Giants of the Monsoon Forest

by Giants of the Monsoon Forest- Living

  31. Also in the SOS party was a local tracker named Goal, a member of the Miri tribe and evidently not one of the Nung porters. See Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 108.

  32. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 105–8.

  33. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 108.

  34. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 112–14.

  35. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 119–22; Martin, Flight, 156.

  36. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 116.

  37. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 112. Martin, Flight, suggests the elephant in the footage might be another tusker whom Mackrell favored, Phuldot, and the mahout a man named Gohain (156–58). These two had been the lead duo during the convoy’s ford of the Dihing River several days before.

  38. Mackrell Film Collection, Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK; and Interview V.

  39. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 115–16.

  40. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 116.

  41. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 123–43; Goodall, Exodus Burma, 214–16.

  42. Goodall, Exodus Burma, 224; and Nigel Pankhurst, “ ‘Elephant Man’ Who Staged Daring WW2 Rescues,” BBC News, November 1, 2010.

  43. Tyson, Forgotten Frontier, 114–15.

  44. Interviews I, L, O, P, and V.

  45. Interview V.

  46. Interview V.

  47. Martin, Flight, 80.

  48. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 158.

  49. Martin, Flight, 254.

  50. Gribble, Burma Night, 146.

  51. James LeRoy Christian, Burma (London: Collins, 1945), 146. Shan here likely means Hkamti.

  52. Ian Fellowes-Gordon, Amiable Assassins (London: Robert Hale, 1957), 26.

  53. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 237, 241–43, 248, 294–98.

  54. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 314–15.

  55. Hugh Clarke, “Of Elephants and Men,” in The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History, ed. Gavan McCormack and Hank Nelson (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 37–44, 40.

  56. Japan’s elephant-mounted invasion of Manipur is referred to in Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 316: “the Japanese crossed [into Manipur] with a column of 350 elephants. . . . The elephants were used over precipitous and impassable country, linking up with motor transport and bullock-carts when they reached roads once more. Their transport system was improvised ad hoc from all available means and, though it did not look smart, it functioned and moved fast.”

  57. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 315.

  58. U Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Singapore: Toppan Printing Co., 1974), xi–xiv, 86.

  59. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 100–1. See also Kazuo Tamayama, Railwaymen in the War: Tales by Japanese Railway Soldiers in Burma and Thailand, 1941–1947 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 142–43.

  60. Ian Denys Peek, One Fourteenth of an Elephant: A Memoir of Life and Death on the Burma-Thailand Railway (London: Doubleday, 2005).

  61. Yin Chun, “The Taciturn Pachyderm: Lin Wang the Elephant Veteran,” Sinorama 84, no. 10 (1995): 108–17.

  62. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 307.

  63. Vicki Constantine Croke, Elephant Company (New York: Random House, 2015), 288.

  64. Russell, Muddy Exodus, 54.

  65. Gale, Burmese Timber, 85.

  66. Richard Lair, Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 1997), 104; and Khyne U Mar, Mirkka Lahdenperä, Virpa Lummaa, “Causes and Correlates of Calf Mortality in Captive Asian Elephants,” PLoS One 7, no. 3 (2012): e32355.

  67. Williams, Elephant Bill [UK ed.], 290–91.

  68. See Chapter 5.

  69. Interviews I, L, O, and P.

  70. Interviews R and U.

  CHAPTER 4: A COUNTERPOINT IN AFRICA

  1. The term subspecies refers to subtle regional differences within the African species, or for that matter within the Asian elephant species. There is no sharp divide between one subspecies and another within the same species. Nonetheless, biologists will often make a distinction between the African forest elephant (Loxodonta africana cyclotis) and the larger and better-known African bush elephant, also known as the African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana africana). A similar differentiation can be made between the mainland Asian elephant (Elephas maximus indicus), the Sumatran Asian elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus), and the relatively smaller Borneo Asian elephant (Elephas maximus borneensis).

  2. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2016 population estimate for African elephants was 400,000 to 500,000.

  3. Raman Sukumar, The Living Elephants: Evolutionary Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 57–59.

  4. For this argument, see Thomas Trautmann, Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). For further discussion of Indian war elephants, see Sukumar, Living Elephants, 59–64; and John Kistler, War Elephants (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 204–24.

  5. Frank Snowden, Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 32. Snowden highlights a statement by the Greek historian Arrian (A.D. second century) that “Ethiopians” (Meroites) were domesticating elephants prior to Alexander the Great. See also Sukumar, Living Elephants, 81; Richard Lobban, Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 155; and Howard Hayes Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 127.

  6. H. A. Sayce, “Second Interim Report on the Excavations at Meroe,” Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology 4 (1912): 53–65.

  7. Sukumar, Living Elephants, 20–21.

  8. Alexander had encountered combat elephants somewhat earlier, at the Battle of Gaugamela against the Persian emperor Darius in 331 B.C. However, due to poor cavalry strategy or bad luck, Darius’s elephants were ineffective during this battle, leaving the Macedonian leader unimpressed. See Kistler, War Elephants, chaps. 6 and 7.

  9. William Gowers, The Elephant in East Central Africa (Nairobi: Rowland Ward, 1953), 143.

  10. Kistler, War Elephants, 34–42.

  11. Paul Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  12. Sukumar, Living Elephants, 45.

  13. Kistler, War Elephants, 97.

  14. Kistler, War Elephants, 98.

  15. Scullard, Elephant in Greek, 131; and Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 296.

  16. The classical geographers Hipparchus, Polybius, and Marinus of Tyre proposed the land bridge, but evidently without reference to elephants. See William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (London, J. Murray, 1873), 2:51. Earlier, Aristotle had put forward the idea of a connection between the “extremities” of Africa and India, based on the observation that both landmasses have elephants. See Simplicius of Cilicia, On Aristotle’s “On the Heavens” 2.10–14, trans. Ian Mueller (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 94. The Sicilian cartographer Muhammed Al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana world map of 1154, commissioned by the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, shows the conjectured land bridge stretching from East Africa to Southeast Asia, almost entirely enveloping the Indian Ocean except for a few narrow straits linking Indian with Chinese waters. The German cartographer Nicolaus Germanus’s Ptolemy map of 1482 is a relatively late world map to show the hypothesized land bridge; other significant fifteenth-century world maps, such as the famous planisphere by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro, omit it.

  17. Kistler, War Elephants, 71.

  18. Gowers, East Central Africa, 144–45.

  19. Gowers, East Central Africa, 146; and Kistler, War Elephants, 138–39.

  20. Gowers, East Central Africa, 148–49; and Kistler, War Elephants, 133.
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  21. John Prevas, Hannibal Crosses the Alps (Staplehurst UK: Spellmount, 1998), 61.

  22. Kistler, War Elephants, 111.

  23. With all this said, the ultimate cause of Hannibal’s failure to defeat Rome was certainly not the strategy of bringing elephants, but rather lack of support from the ruling class in Carthage. See Kistler, War Elephants, 126.

  24. Kistler, War Elephants, 141–42, 149, 156–57; Scullard, Elephant in Greek, 178–85.

  25. Rhoads Murphey, “The Decline of North Africa Since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41, no. 2 (1951): 116–32; Mauro Cremaschi, “Steps and Timing of the Desertification During Late Antiquity,” in Arid Lands in Roman Times, ed. Mario Liverani (Florence: All’insegna del Giglio, 2003); Graeme Barker, “A Tale of Two Deserts: Contrasting Desertification Histories on Rome’s Desert Frontiers,” World Archaeology 33, no. 3 (2002): 488–507; Deon Furstenburg, “Focus on the African Elephant—Loxodonta Africana,” South African Hunter 05040 (2010): 46–49; David Harland, Killing Game: International Law and the African Elephant (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1994), 25; and Sukumar, Living Elephants, 45, 88.

  26. William Barker, “The Elephant in the Sudan,” in The Elephant in East Central Africa (Nairobi: Rowland Ward, 1953), 69; Sylvia Sikes, The Natural History of the African Elephant (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1971), 291; and Kistler, War Elephants, 177. See also A. Paul, A History of the Beja Tribes of the Sudan (London: F. Cass, 1971), 50 and map on 53.

  27. J. L. Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (London: J. Murray, 1819), 527–28; E. A. Wallis Budge, History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia (London: Methuen, 1928), 66; and Lobban, Historical Dictionary, 65.

  28. Barker, “Elephant in the Sudan,” 69; and Lobban, Historical Dictionary, 65.

  29. Kistler, War Elephants, highlights the likelihood that the Ethiopian army was using Kushite war elephants during the third or fourth century (171).

  30. Richard Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (1975; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 111–40.

  31. See John Campbell, Travels in South Africa (London: Black, Parry & Co., 1815), 297; John Campbell, Travels in South Africa: Being a Narrative of a Second Journey (London: Francis Westley, 1822), 240, 256–57, and 307–8; and William Desborough Cooley, “The Tribes Inhabiting the Highlands near Delagoa Bay,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 3 (1833): 310–24. This article contains a folding map with the label “Mahalasely?” just north of Maputo Bay (Delagoa Bay). Elizabeth Eldredge discusses possible translations of the term Mahalaseela—see “The Delagoa Bay Hinterland,” in Slavery in South Africa, ed. Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton (Oxford: University of Natal Press, 1994), 162n93. Neil Parsons suggests the Mahalaseela were one of the Tsonga tribes—see “Prelude to Difaqane,” in The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History,” ed. Carolyn Hamilton (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Press, 2001), 346n69.

  32. William Edward Oswell, William Cotton Oswell, Hunter and Explorer . . . (New York: Doubleday, 1900), 111.

  33. William Desborough Cooley, Claudius Ptolemy and the Nile (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1854), 1.

  34. Edith Sanders, “The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origins and Functions in Time Perspective,” Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 521–32; and Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2003), 12, 202, 207.

  35. Jacob Shell, Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 46–50.

  36. Shell, Transportation, 47; Robert Brown, The Story of Africa and Its Explorers (London: Cassell, 1893), 2:67; and Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events (New York: Appleton, 1885), 5:294.

  37. Robert Foran, Transport in Many Lands (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1939), 39.

  38. Scullard, Elephant in Greek, 62; and Sikes, Natural History, 296.

  39. Murray Fowler and Susan Mikota, Biology, Medicine, and Surgery of Elephants (Ames, IA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 19; and Jacques Van Heerden and Barend Louis Penzhorn, eds., Symposium on African Elephant as a Game Ranch Animal (South African Veterinary Association Wildlife Group, 1995), 71.

  40. Sukumar, Living Elephants, 45.

  41. Herold Wiens, China’s March Towards the Tropics (Hamden, CT: Shoestring Press, 1954), 64–65, 184–86.

  42. James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  43. Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: Athlone Press, 1964), 36; and Wiens, China’s March, 184.

  44. Francis Kingdon-Ward, In Farthest Burma (London: Seeley, 1921), 133–35.

  45. Donald Seekins, Historical Dictionary of Burma (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 251; Wiens, China’s March, 310.

  46. Holt S. Hallett, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1890), 21.

  47. “Karen Languages,” Encyclopedia Britannica (1998).

  48. Scott, Art of Not, 127–77.

  49. Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 55.

  50. Interview X.

  51. Trautmann, Elephants and Kings.

  52. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), chap. 2; Wiens, China’s March, 64.

  53. Michael Charney, Southeast Asian Warfare: 1300–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 144; Harry Miller, Prince and Premier: A Biography of Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al- Haj (London: Harrap, 1959), 19; J. W. Palmer, The Golden Dagon, or, Up and Down the Irrawaddi (New York: Dix, Edwards, & Co., 1856), 112; Grattan Geary, Burma, After the Conquest (London: Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1886), 29–31; and Shell, Transportation, 33–39.

  CHAPTER 5: BREAKABLE CHAINS

  1. Some description of the Karen guerrillas’ elephants can be found in Jonathan Falla, True Love and Bartholomew: Rebels on the Burmese Border (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 131.

  2. Holt S. Hallett, A Thousand Miles on an Elephant in the Shan States (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1890), 52, 285, 312.

  3. Interviews F, C, Z, and R.

  4. Ho Chi Minh Trail (HCMT), The Ho Chi Minh Trail (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1982), 118–31.

  5. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 118.

  6. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 119.

  7. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 123.

  8. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 125–29.

  9. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 130.

  10. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 106–7.

  11. The Kamooks (Khamus) and Kamaits, both part of the larger Kha group, were charged with tending to elephants and logging in the Lao region; see Hallett, Thousand Miles, 21, a book written in 1890. Lair, Gone Astray, discusses the complexity of the modern designation “Khamu,” who are also partially Lao (97). See also Joachim Schliesinger, Elephants in Thailand (Bangkok: White Lotus, 2010), 1:81. During the colonial period, certain Southeast Asian ethnic groups (especially Khamu and Karen) became associated with elephant driving as a means of livelihood; see Katherine Bowie, “Ethnic Heterogeneity and Elephants in 19th Century Lanna Statecraft,” in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2012), 21 and 330–48.

  12. Vu Hung, The Story of a Mahout and His War Elephant (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1976), 43.

  13. Hung, Story of Mahout, 89–93.

  14. Hung, Story of Mahout, 54–58.

  15. Hung, Story of Mahout, 59–62.

  16. Many thanks to Jerome Palawng Awng Lat and Njawng Brang.

  17. HCMT, Ho Chi Minh Trail, 131.

  18. John Prados, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (New York: Wiley, 1999), 221.

  19. Robert Mason, Chickenhawk (New York: Vi
king, 1993), 339–40.

  20. Richard Lair, Gone Astray (Bangkok: FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 1997), 219.

  21. Ingrid Suter, “ElefantAsia in the Lao PDR,” Gajah 33 (2010): 53–57; Lair, Gone Astray, 94.

  22. Interview U.

  CHAPTER 6: STRANGE BEHAVIORS

  1. U Toke Gale, Burmese Timber Elephant (Singapore: Toppan Printing Co., 1974), 76–78.

  2. Interviews I, U, and Y.

  3. Interviews F, G, U, and Y.

  4. Interviews C and U.

  5. Interview J.

  6. Interview P.

  7. Interview P.

  8. Interview fully anonymized.

  9. Interview U.

  10. Interview X.

  11. Interview O.

  12. James Howard Williams, Elephant Bill (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 181–82.

  13. Interview fully anonymized.

  14. Raghav Srivastava and Richa Tyagi, “Wildlife Corridors in India: Viable Legal Tools for Species Conservation?” Environmental Law Review 18, no. 3 (2016): 205–23. See also the discussion in Elephant Task Force, Gajah: Securing the Future for Elephants in India (New Delhi: Ministry of Environment and Forests, 2010); and Interview U.

  15. Interviews G, J, P, and Y. See also Prajna Chowta and Philip Gautier’s documentary The Old Elephant Route (Aane Mane Foundation and Les Films d’Ici, 2000).

  16. Interviews N and W.

  CHAPTER 7: CAMPS AND VILLAGES

  1. Interviews A and H; and my 2013 central Burma field notes.

  2. Interviews Y and P.

  3. James Howard Williams, Elephant Bill (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), 213.

  4. Prajna Chowta and Parbati Barua, both of India, are examples.

  5. Interview H.

  6. Interview X.

  7. Interview A.

  8. See Raymond Bryant, The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 43–76. In the mid-nineteenth century, British colonial officials in India hoped to emulate Southeast Asian tribal methods of getting their tamed elephants to breed, though British records do not make clear which tribes’ practices officials had in mind. See K. Sivaramakrishnan, Modern Forests: Statemaking and Environmental Change in Colonial Eastern India (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 102. Griffith Evans refers to the elephants of the Karens, Laos, and Talines (Mons) of the Karen Hills as “bred” elephants, so it seems likely that it was these three groups’ elephant domesticating practices that drew colonial officials’ attention during the nineteenth century. See Griffith Evans, Elephants and Their Diseases (Rangoon: Government Printer and Stationery, 1910), 1–2. See also Jacob Shell, “Enigma of the Asian Elephant,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers (forthcoming).