In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country

by John T. McCutcheon

On our ship there were four different parties. A young American from Boston, who has been spending several years doing archæological work in Crete, accompanied by a young English cavalry officer, were starting out for a six-weeks' shoot south of the railway and near Victoria Nyanza.

Two professional ivory hunters were starting for German East Africa by way of the lake. Mr. Boyce and his African balloonograph party of seven white men were preparing for the photographing expedition in the Sotik, and our party of four was making final preparations for our march. Consequently there was much hurrying about, and Newland and Tarlton's warehouse was the center of throngs of waiting porters and the scene of intense activity as each party sorted and assembled its mountains of supplies.

Seager and Wormald got off first, going by train to Kijabe, where they were to begin their ten days' march in the Sotik. Here they were to try their luck for two or three weeks and then march back, preparatory to starting home.

The professional ivory hunters were slow in starting. There was delay in getting mules. One of them had shot three hundred elephants in the Belgian Congo during the last four years, and it was suspected he had been poaching. The other had been caught by the Belgian authorities on his last trip, lost all his ivory and guns by confiscation, but was ready to make another try. The ivory game is a rich one and there are always venturesome men who are willing to take chances with the law in getting the prizes.

The Boyce party with its two balloons and its great number of box kites and its moving picture equipment and its twenty-nine cameras and its vast equipment was slow in starting, but it expected to get away on September twenty-fourth, the day after we left. They planned to fill their balloon in Nairobi and tow it at the end of a special train as far as Kijabe, where they were to strike inland from the railway. They were encamped on a hill overlooking the city, with their two hundred and thirty porters ready for the field and their balloon ready to make the first ascension ever attempted in East Africa.

Throngs of natives squatted about, watching the final preparations, and doubtless wondered what the strange, swaying object was. On the evening of the twenty-second the party gave a moving picture show at one of the clubs for the benefit of St. Andrew's church. A great crowd of fashionably dressed people turned out and saw the motion picture records of events which they had seen in life only a couple of days before. There were moving pictures of the arrival of the governor's special train, his march through the city, and many other events that were fresh in the minds of the audience. There were also motion pictures taken on the ship that brought us down from Naples to Mombasa, and it was most interesting to see our fellow passengers and friends reproduced before us in their various athletic activities while on shipboard. Mr. Boyce gave an afternoon show for children, an evening show for grown-ups, and was to give another for the natives the following night. The charities of Nairobi were much richer because of Mr. Boyce and his African Balloonograph Expedition.

While in Nairobi we visited the little station where experiments are being made in the "sleeping sickness." An intelligent young English doctor is conducting the investigations and great hopes are entertained of much new information about that most mysterious ailment that has swept whole colonies of blacks away in the last few years.

In many little bottles were specimens of the deadly tsetse fly that causes all the infection. And the most deadly of all was the small one whose distinguishing characteristic was its wings, which crossed over its back. These we were told to look out for and to avoid them, if possible. They occur only in certain districts and live in the deep shade, near water. They also are day-biting insects, who do their biting only between eleven o'clock in the morning and five o'clock in the afternoon.

In the station there were a number of monkeys, upon which the fly was being tried. They were in various stages of the disease, but it seemed impossible to tell whether their illness was due to the sleeping sickness germ or was due to tick fever, a common malady among monkeys. In one of the rooms of the laboratory there were natives holding little cages of tsetse flies against the monkeys, which were pinioned to the floor by the natives. The screened cages were held close to the stomach of the helpless monkey, and little apertures in the screen permitted the fly to settle upon and bite the animal.

There are certain wide belts of land in Africa called the "tsetse fly belts," where horses, mules and cattle can not live. These districts have been known for a number of years, long before the sleeping sickness became known. In the case of animals, the danger could be minimized by keeping the animals out of those belts, but in the case of humans the same can not be done. One infected native from a sleeping sickness district can carry the disease from one end of the country to the other, and when once it breaks out the newly infected district is doomed. Consequently the British authorities are greatly alarmed, for by means of this deadly fly the whole population of East Africa might be wiped out if no remedy is discovered. It has not yet been absolutely proven that East Africa is a "white man's country," and in the end it may be necessary for him to give up hope of making it more than a place of temporary residence and exploration.