Those who have read anything at all about hunting in Africa have certainly chanced across the name of W.M.D. 'Karamojo' Bell.
Bell was a professional ivory hunter in the days before anyone had any notion of running out of elephants. He arrived in East Africa in 1897 shortly after the age of initial exploration was over and the exploitation phase was really moving along. Africa was pretty well mapped by this time, but there remained massive areas in which no European was known to ever have visited.
Nicknamed 'Karamojo' for his tendency to hunt the Karamojo region of what is now Uganda, Bell is constantly referred to and quoted by modern outdoor writers. In nearly any article or book or conversation about hunting elephants, his name is invoked. The problem is that Karamojo and his legacy are frequently misused and misunderstood. Few people bother to actually read his books, which is understandable since they have spent so much time out of print.
This is a man who personally killed over a thousand elephants, scores of lions, and antelope and cape buffalo probably in the thousands (his safaris included hundreds of people to be fed, clothed and shod for years on end). He amassed a body of experience and knowledge about hunting dangerous prey with rifles which may have been equaled in his own time by other hunters who didn't bother with writing memoirs, but which will certainly never be matched again. He was the great pioneer of hunting very big animals with modern rifles in an age without bag limits or scarcity of prey to limit him.
Bell's book, 'Karamojo Safari,' has been out of print for many years. After some decades it has finally been re-issued in
an excellent facsimile edition by Safari Press. I had been looking for an affordable copy of this book for years and I was very grateful to finally receive a copy on the occasion of my 33rd birthday at the end of July.
Every single quote of Bell's that I have ever heard, and every reference to his work that I have seen, turns out to have been pulled out of the first chapter. I really do wonder whether anyone had bothered to actually read the entire book up until now.
'Karamojo Safari' turns out to be a very good book. Bell's conversational prose steers us on a ten month safari through very rough, often hostile country. But it is not only the journey through the African landscape that makes the book worthwhile; it is also the emotional and ethical challenges that the reader has to find his way through.
Elephants have become the sacred cows of the modern western world. The African elephant has been sadly reduced in numbers and range by hunting and loss of habitat. We have all learned a great deal about the lives and social structure of elephant herds and we naturally have a great deal of sympathy for them. In order to encourage people to protect African elephants from extinction, we had to anthropomorphize them. This change of elephants' status could not possibly have been predicted by the author, given the world and the time that produced him. Yet this change in status becomes an unintended major theme of the book to the modern reader.
As a hunter I often cheered for Bell in some encounters with elephants, while in other instances I found myself rooting for the elephants. I really had to stop and think about why I felt differently about it in different pages and chapters. When Bell was only a few yards from a massive lone bull elephant, I wanted him to succeed. But when there was a description of the elephants being nice to each other I wanted them to escape. In one case a large bull was off on its own with a very young calf, which is unusual. I found myself hoping that something would go wrong and that Bell wouldn't get the bull, simply because I didn't want the calf to be sad (the calf's mother turned out to be nearby and neither mother nor child was harmed, though the bull was killed instantly).
There are various things that Bell got flatly wrong, like the age of elephants. It was a common misconception at the time that elephants could live to be hundreds of years old. He also says some things about ballistics that don't make much sense now, such as the odd notion that a .275 Rigby bullet (aka 7mm Mauser) is inherently less accurate than a .318 is.
The descriptions of race and of the indigenous Africans are more liberal than I expected from a man born in 1880. Bell does not hesitate to describe the very real differences, both cultural and physical, between his own race and the various African races that he worked with or encountered. But he never equates any of these distinctions to a moral or intellectual superiority. He seems to be completely honest about race in a way that would be difficult for modern writers after the racial history of the twentieth century in America and Africa (Bell is Scottish, incidentally).
If anything, Bell tends to regard the native Africans as essentially superior and better-adapted to life in Africa than he was. He regularly marvels at their mental abilities, such as long-distance navigation through dense bush and a talent for sensing small details that he could not.
Bell is arguably an important figure in African history because of the weapons that he began employing for the hunting of elephants.
Up until Bell's time it was very difficult to kill an elephant. These are massive animals with extremely thick hides, large bones, and long distances of flesh to traverse in order to reach a vital organ. Reaching the heart or brain for a swift kill was an improbable feat with the technology available prior to the late 19th century. To attempt to kill an elephant and then to fail can easily be a fatal mistake to the hunter. Throughout most of mankind's history in Africa, we mostly tried to stay the hell away from elephants.
The cuisine in local villages described by Bell is surprisingly low in meat (his fellow Scotsman, Mungo Park, describes a similar situation in West Africa 100 years prior). These people were farming and eating a lot of grain and flour and when crops failed they pretty much just starved. They were desperate for meat. It seems so odd that people could go hungry while surrounded by these literal mountains of meat that elephants represented, but technologically speaking they knew no way of killing the animals.
Then along came the invention of smokeless gunpowder and the metallurgical advances that allowed rifles to be built that could fire higher-velocity loads than ever before without the risk of exploding in the shooter's face. Guns had been used in Africa long before Bell's time but they were only marginally effective on really large prey. Black powder weapons did not fire bullets with enough velocity to reliably reach the heart or brain of an elephant. With the velocity limitations of black powder, the only way to punch right through the animal was to fire a larger piece of lead.
How big? Oh, about a quarter pound of lead. The 'four-bore' gun was your basic edition elephant gun in Africa for many years. It is
not very pleasant to shoot. The four-bore was reckoned insufficient by some people who moved up to the two-bore that fired a half of pound of lead with every shot. I've experienced recoil from guns that bruised my shoulder for a few days (solid slugs from a 12 gauge come to mind). A two-bore elephant gun makes bruises from a twelve gauge look like a Swedish massage. We're talking about nose bleeds in some people after a few shots. Accuracy is pretty difficult under such circumstances. And exactly how many pounds of lead are you likely to carry around on your person through miles and miles of African bush on the trail of elephants?
Guns capable of killing elephants reliably were rare, expensive, inaccurate (in practice, anyway) and difficult for very many people to use properly. Many native Africans had long since dismissed firearms as showy gimmicks with no real place hunting big game.
As the global demand for ivory picked up, people in East Africa saw a good opportunity to make some quick money. Bell describes this economic transition and the cultural changes that came with it. At first the tusks were traded for beads and trinkets. Later the price began to soar and some ivory could be traded for a heifer or two. This could be a life-changing event. Possession of a cow meant a steady supply of milk, increased social standing, and the ability to take a wife. The locals in East Africa started going nuts for ivory.
The way that they got a hold of it was mostly just going out and looking for it. That whole area of the continent was awash in elephants and had been for a very long time. Bones were scattered everywhere and the tusks with them. Ivory didn't seem to have any enormous value to them previously, so there were decades worth of teeth laying around in the bush. Most bones don't last too long out in the open in Africa. Ivory is tougher stuff, being very dense, partially covered with protective enamel, and not having any marrow for scavengers to break it apart for.
As the pick-up ivory disappeared there was some small amount coming in from elephants trapped in pits or snares by natives. This didn't amount to very much.
Enter Karamojo Bell. Having fought in the Boer War he knew a good bit about the differences between the old black powder guns and modern military bolt action rifles. Bell used mostly bolt action Enfield and Mauser type actions, usually chambered for either the .303 or 7mm Mauser (known to Bell and the UK in general as the .275 Rigby). He came to prefer solid, nickel-coated, round-nosed bullets for use on big game. Soft-pointed bullets made wholly of lead tend to deform and fall to pieces when traveling through a large target -- particularly so when the bullet is of a small diameter in the first place.
There is a myth in the shooting and hunting world that Bell refused to use soft-pointed bullets for anything whatsoever. It even says so on his Wikipedia page. This is not exactly true. Bell used soft-pointed bullets on other game quite regularly -- he just didn't like them for elephants.
Bell writes on page 20:
"In the course of time I acquired a long-barrelled .256 Mannlicher, stocked and sighted (iron sights, but extremely refined) by Gibbs of Bristol. I did not use this rifle on elephant; I don't know why unless it was that I had only soft-pointed bullets. It was not until later that I got a .256 Mannlicher-Schonauer and used it on elephant. I used the long Gibbs -- a most beautiful rifle -- entirely for meat-getting. And what a deadly weapon it was! I have known it lay out a score of antelope from one anthill stance in the cool air of morning or evening."
Various other references throughout the book are made to using soft-points on prey other than elephants. Let us lay to rest this myth that Karamojo Bell never hunted with soft-point bullets.
When summing up books about hunting in Africa there is a pretty clear line that emerges: was it before or after Hemingway wrote 'Green Hills of Africa'? Hemingway's novels and short stories came to define the way that westerners tend to look at and write about African hunting. The semi-fictional professional hunting guide, Jackson Phillips (mostly based on the real-life
Philip Percival) became thoroughly our idea of what a professional hunter is supposed to be like and this archetype has made its way into nearly all of the depictions of African hunting since.
The tricky thing about fitting 'Karamojo Safari' into that scheme of things is that it was written in the 1940's after the 1935 publication of '
Green Hills of Africa,' yet the book is about a safari undertaken decades earlier. I wonder whether W.D.M. Bell ever read Hemingway? He states in Karamojo Safari that the only thing from civilization that he really cared for was Charles Dickens' 'Pickwick Papers,' which he had read over a hundred times.
Before I'd read Bell I had always assumed that Peter Hathaway Capstick's work was primarily influenced by Hemingway. We certainly see him presenting himself in a decidedly Philips/Percival light -- which is not to say that Capstick was a phony. He may have really been just like that as a professional hunter, with Hemingway's characters to influence and inspire his own career and life as a professional hunter in Africa.
Capstick's best book is
'Death in the Long Grass,' which belongs in any top five list of the best books on hunting in Africa. In hindsight, I see as much of Bell's influence on Capstick's style as I do of Hemingway. This bit from page 213 of 'Karamojo Safari' reads like it could have come straight out of Capstick's mouth:
"The reek from the already somewhat ripe offal and the abundant man-smell all about seemed not to ruffle [the elephant's] serenity one little bit. What did upset it though was a .275 between the ribs. With a squirm and a bellow of rage that split the welkin he tucked his stern under him and began diminishing in size in the weirdest way. Simultaneously with the roar something flashed by me with a whimper of fear. Every animal in that gathering had experienced vicariously a full-dress rehearsal of being blown to hell by dynamite. The scene lay still and lifeless beneath me in the cold silver light of the gigantic moon."
I honestly had no idea what a 'welkin' was until looking it up a moment ago.
Having previously read Capstick,
Wally Johnson, and
Brian Herne's 'White Hunters' helped me to appreciate how remarkable Bell is. Bell tends to down-play the physical danger posed to an elephant hunter. The obituaries of many of his colleagues suggest that Bell was either extraordinarily lucky or highly skilled.
When an elephant decides that it doesn't like you, it is in a position to do something about the fact with an astonishing repertoire of techniques. It can step on you. It can sit down on you. It can kick you. Knock you down with its trunk and gore its tusks straight through your body and on into the soil. Pick you up with the trunk and throw you over the trees. There are credible accounts of elephants throwing people and then running to catch them on the other end by spearing the moving body on a tusk. They surely don't lack for imagination.
You can't run away. The length of an elephant's gait is incredible and a brisk stroll on their part would probably beat any Olympic sprinter. Even in thick cover an elephant can push right through trees and brush that you or I would have to walk around. Climb a tree and the elephant will either pluck you out of it or knock it down. If you make it to your car then your spouse will only have to make an auto claim in addition to the life insurance paperwork.
Bell took on groups of bull elephant (he avoided shooting females and calves unless he was facing a direct charge and had to act in self-defense) that sometimes numbered in the dozens. To do this successfully for the 25 years that he spent as an ivory hunter, he had to be both brave and intelligent.
It is easy for modern western readers to look at Bell as a sort of caricature; a slob hunter blasting away at thousands of helpless endangered animals with a gun that guaranteed his own safety and success. The imperialist, racist white man traveling with hundreds of servants. But that is just not who Bell was. He seems to have genuinely cared about the people who worked for him and doesn't appear to have looked down on people on account of their color. Nearly every day he risked a sudden, violent death. He did things in order to survive that most of us would not contemplate.
When Bell was far from water and in danger of dying from thirst he would shoot an elephant and place a spear through the dead torso at exactly the right point in order to send the animal's internal reserve of water gushing out the hole. Supposedly after letting the first few gallons spill away with their initial mixture of blood, the remainder was fairly drinkable.
Bell and his core safari staff ate, drank and wore elephant. Shoes and sandals were cut from elephant hide. When it rained they sought shelter under severed elephant ears. They ate massive amounts of elephant meat. Some of his people craved the stuff so much that they would literally drink entire pints of melted elephant fat after a long hike. Their lives were every bit as much defined by elephants as the lives of some plains Indians (as well as the white buffalo hunters) in the mid-1800's were defined by the herds of bison they followed around, living off of the meat while selling the hides and tongues.
It was a completely unsustainable way of life, of course. Sooner or later the world was going to run out of elephants (and bison). First there were the professional ivory hunters like Bell, who at least limited themselves to bulls. Then as Africans worked to feed themselves more reliably they cleared, fenced and cultivated more land. Having a herd of elephants show up and eat months of work in a matter of hours wasn't helping things, so that even cows and calves were shot frequently to protect crops. Elephants were pushed farther and farther back into shrinking habitats. Reduced and isolated, they became vulnerable.
What condition would African elephants be in today, as a species, if Bell and the rest of the ivory hunters of his day had never existed? I don't think that one can read Bell's book without asking that question.
I think elephants would be in better
genetic shape as a species. There has been tremendous natural selection against elephants with decent tusks to the extent that some parks contain a majority of tusk-less animals. But in terms of overall numbers and their odds for long-term survival, I suspect that without the old ivory trade things would still be almost as bad. The biggest threat to elephants' survival in the wild is now arguably loss of habitat. Farming and development are their biggest threat. That was going to happen with or without the big ivory safaris.
If today we could magically resurrect every single elephant from the dead which Bell shot, odds are that it would be a complete disaster. As it stands, perfectly healthy elephants are having to be culled in the wild because there isn't enough food to support all of them.
If you divide food sufficient for 50 elephants among 100 elephants, you get 100 dead elephants within a year or two. But if you kill half of them straight off then at least you still end up with 50 live elephants in the long run. The other problem with letting too many elephants compete for too little food is that they strip the bark off of trees for food as a matter of routine. It is a major part of their diet, though this kills the trees. With limited, isolated habitat, this habit leads to deforestation and desertification when there are too many elephants in one place. That, in turn, leads to the extirpation and perhaps extinction of the other animals depending on that habitat.
I rather like elephants and I personally do not want to kill one, but I don't think that Bell and his kind were the demons that some people might want to make them out as. It was a brutal life that Karamojo Bell led, both for himself and for the animals that he killed. Altogether I'm pleased that he wrote a book about it.
[Photo used courtesy of The Safari Press]
I really shouldn't be spending this much time blogging today when I have a book to finish in the next couple of days. But I saw this piece in the New York Times about feral pigs today and I've got to weigh in on it.
