Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  On April 21, in a torrential downpour, the Admiral arrived at the picturesque and historic island city, with its white walls, pink fortress, and stately palms. British East Africa (after 1920 called Kenya) had only been a Protectorate since 1895 and the area was still a wilderness. White settlement in the more temperate highlands, where wheat, corn, and coffee could be grown, and cattle and ostrich raised commercially, had only begun a few years before with the completion of the Uganda Railway between Mombasa and the immense Lake Victoria Nyanza. In 1909 the ultimate success or failure of the colony, with its few thousand European settlers surrounded by several million tribal Africans, was still an open question. The geography, people, and conditions continually reminded TR of the American West thirty years before.

  At Mombasa’s Kilindi Harbor, Roosevelt was greeted by Acting Governor Sir Frederick Jackson, flanked by an honor guard of Royal Marines from the HMS Pandora anchored amidst native dhows and other vessels. Also on hand were the two hunters assigned to the safari, R. J. Cuninghame and Leslie Tarlton. The lean and heavily bearded Cuninghame was a Scotsman and a Cambridge man who had been, among other things, a whaler in the Arctic, a professional elephant hunter and collector of animals for the British Museum. Tarlton, also an accomplished hunter, was a red-headed, blue-eyed Australian who had fought in the Boer War and stayed on in Africa. The first night they were all given a dinner at the Mombasa Club, where TR met an interesting crowd of local merchants, planters and government officials. He was most intrigued, however, by a German settler on hand who had taken part in hunting down the famous man-eating lions of Tsavo that the Colonel had read of and now heard about at first hand. In his after dinner remarks, Roosevelt praised the civilizing influence of the British Empire in Africa and forecast peace in Europe where the naval rivalry between Britain and Germany, whose own slice of East Africa lay only sixty miles to the south, continued to ratchet up tensions. In his remarks Selous voiced the hope that TR might help bring about an understanding between the two nations when he visited their capitals the following spring.

  The next afternoon the Colonel and his party boarded Governor Jackson’s special train for the 275 mile rail trip inland from Mombasa up to the cooler climate of the hunting grounds, first crossing the seventeen hundred foot long Salisbury bridge to the mainland. To keep people from shooting game from the train, the British had declared the land along the railroad a huge preserve which the Colonel declared a “naturalist’s wonderland.” To better view the exotic wildlife, he and Selous stationed themselves on a special platform built onto the cowcatcher of the small locomotive, which TR noted proudly was an American wood-burning Baldwin. He was delighted literally to be passing through “a vast zoological garden.” Kermit clambered up on the roof of his carriage to gain a better vantage point. They saw herds of giraffe, waterbuck, hartebeest, ostrich, impala and even a rhinoceros all of whom, TR wrote, were “in their sanctuary and they knew it.”15

  At the Kapiti Plains station the next day, TR and Kermit joined the waiting safari. The venture was one of the largest ever outfitted in those parts and the Colonel remarked that the camp, with its seventy-three tents arranged in neat rows, crowned by the large American flag flying in front of his own, looked as if “some small military expedition was about to start.” Leslie Tarlton was waiting for them and called the company to order for TR’s inspection. The scientific nature and ambitious goals of the safari meant that two hundred porters were needed to carry the necessary equipment and supplies, including four tons of salt to preserve the specimens prepared by the three Smithsonian naturalists. The porters, though mainly Swahili speaking Wakamba, were chosen from several different tribes to minimize the danger of mutiny. In any case, to keep order and meet any trouble, the expedition also included fifteen rifle-carrying askari guards, ex-soldiers dressed in red fez, blue blouse, and white knickerbockers.

  Compared to the rough and ready camp life he knew on the Great Plains, Roosevelt found the accommodations almost too comfortable. His green canvas twelve by nine waterproof tent was equipped with mosquito netting and included a rear extension for a daily hot bath. To escape the ever-present ticks, scorpions and other bothersome creatures there was a ground canvas and a cot for him to sleep on. Kermit’s tent was specially lined to do double duty as a darkroom for his photographs. TR had two tent boys to see to his needs, Ali, who knew some English, and Bill, who did not speak at all. In addition he had two gun bearers, Muhamed and Bakari. They carried his three big game rifles: a 30-caliber 1903 Springfield Sporter, a Model 1895 Winchester 405 and a 500/450 Holland & Holland royal grade double-barreled elephant gun donated by a group of English friends and admirers, led by Edward North Buxton.16

  Roosevelt described the Holland & Holland, which had the presidential seal and his initials engraved in gold on the buttstock, as the “prettiest gun I ever saw, and the mechanism as beautiful as that of a watch.”17 Their own rifles, TR told Buxton, looked “coarse and cheap and clumsy beside it.” He had only fired it a half a dozen times as the recoil was heavy and it “made my ears sing.”18Buxton was in turn delighted that the Colonel found the gun “so much to your taste.” He knew it to be effective and trusted it would “prove a good friend to you at interesting moments.”19 To complement this heavy weaponry, Roosevelt brought a customized Ansley H. Fox No. 12 shotgun for birds. This “beautiful bit of American workmanship” was also capable of being loaded with ball as back-up gun for lions. Kermit had his own Winchester 405, as well as a 30–40 Winchester, and for the biggest game a 450 Rigby double-barreled elephant gun. To find the game and study their habits TR carried a telescope given him on the Admiral by an Irish Hussar Captain going out to India. To weigh the game he brought an ingenious beam scale given to him by his friend Thompson Seton.

  The Colonel also had two “saises,” Hamisi and Simba, who looked after his horses, for which he brought his Whitman tree army saddle. He had made special arrangements for a selection of mounts to be on hand and chose two, a sorrel and a brown, which he dubbed Tranquility and Zebra-shape. The natives soon assigned Roosevelt a similarly descriptive name, “Bwana Tumbo” (Mr. Portly Man), while Kermit became “Bwana Mtoto” (Mr. His Father’s Sprout).20In his account TR records another, more flattering, title for himself, “Bwana Makuba” (Great Master), and for Kermit “Bwana Merodadi” (the Dandy Master).21

  Outfitted in khaki safari gear and sun-helmet, hob-nailed or rubber-soled boots depending on conditions, and with the nine extra pairs of eye glasses Edith had packed distributed throughout his gear for safe keeping, Roosevelt could now begin his personal quest to bag the five most dangerous African animals: elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, leopard, and lion. The larger aim of the expedition was to collect family groups for museum display and research of all the major, and minor, species of interest they encountered. Before they were finished ten months later, this would amount to more than 11,000 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, plants and even invertebrates. For big game, the rule established was that the expedition would shoot only what was needed for museum specimens or food. At night and on days of rest which also allowed the taxidermists to catch up, TR sat at his portable writing table scribbling installments on a special two carbon pad for the Scribner’s magazine series published the next year as African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American HunterNaturalist. The two copies were dispatched in separate blue canvas envelopes to insure one made it to New York. He sent off the first article, titled “A Railroad Through the Pleistocene,” on May 12.

  As had been planned, after two days of preparation Roosevelt began his hunt on the way to Kitanga, the seven thousand acre ranch on the Athi River of Sir Alfred Pease, who had met the train at the Kapiti Plains station and, TR reported to his sister Anna, was a “perfect trump.” Theodore, Kermit, Pease, and another settler, Clifford Hill, set forth with gun bearers, sais, and a few porters to carry the game, while the rest of the heavily laden safari followed behind. Nearby were herds of hartebeest, wildebeest,
and Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles. The last, called “tommies,” the Colonel recorded, were “pretty, alert, little things” half the size of the American prongbuck. They had one “very marked characteristic:” their tails kept up an “incessant nervous twitching, never being still for more than a few seconds at a time” while their larger cousins hardly moved their tails at all. Roosevelt thought the Grants the most beautiful of the antelope he had seen, rather larger than a whitetail deer, with “singularly graceful carriage,” and long lyre-shaped horns carried by the old bucks. His first recorded kill, for the table, was a tommy shot at one hundred and twenty-five yards.22

  What TR really sought to collect on this first day, however, were a bull and cow wildebeest, a variety of the brindled gnu or blue wildebeest of South Africa. Their shaggy manes, heavy forequarters, and generally bovine look reminded him of a much less bulky version of the American bison. The hunt for the wary and tough animals was successful, but took several shots at long range, and a hard horseback pursuit of many miles, led by Kermit, to take down the tough old bull. The naturalist Roosevelt noted that both animals were covered with ticks. Around the eyes, “the loathsome creatures swarmed so as to make complete rims like spectacles.” He was astonished that the game seemed to mind them so little. The biting flies appeared more of a bother, “and the maggots of the bot-flies in their nostrils must have been a sore torment. Nature is merciless indeed.”23Such observations, along with contents of stomachs and other measurements, were duly recorded for almost every animal. TR sketched many of his kills in his 1909 diary; the simple but striking line drawings resembling nothing more than the Lascaux cave paintings brought into the modern world by the dotted bullet holes illustrating his marksmanship, or more often lack thereof, as he regularly bemoaned his poor aim.24

  The party traveled sixteen miles further to the Kitanga Hills and Sir Alfred Pease’s farm, where they would be guests for two weeks between hunting sorties. The veranda of the ranch house afforded lovely views of valley and forest, and in the evening they could see, “scores of miles away, the snowy summit of mighty Kilimanjaro turn crimson in the setting sun.”25 The ranch house was still a work in progress and TR endeared himself to Sir Alfred’s wife, Helen, by comparing it to those he knew and loved in the American West. She found in him a “sympathetic heart united to courage, good sense, and intelligence” which amounted to a “streak of genius.” She did not wonder that the American people loved him. To her husband Roosevelt was an exemplary guest, “simple in his habits & wants— always kind, genial, courteous & tactful.” He was a great man who still knew how to “be a boy and enjoy things like a boy.”26 Pease was less laudatory concerning the impetuous Kermit, who gave his father a rather bad scare when he became separated from one of these early hunting parties and stayed out alone on horseback overnight. Only the first of many such unsettling episodes to come.

  The area was in the second year of a drought and reminded TR of the cattle country he knew so well. There were even bushes the color and size of sagebrush, but covered with flowers like morning glories. He also noted the “infinite variety of birds, small and large, dull colored and of the most brilliant plumage.” For the most part they “had no names at all or names that meant nothing to us.”27 True to his lifelong passion for birds, the many detailed and colorful descriptions of them in African Game Trails would make a notable separate volume of its own.

  Pease was himself later the author of a classic study, The Book of the Lion, and endeavored to supply a number of the animals for Roosevelt, who placed the great cat first on his list of desired big game. While hunting from the Pease farm he soon was able to bag two, though disappointing, specimens. These were cubs the size of mastiffs, who dashed out of the bush and were shot before they could be identified. The Colonel would have preferred not to kill them, but he took no chances with lions, which both he and Selous considered the most dangerous African game. Some they spoke to thought the buffalo, rhino and elephant posed greater risks; however, wherever they traveled Theodore and Kermit took grim note of the graves of many more hunters, settlers and natives killed by lions than by any other creature. As additional reminders along the way, Major Mearns’s medical skills would also be called upon numerous times to patch up freshly mauled settlers and natives. Such predations had led the British authorities to categorize lions (and leopards) as vermin, which could be taken in unlimited numbers without any license needed.

  Their first efforts were disappointing, but finally, on another hunt, which included Lady Pease and her daughter Lavender, TR and Kermit were able to track down full-grown lion specimens, a female weighing 283 pounds and a male weighing 400. These Roosevelt took, with some help, dismounted at close range with his 405 Winchester, which he came to call his “medicine gun” for lions. He described the end of the male in a passage in African Game Trails representative of many others, that is colorful and lively, yet at the same time almost apologetic, in his respect for the prey:

  Right in front of me, thirty yards off, there appeared, from behind the bushs [sic] which had first screened him from my eyes, the tawny, galloping form of a big maneless lion. Crack! The Winchester spoke; and as the soft-nosed bullet ploughed forward through his flank the lion swerved so that I missed him with my second shot; but my third bullet went through the spine and forward into his chest. Down he came, sixty yards off, his hind quarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, his jaws open and lips drawn up in a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn to face us. His back was broken. But of this we could not at the moment be sure, and if it had merely been grazed, he might have recovered, and then, even though dying, his charge might have done mischief. So Kermit, Sir Alfred, and I fired, almost together, into his chest. His head sank, and he died.28

  The next day, after killing his first eland, the largest of the antelope, Roosevelt had his first opportunity at a rhinoceros, when a local Wakamba man came up to tell them one was on a hill nearby. The poor eyesight of the rhino allowed TR to walk within thirty yards of the giant beast, which he described as standing “like an uncouth statue, his hide black in the sunlight; he seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world’s past.” For the first time, the Colonel used the powerful Holland & Holland double-barreled rifle. After a first direct hit, the rhino nevertheless was able to get up and charge, and it took two more shots to bring it down, “ploughing up the ground” just thirteen paces from him. In a fashion that would be repeated many times over the next months, TR returned to the main camp to fetch a party of porters to skin and prepare the hides of his kills. One hundred men returned for the rhino and eland, which were within three quarters of a mile of each other. Heller soon complained of “rhinoceritis” (and later “hippopotamaiasis”) when he and his crew of six skinners, all Wakamba with their incisors filed to sharp points, could not keep up with the efforts of the hunters. The rhino kill had put the porters in “high feather” and they chanted to an accompaniment of whistling and horn blowing as they all tramped through the moonlight back to the carcasses.29

  A man of his times, Roosevelt had a patently Darwinistic, paternalistic and racist view of the Africans on the safari. He and Kermit became very fond of several of the men who served them, but never really thought of them as “men” at all. They were children to be taken care of and guided. It was the responsibility of the British to protect and to raise them up to civilized level, which they reckoned would take generations. In turn the Africans should be grateful for the benefits of British rule. Although he realized mistakes would be made, TR thought the natives he saw fortunate to be in the “care” of the British Empire, rather than one of the many less benign alternatives. Independence, given the imperial realities of the ongoing early-twentieth-century “Scramble for Africa,” was not perceived as an alternative. Roosevelt told Sir Harry Johnston that he firmly believed in “granting to Negroes of all races the largest amount of self-government which they can exercise,” but he had an “impatient contempt for the ridiculous t
heorists who wish to give to the utterly undeveloped races a degree of self-government which only the very highest have been able to exercise with advantage.” To TR, an “even more noxious type” was the man who pandered to these theorists in the utopian treatment “of races that are far away, but promptly repudiates their theories when the application is sought nearer home.”30

  To a large extent “raising up” the Africans was left to missionaries who were often belittled, along with their converts, by travelers. Roosevelt, to the contrary, had seen what he considered the good work done with Native Americans and while he was in Africa he made sure to visit many missions. His first such stop was at the interdenominational American Station at Machakos, where he had lunch with the missionaries, whose work, he admitted had many difficulties and often offered “dishearteningly little reward.” The Colonel himself attended either Episcopal or Dutch Reformed services, but praised the efforts of all denominations, Protestant or Catholic. He often said that all religion could be condensed into the eighth verse of the sixth chapter of the prophet Micah: “And what doth the Lord require of thee; but do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” The order of the verse, first to do justly, and only then, to love mercy was important. In TR’s view no parent, or missionary, should simply be gentle and merciful to their charges. Justice must be meted out first as his own father had done.31

  While TR was staying with Pease, Selous and a neighbor, William Northrup McMillan, rode over for lunch. McMillan, a man of Taftlike proportions, was a wealthy American expatriate who had taken up the life of an English gentleman and split his time between East Africa and London. He and Selous reported many lions, including a rare black-maned male, near Juja Farm, McMillan’s ranch in the Mua Hills. This alluring prospect led Roosevelt to relocate the safari’s base to the McMillan house, which was so comfortable, with a library, drawing room and cool, shaded veranda, that he found it hard to “realize we far in the interior of Africa and almost on the equator.” However, he was reminded by the abundant wildlife on the twenty thousand acre spread. Hartebeest, wildebeest, and zebras grazed in sight on the open plain, while hippopotami that lived in the nearby river raided the garden at night. He also noted the plumage and calls of the many exotic birds, among them for the first time the famous honey-guide which led men to rob the hives, and then waited to feast on the bee grubs.