Part 14

C. G. Schillings, phot.

A SCENE IN THE CAMEROONS (GERMAN WEST AFRICA), SHOWING THREE LARGE GORILLAS SHOT BY CAPTAIN DOMINICK. (PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED BY CAPTAIN DOMINICK.)]

The Queen of England has lately expressed the wish that no lady shall come into her presence wearing osprey plumes in her hat. This act of hers should be most heartily welcomed, for the bird world is being destroyed in a way of which only a few experts have any idea. If our ladies only knew that whole species of birds have become extinct, thanks to the fashion of wearing hats trimmed with birds’ feathers, doubtless they would no longer pay allegiance to this destructive fashion. The massacre of birds is carried on in some such way as this. The leading firms agree to make this or that bird fashionable. It is thus that the death-sentence of many rare species of birds is pronounced. The traders scattered all over the world give the hunters who engage in this kind of business directions, for instance, to bring in osprey feathers. And how are they obtained? The royal heron, a timid and beautiful bird, is not easy to stalk. But the businesslike hunter knows what to do. He simply kills the herons in thousands and thousands at their nesting-places. Love for its offspring brings the beautiful creature within range of the gun-barrel of the lurking hunter, who kills thousands of the birds in cold blood when they are gathered together in the breeding season. Countless thousands must be killed, countless thousands more of young helpless nestlings, bereft of the parent birds, must starve to death before enough of these little plumes has been collected to make a load heavy enough to be put on the bearers’ shoulders. And now the dealers of the whole civilised world lay in a stock, so that full provision may be made for a form of fashion-mania that may probably last only a few months. Even in the farthest swamps of America, in the lands beyond the Caspian, and wherever the royal heron breeds, one can follow the bird hunter, and see him at his horrible and murderous work. The end is everlasting silence. A rare species is soon utterly destroyed. In the last century alone about two dozen species of birds became extinct. And in these days nearly a dozen more species of birds are threatened with extinction! According to the Reports of the Smithsonian Institute this is notably the case in America with regard to quite as many species. The wonderful birds of paradise are going; the latest “trimming” for the hats of American ladies, these dwellers in remote islands of the Southern Seas are to be threatened in a more serious degree, and probably to a great extent exterminated. Everywhere we have the same lamentable facts! It is certainly high time to interfere effectively. I myself think that the best results would follow from appeal to all noble-minded women.

In Africa I have already observed an example of the disappearance of one species of bird--every European takes a lot of trouble to get possession of some of the much-prized marabou feathers. Now, as long ago as the year 1900, at London, as a member of the International Conference for the Protection of Wild Animals, I did my best to obtain, at least on paper, some measure of protection for the marabou. This bird had not only quite won my heart by its extraordinary sagacity, but for the same reason it was a general favourite even in the times of classical antiquity. My efforts were in vain. And this will mean nothing more or less than the extermination of a large and handsome bird, which is comparatively easy to hunt down, and the rate of increase of which is exceptionally small.

From all these points of view the support of the “League for the Protection of Bird Life in Germany” is to be warmly recommended. In England these reasons have brought about the formation of the “Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire,” which devotes itself to the protection of animal life in general throughout the world-wide British dominions.

XXIX. FELIS LEO, THE LION.

ONE OF CORNWALLIS HARRIS’S SKETCHES, SHOWING HOW HALF A CENTURY AGO NUMBERS OF LIONS WERE TO BE FOUND TOGETHER IN BROAD DAYLIGHT IN SOUTH AFRICA. I HAVE SEEN SIMILAR GATHERINGS IN EAST AFRICA, NOTABLY ON JANUARY 25, 1897. HARRIS’S SKETCH SHOWS THE GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF THE MANE IN THE NOW NEARLY EXTINCT SOUTH AFRICAN LION, A CONTRAST TO THE ALL BUT MANELESS LIONS OF EAST AFRICA.]

Let us now follow a little more closely, under the guidance of English writers, the process of the extermination of the South African animal world. This lamentable work was completed very rapidly in the course of only something like a hundred years. From numerous English authorities, as well as from the publications of the Society already named, I have been able to ascertain that the last “blaauwbok” was killed by the Boers in Cape Colony about the year 1800. From extant sketches of this wild animal, it appears that it was a smaller species of the splendid horse-antelopes still to be found in other parts of Africa. During the following seventy-five years the extermination of several other kinds of animals was systematically carried out; and exactly eighty years later the last quagga, a kind of zebra (Equus quagga) was killed by the Boers. In England there is only one single specimen preserved, and that in a very poor condition. It is to be found in the British Museum. A further sacrifice to the advancing Europeans was the giant, wide-mouthed, “white” rhinoceros (Rhinoceros simus, Burch.), a mighty creature, that formerly ranged in thousands over the grassy plains of South Africa. The length of a horn taken from one of them is given as 6 ft. 9 in., English measurement! Even as late as the year 1884, a single trader was able to pile up huge masses, small hills, of these rhinoceros horns by equipping some four hundred tribesmen of the Matabele race with guns and ammunition and sending them out rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few specimens of this animal for the museums, and they are almost worth their weight in gold. Information lately obtained seems to indicate that a very small number of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five in all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible swamps in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on account of its deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. However, the Government of Natal has, I am pleased to say, made the killing any animal of this species, without legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of £300.

An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William Cornwallis Harris, is an authoritative witness as to the extermination of wild animals in South Africa in 1836, though it must have been going on for a long time before that without any written record. The Boers must have slaughtered hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that date we have no first-hand written evidence on the subject. Their proceedings were precisely of the same character as the events that have occurred in our own day in connection with the destruction of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and other animals throughout Africa. This destruction goes on silently, and only a few men who have a special knowledge of the circumstances bring some information about it to the world at large. The rest keep silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing.

The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, C. J. Anderson and their contemporaries give some idea of what enormous multitudes of wild creatures then wandered over the plains of South Africa. We are inclined to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier epochs. The process of animal-destruction by the hand of man has been going on from immemorial times. For thousands of years man has been continually pressing the animal world back more and more, and it has had to give way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going on so slowly and so imperceptibly that it is only by the scanty remnants left from earlier times that we can form some estimate of the wealth that has disappeared. These are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off islands of the world’s seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all the uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of this. Not only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but also from some of his contemporaries, we have descriptions of the former abundance of wild life in the Cape districts of South Africa. At that time the country was, in the literal sense of the word, covered with countless herds of Cape buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras, quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse-antelopes, oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, springbocks, and ostriches. Herds of hundreds of elephants were to be seen. Every marsh, every river-bed, was literally overcrowded with hippopotami. All other kinds of animals that are now so scarce, such as the large and handsome kudu, and all the different kinds of small wild animals, were to be met with in vast numbers. Although since the year 1652 South Africa had been to a continually increasing extent occupied by the Boers, all these wonderful things had managed to survive in rich profusion up to the moment when, about a hundred years ago, the great war of extermination began. Various causes contributed to bring this about: the increasing numbers of the settlers, their continual penetration farther and farther into the interior, and, above all things, the improvement of firearms.

The natives, although very numerous in South Africa, had, as happens everywhere, left the animal life of the country in its abundance to the Europeans, who were overrunning the land in increasing numbers. It was reserved for these to bring the war of extermination to an end in a short time. Truly a melancholy spectacle!

Wilhelm Bölsche describes all this in fitting words: “In Africa,” he says, “a wonderful drama is to-day unfolding itself before our eyes. It is the downfall of the whole of a mighty animal world. What is being destroyed is the main remnant of the great mammalian development of the Tertiary period. Once it spread in the same fulness over Europe, Asia, and North America. Now in its last refuge this most wonderful wave of life is rapidly ebbing away. Everything contributes to this result--human progress, human folly, and even disease among the animals themselves.”

SKETCH OF A HERD OF ELEPHANTS IN SOUTH AFRICA, BY HARRIS. IT GIVES AN IDEA OF THE ABUNDANCE OF ELEPHANTS IN THE CAPE DISTRICTS SIXTY YEARS AGO. THIS EXPLORER’S SKETCHES GIVE A TRUE PICTURE OF THE LANDSCAPE AS WELL AS OF THE ANIMALS.]

To give an example: Through the trifling fact that we have ivory balls for billiards, the African elephant goes to destruction. The individual cannot stop this; but what he can do is to secure more material for each special branch of science before the door is closed, and to once more observe in their primeval surroundings the last elephants, wild buffaloes, giraffes--those last living vestiges of the Tertiary period.

But above all, the sketches of Le Vaillant, a French explorer, who, about 1780, set out from Cape Town on his travels into the interior, are of great importance for our study of the former abundance of animal life in South Africa. They are all the more interesting for German readers because he traversed part of what is now German South-West Africa, and gives in his book an account of its condition at that time. He, too, tells of absolutely incredibly great multitudes of wild animals; on the banks of the Orange River he comes upon great herds of elephants and giraffes, and he cannot find enough to say of the astonishing wealth of animal life. For those who know German South-West Africa, his narrative is of special interest. He formed collections which he brought back with him to his native country, and to all appearance is a fairly trustworthy authority, though at the same time, like many contemporary and later travellers, here and there he makes assertions that are clearly unwarrantable. For instance, in one place he tells how he once rode a zebra, that he had wounded, for a considerable distance, back to his camp.

Some fifty years later, at the period of the journeys of Captain William Cornwallis Harris, as I have already remarked, the same conditions prevailed, with regard to the abundance of wild animals, as in the days of Le Vaillant. It was almost a daily experience for the traveller to be molested by lions. The Vaal River then teemed with hippopotami. What is now the site of Pretoria was inhabited by a number of rhinoceroses, that were absolutely an annoyance to the explorer: “Out of every bush peeped the horrible head of one of these creatures.” Of the neighbourhood of Mafeking he tells us that the gatherings of zebras and white-tailed gnus literally covered the whole plain; that with his own eyes he had at one time seen at least fifteen thousand head of wild animals! In another place he tells us of an absolutely overwhelming spectacle. He saw at the same time more than three hundred elephants; to use his own expression, the plain looked like one undulating mass.

William Cotton Oswell, whom I have mentioned in my earlier work, and who died as lately as 1893, knew the countries of South Africa in the days of Livingstone, and gives the same account of them as his predecessor Harris. He once came upon more than four hundred elephants gathered together in one herd on the open velt. Unfortunately, like so many others, he published very few sketches.

Gordon Cumming, a traveller well known to the German public through Brehms’ Tierleben, has also left us sketches of those days that corroborate the descriptions given by his contemporaries. He tells how, in the year 1860, a great drive was organised in the Orange Free State in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh, afterwards Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The number of wild animals driven together by the natives, which included zebras, quaggas, gnus, cow-antelopes, blessbock, springbocks, and ostriches, was estimated at five-and-twenty thousand. The number killed on this one day was reckoned at about six thousand animals, and a number of natives were trampled to death by the herds of wild beasts.

At this time there were still Europeans in South Africa who made elephant-hunting their ordinary business. Now there are neither elephants nor indeed any other kind of wild animal in numbers worth mentioning in these once rich hunting grounds. They have all been killed off in the course of a hundred years. Where once hundreds of thousands of gnus lived their life, there are now only a few hundred specimens carefully preserved and guarded. And the same is the case with all other wild animals. Many species are gone completely and for ever. A similar process will go on slowly but surely throughout the whole of Africa, wherever civilisation penetrates. There is only one chance of the beautiful wild life of Africa being permanently preserved, and that lies in the hunters themselves consenting to protect and spare it.

It has been rightly remarked by such a competent authority as A. H. Neumann (who is, moreover, one of the most experienced of English elephant hunters) that the continued existence of many wild African species is not incompatible with the progress of civilisation. He points out that we can only reckon with some degree of certainty on the effective preservation of wild animals, where not only reservations have been established for them, but where also a considerable amount of control can be exercised over both Europeans and natives. In his opinion, for instance, a mere regulation forbidding the shooting of female elephants is impracticable: “I should like,” he says, “to see one of those who have drawn up such a regulation come into the African bush, and there show us how we are to distinguish between female and bull elephants in these impenetrable thickets.”

In the British colonies in Africa reservations for wild animals have been established with most successful results. Those of British East Africa, the Sudan and Somaliland, and finally of British Central Africa, taken together, have about five times the area of the Victoria Nyanza.

C. G. Shillings, phot.

GROUP OF WILD ANIMALS AT HAGENBECK’S ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS AT STETTINGEN, NEAR HAMBURG. THE ANIMALS LIVE IN OPEN SPACES ARRANGED TO REPRESENT THEIR NATURAL SURROUNDINGS, AND THE SPECTATORS ARE PROTECTED BY WIDE TRENCHES AND GRILLES. HERR HAGENBECK IS SEEN ON THE LEFT.]

By means of reports made as carefully as possible by the district authorities, estimates have been obtained of the numbers of existing wild animals. In the laying out of the reservations the very migratory habits of the African fauna have been taken into consideration as far as is practicable, and by strict protective regulations of various kinds most satisfactory results have been secured. In the Transvaal Colony, too, a reservation has been marked out in the Barberton district between the Olifant River and the Portuguese frontier. Any one shooting in this reservation without a permit is liable to a fine of £100, or six months’ imprisonment. There is a very interesting official report as to the wild inhabitants of this reservation. “It contains one old rhinoceros (with shot-marks on its hide), a small herd of elephants, a considerable supply of ostriches, from five to nine giraffes, a satisfactory quantity of gnus, and also of ‘black-heeled’ or impallah-antelopes, two or three small herds of buffaloes, several herds of zebras, numerous waterbuck and kudus, and a small number of horse-antelopes. On the other hand, whether oryx-antelopes and eland are still to be found there appears to the author of the report in the highest degree doubtful.”

However, in the extensive reservations that have been established in other British possessions in Africa, and especially in those of the Sudan, a large number of the beautifully formed dwellers of the wilderness still live their life, and this must be a delight to the heart of every sportsman.

It is to be hoped that through thus establishing “sanctuaries” (as the English call them), with the consequent supervision, a means has been found of protecting the indigenous wild life of Africa, as well of America, for a long time to come.

In German colonies, too, efforts are being made to preserve, as far as possible, the native fauna. The more our views can be made clear, the more complete the survey of this difficult subject can be made by the combined experience of many experts being gradually brought to bear together upon it, the sooner may we anticipate satisfactory results from this co-operative action. For years I have been following with close interest everything connected with this question, and my wide correspondence with officers, officials, and private individuals warrants me in concluding that on all sides there is an energetic movement in progress. Of course, we have to face serious difficulties in such a campaign. Thus it seems, according to numerous and trustworthy reports, that the attempt to establish Boer settlements in the Kilimanjaro district in East Africa has had, and still is having, very fatal results for the once splendid wild life of that region. And, indeed, it is no easy matter to reconcile a colony of Boers--the people who have already made such a clean sweep of the wild life of South Africa--to the preservation of the fauna of the country. One can see how difficult the regulation of these matters is for the authorities.

We must not forget also that, as a result of the wonderful improvements in firearms, the problem of the protection of wild animals presents itself to-day in quite a different fashion from that of the days of the hunters of fifty, or even of twenty-five years ago.