Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II
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25 F for female Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant, p. xii.
26 Haing, a male Sukumar, The Living Elephants, p. 123. The tuskless males, called makhnas in India, tended to be bigger than their tusked brethren. And their trunks seemed more thickset.
27 The uzi told him Document S1, p. 13a.
28 As Kipling Kipling, “Toomai of the Elephants,” p. 152.
29 “When wild elephants are caught” EB MS, p. 42.
30 “very essence of brutality” Document M1, J. H. Williams’s detailed autobiographical movie treatment.
31 steeped in tradition White, Burma, p. 85.
CHAPTER 6: THE FAIREST TUSKER OF THEM ALL
1 deep-set dark eyes J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 30.
2 A superstitious man Conversation with Treve Williams via Skype, February 9, 2013.
3 “There are ways” J. H. Williams, In Quest of a Mermaid, p. 21.
4 Bandoola had been born J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 34. Williams says Bandoola was born under a full moon. Using the NASA eclipse website, one can fix his birthdate as November 3, 1897. Ningyan is cited as Bandoola’s home village (p. 112). Ningyan later became known as Pyinmana, according to Hugh Nisbet, Experiences of a Jungle Wallah (St. Albans, UK: Fisher, Knight, 1910). p. 9.
5 Although tigers and elephants Rabinowitz, Life in the Valley of Death, p. 32.
6 a five-hundred-pound predator Susie Green, Tiger (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 12.
7 courageous Burmese military hero Thant Myint-U, River of Lost Footsteps, pp. 112–13.
8 In the wild Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 134; Cynthia Moss, Little Big Ears: The Story of Ely (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 19. Babies watch their elders to learn which grasses are edible, wrap their trunks around clumps of it, rip it from its roots, and shake the dirt off. The lesson isn’t just visual. The calves reach up into their mother’s mouths to pull blades out to taste. In between, the learning curve can be comical. Often a baby will manage to tear grass out only to seem to forget what it was for—placing it on top of his head instead of in his mouth.
9 could not nurse Sukumar, Living Elephants, pp. 129–38. Calves nurse about three minutes out of every hour, and have physical contact about two dozen times an hour.
10 The system guaranteed Document S1, p. 30.
11 He traveled eighty miles J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 34.
12 White elephants came Jan McGirk, “Found: A Holy White Elephant,” The Independent (London), August 21, 2004; Alexander, Astonishing Elephant, p. 74; Jeffrey A. McNeely and Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, Soul of the Tiger (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), pp. 102–3; Larkin, Finding George Orwell in Burma, p. 121; Sarah Amato, “The White Elephant in London,” Journal of Social History 43, no. 1 (September 22, 2009): p. 31; Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant, pp. 3, 135–46; Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases, p. 11; Rita Ringis, Elephants of Thailand in Myth, Art, and Reality (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 94–96; Yoe, Burman, p. 481; Douglas H. Chadwick, The Fate of the Elephant (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992), p. 348.
Sacred white elephants were rarely actually white. Over hundreds of years, some white elephants may have been true albinos with little or no pigment. But albinism in many animals, including humans, can be incomplete. Almost always, white elephants did have color. It was not a black-and-white, or even a gray-and-white, issue.
Translating the word simply as “white,” as we do in English, is inaccurate, and the translation causes an impossible expectation for Westerners. In 1884, a white elephant that P. T. Barnum had shipped to London was met with inevitable disappointment by the public.
The Burmese said there were twelve separate rankings of white elephant. In assigning these, pale skin, white nails, white tail hairs, or white eyes would count toward the designation. Many of the characteristics that distinguished such an elephant, though, were more nuanced; some of them, such as toenail number and shape, have nothing to do with pigmentation.
“It has been therefore found necessary to determine some infallible test points, which will demonstrate the right of the animal to his title,” Yoe wrote. “Determining white elephants is quite a science, and there is a very considerable literature on the subject. The Burmese skilled men fix upon two of these tests as superior to all others. One is that the elephant shall have five toe-nails on his hind feet instead of four. This is a good way of making certain, but occasionally there are indubitably black elephants which have the sacred number of toes. These are white elephants debased by sin, labouring under the evil kan of previous existences, and therefore ineligible for the honours accorded to the real animal. The other test is considered perfectly decisive, no matter what the precise tint of the skin may be. It is this: if you pour water upon a ‘white’ elephant he turns red, while a black elephant only becomes blacker than ever.”
There were worst things than finding out an elephant wasn’t sacred. Some physical features even marked an animal as profane, bringing bad luck to the owner—among them black spots or warts, skin that looked like that of a rhinoceros, or exhibiting a loose fold of skin from throat to forelegs that resembled bees settling in a swarm.
Gender was not a factor; females could make the sacred cut, though tuskers always created more excitement.
A strange element of the concept of the white elephant emerged in the West. Because the proper care of a white elephant was so expensive, it was said that to receive one as a gift could be financially disastrous. “White elephant” became an idiom for any gift as burdensome as it is valuable. (Though rulers did not ordinarily part with these sacred creatures.)
The untimely death of a white elephant would signal coming catastrophe or reveal some unworthiness in a country’s leaders. And the desire to possess these animals could lead to chaos. In the 1500s, Englishman Ralph Fitch wrote of a Burmese monarch, “The king in his title is called the King of the White Elephants. If any other has one and will not send it to him he will make war with him for it, for he would rather lose a great part of his kingdom than not conquer him.”
13 Williams realized J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 102. “Po Toke was my master in the study of elephants,” Williams said, “my most trusted assistant in their management.”
CHAPTER 7: THE BURNING BOSS
1 “Don’t make a practice” Document S1, p. 29.
2 After the first elephant J. H. Williams, In Quest of a Mermaid, p. 47; J. H. Williams, Elephant Bill, p. 173; letter published in The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 28 (1922): p. 1125. In his writing, J. H. Williams contradicts himself on the order of elephants killed, and/or the dates. In two books, he tells very different stories about the last elephant he shot. In Quest of a Mermaid, he said he shot an elephant for the last time in August 1921, but in his printed letter in The Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, he says he killed the tusker with the “corrugations on the tusks” in May 1922. It’s possible he meant May 1921, but very doubtful. In J. H. Williams, Elephant Bill, p. 173, he says that Poo Ban, a great tusker in musth, was the last elephant he shot. The story of Poo Ban takes place in an area of Burma to which he wasn’t assigned till about 1930, and yet he had stopped killing long before that date. “The thought of killing even a wild tusker from then on was most distasteful,” he would write, “and to kill a tame elephant was tantamount to murder.”
3 “I allowed” EB MS, p. 94.
4 in his diary This diary and all of J. H. Williams’s journals would be lost in WWII.
5 Harding never mentioned EB MS, p. 14.
6 Harding pulled him aside Document S1, p. 30.
7 “I’ll back you” Ibid.
8 If he could do that Ibid., p. 39.
9 “If you saw Bandoola” Document M1, movie treatment fragment. No page number.
10 In a single decade Pointon, Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Limited, p. 68.
11 And each one cost Smith, “Working Teak in the Burma Forests,” p. 246. Today’s dollars in consultation with Paul Sol
man, financial reporter, PBS, September 1, 2011. And Document fragment 21, p. 6.
12 “practical and humanitarian” Document fragment 21, p. 5.
CHAPTER 8: SEX, CRICKET, AND BLUE CHEESE
1 rendezvoused with Harding J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 66. The meeting did not take place at Harding’s camp.
2 green canvas mailbag J. H. Williams, In Quest of a Mermaid, p. 28.
3 specialty cheeses Ibid., p. 60. Williams had to admit that his boss “knew how to treat a cheese to perfection.” And, truth be told, the pungent wheels were providing more tangible satisfaction to Williams than the pretty letter writers. Harding managed to keep his prized provisions from spoiling, and he had them “dressed in a starched white napkin with all the pomp of a London club.” Williams wasn’t just amused by Harding’s obsession; he felt that “it was one of the clues to the secret of his character, this effort to bring an English luxury into the Upper Burmese jungle. Though he was a real jungle salt, I feel that he had never become fully reconciled to being there, that his longing for his native country was constant and nagging, like an aching tooth.”
4 Bandoola would take According to Document 1, Bandoola could be as gentle as a female.
5 named Jabo EB, p. 138; FOEB MS, p. 64b. Williams, in fever, had fallen asleep in a canvas folding chair in front of his tent. He felt something icy against his skin and opened his eyes to see the beautiful face of a compact, powerfully built half-feral village dog who had pressed against him. When the dog looked into Williams’s eyes, his whole hind-end began wagging and wiggling “in default of a tail,” which had apparently been lopped off long before. Sick and dreaming of home and the Cornish cliffs, Williams fell in love with this “friendly, sympathetic creature.” Jabo—the name means “piebald”—was known to the villagers and the elephant men as a scrappy camp follower. When the dog returned to Williams’s tent later, one of the servants threw boiling water at him, scalding him. As sick as Williams was, he ordered chicken and rice cooked for the dog, which he hand-fed to him. (It would be the menu for all the dogs he owned in Burma.) He continued to offer food, and the dog reappeared nervously each day for the meal. Soon, Jabo was following Williams from camp to camp and flattening his little body up against him for pats and hugs. He would never be a truly domesticated dog—he avoided sleeping in the tent, and wherever they went, the dog would bound away from camp looking for love and excitement—but Williams and Jabo became companions.
6 for a trip to headquarters Rangoon was confirmed as the destination in an email from Treve Williams, June 26, 2011.
CHAPTER 9: SCHOOL FOR MEN AND ELEPHANTS
1 coated in green scum Smith, “Working Teak in the Burma Forests,” p. 244.
2 The sleeping logs Ibid., p. 246. One of Williams’s colleagues found out the hard way how quickly the terrain could be transformed. He had camped on the banks of a little creek, then crossed it for a day of work on the other side. But the rains started while he was out. When he tried to return to his own camp the stream had become a raging river. He stood at the edge, soaking wet, with water pouring off the brim of his hat, staring at a dry tent and good food on the opposite bank. Close but unreachable. “I could see through the mist of rain my own camp tantalizingly near, on the other side,” he wrote. He hunkered down as best he could, but was nonetheless exposed to the elements. It took almost two days for the water to calm enough for him to ford, by which time, he “went straight to bed with a roaring dose of fever.”
3 spell of malaria J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 195.
4 Aung Net would gently J. H. Williams, In Quest of a Mermaid, p. 19.
5 their animist cosmology H. N. C Stevenson, Burma Pamphlets No. 6: The Hill Peoples of Burma (Calcutta: Longmans, Green, 1944), p. 27. Buddhism “is superimposed upon Animism and has not wholly replaced it,” explained a series of pamphlets on Burma published during colonial times.
6 Most are ghosts Andrew Sinclair, “Spiritual Land of Prayers and Pagodas,” The New York Times, June 8, 1986.
7 specific nats Melford E. Spiro, Burmese Supernaturalism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 108.
8 fond of coconuts Denis D. Gray, no headline, dateline Rangoon, Burma, Associated Press, February 27, 1983. Story on the persistence of nats in Burmese culture.
9 cheroots could be left James, Snake Charmer, p. 187.
10 two elephant handlers per calf J. H. Williams, “It Happened to Me: The Elephant Goes to School,” p. 2.
11 just how tolerant Document fragment 21, p. 8. Williams once saw a big old tusker adopt a little female calf who had lost her mother to anthrax. “It was a pathetic sight to see the baby searching between the forelegs of this big tusker for udders, and finding nothing but dry nipples.” The calf was weaned on bamboo shoots successfully, though she continued to suckle at the bull’s teats.
12 only three students enrolled J. H. Williams, “It Happened to Me: The Elephant Goes to School,” p. 2.
13 A small thatched shrine EB MS, p. 43.
14 They flirted with them Ibid., pp. 42–43.
15 Males would spend Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 179.
16 arranging a rendezvous Document fragment 21, p. 8.
17 Some Asian elephants Shermin de Silva, Ashoka D. G. Ranjeewa, and Sergey Kryazhimskiy, “The Dynamics of Social Networks Among Female Asian Elephants,” BMC Ecology 11, no. 17 (2011), http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6785/11/17. Accessed November 20, 2013.
18 The detailed sorting Virginia Morell, “Asian Elephants Are Social Networkers,” Science NOW, July 26, 2011.
19 could control the young ones EB MS, p. 47. Williams wrote that the bull elephant would act like “a stuffy strict old Nurse in the park,” who seemed to say to his charges, “Don’t you dare speak to those children coming toward us.”
20 Gathering logs Susan Williams, Elephant Boy, p. 72.
21 He worried J. H. Williams, Bandoola, p. 82.
CHAPTER 10: DRUNK ON TESTOSTERONE
1 On a sweltering Treve Williams, in a June, 13, 2012, conversation, provided the year as 1922.
2 Bandoola was right on schedule Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant, p. 45. Wild African elephants start a little later—closer to thirty. See also Cynthia J. Moss, Harvey Croze, and Phyllis C. Lee, The Amboseli Elephants: A Long-Term Perspective on a Long-Lived Animal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 278.
3 The strength of musth Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 108.
4 Musth had been recognized Ibid., p. 101; Scigliano, Love, War, and Circuses, p. 76.
5 “Excitement, swiftness, odor, love passion” Franklin Edgerton, trans., The Elephant-Lore of the Hindus: The Elephant-Sport (Matanga-Lila) of Nilakantha (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1985), p. 81. First published in New Haven, Conn., by Yale University Press, 1931.
6 only in 1981 Sukumar, Living Elephants, pp. 101, 155; Sukumar, Elephant Days and Nights, p. 38, 39; Payne, Silent Thunder, p. 77. Part of the confusion arose because African female elephants also secrete fluid from their temporal glands when excitedly greeting one another, though the chemical composition of the fluid is different from that of musth bulls. Even Asian female elephants occasionally dribble fluid from these glands, but its purpose remains a mystery.
7 levels of the hormone Sukumar, Elephant Days and Nights, p. 38; Alex Shoumat-off, “Agony and Ivory,” Vanity Fair, August 2011, p. 125.
8 Bigger, stronger males Sukumar, Living Elephants, p.114.
9 running in the opposite direction Sukumar, Elephant Days and Nights, p. 37.
10 are attracted to them Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 113.
11 recognized four stages Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant, p. 45.
12 A musth bull is pungent Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 116.
13 He stands tall Ibid., p.103.
14 Depending on the bull’s age Ibid., p. 25.
15 a thousand pounds Payne, Silent Thunder, p. 25.
16 impairs their immune systems Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 118.
18 argue confidently Williams, Bandoola, p. 89; Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases, p. 175; Sukumar, Living Elephants, p. 101; Smith, “Working Teak in the Burma Forests,” p. 255. Many believed that musth had nothing to do with reproduction. Over time, Williams had heard much about the condition as he sat around the campfires at night, sipping whiskey and learning from the riders. But there was always such disagreement about it, even in the literature. Because males in musth secrete copious amounts of fluid from their temporal glands, a pair of modified sweat glands located on either side of their heads, many people thought of musth almost as a cold: One text even referred to it as “Congestion of the Temporal Glands.” But the idea that musth was a medical problem didn’t seem plausible to Williams, even this early in his career. He said he “was convinced that there was nothing abnormal about musth, unless the sexual urge was to be considered abnormal.” National Geographic magazine concurred with the nonsexual diagnosis: “There is no need to go into the question of must,” the writer, using an alternate spelling, maintained, “that curious temporary insanity which, at almost regularly stated seasons, attacks males. In my opinion, it is not, as some people believe, a sex state. The cause is hard to determine, but it may be an overcharging of certain glands which have their exits in the face of the animal.”
19 the riders called pa-ket-hlwe Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases, p. 12.
20 nearly touched the ground Payne, Silent Thunder, p. 74; Fowler and Mikota, Biology, Medicine, and Surgery of Elephants, pp. 104, 353. The elephant’s penis is so large that biologists say it is “theoretically possible for an elephant to step on the penis.” In fact, one unfortunate elephant in Africa was observed inadvertently kicking his own penis as he ran—he had been wooing a female when a larger bull started chasing him and he didn’t have time to retract it.