Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (9 page)

The day he arrived at Juja Farm, May 15, TR reported to Lodge that the first three weeks of hunting had so far had been very successful. They were in settled country and there had been no hardship. He had shot “neither well nor badly; having made a number of misses that he had no right to; but having killed most of the things that I specially desired to kill—the lions and rhino.” He was rather pleased to find that the American rifles he brought, which everyone had warned him against, had done well. The British authorities had been most kind and “cordially approved of the tact of the people who had arranged my caravan, in providing a large American flag, with which I am solemnly marching through Africa.”
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Lodge had written Roosevelt of America’s fascination with his journey, which the people followed in the daily news as if it was a serial story. Many of the papers had no love for TR but published the accounts anyway as the public demanded it. “They follow it all,” he told his friend, “with the absorbed interest of a boy who reads ‘Robinson Crusoe’ for the first time.” Lodge had known Roosevelt would be missed, but confessed he was “not prepared for the intensity of the popular interest in every movement you might make after you had left office.”
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Lions would prove elusive at the McMillan ranch, but Theodore and Kermit had no shortage of other hunting. Included in the Colonel’s bag were water-buck and impala. The first he described as a “stately antelope, with long, coarse gray hair and fine carriage of the head and neck.” Despite the name he did not find it prone to going in the water, but it did live near streams and lakes. The impala, often found with the water-buck, were joined with the Grant’s in his mind as among the most handsome of all antelope. About the size of white-tailed deer, the impala’s “beautiful annulated horns” made a single spiral, and their coat was like satin with its contrasting shades of red and white. They also had the most graceful movements of any animal he knew, and when frightened it was extraordinary to see them “bounding clear over the tops of tall bushes, with a peculiar bird-like motion and lightness.” Once again, on close examination, the specimens they took were infested with ticks.
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Juja Farm was bounded by three rivers: the Athi, Nairobi, and Rewero, all of which contained hippopotami and crocodiles. Roosevelt was particularly keen to get the first, but while on the lookout for a specimen came across instead an aggressive old female rhino, which he had no choice but to shoot after it charged within forty yards. Though they tried mightily to avoid repetitions of this incident, over the course of the safari several other rhino met similar unfortunate ends. Under such circumstances, TR wrote, it was not to be expected that men would take “many chances when face to face with a creature whose actions are threatening and whose intentions it is absolutely impossible to divine.” In fact, he did not see how the rhino could be permanently safeguarded, except in very out of the way places or game preserves. Otherwise, its “stupidity, curiosity, and truculence” made up a “combination of qualities which inevitably tend to insure its destruction.”
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That afternoon, Roosevelt also shot his first hippopotamus in a deep pool, but it submerged and he did not know whether he had killed it until the body surfaced the next day and was pulled to shore. All this he very briefly reported to Dawson at Nairobi for publication, on the condition that he share the information with his press colleagues there, including Captain Foran, Ambrose Lambert of the
New York Sun
services, and Vaughan Evans of the London
Daily Mail
. Many more such brief bulletins would follow at intervals of ten days to two weeks.

At Juja Farm TR was also able to finish four more articles for
Scribner’s
. Though he had plenty to write about for publication, it was not always easy to do so in the field, and he told his sister Corinne that he really did not know how he had done it. In fact, sometimes when he came in early from a hunt he point blank refused to write at all but spent an hour or so with a book from the “Pigskin Library” which, he assured his sister, had been “the utmost comfort and pleasure.” Fond though he was of hunting and the wilderness, he could not thoroughly enjoy either if he were not able, from time to time, “to turn to my books.”
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While Mearns and Loring went on a collecting trip down the Nairobi River, TR and Kermit visited Kamiti Ranch, between the Kamiti and Rewero Rivers. This was the home of Herbert Heatley, and at twenty thousand acres the largest dairy cattle farm in East Africa. The cattle and the climate led Roosevelt to compare what he saw to Wisconsin. The similarities, however, did not include the African buffalo or the completely un-Wisconsin-like papyrus swamps along the Kamiti in which he hunted them. There the papyrus grew to a height of twenty feet and the green stalks were so thick that in many places it was impossible to see more than six feet ahead. Once inside, in hip deep mud and water following the channels made by the hundred or so buffalo in the herd, TR lost all sense of direction.

Considered by some to be the most dangerous of all the game, Roosevelt described the buffalo as “an enormously powerful beast with, in this country, a coat of black hair which becomes thin in the old bulls, and massive horns which rise into great bosses at the base.” Sometimes in old age these bosses met “so as to cover the forehead with a frontlet of horn.” The buffalo on Heatley’s farm had been relatively unmolested by hunters, but were still wary. Fortunately for TR, Kermit, and Cuninghame, they found the herd on an island outside the swamp and were lucky to take four animals. An elated Colonel invited the two pressmen, Dawson and Foran, up from Nairobi, to stay a few days at his camp. He told Foran, “bring your blankets, we’ll put you up.” That morning, he reported, “Kermit and I killed three buffalo bulls.” In the afternoon, they got a wounded bull “in the edge of the papyrus & finished him off.”
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At the end of May the two parties rejoined at Nairobi, the capital of British East Africa. TR and Kermit stayed at Government House with Acting Governor Jackson, who was also one of the leading experts on East African birds and spent many hours helping Mearns to identify and arrange his specimens for the National Museum. At the same time Heller packed eighty-six large animals, almost all shot by Roosevelt. He reported to Walcott’s assistant in Washington that at the pace they were going, they would be able to “fill every nook and cranny of the museum with large mammals.” Also that Mearns and Loring were “gleefully engaged in securing the small animals and had shown no tendencies to become big game hunters.”
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While the naturalists prepared the first shipment for the Smithsonian, the local notables feted TR and Kermit. The British at Nairobi, as those across the Empire, tried to recreate the comforts and rituals of society at home, down to meals and gardens. At one dinner the menu included hors d’oeuvres, bouillon, lobster sauce mayonnaise, chicken aspic and jardinière, roast duck, roast lamb, peas, cauliflower, roast potatoes, ice cream, and asparagus béchamel.

Though most outsiders, including Warrington Dawson, found it a hideous place full of tin huts, TR was quite taken with Nairobi and its houses, standing on their own, and usually “bowered in trees, with vines shading the verandas and pretty flower gardens round about.” It was in his estimation a “very attractive town, and most interesting with its large native quarter and its Indian colony.” One of the streets was made up entirely of Indian shops and bazaars.
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Since he had arrived at Mombasa, busy Indian merchants had been prominent wherever there had been settlements, and Indian agents also manned many of the rail stations along the way.

Almost unanimously the settlers with whom Roosevelt stayed, or otherwise conversed, saw the Indian population already on the ground and any further Asian immigration as a threat to making British East Africa, as they put it, a “White Man’s Country.” Their dream was to create in Africa another white dominion, a miniature New Zealand or Australia, and to this notion they found TR sympathetic, at least to the discouragement of any further Indian settlement in the highlands where they would “come into rivalry with whites.”
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Indian immigration was one of the issues the Colonel was exhorted to take up on the settler’s behalf once he reached England. They also complained of Winston Churchill who, not quite two years before, had made a tour of British East Africa to inspect the newly opened railway to Uganda. The then Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office had seen army service in India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of Britain’s Empire, and to him East Africa was a backwater which was not paying its own way and consequently a drain on thin British resources.

Arrogant as ever, Churchill spent much of his time hunting from his private rail car, where iced buckets of champagne awaited him at the day’s end. He looked down upon the settlers and, once he got home, declared himself sympathetic to Indian immigration.
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The people TR met had “hoped much” from Churchill’s visit, but, as he told his British friend Sir George Otto Trevelyan, “for various reasons most of them had disliked him when he passed through the country, and felt that his speeches and writings when he returned showed that he either had not really grasped the situation or else did not care to do them justice.”
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These writings included
My African Journey
, in which Churchill derided the settler’s cry for a “White Man’s Country” as a “White Man’s Dream,” and praised the industriousness of his Asian rival “the brown man,” who, he pointed out, had been in East Africa long before the British.
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The safari’s next destination was the Sotik, a huge limestone plain on the Protectorate’s border with German East Africa, where over the following month they found the best shooting, and collecting generally, of the whole trip. Taking the railroad from Nairobi to Kijabe, on June 5 they began a sixty-five mile trek across the desert to the Guaso Nyero River. This slow journey through “the Thirst,” with a line of two hundred porters on foot trailing behind the horses and with four huge, white sail-topped, ox-wagons along to carry their water supply, was perhaps most like a scene from Rider Haggard’s
King Solomon’s Mines
than any other episode in Africa. Along the way they encountered the cattle, sheep and donkey herds of the tall, dignified, and friendly Masai, whom TR described as “herdsmen by profession and warriors by preference, with their great spears and ox-hide shields.” The Masai reflected the “ethnic whirlpool” of the area. Some were of the “seemingly pure negro type”; others like “ebony Nilotic Arabs.” Still others he found strikingly like “the engravings on the tombs, temples, and palaces of ancient Egypt; they might have been soldiers in the armies of Thothmes or Ramses.”
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For a few days there were no comfortable tents at night and TR and Kermit slept on the ground in their army overcoats with their saddles as pillows. In the evenings round the campfire they traded stories. Cuninghame and Tarlton spoke of elephant hunting in the Congo, and adventures with lion and buffalo. Mearns described his long hikes and fierce fighting in the hot Philippine forests, including a shocking story of a night spent collecting Moro heads for the Smithsonian. Loring and Heller told of hunting and collecting in Alaska, the Rockies, and along the Mexican border. Always, TR recorded, “our talk came back to strange experiences with birds and beasts, both great and small, and to the ways of the great game.” The naturalists trapped and shot a wealth of birds and mammals including “very spry and active” meercats, “things akin to a small mongoose” which lived out on the open plains as did prairie dogs and looked like “pocket-pins when they stood up on end to survey us.” However, TR and Kermit were not completely without mercy when it came to collecting specimens. They found a “wee hedgehog, with much white about it,” that would cuddle up in the Colonel’s hand “snuffing busily with his funny little nose.” They did not have the heart to turn the “friendly little fellow” over to the tender mercies of the naturalists and so released him.
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At the Guaso Nyero, Mearns and Loring stayed in the vicinity of the camp collecting small game, including many varieties of poisonous snakes, while Heller accompanied TR and Kermit farther south. Once again their intention was to collect family groups of all the major species. Over the next five weeks the hunters bagged various antelope, including eland and their first topi, closely related to the hartebeest and wildebeest. The topi could be distinguished at long distance by their darker color. The wildebeest was the “least normal and most grotesque and odd-looking of the three,” and his “idiosyncrasies of temper” were also the most marked. The hartebeest came next with his “high withers, long face and queerly shaped horns.” The topi’s power of leaping was great. TR had seen one “when frightened bound clear over a companion, and immediately afterward over a high ant-hill.”
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Besides antelope, the party also shot lion, cheetah, zebra, rhinoceros, hyena, and giraffe. To Roosevelt the last, which were such big targets they could be shot at three hundred yards, were particularly interesting. He wanted a large bull, two cows and a young one for the Smithsonian and found to his surprise that the young were the shyest and most suspicious. It was the adults who exhibited a “tameness bordering on stupidity.”
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He was able to bag his group while Kermit, whose shoulder was sore from a fall from his horse, devoted himself to taking shots with his camera.

TR enjoyed the time the safari gave him with his son very much, however, he continued to fret for Kermit’s safety. He confided to Ethel that her brother was the most pleasant of companions “when he is where he can’t get in a scrape,” but also a constant source of worry owing to his “being very daring, and without proper judgment—as to what he is, and what he is not, able to do.” He was very hardy, a good rider and carried himself admirably in danger, but did not know his own limitations and that at nineteen he still had much to learn. TR was very proud of Kermit and “devotedly attached to him,” but told his daughter, “Heavens, how glad I shall be to get him out of Africa!”
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