In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

In 1905 Nairobi was a town of tin houses, many black people, a few Hindus, and fewer white men. Before my departure for the Athi Plains, where I planned to begin my collections, I wished to find a place in Nairobi where I might store material as I sent it in from time to time from the field. Around and around I wandered without finding any one who was able to offer a helpful suggestion. Then one day, as I was passing the open door of an unpromising galvanized iron building, I heard the encouraging clatter of a typewriter and lost no time in investigating. At the rear of a bare room about thirty feet wide and forty feet long was a door on the other side of which someone was plying the typewriter furiously. Finally there came forth from behind that closed door a blue-eyed, red-haired chap, apparently extraordinarily busy and much annoyed at being interrupted. However, his annoyance vanished when I told him what I was looking for and he suggested that I use a third of the front part of his building at a rental of five rupees—about a dollar and a half—per month. This arrangement was eminently satisfactory to me and we closed the bargain at once.

The red-haired man was Leslie J. Tarlton. No description of British East Africa is complete without some reference to Tarlton, the Boer War veteran now known to hunters the world over because of the flourishing business he has built up in Nairobi—a part of which is equipping safari hunters with everything from food to niggers.

Tarlton and his partner, Newland, were Australians who had served in the Boer War. At its close they set out to make their fortunes somewhere in Africa. Coming to Nairobi with none too much of this world's goods but plenty of ambition and enthusiasm, they were casting about for an objective when on that morning in 1905 I stumbled upon Tarlton's iron house. The safari business into which they fell that day helped to make them prosperous men until the opening of the World War in 1914 put an end to African hunting for a time.

Tarlton afterward confessed to me that the typewriter that first attracted my attention would not write at all. Its only use was to make a noise when a prospective client came in sight. It was perhaps the first propounder in Nairobi of the modern business principle that nothing succeeds like success and it propounded no less diligently because Tarlton had not yet discovered what his post-war profession was to be. Two or three weeks after our first meeting, when I came in from the plains, my safari laden with collections to be packed in brine, Tarlton was much on the job, observing the process and assisting whenever he saw an opportunity. Finally he asked why he could not learn to do such work for me. His proposal was that he act as my agent, sending food and other supplies to us in the field as they were required and thus obviating the necessity of my coming in whenever a consignment of skins was made. As time is precious in the field and one does not often happen upon a helper of such ingenuity and diligence, we soon came to terms. Newland, Tarlton, and Company had acquired their first safari client. Later on we provided poison tanks and the other paraphernalia necessary in caring for trophies before they can be shipped. Since that time, Newland and Tarlton have prepared skins and packed and shipped them for innumerable safaris.

When in 1911 black-water fever so nearly got me, Tarlton was also thought to be dying in the Nairobi hospital, but he, too, surprised his friends by his unwillingness to conform to their expectations, and, while we were both convalescing, invited me to his house to stay. Those weeks in Nairobi were a great time for reminiscence. Tarlton told me a story every morning before breakfast as he whistled and chirped about his dressing. And he always ended with the assertion that some day he was going to write a book on that particular subject. One morning he recited an anecdote about Theodore Roosevelt, adding, "Some day I am going to write a book on 'Ex-Presidents I Have Known'."

But the story I recall with the keenest relish recounts the adventures of three Boer War veterans. They had reached the bottom of their luck after the war, and making a pot, went into the Congo to poach elephants. They had good shooting at first, then no luck at all. Their supplies were nearly exhausted. But they took heart one evening when they came upon elephant signs and carefully laid their plans for the next day's hunt. A last pot of jam remained in their commissariat, and a last pot of jam is treasured by a man in that country as one saves a last bottle of champagne. The hunter must have fruit, and since no wild fruit grows there, in the old days his supplies included large quantities of preserved fruit and marmalade. The three adventurers had saved that last pot of jam to be used to celebrate and they agreed that the time for celebration had come provided they brought home ivory on the morrow. Their plan was that each man should take a different direction. On his return that night the first hunter's trail crossed that of one of his companions. Both had their ivory and they went into camp together ravenously hungry, their appetites whetted by anticipation, to find that the third fellow had stayed in camp all day and had eaten the jam alone and unabetted. His companions saw red. The normal thing in a frontier country when a man fails to play his part is to kill him. That was their intention, but they made up their minds not to be rash about it. They decided to take the man into the woods some morning and come back alone. But they thought better—or worse—of it the next day.

The story ends in Tarlton's own words:

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, my next book will be entitled 'Murdered from Marmalade,' or 'The Jam that Jerked him to Jesus'."

Tarlton was the best game shot I have ever known. We had gone out together on one occasion to get meat for dinner when we sighted a Thompson's gazelle at a distance of 225 yards.