The name of Joseph Thomson, the African traveller, will always rank among the foremost of those who in the second half of this century have striven to open the Dark Continent to civilized man, and have lost their lives at an early age by violence or disease in consequence. Thomson was, moreover, one of the very few amongst African explorers who had never shed the blood of a native, nor even, we believe, during his many journeys, fired a shot in self-defence. Thomson’s name has been worthily associated with the present Gazelle, of which he was the discoverer during his expedition through Masai-land to Lake Victoria in 1883 and 1884, and of which he first brought back specimens to Europe.
Thomson, as we are informed by Dr. Günther, who described this Gazelle as Gazella thomsoni in June 1884 from two frontlets presented by Thomson to the British Museum, met with it on his way up the country from the plains near Kilimanjaro to Lake Baringo, at various elevations under 6000 feet. Dr. Günther, we may remark, in his description and figure of these horns fell into a not unnatural error in treating the more slender pair (fig. 74a, p. 172) as those of a female. But, as we have already stated, the horns are always abnormally small in the doe of this Gazelle, and sometimes, it is said, altogether wanting. The slenderer pair of horns shown in Dr. Günther’s figures, which we have been kindly allowed to reproduce in this work, are, like the stouter pair, doubtless those of a male.
In his volume ‘Through Masai-land,’ Thomson does not appear to have made any reference to this Gazelle, except by repeating the figures of the horns (p. 536) already published by Dr. Günther. Thomson had intended, we believe, to put his notes on the animals and plants collected and observed during this expedition into an Appendix, which, however, from pressure of other matters, was never written.
After Thomson himself, the next earliest information obtained concerning this Gazelle appears to be that collected by Sir John Willoughby’s hunting-party in 1886–87. In the Appendix to ‘East-Africa and its Big Game,’ Mr. Hunter writes of it as follows:—
“This Gazelle, discovered by Mr. J. Thomson during his trip through Masai-land in 1883, was found in large numbers in the plains in the Masai country to the south-west of Kilimanjaro, and we also came across it on the borders of the Masai country at the south end of Kyulu mountain, but it is not met with on the south side of the mountain between these two points. I have seen these Gazelles mixing with Gazella granti, the female of which, at long range, though larger, is easily mistaken for a male G. thomsoni, both having the broad black stripe on the side. They are generally seen in small herds of one male to about ten females.”
In the first volume of ‘Big Game Shooting,’ of the Badminton Library, Mr. F. J. Jackson, than whom no one can be better qualified to speak of East-African Antelopes, gives us his experiences with the present species in the following words:—
Fig. 75.
Front view of head of Thomson’s Gazelle, ♀.
(Neumann’s ‘Elephant-Hunting,’ p. 11.)