Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (7 page)

Roosevelt was not a good sailor and suffered from violent seasickness. Consequently, despite perfect weather and smooth seas, he spent much of the first few days aboard ship reading in his suite’s sitting room. This inactivity only made him more “homesick” for his wife. An ocean voyage, he wrote to his sister Anna, was “always irksome” but the only thing to do was enjoy it as much as possible, which was “easy enough in the present instance.” The people on the ship were mainly Americans and, once he had gained his sea legs, TR found many connections of common friends.
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Also aboard were the three Smithsonian naturalists who would do the big game taxidermy and the trapping and shooting of the smaller fauna and flora that would make up the vast majority of the collection sent back to the National Museum. The lesser specimens were the responsibility of Professor J. Alden Loring, an expert on small animals, and Major Edgar Mearns, who was not only a retired Army Surgeon as already noted, but also a bird expert who had acquired his zoological experience on duty in the Philippines and while attached to the Mexican Boundary Commission. The other naturalist, Dr. Edmund Heller, was responsible for preserving the big game Theodore and Kermit shot. He had trained in Alaska and the Galapagos Islands and had already made two trips to Africa as a naturalist for the Field Museum in Chicago. After Heller agreed to join the venture, TR wrote him at his post at the University of California, Berkeley, that he was “delighted you can come.” There was not “a man in America” he was “more anxious to have with me.”
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A week into the voyage they reached the Portuguese Azores, which the Colonel found “very interesting; so quaint and old-world.” Kermit went ashore at Horta for a “snoop” and souvenir shopping while the three naturalists began shooting birds and gathering plants for the collection. On a second island, Punta Delgada, they visited Sao Miguel, a picturesque town of 25,000, where the streets, sidewalks, and houses were made of solid rock, painted white or pink. Major Mearns recorded that Roosevelt was in “fine fettle’ and Kermit was “the real stuff.” Leaving the island group they sailed by a snow-capped mountain that Mearns thought as beautiful as Fujiyama.
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At the Azores a gossip from the
Hamburg
spread the tale that Roosevelt had been attacked by a deranged man from steerage. This account soon made its way into the papers in New York to the horror of Edith, who for the last seven years had dreaded the assassination of her husband. A few days later, at scenic Gibraltar, Roosevelt told reporters that there had been no attack, but that a man, muttering in Italian, had approached him only to be quickly taken in charge by the crew. He had later gone down to steerage and shaken the hands of the Italian passengers to assure them there were no hard feelings. TR described Gibraltar’s British governor, general Sir Frederick ForestierWalker, as looking “as if he had walked out of Kipling.” The general’s “nice Kipling-like aides,” showed the Colonel what there was to see and a pleasant niece gave him tea at the Governor’s Palace.
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This was a first example of the extraordinary courtesy Roosevelt was shown throughout the British Empire, in which he spent most of the next year.

The expedition members changed ship for British East Africa at Naples, where TR and Kermit were greeted by Emily Carow, Edith’s maiden sister who lived in Italy, and by Lloyd Griscom, the U.S. ambassador. After a long and busy day ashore, amidst crowds of well wishers reminiscent of Hoboken, the travelers boarded the
Admiral
, another very comfortable German liner bound for Mombasa via the Suez Canal, the Egyptian lifeline to Britain’s Empire. TR reported to his sister Corinne that among the “polyglot crowd aboard” there were “plenty of people with whom it is really pleasant to talk in English or in those variants of volapuk which with me pass for French or German.”
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Kermit made friends with all the young people who could speak English and some older than him as well. He had brought his mandolin along and organized a ship’s musical, during the chorus of which his father drifted off to sleep.

To Roosevelt’s delight Frederick Selous, bound for a safari of his own, was able to join him on this leg of the voyage. Along the way the two men held forth on deck chairs trading stories for the amusement of all and sundry. Selous shared the sort of hunting tales that had so impressed Roosevelt at the White House, while the Colonel spun stories of Cuba, but mainly of “his old pals in the West—John Willis, and Seth Bullock and ‘Cold Turkey’ and ‘Hell Roaring Bill Jones’ and the ‘lunatic what hadn’t his right senses’—not forgetting the Goblin Bear and the boom town reduced to desolation because ‘hell-and-twenty Flying A cowpunchers had cut the court-house up into pants’ ”
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All “two-gun” tales he would tell again to the delight of royals across Europe.

Another traveler on the
Admiral
was Francis Warrington Dawson, the United Press wire service chief at Paris and its European correspondent. He appeared at Naples with a letter of introduction from TR’s friend Henry White and had other connections with Roosevelt’s family.
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Dawson made himself useful by helping the Colonel to repudiate a bogus and insulting interview published in the French press. The offending paper,
Le Journal
, consequently was denied serialization rights for TR’s safari articles. This incident, and the false report of the attack on the
Hamburg
, convinced Roosevelt that it might be useful to head off such episodes in the future by filling the news vacuum with authorized bulletins. For this he enlisted Dawson and Robert W. Foran, an ex-Captain in the East African constabulary based in Nairobi, who represented the Associated Press Syndicate.

En route to Mombasa the
Admiral
made several stops, the first a sympathy call at earthquake and tidal wave ravaged Messina in Sicily, where 100,000 had died the previous December. At the time TR had immediately committed $500,000 in United States aid, and personally donated $500 to the Red Cross relief effort. He also diverted American supply ships from the Great White Fleet then at Suez to join the relief effort. Two American vessels and their crews were still on duty at Messina when Roosevelt arrived at the heart-breaking scene, which he reported to his sister Anna, was “terrible beyond description.” However, he went on that it was “enough to make one glow with pride to see how our little group of officers and men from the Navy were doing their work.” They were so “cheerful, ready and absolutely efficient” and, in his estimation, by building hundreds of wooden huts for the survivors and in other relief efforts had “literally done more than the Italians themselves, or than all the other Europeans combined.”
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TR allowed Dawson to send off a dispatch to this effect for the press.

Back at Sagamore Hill, Edith and Ethel already missed the travelers dreadfully. Mrs. Roosevelt consoled herself with food, gaining fifteen pounds in the first two weeks of her husband’s absence. She confessed to Alice that the “prospect of not seeing Father till next March is unsupportable.” Ethel wrote to her brother that it was “horrid not having you and father with us on Easter.” Her depression had not been helped at church where the sermon dwelt on mankind’s having “gone to the bow-wows.”
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Meanwhile, at Port Said in Egypt, Roosevelt was received by the British and French canal officials, and was given a copy of Dumas’s
Louves de Machecoul
to add to the “Pigskin Library” by the brother of his friend Ambassador Jusserand. Specimen collecting continued. Referring to the African trip they had taken as children thirty-eight year before, TR told Corinne that bird skins from Suez were “drying in my room at the moment, just as if we were once more on the Nile.”
¹³
Another hunt was carried out at Aden en route so that by the time they reached Mombasa they already had 102 “nicely prepared” birds of three species and many shells and plants.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Buxton 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.