The 'great African hunters,' books

[JSnover]

Lately I've been reading books by Capstick and Taylor, I'm buying Ruark's Use Enough Gun... this week and trying to locate any of Selous' work.
If any CB members are into these sort of books, who/which would you recommend?

[Charles Ellis]

There are 28 books in the Capstick series from St.Martins Press. Some he wrote,some he edited. I have and have read them all.
J.A.Hunter's books are interesting. W.D.M.Bell, Fredrick C. Selous, P.J.Pretorius, James Sutherland, John Boyes, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry M. Stanley, Carl E. and Mary L. Jobe Akeley, Martin and Osa Johnson and I know there are many more. If you decide to expand your wanderings to India there is Jim Corbett, Kenneth Anderson, and Sir Samuel Baker can take you there. I certainly hope you enjoy you literary journeys as much as I have.

[JWT]

Here is a list to get you started... Just kidding.

209432
209433
209434

Ruark is excellent although it is mostly fiction. Boyes and Pretorious were good. The books by Jim Corbett are interesting (about India). Ionides and the Wykes book about him are both very interesting. Patterson's "Lions Of Tsavo" is a classic. I included Hemingway but I really don't like his writing style. He must have been paid by the word.

[hawkenhunter50]

WDM Bell's Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter

[StolzerandSons]

Have you tried the Gutenberg project?
http://www.gutenberg.org/
If you use the search, you can find books by author, by subject, by title, etc. There are a lot of really good hunting books available for download there.

[GhostHawk]

I found a variety of books by the authors listed above. Some at Gutenberg, some at another site.

I am also a big fan of H Rider Haggerd who wrote a lot about africa and hunters. But, you do have to accept that culture and accepted mores, language have changed since he wrote. The way he talks is the way many talked back then. I don't think he hated the natives, he just had different attitudes about them than we do today.

Truth be told Haggard would have been welcome at our dinning room table. My dad was really no different.

[beezapilot]

Ruark's "Use Enough Gun" was more a collection of shorts than I was hoping for. Something of Value was a great read in my opinion. Uruhu was OK, an odd continuation of seemingly the same story with seemingly the same characters, but different names, bit strange really.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote some readable stuff on his adventures in Africa.

I'm going to check out H Rider Haggerd, I've not heard of him

[jonp]

don't know but Jim Corbett sure fired the imagination of a kid from rural Vermont in the late 60's.

[GhostHawk]

About 2/3'rds through Corbett's Man eaters of Kumaon. Good stuff in my opinion.

Haggard can be good, great at times, in other spots, other subjects can be lackluster.
On the whole I would say at least half of his story's I felt were well worth the time spent.
Maybe a bit better than that.

He paints a great picture of what it was like to harness up several yoke of oxen and go trekking through the bush.

At times I wish he would get more into the hunting, gun, large bore vs small etc.

[Porterhouse]

"Elephant Hunters, Men of Legend" by Tony Sanchez-Arino.
Not well known but one of the best books on the subject. The author himself is one of the last ivory hunters and he preserved many great hunters life stories. The book contains what guns they used, what caliber was preferred,etc. A bit pricy and may be hard to find but deffinetely worth the effort.

[JSnover]

You guys are the best, thanks!

[JSnover]

Have you tried the Gutenberg project?
http://www.gutenberg.org/
If you use the search, you can find books by author, by subject, by title, etc. There are a lot of really good hunting books available for download there.
Thanks!

[Survival Bill]

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

[StolzerandSons]

Thanks!
You're welcome.


would a been nice to have the links to them books ya found.
Who are you asking for links?

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Ruark's "Use Enough Gun" was more a collection of shorts than I was hoping for. Something of Value was a great read in my opinion. Uruhu was OK, an odd continuation of seemingly the same story with seemingly the same characters, but different names, bit strange really.

Theodore Roosevelt wrote some readable stuff on his adventures in Africa.

I'm going to check out H Rider Haggerd, I've not heard of him

You will need the spelling "Haggard" to get many results in searches, such as my life support system, www.bookfinder.com , or eBay. The latter is where you will once in a while find unrecognised bargains, like my first edition of "King Solomon's Mines" for £20. Now that is a hunting story! He has the merit of being more than seventy years dead, which puts him out of copyright just about everywhere, so most of his books are available free on www.gutenberg.org .

He is pretty good on hunting, although it is rarely his main subject. His attitude to natives is tremendously enlightened for the time, and compared with much we hear today. He constantly hammers home the message that they vawry as much, but are just as often motivated by the highest emotions, as the rest of us. Like almost everybody in those days, he specially admires the Zulus, as good friends when they aren't at war, who think spearing to death is only what people do, but would be horrified at the barbarity of evicting someone for not paying his mortgage. He frequently sides with his African characters against whites, and was the first to write a full-length novel, pulling a lot fewer punches than "Hiawatha", about tribal Africans without a white person in sight.

WDM Bell is certainly the best writer on the science of elephant hunting, and like all the best of them, makes light of the danger to himself. But suppose a man has reduced elephant hunting to a 99% chance of coming out on his feet? That gives you a .0039% chance of survival. He must have been doing something a lot better than 99% right. He is also first rate on the friendship fair treatment brought him, among people far more primitive than the essentially disciplined Zulus.ng,

Jim Corbett must count as the most selfless of the great hunters. He is the sort of British Indian most people forgnlet nowadays, born of several generations there, and motivated by love of both the hill village people and the maneaters he killed purely to protect them. He is of interest for a lot more than Indian animals or Indian hunting, in jungle where ranges could easily be in feet rather than yards. He certainly thought of himself as no hero, for often he was seriously afraid, and knew his life depended on the knowledge he had gained since early childhood, as described in "Jungle Lore".

Another interesting book, "Tree Tops" dates from 1952, and the Kenyan hotel, or rather wildlife hide, of that name. Guests had to be accompanied by a skilled hunter, and when Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited in 1952, Corbett got the job. He reports her as quite unafraid when they found themselves close to elephant on the way in. During the night he realised that leopards could easily have climbed the ladders, so the 76-year-old Corbett sat up all night with a rifle, and felt something brush against the handrope.

In the morning they got the news that King George VI had died in the night, and Corbett wrote, in the hotel visitor's book, the first words ever written about Queen Elizabeth II:

For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess, and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience, she climbed down from the tree the next day a Queen—God bless her.

He finished writing his book, a slim little thing, and a few days later died.

The two volumes of the Badminton Library series on "Big Game Shooting" are very handsomely bound and sometimes cheap for what they are. Volume 1 is mainly African, with chapters by Baker, Oswell and Selous. Volume II is mostly Asian.

Blackwood's Magazine was a British tradition for over 160 years. Dr. Brydon, the only man other than prisoners to escape the Kabul retreat of 1842, attributed his survival to a copy inside his cap for insulation, which caused only a small portion of his skull to be removed by a sword-cut. Nonsense to grumble. In the 1930s Blackwoods published a series of articles, some much earlier, in a series of twelve small volumes, "Tales of the Outposts". I don't suppose "How the East was won" will ever be written, let alone filmed, but these articles, not from professional writers, but from people who were there, come pretty close. Odd volumes do sometimes go cheap, and Volume X, "Shikar" (i.e. Indian hunting, though it isn't all Indian) is very good.

Another first-rate book on South Africa in the earlies, with much hunting, is "Jock of the Bushveld", by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, about a young transport driver and his bull terrier. But for this you need the paper edition, with splendid line drawings on every page. Fitzpatrick actually became one of Cecil Rhodes's bright young men, trying to turn Southern Africa into a sort of mineral United Fruit. He was convicted for high treason against the Transvaal for an attempt to do a Bay of Pigs in 1896, and like the others got out after four months. But he shows a huge admiration for Zulus, especially those distinguished by the fine achievement of destroying a British battalion.

[texasnative46]

To All,

Bell, Capstick, Corbett & Ruark are my four favorite "outdoors authors". - I've read everything that all of them wrote.

Frankly, my boyhood was "not particularly pleasant" & I dreamed of BEING Robert Ruark. = My beloved grandfather passed away when I was 12.
(Over the last 25 years, I've tried unsuccessfully to buy "The Old Man's house in Southport several times & to establish a Robert Ruark weekend. = Ruark wasn't "popular" with the locals after he became an adult, as it is said that he was divorced, drank too much & was "too rich for his own good". - Small towns are frequently jealous of/hateful about local folks who move away & thereafter become successful.)

yours, tex

[Bent Ramrod]

It’s interesting to compare Peter Capstick’s dramatically-written adventures of some of these White Hunters with their own stiff-upper-lip narratives of those same adventures in their own books. Pretty much just another day at the office, as far as they were concerned.

I found an interesting one, Life With Ionides, by Margaret Lane. She met Constantine J.P. “Iodine” Ionides at one of his lectures in London and lived with him in Africa for a while. By then, his big game hunts were done; he was into conservation, and he made his living selling snakes for antivenin.

However, his reminiscences were absorbing, to say the least. He told Lane how he was mauled by an elephant once, with complete, dispassionate analysis of how it was totally his fault. At the denouement, the elephant was chasing him and he tripped and fell on his face. “There was an extraordinary pause,” he said. I’ll bet there was! :shock:

A good overview is White Hunters by Brian Herne. Strange to think that the bulk of those Ruarkian and Hemingwayan African safaris that we automatically think about were encompassed by only about sixty years. After the countries achieved independence. The Golden Age was over.

[hiram]

For fun-- Watch the movie 'Trader Horn'.

http://www.moviejourneys.com/mogambo-the-white-hunters/

[GOPHER SLAYER]

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.

[Larry Gibson]

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.

209849209850209851

[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........:groner:

[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.