Part 40

The subspecies T. o. gigas is based on a pair of horns obtained by Heuglin on the White Nile, and distinguished by their large size, great length (35 inches), and strong corrugations. From Schweinfurth’s observations we learn that this form carries well-marked body-stripes throughout life, sometimes 15 in number. In these two respects it would seem to approach Taurotragus derbianus, but Schweinfurth says nothing about the black neck of the last species.

Hab. South Africa, from the Cape Colony (where it is now extinct) to Angola on the west and to the Transvaal and Mozambique on the east, and thence up to the Zambesi; at its northern limits passing into the striped form (T. o. livingstonii), which extends throughout Eastern Africa up to and rather beyond Mount Kenia; also found on the White Nile and in the adjacent districts (T. o. gigas).

At the close of the long series of Antelopes we arrive at the largest and finest form of the whole group, and one, moreover, that might well become of great economical importance to mankind, if proper measures were taken for its acclimatization.

The “Eland,” as it is now universally called, was well known to the early settlers of the Cape, where it received its name from some fancied resemblance to the Elk (Alces machlis), which is the “Eland” of the Hollanders and the “Elenn” or “Elendthier” of the Germans. It must have been size, we suppose, more than any other point of similarity, that induced the Dutchmen to apply such an unsuitable name to this animal.

The old traveller Peter Kolben, about 1719, gave the first recognizable, though rather misleading, account of the Eland, which at that epoch was still found in the mountains near Capetown. In 1764 Buffon, in the twelfth volume of his ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ called it “Le Coudous,” or, at any rate, gave unmistakable figures of its horns under that name, which, we suppose, he had by some error transposed to it from the Kudu (Strepsiceros capensis). It was mainly upon Kolben’s Alces capensis and Buffon’s “Coudous” that Pallas, in his first essay on the genus Antilope (1776), based his Antilope oryx, alleging that it “seemed to be” the Antilope oryx of ancient authors! At the same time he states that he had examined a complete skeleton of this animal in the Museum of Prince William of Holland. Very unfortunately, in his second and amended list of the Antelopes, Pallas proposed to make a change in his former names by transferring the term “oryx” to another animal (the Antilope bezoartica of his first memoir) and assigning the new name “oreas” to the Eland. This change, however, we may say, has been generally acquiesced in, and the name oreas has been almost universally applied to the Eland, either specifically or generically, until modern days, when the zealous searchers after priority have resuscitated Pallas’s long-forgotten term “oryx.” This, indeed, seems certainly to be the earliest specific name applicable to the present animal and should, in strict justice, be adopted.

As regards its generic name the Eland has been equally unfortunate. Desmarest, in 1822, first proposed to use “Oreas” as a subgeneric term for this form; and Gray, in 1850, employed it as a genus, combining it with the specific term “canna,” so that the name of the Eland became Oreas canna. As will be seen by our list of synonyms, this name was generally adopted, and has been in constant use for the present species for the last twenty years. We have, however, shown that “oreas,” as a specific term, must give place to “oryx”; and in like manner “Oreas” cannot stand as a generic term for the present animal, because it has been previously employed in zoology as a genus of Lepidoptera (1806) and as a genus of Mollusca (1808), both of which antedate Desmarest’s use of it in 1822. Under these circumstances it is necessary to adopt the next given name, Taurotragus of Wagner, and the correct scientific name of the Eland, according to modern usage, will be Taurotragus oryx.

Having now stated at full length our reasons for the unwelcome but necessary change of name of this Antelope, we will resume our comments on its literary history.

In the Supplement to his ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ published in 1782, Buffon was able to give an improved account of the Eland. This was mostly copied from Allamand’s article inserted in Schneider’s edition of the ‘Histoire Naturelle,’ issued at Amsterdam in the previous year, and was accompanied by a perfectly recognizable figure of the whole animal under the name of “Le Canna,” adopted from its supposed Hottentot appellation. Shortly afterwards (1783) Vosmaer, in a number of his ‘Regnum Animale,’ published a full description and coloured figure of the Eland from a specimen then living in the Menagerie of the Prince of Orange in Holland, probably the same as that from which Allamand had taken his information. Sparrman, who visited the Cape about this period, also gave a good account of the structure and habits of this Antelope, as observed by him in the Alexandria and Somerset-East Divisions of the Colony. Paterson, in 1790, recorded having met with Elands in Caledon, as also in the Van-Ryndorp and Uitenhage Divisions a few years previously. Thunberg, another well-known traveller and naturalist (1795), found the Eland in Uniondale, and Lichtenstein in Calvinia, Aberdeen, and Middelburg (1803–4). Our countryman Burchell, as recorded in his ‘Travels,’ came across Elands in 1822, in Prieska, Herbert, and Britstown, and found them numerous in Hanover.

We may now pass on to the days of Harris, whose celebrated hunting-expedition into the interior took place in 1836 and 1837. Even at that date the Eland was pronounced to be extinct in the Cape Colony, but was met with in abundance on the banks of the Vaal River, where Harris feasted himself and his followers on its succulent meat.

By all classes in Africa, Harris writes, the flesh of the Eland is deservedly esteemed over that of any other animal:

“Both in grain and color it resembles beef, but is far better tasted and more delicate, possessing a pure game flavor, and exhibiting the most tempting looking layers of fat and lean—the surprising quantity of the former ingredient with which it is interlarded exceeding that of any other game-quadruped with which I am acquainted. The venison fairly melts in the mouth; and as for the brisket, that is absolutely a cut for a monarch.”

It is right, however, to mention that other experienced authorities do not altogether agree with Harris’s pronouncement on this subject. Mr. Selous, for example, states his opinion that the flesh of the Eland has been “very much over-estimated,” and is “not to be compared in flavour with that of the Buffalo, Giraffe, Hippopotamus, and White Rhinoceros.” (De gustibus non est disputandum!)

Harris describes the favourite haunts of the Eland on the Vaal River in his days as follows:—

“The Eland frequents the open prairies and low rocky hills interspersed with clumps of wood, but is never to be met with in a continuously wooded country. Rejoicing especially in low belts of shaded hillocks, and in the isolated groves of Acacia capensis which, like islands in the ocean, are scattered over many of the stony and gravelly plains of the interior, large herds of them are also to be seen grazing like droves of oxen on the more verdant meadows, through which some silver rivulet winds in rainbow brightness betwixt fringes of sighing bulrushes. Fat and lethargic groups may be seen scattered up and down the gentle acclivities, some grazing on the hill side, and others lazily basking in the morning sunbeam. Advancing they appear to move like a regiment of cavalry in single files, the goodliest bulls leading the van; whereas during a retreat these it is that uniformly bring up the rear. As the day dawned over the boundless meads of the Vaal River spread with a rich carpet of luxuriant herbage, and enamelled with pastures of brilliant flowers, vast droves of these lordly animals were constantly to be seen moving in solemn procession across the profile of the silent and treeless landscape, portions of which were often covered with long coarse grass, which when dry and waving its white hay-like stalks to the breeze, imparted to the plain the delusive and alluring appearance of ripe cornfields.”

Since Harris issued his work in 1840 all the writers on the game-animals of Southern Africa have devoted more or less space to the Eland. Delagorgue, who published his travels in 1847, found this Antelope in plenty in Zululand. Methuen, in his ‘Life in the Wilderness’ (1848), describes its habits in the Kalahari Desert, and Livingstone (1857) alludes to the Eland as being able to exist without water, and states that one may see hundreds of them in places thirty or forty miles distant from that element. The Hon. W. H. Drummond, in his ‘Rough Notes on the Large Game of South Africa,’ has devoted a whole chapter to the pursuit of the Eland, which he met with on the Black and White Umvalosi Rivers, and in other districts, but not within the Colony itself, in which, according to Bryden, it became extinct between 1840 and 1850, having probably lingered longer in the waterless deserts of Bushman’s Land than in any other locality.

Finally, Mr. H. A. Bryden, writing in 1897, in his ‘Nature and Sport in South Africa,’ on the rapidly disappearing forms of South-African game, laments the noblest of all the Antelopes of the world as taking the lead in this sad progress. At the present time, he says, one must go far north into the parched and pathless recesses of the Upper Kalahari before the “vanishing Eland” can be reached, and “even in these unexplored wilds these rare creatures can nowadays be scarcely considered safe.” Mr. Bryden proceeds to describe the progress of its extermination now going on as follows:—

“Directly the rain falls, hunters from among the Bakwèna, Bangwaketse, and Bamangwato tribes, well-mounted, and armed with breech-loading rifles, penetrate to the innermost recesses of the Kalahari, and, wandering from one pool of rain-water to another, deal destruction among the game, and especially among the Giraffes and Elands. That Elands are still plentiful in these regions of the Kalahari I can personally testify, having found them in numbers, and procured specimens in two or three days’ hunting from the desert road between Khama’s and the Botletli river (between Inkonanē and Kannē) within recent years. Coming down country, too, I saw at Sechele’s town—Molepolole—numbers of horns and heads of freshly slain Elands, some of them magnificent examples, which had been recently shot by Bakwèna hunters. But that, even in the North Kalahari, these and other game can long resist the incessant war of extermination waged against them, I am much more than doubtful.”

Thus we see that the typical brown unstriped Eland, which formerly pervaded the whole of the Cape Colony and the adjacent districts, and in 1652 (according to Van Riebeck) was found even on Table Mountain, is now, as nearly as possible, extinct; although its closely-allied white-striped brother, called Livingstone’s Eland, after the distinguished explorer and missionary, is still to be met with in the countries further north. As regards the points of difference between Livingstone’s Eland and the typical form, which we will now proceed to explain, we cannot do better than quote from Mr. Selous’s excellent article on the subject lately published in Mr. Rowland Ward’s ‘Great and Small Game of South Africa’:—

“The Eland of South-western Africa, as described by the earlier European travellers who visited the Cape Colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more recently figured by Sir Cornwallis Harris from specimens obtained in 1837 in what is now British Bechuanaland and the Western Transvaal, was of a uniform pale fawn-colour from birth, though the coats of the older animals gradually became so thin that the dark colour of the underlying skin showed more and more through the scanty hair, giving them a general greyish appearance, the old bulls often looking a bluish- black in deep shade, and being described by the colonists as ‘blue bulls.’ On the other hand, all the Elands found throughout Rhodesia and Eastern South Africa, and wherever I have travelled to the north of the Zambesi, are striped. The calves are a rich reddish-fawn in ground-colour, with a dark mark down the back, black patches on the insides of the fore-legs, and eight or nine conspicuous white stripes on each side,”

As these striped Elands grow up, Mr. Selous continues, they differ considerably one from another. Both bull and cow become of a bluish grey as their coats become thinner with age, and at a little distance the white stripes are often indistinguishable, although as long as there is any hair left they can always be seen on close inspection. Also the dark patches on the inner sides of the front legs become more faint with age, and in very old animals disappear altogether.

Mr. Selous also points out that intermediate forms are found between the two subspecies of Elands, and that, in fact, there is a complete passage through a long series of variations from one form to the other.

That this is the case is shown clearly by Mr. Selous’s own observations. He writes (in the same work) as follows:—

“In April 1879 I shot some Elands in the Northern Kalahari, between Bamangwato and the Botletli River. None of these Elands showed any signs of stripes, but two of them had light grey patches on the insides of the fore-legs. About 150 miles farther north, however, nearly all the Elands that I shot were more or less striped, though in most cases the stripes were so faint that they only became apparent on a close inspection. Travelling northwards towards the Chobi River, I found that although Elands were still to be met with, on which no stripes could be detected, most of them were more or less plainly striped, the patches on the insides of the fore-legs becoming gradually darker at the same time. North of the Chobi, and between that river and the Zambesi, the Elands, taken as a whole, become well striped, and the dark markings on the insides of the fore-legs more and more conspicuous, many individuals being as richly marked as the real Taurotragus oryx livingstonii, which was first observed by Dr. Livingstone at Sesheke, immediately north of the Central Zambesi. Thus, speaking from my own experience, I should say that all the Elands found in South Africa at the present day south of the 23rd parallel of latitude are grey Elands (Taurotragus oryx typicus), but that north of that parallel of latitude a tendency to show white stripes on each side of the body, and dark patches on the insides of the fore-legs, together with a dark median line down the centre of the back, from the withers to the tail, commences. I would say further that this tendency is at first confined to certain individuals, but becomes more general, and the white stripes and dark markings gradually more intensified in individuals, as one travels north and north-east, until north of the Zambesi and in Mashunaland, and all over South-eastern Africa, all the Elands are striped without exception, and all of them show black patches on the insides of the fore-legs and a dark mark down the centre of the back, and often a white arrow-shaped mark across the nose, as in the Koodoo and Bushbuck.”

Mr. Bryden and other well-known authorities on the game-animals of South Africa entirely confirm Mr. Selous’s observations.

Under these circumstances it seems quite impossible to treat Livingstone’s Eland as a distinct species, but, as will be seen by our list of synonyms, we have placed it under a different heading, and have assigned most of the references to Elands north of the Zambesi to Taurotragus oryx livingstonii.

We will now, starting from the Zambesi, endeavour to trace the Eland into the most northern part of its range.

Peters, in his ‘Reise nach Mossambique,’ gives several localities for the Eland in the Portuguese Provinces on the Zambesi. Mr. R. Crawshay, who has devoted great attention to the Antelopes of Nyasaland, tells us that the Eland is widely distributed there, both on the hills and on the wooded plains at the foot of them, and gives many localities in which they are to be met with. As regards its markings, he informs us that it is subject to great variety in British East Africa, “both in colour and as regards the plainness or otherwise of the white stripes.” In a single troop, individuals may be seen varying from a light tawny yellow to the slaty blue of old age, while in some the stripes are clearly defined, in others faintly, and in others again they are not distinguishable at all.

In 1895 Sir Harry Johnston, K.C.B., F.Z.S., presented to the Zoological Society of London a remarkably fine pair of horns of Livingstone’s Eland, which are now suspended in their meeting-room at Hanover Square. The animal which carried them was shot in 1893 in Nyasaland between Zomba and Lake Chilwa. By the kind favour of that Society we are able to insert in these pages a copy of the figure of these horns (fig. 116, p. 205), which was published in the ‘Proceedings’ for 1895.