Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  In a sudden translocation to a world of water, he finds himself in a rowboat with Kermit, gliding among purple and pink water lilies. Delicate jacana birds race across the pads, treading so lightly the flowers barely dip. His ornithologist’s eye and ear rejoice at a wealth of other bird life: tiny kingfishers coruscating in the sun like sapphires, white-throated cormorants, spur-winged plover clamoring overhead, little rills threading the papyrus, grebes diving, herons spearing, and baldpate coots resembling the kind he collected as a teenager, except, he notes, for “a pair of horns or papillae at the hinder end of the bare frontal space.”

  But he is looking for hippos. The prodigious beasts prove surprisingly fast and difficult to kill in the water. He hits one, this first day on Lake Naivasha, and another the next; but they submerge at once, and decline to float up dead. On the third day, just as he feels an attack of malaria coming on, he encounters a big bull wading. He fires shakily, breaking its shoulder, whereupon it flounders at him with open jaws. He fires again and again, trying to control his tremor, and finally shoots right down its throat. The tusks clash like a sprung bear trap. At point-blank range, the hippo swerves a little, and he drills it through the brain.

  Then, curling up on the floor of the boat, he succumbs to his fever.

  HE KNOWS THIS IS NOT African malaria, but the Cuban variety that has plagued him since Rough Rider days. Always the sudden convulsions, the cracking headache, then zero at the bone. And always, since he believes illness is weakness (like grief or fear or self-doubt), he fights it off until it fells him. Fortunately, attacks never last long. He is well enough after five days to go out looking for more hippos. This time he leaves Kermit behind, and orders two “boys” to row him alone across the lake.

  Although he assures himself that he has spilled no more blood, so far, than is necessary to satisfy the Smithsonian and feed his safari, he is aware that his hunter’s luck has been extraordinary. It is the talk of the sundowner set in Nairobi. In just three months, he and Kermit have bagged multiple specimens of most of the major African species. Thanks to herculean skinning and salting by Heller and Mearns, he can congratulate himself on having shipped, via the railway to Mombasa, “a collection of large animals such as has never been obtained for any other museum in the world on a single trip.”

  The trouble with such luck is that it is bound to be perceived by critics of big-game hunting as indiscriminate slaughter. Local “bush telegraph” exaggerates the number of his kills, not to mention his profligacy with bullets. He is sensitive of being caricatured as anything other than the serious leader of a scientific expedition, and begins to regret his press ban. Perhaps he should do more than send the occasional scrawled trophy tally to the little pool of reporters in Nairobi. It is not the kind of “copy” they want.

  Whenever he veers near the capital, he can feel their avid interest pulling at him, like magnetic current. The fact is, he is magnetized himself. Despite his pose of privacy, he remains irredeemably a public figure, obsessed with his own image, half wanting to confide in those he holds at bay. He misses the worshipful cadre of young scribes who took virtual dictation from him in Washington. That “Newspaper Cabinet” is now disbanded, and Taft’s self-deprecating envoi (“I have not the facility for educating the public as you had”) suggests that the White House is going to be a poor source of news for the next four years. American editors will have to look farther afield for good material. No story could be more surefire than that of Colonel Roosevelt daily risking death in Africa!

  Hence the presence, this day in Naivasha, of F. Warrington Dawson, a young United Press correspondent who has pursued him all the way to Kapiti. Dawson—Southern, French-educated, the author of two successful novels—is obviously eager to serve him. They might discuss how in camp tonight. That hippo “bull” of five days ago turned out, embarrassingly, to be an old cow. The misidentification was excusable, for she was barren, and had developed male characteristics. But it is exactly the sort of thing he does not wish broadcast, as some kind of joke.

  IF ONLY TO IMPRESS DAWSON, he wants to get a big bull, and get it cleanly—not an easy task with low-profile quarry.

  The lake lies almost still. For an hour of stealthy progress, he cannot be sure what are mere strips of mud, wetly gleaming, and what the possible heads of hippos. At last he distinguishes a dozen flat foreheads. He fires at seventy yards, and they all sink without trace. He thinks he may have hit one of them. Still standing, he orders his rowers to advance. He catches their sudden fear, then the boat shudders over some vast upheaval, knocking him off his feet. The water roils as back after huge back rises in rage. Repeatedly, he fires his .30-caliber Springfield at the closest heads (one with a lily-pad eye patch that reminds him, in the midst of panic, of “a discomfited prize-fighter”). The other hippos plunge for cover.

  Calm returns to the lake. He waits for it to give up its dead. After an hour, to his surprise and shame, four carcasses surface. One of them is the bull he wanted, but the rest are cows, unneeded as trophies, undeniable as kills. He persuades himself that they will be a food bonanza for his porters, and for the natives of Naivasha.

  Darkness falls as he supervises the laborious business of belaying, mooring, and towing tons of meat. The night grows stormy. Long swells roll through the reeds. He does not get back to camp until three the next morning. Before dawn, he awakes with an attack of acute despair. Alarmed at his haggard look, servants go to fetch Dawson. “Bwana Mkubwa kill mingi kiboko!” Many hippos.

  “Warrington,” he says when the reporter appears, “the most awful thing has happened.”

  He need not worry. Dawson is so touched to be confided in (“I don’t know what to do.… We shall have to let the papers know”) that the story goes out as an attack by, rather than on, the herd of hippos. It is released by a young man who can now style himself secretary to the former President of the United States. In his diary for 23 July, Dawson proudly notes, “Wrote letters for the Colonel.”

  THE LETTERS, DICTATED with much snapping of teeth, pacing back and forth, and smacks of right fist into left palm, are in response to the first overseas mail the safari has received in nearly two months. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and other politically obsessed correspondents report that President Taft is proving an inept executive, and that Republican insurgents now pose a serious threat to the unity of the Republican Party. But the immediacy of such bulletins fades in proportion to the distance they have come, and the leisurely pace of African “runners.”

  There is, in any case, little that a former Party head can do, other than express polite concern. Lodge must understand that he has divorced himself from affairs of state. “Remember that I never see newspapers.… I am now eating and drinking nothing but my African expedition.”

  He admits to Dawson that he would rather not hear anything about the Taft administration. Insofar as he will discuss his own future, he talks of returning to Oyster Bay for a quiet life of writing books and articles. He says he would like to become “a closer father” to his two youngest sons, whom he feels he may have neglected during his years as President.

  However, he does dictate one startling remark that Dawson fails to recognize as news. It occurs in a message of sympathy to Henry White, whom President Taft has dismissed as American ambassador to France: “He said without any qualification that he intended to keep you. It was, of course, not a promise any more than my statement that I would not run again for President was a promise.”

  HE IS NEARER DEATH, around midday on the nineteenth of August, than he was on Kettle Hill in Cuba, or when he battled for breath as an asthmatic child. An elephant bears down upon him in dense jungle, creepers snapping like packthread in its rush. There are no bullets left in his Holland & Holland rifle: both barrels were needed to dispatch another elephant, only moments before. He dodges behind a tree, ejecting the empty cartridges and jamming in two fresh ones. R. J. Cuninghame fires twice, with the hair-trigger reaction of a professional. The elephant stops in its t
racks, wheels, and vanishes, trumpeting shrilly. A copious trail of blood marks its departure.

  Hunters’ etiquette requires that it be followed. But the contrary duty of a collector is to begin, at once, the task of skinning the specimen already killed, a big bull carrying a hundred and thirty pounds of ivory. Several days’ work lies ahead, in humid weather (they are on the lush piedmont of Mount Kenya). He watches fascinated as the safari team—porters, gunbearers, and ’Ndorobo guides alike—throw themselves bodily into the work of flaying and cutting up his quarry.

  Soon they were all splashed with blood from head to foot. One of the trackers took off his blanket and squatted stark naked inside the carcase, the better to use his knife. Each laborer rewarded himself by cutting off strips of meat for his private store, and hung them in red festoons from the branches round about. There was no let-up in the work until it was stopped by darkness.

  Our tents were pitched in a small open glade a hundred yards from the dead elephant. The night was clear, the stars shone brightly, and in the west the young moon hung just above the line of tall tree-tops. Fires were speedily kindled and the men sat around them, feasting and singing in a strange minor tone until late in the night. The flickering light left them at one moment in black obscurity, and the next brought into bold relief their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleaming eyes, and flashing teeth.… I toasted slices of elephant’s heart on a pronged stick before the fire, and found it delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.

  BLOOD, NAKEDNESS, FLESHY festoons, music, moon, and fire, his mouth full of cardiac meat: after four months, he has arrived at the heart of darkness. He is at one with the mightiest of animals, its life juices mingling with his own, at one with all nature, with the primeval past. No longer a mere time traveler in the Pleistocene, he has become a virtual denizen of it. The pages of his safari diary, covered with sketches of every animal he has slain (usually shown in motion, extremities tapering off into blankness), uncannily recall Paleolithic art. Yet a part of him is repelled by much of what he observes: baboons tearing open newborn lambs to get at the milk inside them, a hyena suffocated by the very guts it burrows into, flies walking around the eyes of children. “Life is hard and cruel for all the lower creatures, and for man also in what the sentimentalists call a ‘state of nature,’ ” he writes. “The savage of today shows us what the fancied age of gold of our ancestors was really like; it was an age when hunger, cold, violence, and iron cruelty were the ordinary accompaniments of life.”

  “THE PAGES OF HIS SAFARI DIARY UNCANNILY RECALL PALEOLITHIC ART.”

  Roosevelt records his kills on 5 and 6 October 1909. (photo credit p.4)

  The intense physicality of Africa so stimulates him intellectually that he has already read most of his Pigskin Library—some covers stained with blood, oil, ashes, and sweat till they look like saddle leather. He balks only at three or four of Shakespeare’s plays. The aphorisms of Omar Khayyám, Sir Walter Scott, Ferdinand Gregorovius, and Lewis Carroll are as apt to flavor his campfire conversation as ornithological data. He seems to register everything he reads, just as he mentally photographs everything he sees—the new moon reflected among water lilies, a clutch of hartebeest droppings, a mirage’s “wavering mockery,” ostriches “mincing along with their usual air of foolish stateliness.” His ear for sounds is just as acute, and he notes them down with extreme precision: the “batrachian” croaks of hyraxes, the “bubbling squeals” blown through the nostrils of a submerging hippo, the pack of a bullet hitting rhino hide, the “bird-like chirp” of a cheetah.

  One sound falls with especial sweetness on his ear: Kermit playing “Rolling Down to Rio” on the mandolin. He is proud of his son, who despite a weedy physique has managed to emulate all his own hunting feats—even shooting an elephant. The boy has taken surprisingly well to the African wilderness—so much so, he would seem born for life in an alien environment. He has a linguistic gift, and has added a fairly fluent command of Swahili to the French, Latin, and Greek he learned at Groton. Socially, Kermit tries to be friendly, but is inhibited by a lackluster personality. He is happiest when hunting, and remains cool in the face of danger.

  Possibly the image of another narrow-chested Harvard undergraduate, thirty years ago, amazing the backwoodsmen of Maine with equal feats of courage and endurance hovers in a father’s memory. Nothing dull about that youth! Even then, people seemed to be irradiated in contact with him. His peculiar glow, which he gives off as naturally as a firefly, has not transmitted to any of his children—unless Alice’s fitful sparks of conversational brilliance, and signs that Quentin is developing an exceptional charm, can be regarded as genetic.

  He has grown used, over the years, to being surrounded by crowds wearing the strange fixed smile, half-awed, half-predatory, that is celebrity’s reflection. On the rare occasions he visits Nairobi to pick up supplies and mail, the smile greets him as if he were still President, as if he were not a private hunter in one of the remotest colonies in the world. He has to laugh when he returns to the trail, and finds himself surrounded by a “thoroughly African circle of deeply interested spectators.” Wildebeest and kongoni form the perimeter; a rhino peers shortsightedly with small pig’s eyes, less than half a mile away; four topi advance for a closer look; a buck topi and a zebra follow suit; and high overhead, vultures wheel. So long the center of other circles, social, intellectual, and political, he is now, apparently, a focal point of the Sotik plateau.

  Quitting the safari entirely for a week, with only Kermit and a few Kikuyu servants for company, he camps in the cold highlands of the Guaso Nyero. Freak rains fall almost every night. Snug in his tent and stoutly clad by Abercrombie & Fitch, he is concerned at the way his half-naked men cower under bushes, instead of building some sort of roof for themselves. He has to drive them to chop and plait leafy boughs.

  It is plain to him that the pagan tribes of British East Africa are in a state of development far behind that of the Pawnee and other aboriginal peoples. It would be useless to offer them any kind of independence: “The ‘just consent of the governed,’ in their case, if taken literally, would mean idleness, famine, and endless internecine warfare.” He declines, however, to treat them as irredeemable, in the manner that comes so naturally to their colonial masters. They have as much civilized potential as his own ancestors did, back in the days when bison roamed the forests of Europe. He shocks the complacency of a dinner in his honor, at the Railway Institute in Nairobi, by saying, “In making this a white man’s country, remember that not only the laws of righteousness, but your own real and ultimate self-interest demand that the black man be treated with justice, that he be safeguarded in his rights and not pressed downward. Brutality and injustice are especially hateful when exercised on the helpless.”

  AS HIS FIFTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY approaches on 27 October, he begins to pine for Edith. A mighty hunter, with much killing yet to do, should not give way to “homesickness” (the word he applies to all private desires), but he finds himself counting the months and days until they meet in Khartoum. A chance reference to the Song of Solomon, in the midst of a letter he addresses to an editorial friend, makes him segue into a rhapsody on domestic bliss: “I think that the love of the really happy husband and wife—not purged of passion, but with passion heated to a white heat of intensity and purity and tenderness and consideration, and with many another feeling added thereto—is the loftiest and most ennobling influence that comes into the life of any man or woman, even loftier and more ennobling than the wise and tender love for children.”

  In November, on the seventeenth, another anniversary looms: that of his engagement to Edith. He writes to her from his camp beside the River ’Nzoi:

  Oh, sweetest of all sweet girls, last night I dreamed that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream; and when I waked up it was almost too hard to bear. Well, one must pay for everything; you have made the real happiness of my life; and so it is natural and right that I should constantly [b
e] more and more lonely without you.… Do you remember when you were such a pretty engaged girl, and said to your lover “no Theodore, that I cannot allow”? Darling, I love you so. In a very little over four months I shall see you, now. When you get this three fourths of the time will have gone. How very happy we have been these twenty-three years!

  He signs it “Your own lover.”

  Moving on to Londiani on the last day of the month, he disbands the main body of his safari. He has already spent almost all of the $75,000 Andrew Carnegie and a few other American sponsors have lavished upon the expedition. It has collected all it needs in British East Africa—indeed, more than it is officially entitled to: almost 4,000 mammals large and small, plus 3,379 birds, 1,500 reptiles, frogs, and toads, and 250 fish. In addition there are uncounted numbers of crabs, beetles, millipedes, and other invertebrates, and several thousand plants.

  From now on, he and Kermit will hunt in Uganda Protectorate and the Sudan with a much smaller retinue of porters and horse boys. Heller, Loring, and Dr. Mearns insist on staying with him. They are insatiable for more specimens, and airily confident that the safari will stay in business for another three very expensive months. This worries him. He is generous by nature, but also improvident, with little understanding of the real value of money. He has insisted on paying his and Kermit’s own way so far, not dipping into sponsor funds. Edith is bound to remind him, if the funds run out, that he has two more sons to put through Harvard—with Quentin unlikely to graduate until the spring of 1919. He is by no means financially secure. His entire presidential salary went toward entertaining, and his Nobel Peace Prize award, totaling almost $40,000, has been placed at the disposal of Congress, as something he feels he has no right to keep. Nor is he likely ever again to negotiate a publishing contract as big as his current one.