The 'great African hunters,' books

[vzerone]

Does anyone feel that Capstick exagerated about some of his exploits?

[Larry Gibson]

Just denoted a tone of jealousy from some because he tells a much better story than they do......

[jonp]

I can tell you one thing. After a camara Safari in Tanzania a few years ago (main purpose was climbing Kilimanjaro) I never wished for a gun more in my life. Lions, Wildebeest, Cape Buff, Giraffe, Elephant, Dik Dik everything was right in front of my eyes including Hippo.

[JSnover]

I see that no one has mentioned John Taylor's, African Rifles & Cartridges. I have read my copy twice and loaned it to friends. It covers his thirty years of hunting in Africa but he also talks about the guns and ammo he used and recommends. I highly recommend this book.

I just got a copy the other day and have read two of his other books.
Good stuff.
Taylor was 'controversial,' I guess but his attitude towards the natives was pretty close to that of the other professional hunters I've read so far. Seems like he summed it up pretty well when he wrote that the Africans didn't really know how to lie, cheat, or steal until they learned it from the British.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I remember Ionides well on 1950s television, and in Alan Wykes's book. I believe he claimed a high acquired resistance to snakebite through repeated exposure. But even when my age was in single figures, I had read that the horses injected to provide serum would develop extreme tolerance which would someday disappear, and they could die from a does that wouldn't kill a rabbit. Ionides must have known that. I kept a European adder as a pet for a while, harmlessly tiny, but instant mortality... Give me lions and tigers any day.

I knew old Africa hands, white ones, who detested Ruark for his portrayal of the Kenyan independence movement. The Mau-Mau, not a tribe but an organisation, was beastly in the extreme, mostly to other natives. But as with India, there was a whole movement in government who were far more interested in educating and advancing those other natives, than were the local white money-making elite. A bit like the former Confederacy, really.

I think the later writers on big game hunting were often writing partly for people who might become clients in a specialised form of recreation, and partly for the general public who never would. Very often they were writing in large part about themselves. In the early days they were also explorers and inventors, going out into a new world (without capital letters) and devising techniques and interpersonal style which would be of vital importance to those who followed.

I also think you get more dispassionate accuracy from the British pioneers than Americans, not from innately less tendency to tell stretchers (just look at politics"), but because they were so often there in some official capacity, writing reports in which inaccuracy would blast their careers. They had to avoid the risk of people saying "How come it got so much better in your book?"

[aephilli822]

...
I also think you get more dispassionate accuracy from the British pioneers than Americans, not from innately less tendency to tell stretchers (just look at politics"), but because they were so often there in some official capacity, writing reports in which inaccuracy would blast their careers. They had to avoid the risk of people saying "How come it got so much better in your book?"

valid hypothesis

[Larry Gibson]

I always assumed British writers just liked their martinis "dry" because that's the way they wrote........

[Bent Ramrod]

I don't recall any specific instances where Capstick changed any important facts or inserted nonexistent situations into his retellings. He just reworked the as-told narrative into a more dramatic retelling. The addition of dialogue that may not have occurred or detail that doesn't change the story significantly isn't really falsification of the basic story, especially if nobody knows what was said or seen in those instances anyway. The fish (if you will) wasn't lengthened, but the waiting, catching and the resultant playing, fighting and landing were described as dramatically as possible, within the bounds of the original narrative. This is what good storytellers do.

There are many other examples of this kind of story reworking; Col. Cooper's "Get Charlemagne!" is a more intense retelling of Capt. Thomason's rendition of Herman Hanneken's elimination "with extreme prejudice" of a Haitian warlord. Jack O'Connor complained about Russell Annabel's use of "the epic beginning" in his hunting stories. But I like dramatic retellings and epic beginnings, although the originals are also of interest. Americans in general are more used to action movie scripting than simple literary retelling; if one wants to grab an audience over here, one must follow the rote.

As one of Annabel's characters said to him in a story, "I don't want this hunt to be 'There he is.' BANG! 'You got him.'" I'd rather have something more in a hunting story, myself.

Of course, to leap from the page to a real movie treatment, the semi-animated movie The 300 covers what takes up less than three pages in Herodotus' Histories. And most of his three pages were devoted to a list, by names, of the Greeks who opted to sneak away from the fight, leaving Leonidas to his own devices. No mention of Xerxes being an 8-foot tall androgyne with a ripped body and a sub-bass woofer voice, either.

[JSnover]

While I have numerous "African" and other hunting books my favorite is this collection of short stories, chapters and excerpts from many old books dating back from the mid 1800s up through modern African hunting of 30 years ago. As you can see each volume is dedicated to an African country and numerous authors. I've spent many a relaxing time reading and rereading the various adventures. This collection is probably my most prized hunting books.

Thanks Larry!
For anyone else who might be interested Safari Press is still around and offers quite a few books of this nature.

[JSnover]

would a been nice to have the links to them books ya found.

If this was for me, I'm having pretty good luck with St. Hubert's Press, St. Martin's Press, and Safari Press.

[abunaitoo]

A friend passes along his Sports Afield magazines to me.
Lots of time it has short stories of the past about big game hunting.
Very entertaining.