without hesitation (or at least, none that he noticed). It was a bold, almost reckless thing for her to do, because she knew well enough that her freshly minted fiancé would be gone for two or three years on an expedition that would be fraught with dangers of all sorts—charging elephants, venomous snakes, quicksand, illness, infections, assault, robbery, and drowning, to name just a few. Will was strong as a bullock, seemingly fearless, competent in any number of ways, and filled with a young man’s conviction that he could overcome any peril. Even so, there was no getting around the fact that this expedition was dangerous in the extreme, and their engagement akin to getting betrothed to a soldier boy going off to the front. (Hornaday did not mention this to Josephine, but the whole expedition was so perilous that the Travellers Insurance Company had refused to underwrite it at all.)