Wilhelm Bölsche describes all this in fitting words:[19] “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,[20] 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.”