My First Voyage to Southern Seas

by William Henry Giles Kingston

At length we reached a plantation which we were told belonged to Mr Coventry. A small, but comfortable-looking bungalow stood in the midst of it. I cannot describe the anxiety with which I approached the door. A native servant appeared. I had to wait till Mr Fordyce came up to interpret for me. Mr Coventry was not there. He had been for some time, but he was lately joined by a young gentleman with whom he had set out for another estate he had purchased to the north of Kandy, and, from his having taken his rifles and other sporting guns, it was supposed that he had gone on some hunting expedition. The information was not altogether unsatisfactory. I hoped at length to come up with him, and my heart bounded with joy at the certainty it seemed to me that the young gentleman spoken of was my brother.

Mr Fordyce did not appear to sympathise with me as much as I should have expected in my anxiety to find my brother.

“You will fall in with him all in good time, and a few days or weeks cannot make much difference to either of you,” he remarked.

Soon after this we heard that there was to be held, at the distance of two or three days’ journey off from where we then were, a corral or grand elephant hunt.

“We will without fail attend it,” exclaimed Mr Fordyce. “It is one of the things most worth seeing in Ceylon, and I have not been at one for many years.”

Of course Nowell and I were delighted to go. Ceylon has for time immemorial been celebrated for the number and size of its elephants, and for their great sagacity and docility when trained. They have, therefore, annually been caught and tamed, and sent off to different parts of Asia, where they have been highly prized.

We had pitched our tents one evening at the distance of about half a mile from one of those wonderful lakes formed artificially in days long past for the purpose of irrigating the rice fields of the low country. They were usually created by the erection of a dam across the mouth of a valley, oftentimes not less than two miles in length, and from fifty to eighty feet in height, and of a proportionable thickness. Often these artificial pieces of water are ten or a dozen miles in circumference, and of great depth. They are usually full of crocodiles, and are frequented by wild-fowl of all sorts. Our evening meal was preparing, when one of our Moors came in with the announcement that a herd of buffaloes were in the neighbourhood feeding close to the lake, and that we might have a fair chance of trying our powers on them. Delighted at the prospect, Nowell and I seized our rifles, and mounting our horses, rode off towards the spot indicated.

“I will let you go by yourselves, young gentlemen. After a long day’s journey, I do not feel that my love of sport would induce me to go through more fatigue,” observed Mr Fordyce.

Solon, of course, was very anxious to accompany me, but the Moor said he would interrupt the sport, so very unwillingly I left him in our camp. Nowell had already had some practice in buffalo as well as in elephant shooting and other wild sports in Ceylon. He explained to me that it is necessary to be very cautious in approaching a herd; sometimes they will pretend to fly, and all of a sudden turn round and charge their pursuers with the most desperate fury. We were both armed with double-barrelled rifles and hunting-knives, with, as I believed, a good supply of powder and bullets, and so we thought ourselves a match for any wild beasts in the world. The scenery was very beautiful. There was a wide extent of plain covered with richly green grass, and here and there sprinkled with clumps of trees, under which herds of deer crouched in the shade, while others browsed around. Promontories of various shapes, some wooded, and some with only a single palm-tree on them, ran out into the bright lake, at the further end of which rose lofty hills covered thickly with shrubs to their very summits, the bluest of blue mountains appearing one beyond the other in the far distance. As we rode along we put up a number of wild-fowl, teal, and ducks; and the deer, as soon as they saw us, scampered off to a distance, so that we could not have a shot at them had we wished it. The ground now became too uneven for our horses, so Nowell proposed that we should leave the Moor in charge of them, while we walked on towards the spot where we expected to find the buffaloes.

“I am quite up to the work to be done, and it will be much more creditable to attack them by ourselves,” he observed.