In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

After devoting a good deal of thought to searchlights and searchlight mirrors, I helped in lightening the apparatus materially and developed a device for searchlight control. This control, which involves the same rotary principle as my motion-picture camera, enables the operator standing at the end of an arm to direct the rays of the light toward any object in the sky and to keep it in view by following up its movements with the light. It is one of several devices developed at that time which have since been patented by the Government in my name.

Roosevelt once asked me why I declined to wear the major's uniform offered to me. "Well, Colonel Roosevelt," I replied unhesitatingly, for I had my good reason for so doing, "if I were wearing a uniform, I could not go to my colonel and tell him he was a damn fool."

Roosevelt laughed heartily.

"You are quite right," he replied. "Stick to it!"

As a civilian I went about wherever work was going on, talked freely with the workmen, heard them discuss their mechanical difficulties, and got from them their ideas for improvements. As a civilian I was also free to carry those ideas wherever they could do the most good. If I had had to comply with the red tape of army officialdom, not only would my own work have been handicapped, but also the ideas and troubles of the private actually handling the machine might never have gone past his sergeant. When the armistice was signed, I was planning to go overseas to observe the difficulties that the men were having at the front, so that I narrowly escaped the khaki.

Whatever my services may or may not have contributed to the defeat of the Germans, at least I have escaped the accusation directed toward many a dollar-a-year man of being overpaid. The usual dollar-a-year man, though the dollar was never paid him, received his expenses, while my contract called for a salary of ten dollars per day without expense money. My original agreement was to include expenses, but some slip was made which always seemed too difficult to correct. This arrangement made my loss even greater than that of those men who received the fabulous amount prescribed by law, for needless to say my weekly stipend was inadequate to cover the one item of railway fare. Still one had to serve to be happy in those days, no matter what the cost. Inasmuch as the Akeley camera also lost heavily on war contracts, I have had the additional satisfaction of escaping governmental investigation on the score of excess profits. After it was all over, I ungrudgingly paid the normal tax on the money I had lost, and I would not swap those months with the Government for anything else in my experience.

Since the war, with the intermission of my trip to Africa for gorillas in 1921, I have stuck to my sculpture and taxidermy except for various lecture trips.

A man who is fortunate enough to have witnessed the beauties of the African forests and who has come to know the forest's inhabitants and their ways, is almost sure to be called upon to share his good fortune with others, and I have done a good deal of lecturing. My first lectures were to be given at Fullerton Hall in Chicago for the Field Museum shortly after my return from Africa in 1906. Fortunately, I had occasion to deliver a lecture in South Chicago a few days before my first museum lecture was scheduled. Otherwise, I probably would have dropped dead when I faced the Fullerton Hall audience. I think the thing that saved me from running then was the fact that I had a small audience behind a screen at the rear of the platform and knew that it blocked my escape.

I had tried to prepare a lecture, had realized that that was impossible, and had finally decided to show my audience the pictures and make whatever comments they brought to mind. Then, when I got on the platform without the vaguest idea of what I was going to say first, it suddenly occurred to me that I was no worse frightened than I had been one day on the banks of the Tana when I suddenly found myself, with nothing but a camera in my hand, charged by a rhinoceros. Apparently I had no escape except a thirty-foot drop into the crocodile-infested waters of the Tana below. But the rhino stopped ten or fifteen feet from me, gazed at me stupidly, and settled down with the apparent intention of going to sleep. I took hope when the thought crossed my mind that this new terror might settle down with the same intention as the old rhino, leaving me to my own resources quite unharmed. So I told my audience the story of the rhino, the ice was broken, and I fear I nearly talked them to death before the lecture ended.