Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (10 page)

After more than two weeks in the Sotik, Roosevelt reported to his sister Anna that “certainly life in this particular wilderness is delightful.” The nights were so cool as to make warm blankets a necessity, although they had to be careful of the sun at noon. The multitude of game made it a hunter’s paradise, so no wonder he enjoyed it so. Their game bag so far included over a hundred animals from rhino to giraffe to dikdik, a “tiny antelope no bigger than a hare.” TR had not looked at a newspaper since he left home and had already sent six chapters to Scribner’s but had no idea whether they were good or not.
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In the same vein Theodore told his sister Corinne that he was happy to say he knew “nothing whatever of politics at home” and hoped to keep “in that same blessed state of ignorance” until he returned the next June. Then he would take up political work again, “probably not in any direct partisan sense,” but chiefly in the pages of the
Outlook
on matters such as the “conservation of natural resources, the control of big corporations, and how to deal with socialism and the like.”
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Roosevelt’s contention that he knew “nothing whatever of politics at home” was a bit of an exaggeration. Though he did not have newspapers at hand he did receive reports, though irregularly and a month or so after they were written, from family and friends, notably his wife and Henry Cabot Lodge.
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The last, who supported the Massachusetts manufacturing interests in the senate, had already written about the ongoing congressional fight over tariff revision, a major economic issue in these years and also a political minefield that TR had sidestepped while in office. He had told the muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker that he was “not deeply interested” in hard economic problems such as banking and the tariff; “my problems are moral problems, and my teaching has been plain morality.”
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Taft was left behind to referee the ensuing congressional free for all over the tariff bill, which split the Republican party between an Old Guard “standpatter” protectionist faction and the insurgent progressive wing which supported downward revision. The president was pledged to the latter; however, following his own conservative inclinations, Taft drifted into the standpatter camp. He felt abandoned by TR, who almost certainly would have steadied his course. Before too long, disillusionment with Taft in the congressional tariff battle led one senator to comment that as a consequence “it may not be so wild a prophecy to say that the next President will be an African.” This reference to TR brought down the house.
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As fate would have it, Taft was further isolated in May 1909 by the stroke which incapacitated his wife Nellie. She, along with TR, had pushed him into the presidency and was a close confidant and advisor. The seriousness of her condition was kept from the press and consequently Edith Roosevelt only sent consolations the next month, assuring Taft that she would have written sooner had she known the truth of Nellie’s illness which she had only learned from Captain Butt’s recent visit to Sagamore Hill. Edith also told Taft, who had had no contact with her husband since his departure, that her letters from Africa were full of accounts of good hunting and that “Theodore feels that already the trip has been immensely successful, beyond all his hopes.”
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Hearing news of TR’s African triumphs, while he was alone in Washington beset by beasts of another sort, cannot have been pleasant for the president.

Though Roosevelt did not write directly, he did ask their mutual friend Elihu Root, his former secretary of state who had taken a New York seat in the senate, to give his warm regards to Taft, whom he had heard from Lodge was “doing excellently.” Of course, TR went on, “Fixing up a Tariff” was much more important than his present occupation, but “not nearly so alluring.” Taft was bound to have “his little problems and worries” as president, but that simply was to be expected and things would be all right. TR also confided to Root his worries over the finances of the expedition, which had proved much more expensive than envisioned and after only two months had already used up much of its original funding. Unless Walcott at the Smithsonian could arrange more, the naturalists, who had been doing really remarkable work, would have to go home that summer. He and Kermit would have to finish the trip “on a hunter basis—which would be a pity” for he did not think a chance like this would ever occur again.
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To keep the naturalists on board, in the end Roosevelt was forced himself to send a plea to Andrew Carnegie, who supplied a further $20,000. In return he would expect a grateful TR to use his inf luence in Europe to further the millionaire’s dreams of international arbitration, disarmament and a league of peace.

From the parched Sotik, the party marched north four days to the lush shores of Lake Naivasha, where hippopotamus was again the prey. They camped near Saigo Soi Ranch, the home of the Attenborough brothers, who provided a steam launch, and big heavy rowboat to use in the hunt. Once again tall green papyrus groves fringed the lagoons, which were covered by water lilies, bearing purple or pink flowers. Across the lilies ran richly colored birds called “lily-trotters” with toes so long and slender the lily pads supported then without sinking. In the lagoons there were also a number of hippo that bellowed and roared at night when they came ashore to feed. On land TR found them “astonishingly quick in their movements for such shapeless-looking, short-legged things.” In the water they were also unexpectedly quick, particularly in the shallows where they could “gallop very fast on the bottom under water.” After several frustrating days in the launch and rowboat, Roosevelt finally shot a hippo on shore which, in its attempt to get back into deep water, charged the boat “with jaws open bent on mischief.” Kermit snapped photos while his father stopped the hippo with a brain shot.
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At Lake Naivasha the Colonel received the upsetting news of the dismissal from the Paris embassy of his friend Henry White, a mere three months after Roosevelt had assured White that Taft would keep him in place. Now an embarrassed TR confided to his friend in Paris that the “last thing he wanted to do was criticize his successor,” but he wanted him to know that “everything I could do for you was done,” not out of his affection for White, “but because as I told Taft I regard you as without exception the very best man in our diplomatic service.” Though he had not made a personal request of Taft, he had told him that there were “certain men whose qualifications were of so high an order that I felt I ought to dwell on them and that conspicuous among these was yourself.” Taft had told TR and Lodge that he meant to keep White, but he added, ominously for the future, that of course, it was “not a promise any more than my statement that I would not run again for President was not a promise.”
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More lighthearted news came from Jusserand, to whom Roosevelt had reported that he was as usual having a grand time. The French Ambassador replied that had seen various reports over the previous four months, but doubted the veracity of most of them, and was delighted to hear from TR “direct.” Now he knew the “truth of it; all is as it should be, and you are having, ‘The Time of Your Life,’ just as you had it at the White House, Oyster Bay, Cuba, North Dakota, etc.” For the Colonel’s amusement, the Frenchman enclosed a newspaper cartoon which showed TR in pith helmet writing on a “Mombasa Souvenir Postcard” addressed to the U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, with the message: “Every time I shoot something I think of you.” Jusserand told his friend to continue, “but not too long and mind the mosquitoes.” And if the Smithsonian did not have enough room for all his “Rhinos and Hippos” he enclosed another drawing by Clifford Berryman (whose 1902 TR cartoon had inspired the Teddy Bear), which showed a parade of fashionable ladies wearing elephant, rhino and antelope heads, lion muffs and antelope stoles, outside a shop. In its window a sign declared “Latest importations from our agent in East Africa” and another in front of a male lion head stated: “This superb specimen killed by Bwana Tumbo (T.R.).”
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Among the many requests sent to Roosevelt from home was one for the permission needed to trademark a “Bwana Tumbo: Hunting in Africa” children’s game, but youngsters needed no official rules to take themselves off into the woods pretending to be intrepid hunters in mock safaris of their own. This trend gave fodder to one critic, Dr. William J. Long, whose “nature faker” writings TR had attacked mercilessly while he was president. In a
New York Times
article, Long declared that the “worst feature in the whole bloody business” was not the “killing of few hundred wild animals in Africa,” but the “brutalizing influence” which TR’s reports of this from Africa had on thousands of American boys. While tramping through some woods only the previous week, Long claimed to have come across “half a dozen little fellows,” the oldest calling himself “Bwana Tumbo,” who were “shooting everything in sight, killing birds at a time when every dead mother meant a nest full of young birds slowly starving to death.” How could he convince them that their work was “inhuman,” Long asked, when “the great American hero” was “occupied at this time with the same detestable business?” And why should they not also “be heroic and make a few fine shots” since “faunal naturalists and other game butchers have killed off all our buffaloes?”
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All the interest at home, good and bad, led TR to call for action from his editor at
Scribner’s
, Robert Bridges. Roosevelt instructed Bridges that he ought to publish the two additional chapters he had sent from Lake Naivasha as articles as soon as possible. Further, his trip had attracted, not only the avid attention of the country, but also the competition. He had been told that no less than eight books were in preparation on hunting and traveling in British East Africa and scheduled to be published by the beginning of the following year. The object, of course, was to “forestall our book.” Therefore, to get the first article out by October or November would be “from every standpoint advisable.” TR also told Bridges that he thought Kermit had done very well with the photographs and “from the zoological standpoint they are the most important of all” and they ought to use “quite a number of them.”
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The
Scribner’s
articles began running in the October 1909 issue and finished the following September, just before the book was published.

On Lake Naivasha searching for a bull hippo to complete the group, chance took the Colonel’s rowboat smack into a school of hippo which bumped the bottom several times in their panic to flee after Roosevelt opened fire. The first jar caused them all to sit down. They were struck again, and, he recorded:

the shallow muddy water boiled, as the huge beasts, above and below the surface, scattered every which way. Their eyes starting the two rowers began to back water out of the dangerous neighborhood, while I shot an animal whose head appeared on my left, as it made off with frantic haste. I took it for granted that the hippo at which I had first fired . . . had escaped. This one disappeared as usual, and I had not the slightest idea whether or not I had killed it. I had small opportunity to ponder the subject, for twenty feet away the water bubbled and a huge head shot out facing me, the jaws wide open. There was no time to guess at its intentions, and I fired on the instant. Down went the head, and I felt the boat quiver as the hippo passed underneath . . . a head burst up twenty yards off, with a lily-pad plastered over one eye, giving the hippo and absurd resemblance to a discomfited prize fighter, and then disappeared with great agitation.
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This unwanted carnage occurred simultaneously with an onset of the fever Roosevelt had been subject to since his days in Cuba and the combination sent him into a depression such as Warrington Dawson, who was at the base camp, had not seen. A distraught TR told Dawson that he greatly regretted the hippo incident but had been forced by circumstances to fire into the herd, never dreaming he would kill so many. He went on, “I don’t know what to do about it. We shall have to let the papers know. And this is
not
a game-slaughtering expedition.”
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The Colonel was painfully aware of the articles being published at home alleging just such butchery. A week earlier he had written to Captain Foran, who had been lion hunting himself, about the proper response. Before he sent anything TR wanted to discuss the matter, but he told Foran that he thought all that was necessary to say was that “not an animal has been shot except for food or to be preserved for the National Museum, and that as a matter of fact almost all have been thus preserved.”
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As it fell out, the press response to the incident on Lake Navaisha did not prove as violent as feared and within a few days Roosevelt had rebounded, both from the fever and his depression.

In Nairobi for a refit, and to ship the second lot of specimens, TR again enjoyed the considerable hospitality of the McMillans, this time at their house, Chiromo, “with its broad, vine-shaded veranda, running round all four sides, and its garden, fragrant and brilliant with innumerable flowers.”
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The mail waiting at Nairobi included a letter from Lodge, who passed along a comment of their mutual friend Elihu Root, now occupying the New York senate seat previously held by “Boss” Thomas Platt who in 1900 had maneuvered the troublesome TR out of the governor’s chair into the vice presidency. About one of the newspaper dispatches on the hunt, Root jibed: “Of course Theodore shot three lions with one bullet and Kermit shot one lion with three bullets.”
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Roosevelt instructed Lodge to tell Root that he did not “at all like his hardened skepticism about the lions” and if this sort of thing continued he would have to “lead an insurrection” to put Tom Platt back in Root’s New York seat when his “term expires—if as I anticipate the worthy Platt at that period still continues to exist in a condition of wicked and malevolent mummification.”
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