Part 12

The hunters of these large beasts are called Agageer, from Agaro, to kill, by cutting the hams or tendon of Achilles with a sword. I have already described the manner of this hunting. These Agageers, the only people that have an opportunity of observing, if they would only tell what they do observe truly, say, they frequently see rhinoceroses with three horns grown; that this last is round, but does not crook at the point, and is not quite so long as are the other two, nor tapered so much as the foremost or crooked one; but this I leave entirely upon their veracity. I never did see the animal myself, nor three grown-horns adhering to each other, as I have seen two. So if this is truth, here is a third species of this quadruped. They say the third horn is only upon the male, and does not grow till he is advanced in years; the double horn which I have is fixed to a strong muscle or cartilage; when dry, exceedingly tough. It comes down the os frontis, and along the bone of the nose; but not having observed accurately enough at the time the carcase was lying before me, I do not remember how this muscle terminated or was made fast, either at the occiput or on the nose. It has been imagined by several that the horn of the rhinoceros and the teeth of the elephant were arms which nature gave them against each other: that want of food, and vexation from being deprived of their natural habits, may make any two beasts of nearly equal strength fight or destroy each other, cannot be doubted; and accordingly we see that the Romans made these two animals fight at shows and public games: but this is not nature, but the artifice of man; there must be some better reason for this extraordinary construction of these two animals, as well as the different one of that of so many others. They have been placed in extensive woods and deserts, and there they hide themselves in the most inaccessible places; food in great plenty is round about them; they are not carnivorous, they are not rivals in love; what motive can they have for this constant premeditated desire of fighting?

I have said the rhinoceros does not eat hay or grass, but lives entirely upon trees; he does not spare the most thorny ones, but rather seems to be fond of them; and it is not a small branch that can escape his hunger, for he has the strongest jaws of any creature I know, and best adapted to grinding or bruising any thing that makes resistance. He has twenty-eight teeth in all, six of which are grinders, and I have seen short indigested pieces of wood full three inches diameter voided in his excrements, and the same of the elephant.

But besides these trees, capable of most resistance, there are in these vast forests within the rains, trees of a softer consistence, and of a very succulent quality, which seem to be destined for his principal food. For the purpose of gaining the highest branches of these, his upper lip is capable of being lengthened out so as to increase his power of laying hold with this in the same manner as the elephant does with his trunk. With this lip, and the assistance of his tongue, he pulls down the upper branches which have most leaves, and these he devours first; having stript the tree of its branches, he does not therefore abandon it, but placing his snout as low in the trunk as he finds his horn will enter, he rips up the body of the tree, and reduces it to thin pieces, like so many laths; and when he has thus prepared it, he embraces as much of it as he can in his monstrous jaws, and twists it round with as much ease as an ox would do a root of celery, or any such pot-herb or garden-stuff.

Such, too, is the practice of the elephant; we saw, at every step in these immense forests, trees in different progresses of this operation, some divested of their leaves and branches, and cut over as far down the trunk as was soft, and pliable, and was capable of being snapped off by one bite, without splitting or laceration; others, where the trunk was cut into laths or ribbands, some of which were ate in part, others prepared, but which had been left from satiety or apprehension of danger, a feast without labour for the next that should find it. In some places we saw the trees all consumed, but a stump that remained about a foot from the ground, and these were of the most succulent kind, and there we distinctly perceived the beginning of the first laceration from the bottom; and what, beside the testimony of the hunters, confirmed this fact beyond doubt was, that in several places large pieces of the teeth of elephants, and horns of the rhinoceros were brought to us, partly found lying on the ground at the foot of these trees, and part sticking in them.

Neither the elephant nor rhinoceros eat grass; if their food depended upon that, many times in the year they must be reduced to a state of starving, for the grass is naturally parched up in some seasons, and at others burnt purposely by the Shangalla. It is true, that in Europe their chief food is hay; trees cannot be every day spoiled for them in the quantity they would need. But this is not their natural food, more than the sugar and the aquavitæ that are given them here.

The roughness of the tongue of the rhinoceros is another matter in dispute: it is said to be so rough, that the animal with that can lick off the flesh of a man’s bones. Others say, the tongue is so soft that it resembles that of a calf. Both of these are in some measure true, but aggravated by the reporters. The tongue of the young Rhinoceros is soft, for the skin is much tougher and thicker too, than that of a calf, and has apparently some furrows or wrinkles in it, but it has no pustules nor rudiments of any that are discernible, nor indeed has any use for them. On the other hand, the tongue and inside of the upper lip of the old Rhinoceros are very rough, and this appears to me to arise from the constant use he makes of these parts in seizing the branches of trees which have rough barks, particularly the acacia. It is, when pursued, and in fear, that we see he possesses an astonishing degree of swiftness, considering his size, the apparent unwieldyness of his body, his great weight before, and the shortness of his legs. He is long, and has a kind of trot, which, after a few minutes, increases in a great proportion, and takes in a great distance; but this is to be understood with a degree of moderation. It is not true, that in a plain he beats the horse in swiftness. I have passed him with ease, and seen many worse mounted do the same, and though it is certainly true, that a horse can very seldom come up with him, this is owing to his cunning, but not his swiftness. He makes constantly from wood to wood, and forces himself into the thickest part of them. The trees that are frush, or dry, are broke down, like as with a cannon shot, and fall behind him and on his side in all directions. Others that are more pliable, greener, or fuller of sap, are bent back by his weight and velocity of his motion. And after he has passed, restoring themselves like a green branch to their natural position, they sweep the uncautious pursuer and his horse from the ground, and dash them in pieces against the surrounding trees.

The eyes of the Rhinoceros are very small, and he seldom turns his head, and therefore sees nothing but what is before him. To this he owes his death, and never escapes, if there is so much plain as to enable the horse to get before him. His pride and fury, then, makes him lay aside all thoughts of escaping but by victory over his enemy. He stands for a moment at bay, then, at a start, runs straight forward at the horse, like the wild boar, whom in his manner of action he very much resembles. The horse easily avoids him, by turning short to aside, and this is the fatal instant: The naked man, with the sword, drops from behind the principal horseman, and unseen by the Rhinoceros, who is seeking his enemy the horse, he gives him a stroke across the tendon of the heel, which renders him incapable of further flight or resistance.

In speaking of the great quantity of food necessary to support this enormous mass, we must likewise consider the vast quantity of water which he needs. No country but that of the Shangalla, which he possesses, deluged with six months rains, and full of large and deep basons, made in the living rock, and shaded by dark woods from evaporation; or watered by large and deep rivers, which never fall low or to a state of dryness, can supply the vast draughts of this monstrous creature; but it is not for drinking alone that he frequents wet and marshy places; large, fierce, and strong as he is, he must submit to prepare to defend himself against the weakest of all adversaries. The great consumption he constantly makes of food and water necessarily confines him to certain limited spaces; for it is not every place that can maintain him, he cannot emigrate, or seek his defence among the sands of Atbara.

The fly, that unremitting persecutor of every animal that lives in the black earth, does not spare the rhinoceros, nor is afraid of his fierceness. He attacks him in the same manner as he does the camel, and would as easily subdue him, but for a stratagem which he practises for his preservation. The time of the fly being the rainy season, the whole black earth, as I have already observed, turns into mire. In the night when the fly is at rest, he chooses a convenient place, and there rolling himself in the mud, he clothes himself with a kind of case, which defends him against his adversary the following day. The wrinkles and plaits of his skin serve to keep this muddy plaster firm upon him, all but about his hips, shoulders, and legs, where it cracks and falls off by motion, and leaves him exposed in those places to the attacks of the fly. The itching and pain which follow occasion him to rub himself in those parts against the roughest trees, and this is at least one cause of the pustules or tubercules which we see upon these places, both on the elephant and rhinoceros. The Count de Buffon, who believes these pustules to be natural parts of the creature, says, in proof of this, that they have been found in the fœtus of a rhinoceros. I do not pretend to disbelieve this; it may be, that these punctures happening to the old female at the time she was with young, the impression of her sufferings might have appeared upon the young one. However this is, I cannot conceal that I have heard, not from hunters only, but men worthy of credit, that this is the origin of these protuberances; and many rhinoceroses, slain in Abyssinia, are known to have been found at the season of the fly, with their shoulders and buttocks bloody and excoriated. It is likewise by no means true, that the skin of the rhinoceros is hard or impenetrable like a board. I should rather suspect this to be disease, or from a different habit acquired by keeping; for in his wild state he is slain by javelins thrown from indifferent hands, which I have seen buried three feet in his body. A musket shot will go through him if it meets not with the intervention of a bone; and the Shangalla kill him by the worst and most inartificial arrows that ever were used by any people practising that weapon, and cut him to pieces afterwards with the very worst of knives.

I have said that, in the evening, he goes to welter in the mire. He enjoys the rubbing himself there so much, and groans and grunts so loud, that he is heard at a considerable distance. The pleasure that he receives from this enjoyment, and the darkness of the night, deprive him of his usual vigilance and attention. The hunters, guided by his noise, steal secretly upon him, and, while lying on the ground, wound him with their javelins mostly in the belly where the wound is mortal.

A surgeon of the Shaftesbury Indiaman was the first who observed and mentioned a fact which has been rashly enough declared a fable. He observed on a rhinoceros newly taken, after having weltered and coated itself in mud, as above mentioned, several infects, such as millepides, or scolopendra, concealed under the ply of the skin. With all submission to my friend’s censure, I do not think he is in this so right or candid as he usually is; not having been out of his own country, at least in any country where he could have seen a rhinoceros newly taken from weltering in the mud, he could not possibly be a judge of this fact as the officer of the Shaftesbury was, who saw the animal in that state. Every one, I believe, have seen horses and cows drinking in foul water seized by leeches, which have bled them excessively, and swelled under the animal’s tongue to a monstrous size. And I cannot say, with all submission to better judgment, that it is more contrary to the nature of things, that a leech should seize an animal, whose custom is to welter in water, than a fly bite and deposit his eggs in a camel in the sun-shine on land. But further I must bear this testimony, that, while at Ras el Feel, two of these animals were slain by the Ganjar hunters in the neighbourhood. I was not at the hunting, but, though ill of the flux, I went there on horseback before they had scraped off their muddy covering. Under the plies of one I saw two or three very large worms, not carnivorous ones, but the common large worm of the garden. I saw likewise several animals like earwigs, which I took for young scolopendræ, and two small, white, land-snail shells. I sought no further, but was told a number of different insects were found, and some of them that sucked the blood, which I take to be a kind of leech. There is then no sort of reason to accuse this gentleman of telling a falsehood, only because he was a better observer, and had better opportunities than others have had, and it is indeed neither just nor decent; on the contrary, it is a coarse manner of criticising, to tax a man with falsehood when he speaks as an eye-witness, and has said nothing physically impossible.

The rhinoceros shewn at the fair of St Germain, that which the Count de Buffon and Mr Edwards saw, kept clean in a stable for several years, I shall believe had neither worms nor scolopendræ upon it, neither does this officer of the Shaftesbury report it had; but he says, that one covered with mud, in which it had been weltering, had upon it animals that are commonly found in that mud; and this neither Mr Parsons nor Mr Edwards, nor the Count de Buffon, ever had an opportunity of verifying.

Chardin says, that the Abyssinians tame and train the rhinoceros to labour. This is an absolute fable; besides, that we have reason to believe the animal is not capable of instruction, neither history not tradition ever gave the smallest reason to make us believe this, nor is there any motive for attempting the experiment, more than for believing it ever was accomplished. Tractable as the elephant, is, the Abyssinians never either tamed or instructed him; they never made use of beasts in war, nor would their country permit this training; so much the contrary, as we have already seen, that Ptolemy Philadelphus, and his successor Ptolemy Evergetes, did every thing in their power to persuade them to take the elephant alive, that they might tame them; but, as he was a principal part of their food, they never could succeed; and the latter prince, for this very purpose, made an expedition into Abyssinia, and was obliged to extirpate these hunters, and settle in their place a colony of his own at Arkeeko near Masuah, which he called Ptolemais Theron for that very reason; after which, he himself tells us in the long Greek inscription he left in the kingdom of Adel, that he had succeeded so far, by means of his colony of Greeks, as to train the Ethiopic elephant so as to make him superior to those in India; but this he could never do by employing Abyssinians.

It is a general observation made in every part where this animal resides, that he is indocile, and wants talents; his fierceness may be conquered, and we see, with a moderate degree of attention, he is brought to be quiet enough; but it is one thing to tame or conquer his fierceness, and another to make him capable of instruction; and it seems apparently allowed to be his case, that he has not capacity. A steady, uniform fierceness in the brute creation, is to be subdued by care and by hunger, this is not the case with him, his violent transports of fury upon being hungry, or not being served in the instant with food, seems to bar this manner of taming him. His behaviour is not that of any other animal; his revenge and fury are directed as much against himself as against an enemy; he knocks his head against the wall, or the manger, with a seeming intention to destroy himself, nay, he does destroy himself often. That sent from India to Emanuel king of Portugal, in the year 1513, and by him presented to the pope, was the cause the ship that carried him was sunk and lost, and the one that was shewn in France purposely drowned itself going to Italy.

The rhinoceros and the elephant are the principal food of the Shangalla. The manner of preparing the flesh I have already described, and shall not repeat. He is ate too with great greediness by all the inhabitants of the low country, and Atbara. The most delicate part about him is supposed to be the soles of his feet, which are soft like those of a camel, and of a gristly substance; the rest of the flesh seems to resemble that of the hog, but is much coarser. It smells of musk, and is otherwise very tasteless; I should think it would be more so to the negroes and hunters, who eat it without salt. The only hair about it is at the tip of its tail; they are there few and scattered, but thick as the lowest wire of a harpsichord; ten of these, fastened side by side, at the distance of half an inch from each other, in the figure of a man’s hand, make a whip which will bring the blood every stroke.

This rhinoceros was thirteen feet from the nose to its anus; and very little less than seven feet when he stood, measuring from the sole of his fore-foot to the top of the shoulder. The first horn was fourteen inches. The second something less than thirteen inches. The flat part of the horn, where it was bare at its base, and divested of hair, was four inches, and the top two inches and a half broad. In the middle it was an inch and quarter thick; it was shaped like a knife; the back two inches, and, when turned, measured one fourth of an inch at the edge.

It seems now to be a point agreed upon by travellers and naturalists, that the famous animal, having one horn only upon his forehead, is the fanciful creation of poets and painters; to them I should willingly leave it, but a Swedish naturalist, Dr Sparman, who has lately published two volumes in quarto, in which he has distinguished himself by his low illiberal abuse of learned foreigners, as much as by the fulsome flattery he has bestowed on his own countrymen, has shewed an inclination to revive this antiquated fable. I do not, for my own part, believe the authority will be thought sufficient, or have many followers. The publisher, by way of apology, as suppose, for his rusticity and ill-manners, says, that he was employed in labour to earn a sufficient sum upon which to travel. What labour he applied to is not said; it was not a lucrative occupation surely, or the Doctor was not an able labourer, as the sum produced was but 38 dollars, and I really think his knowledge acquired seems to be pretty much in proportion to his funds.

Kolbe mentions what would seem a variety of the rhinoceros at the Cape. He says it has one horn upon its nose, and another upon his forehead. This the Count de Buffon thinks is untrue, and, from other circumstances of the narrative, supposes that Kolbe never saw this rhinoceros, and has described it only from hearsay. Though this, too, is Doctor Sparman’s opinion, yet, unwilling to let slip an opportunity of contradicting the Count de Buffon, he taxes it as an improper criticism upon this rhinoceros of Kolbe: he says the description is a just one, and that a man of the Count’s learning should have known that the forehead and nose of all animals were near each other. Although he has given a strange drawing of the skeleton of the head of a rhinoceros, where the nose and the forehead are very distinctly different, yet, in another drawing, he has figured his rhinoceros bicornis, with a head seemingly all nose, and much liker an ass than any thing we have seen pretended to be a rhinoceros ever since the time of Albert Durer. He pretends that, in his travels at the Cape, he saw an animal of this form, which had two horns upon his forehead, or his nose, whichever he pleases to call them. If such an animal does really exist, it is undoubtedly a new species; it has not the armour or plaited skin, seen in every rhinoceros till this time. He tells us a heap of wonderful stories about it, and claims the honour of being the first discoverer of it; and really, I believe, he is so far in the right, that if he can prove what he says to be true, there is no man that will pretend to dispute this point with him. Besides its having a skin without plaits, it has two horns on the forehead, so loose that they clash against one another, and make a noise when the animal is running: then he has one of these only that are moveable, which he turns to one side or the other when he chooses to dig roots; an imagination scarcely possible, I think, to any one who has ever seen a rhinoceros. With these loose and clashing horns he diverts himself by throwing a man and horse into the air; and, though but five feet high, at other times he throws a loaded, covered waggon, drawn by two oxen, over hedges into the fields.

London Publish’d Jan.^y 19.^{th} 1790 by G. Robinson & Co.]

This rhinoceros very luckily is not carnivorous, for he is among the swiftest of animals, and smells and scents people at a great distance; and yet, with all these advantages, though his constant occupation, according to Dr Sparman, seems to be hunting waggons and men also, he never was so successful as to kill but one man, as far as was ever known.

HYÆNA.

There are few animals, whose history has passed under the consideration of naturalists, that have given occasion to so much confusion and equivocation as the Hyæna has done. It began very early among the ancients, and the moderns have fully contributed their share. It is not my intention to take up the reader’s time with discussing the errors of others, whether ancient or modern. Without displaying a great deal of learning to tell him what it is not, I shall content myself with informing him what it is, by a good figure and distinct relation of what in his history hath been unknown, or omitted, and put it in the reader’s power to reject any of the pretended Hyænas that authors or travellers should endeavour to impose upon him. At the same time, I shall submit to his decision, whether the animal I mention is a new one, or only a variety of the old, as it must on all hands be allowed that he is as yet undescribed.

Most of the animals confounded with him are about six times smaller than he is, and some there are that do not even use their four legs, but only two. The want of a critical knowledge in the Arabic language, and of natural history at the same time, has in some measure been the occasion of this among the moderns. Bochart discusses the several errors of the ancients with great judgment, and the Count de Buffon, in a very elegant and pleasant manner, hath nearly exhausted the whole.

I do not think there is any one that hath hitherto written of this animal who ever saw the thousandth part of them that I have. They were a plague in Abyssinia in every situation, both in the city and in the field, and I think surpassed the sheep in number. Gondar was full of them from the time it turned dark till the dawn of day, seeking the different pieces of slaughtered carcases which this cruel and unclean people expose in the streets without burial, and who firmly believe that these animals are Falasha from the neighbouring mountains, transformed by magic, and come down to eat human flesh in the dark in safety. Many a time in the night, when the king had kept me late in the palace, and it was not my duty to lie there, in going across the square from the king’s house, not many hundred yards distant, I have been apprehensive they would bite me in the leg. They grunted in great numbers about me, though I was surrounded with several armed men, who seldom passed a night without wounding or slaughtering some of them.

One night in Maitsha, being very intent on observation, I heard something pass behind me towards the bed, but upon looking round could perceive nothing. Having finished what I was then about, I went out of my tent, resolving directly to return, which I immediately did, when I perceived large blue eyes glaring at me in the dark. I called upon my servant with a light, and there was the hyæna standing nigh the head of the bed, with two or three large bunches of candles in his mouth. To have fired at him I was in danger of breaking my quadrant or other furniture, and he seemed, by keeping the candles steadily in his mouth, to wish for no other prey at that time. As his mouth was full, and he had no claws to tear with, I was not afraid of him, but with a pike struck him as near the heart as I could judge. It was not till then he shewed any sign of fierceness; but, upon feeling his wound, he let drop the candles, and endeavoured to run up the shaft of the spear to arrive at me, so that, in self defence, I was obliged to draw out a pistol from my girdle and shoot him, and nearly at the same time my servant cleft his skull with a battle-ax. In a word, the hyæna was the plague of our lives, the terror of our night-walks, the destruction of our mules and asses, which above all others are his favourite food. Many instances of this the reader will meet with throughout my Travels.

The hyæna is known by two names in the east, Deeb and Dubbah. His proper name is Dubbah, and this is the name he goes by among the best Arabian naturalists. In Abyssinia, Nubia, and part of Arabia, he is, both in writing and conversation, called Deeb, or Deep, either ending with a b or p; and here the confusion begins, for though Dubbah is properly a hyæna, Dabbu is a species of monkey; and though Deeb is likewise a hyæna, the same word signifies a jackal; and a jackal being by naturalists called a wolf, Deeb is understood to be a wolf also. In Algiers this difference is preserved strictly; Dubbah is the hyæna; Deeb is the jackal, which run in flocks in the night, crying like hounds. Dubb is a bear, so here is another confusion, and the bear is taken for the hyæna, because Dubb, or Dubbah, seems to be the same word. So Poncet, on the frontiers of Sennaar, complains, that one of his mules was bit in the thigh by a bear, though it is well known there never was any animal of the bear-kind in that, or, I believe, in any other part of Africa. And I strongly apprehend, that the leopards and tigers, which Alvarez and Don Roderigo de Lima mention molested them so much in their journey to Shoa, were nothing else but hyænas. For tigers there are certainly none in Abyssinia; it is an Asiatic animal. Though there are leopards, yet they are but few in number, and are not gregarious, neither, indeed, are the hyænas, only as they gather in flocks, lured by the smell of their food; and of these it would seem there are many in Shoa, for the capital of that province, called Tegulat, means the City of the Hyæna.

If the description given by M. de Buffon is an elegant and good one, the draught of the animal is no less so. It is exactly the same creature I have seen on Mount Libanus and at Aleppo, which makes me have the less doubt that there are two species of this animal, the one partaking more of the dog, which is the animal I am now describing, the other more of the nature of the hog, which is the hyæna of M. de Buffon. Of this the reader will be easily satisfied, by comparing the two figures and the measures of them. The same distinction there is in the badger.

The animal from which this was drawn was slain at Teawa, and was the largest I had ever seen, being five feet nine inches in length, measuring from his nose to his anus; whereas the hyæna exhibited by M. de Buffon was not half that, it being only three feet two inches nine lines in length. Notwithstanding the great superiority in size by which the hyæna of Atbara exceeded that of M. de Buffon, I did not think him remarkable for his fatness, or that he owed any of his size to his being at that time in more than ordinary keeping; on the contrary, I thought the most of those I had before seen were in a better habit of body. As near as I could guess, he might weigh about 8 stone, horseman’s weight, that is, 14 pound to the stone, or 112 pound.