ART. VI. THE PRESERVATION OF BIG GAME IN AFRICA. 1. Two African Trips: with Notes and Suggestions on Big Game Preservation in Africa. By EDWARD NORTH BUXTON. London: Edward Stanford. 1902. 2. Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. By ARTHUR H. NEUMANN. London: Rowland Ward. 1898. 3. An Ivory Trader in North Kenia. By A. ARKELL-HARDLondon: Longmans & Co. 1903. WICK. 4. Mit Blitzlicht und Büchse. By C. B. SCHILLINGS. Leipzig: R. Voigtländer. 1905. 1903. 5. Big Game Shooting and Travel in South-East Africa. By F. R. N. FINDLAY. London: T. Fisher Unwin. 6. Records of Big Game. 4th edition. By Rowland Ward. London: Rowland Ward, Limited. 1903. 7. Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. Vol. I. London: Privately printed. 1904. IT T is doubtless inevitable that civilisation, advancing into savage countries, should destroy many wild animals. There are various reasons, some utilitarian, most, perhaps, sentimental, why we believe that this is to be regretted. Some of the beasts may be useful to man in different ways; others may be merely strange or beautiful. Be this as it may, there are few persons endowed with righteous feelings who do not hear with some indignation that an animal of either sort has been completely exterminated by man. It has taken untold centuries to produce by evolution a giraffe or a zebra; and when the last of the kind has been killed by man no human effort can ever replace the loss which the world has sustained. We purpose, therefore, to assume without discussion that it is desirable to save from indiscriminate slaughter the various forms of animal life in Africa which are either harmless or useful to man. The European Powers which are chiefly interested, assembled in conference at London, have signed a convention with this object. How far it may be desirable to allow harmful animals to be exterminated, or where the line is to be drawn, we shall not stop to inquire. The entire disappearance of lions or leopards from the face of the world would be a sad thing, though they are unpleasant to those who are compelled to live in their neighbourhood. The present position of affairs in Africa is unique in the history of the world. A huge continent with an astounding fauna remained unexplored by white men until near the middle of the nineteenth century, and was then suddenly partitioned among the nations of Europe. Leopold King of the Belgians summoned representatives to the Brussels Conference, and the division of Africa among the European Powers began. Now railways are being pushed forward in every direction, steamers are running on all the great lakes and rivers, and the country is being developed with feverish haste and all the most modern adjuncts of civilisation. Such being the posture of things to-day, it is easy to show what danger the fauna runs from this invasion. Everyone takes toll of the game; no one takes thought of those who come later. So-called sportsmen arrive bent on killing as much as they can; and colonists live on the game as long as it lasts. We propose, therefore, to show the need for action before it is too late; to examine the measures that have been taken to insure the preservation of animals; and to consider how they may be improved and enforced to save those which are in peculiar danger of becoming extinct. The rapidity with which the whole continent has been opened up makes it urgent, if we are to do anything to save the fauna from being swept away, that we should act promptly and firmly. Animals become extinct so suddenly that there is often no preliminary warning, and no one perceives that they have even become rare. The first of the splendid African fauna to go was the blaauwbok, a beautiful antelope, whose range was restricted to one province in the south-west of Cape Colony. By the year 1800 the last blaauwbok had been killed. The quaggas, once existing in great herds, though their northern range was limited by the Vaal River, survived about eighty years longer. The last quaggas in the Great Karroo were killed about 1865; in the Orange Free State they survived a little longer; but by 1879, at latest, the last of the quaggas had joined the blaauwbok among extinct animals. They had been destroyed, almost entirely, by hide-hunting Boers. The history of the great rhinoceros known as Burchell's, or, for some unexplained reason, as the 'white' rhinoceros, is somewhat similar. Yet the white rhinoceroses were once so abundant that the whole veldt from the Orange River to the Zambesi seems to have been dotted over with groups of them. Travellers record having counted eighty or a hundred on a day's march. But the largest terrestrial mammal after the elephant was too easy a mark and too attractive a supply of meat to escape destruction. Whether it had been quite swept off the face of the world was for a time doubtful. Now, according to the latest reports, some twenty-five are left in Zululand, where the Natal Government has attempted to preserve them by imposing a fine of 300l. for their destruction. It is not impossible that a few may linger on in Northern Mashonaland which have so far been fortunate enough to escape the settlers. A man does not need to be very old to remember when the whole interior of Africa was left blank upon the map. 'So geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, Place elephants for want of towns.' To the ancients Africa meant nothing but the Nile and the Desert. We do not propose to inquire whether Herodotus is right in saying that a king of Egypt sent an expedition of Phoenician seamen to circumnavigate Africa, and that they returned declaring they had done so. Neither these ancient Phoenicians nor the Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century added anything to our knowledge of the interior. The Dutch settlers at the Cape had no enterprise for exploration, and for nearly two centuries they left the big game around them almost unmolested. One may say, without exaggeration, that the exploration of the interior only began with Mungo Park, and that more has been discovered in the last sixty years than in all the nineteen centuries before. We pass straight to the days of Livingstone, who at once took the first place among the explorers of Africa. It was less than fifty years ago that Livingstone, the first European to reach the upper waters of the Zambesi, discovered the Victoria Falls. Now the railway from Cape Town is built to the river and beyond, and Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son are advertising cheap excursions to the Falls of the Zambesi. To some of us it seems but yesterday that the great lakes were discovered. Burton and Speke in their expedition of 1857 reached Lake Tanganyika. Speke and Grant a little later got from Zanzibar to the great reservoir of the Nile, which they named Victoria Nyanza. Now the tourist by railway from Mombasa to Port Florence is said to be greeted, as he steams into the station, with the familiar cry: Keep your seats for the boat!' which last saluted his ears at Folkestone or Dover Town. In 1864, Baker, coming from the north, found himself upon the shores of Albert Nyanza, and there is now a railway open as far as Khartoum. We may be allowed to wonder how many years must elapse before the caravans of camels in the north, the lumbering ox-waggons in the south, and the long string of native porters in equatorial Africa are quite superseded by the steam engine. Difficulties of transport and fever are more likely to preserve the big game in many districts than any human efforts. If the warnings of the past had any weight in directing our present action we should not despair. Were any warning needed, none more awful or more pointed could be discovered than the case of South Africa, where a vast district that a little while back was likened to a natural paradise or open-air menagerie has been almost denuded of every sort of animal life. In the old books of travel or sport one can trace the stages by which the big game has been exterminated, first in Cape Colony, then south of the Orange River, then south of the Vaal, then south of the Limpopo, until the Zambesi has now become a frontier between a country where almost everything has been shot down, and a district of no longer virgin soil, but not yet wiped clear of game. The profusion of animals-elephants, rhinoceroses, zebras, buffaloes, gnus and other antelopes of many descriptions-which encountered the early travellers on the South African veldt almost defies description and exceeds belief. One of the earliest authorities is the well-known naturalist, Le Vaillant, a Frenchman who made an expedition from the Cape in 1780. His book is chiefly interesting for the account he gives of the game in the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Town. In the course of a few miles the party found themselves surrounded by zebras, antelopes, and ostriches. My 'dogs eagerly pursued these creatures, who mingled as they 'fled and altogether formed one vast herd; but the moment 'I had called off my dogs, and they thought themselves out ' of danger, each different species composed a separate band and kept at a certain distance from each other. I could have shot numbers of them from my waggons, for they were ' very tame and seemed pleased to gaze on us.' A little further up country the traveller came upon buffaloes and immense herds of elephants, so amazingly numerous that we thought it inadvisable to dispute their passage-my camp animals and carriages would have been pulverised in a moment.' The first English sportsman who penetrated any distance into South Africa was Captain William Cornwallis Harris, whose book has been so often quoted by later writers that it has become a classic. He started from Port Elizabeth in 1836, and made his way nearly to the Tropic of Capricorn-not quite so far, that is to say, as the northern limits of what is now the Transvaal Colony. The description which this pioneer among sportsmen gives of the country he traversed would be incredible were it not confirmed by others who came a little later. The landscape, to use his words, presented the appearance of a moving mass of game. In places the face of the country was literally white with springboks. Lions daily disturbed the travellers. Even south of the Vaal River the number of animals almost realised fable, and paths or roads were made, resembling highways, by the tramp of their hoofs. He mentions countless herds of antelopes, quaggas, and ostriches, none of which had ever been shot at. The Vaal River itself was teeming with hippopotami. At every pool these monsters might be seen. Harris encamped near the present site of Pretoria, at the foot of the Magaliesberg, and records his experiences in these words: The country now literally presented 'the appearance of a menagerie, the hosts of rhinoceroses, in particular, that daily exhibited themselves almost exceeding belief. Whilst the camp was being formed an ugly head might be seen protruded from every bush, and 'the possession of the ground was often stoutly disputed.' Of the country near Mafeking he writes: "We soon perceived large herds of quaggas † and brindled gnoos, which con'tinued to join each other until the whole plain seemed 'alive. The clatter of their hoofs was perfectly astounding, ' and I could compare it to nothing but the din of a 'tremendous charge of cavalry or the rushing of a mighty tempest. I could not estimate the accumulated numbers at less than fifteen thousand, a great extent of country being actually chequered black and white with their 'congregated masses.' We must desist from the temptation of making further extracts when we have quoted 6 6 *Wild Sports of Southern Africa. † Harris doubtless meant zebras, which are often called 'quaggas' by the Boers and colonists, who do not distinguish between the two species. |