by Iain Overton
Here, centuries before, the Icelandic government had come to pitch their summer tents at their annual meeting. It was a place steeped in ancient rulings. In the rocks, you’d catch glimpses of cut-deep blackness and wonder what secrets lay in those shadowed ravines. For me, it offered a small insight into why Icelanders seemed able so respectfully to accommodate the gun laws handed down to them by the state. Hard punishment had once ruled those ancient days and blood had flowed here.
‘In Olden times,’ a metal panel read, ‘drowning was widely used as a method of execution. People were drowned in marshes, in fresh water and in the sea. In Iceland, provision was made in law for execution by drowning from 1281.’
Names dotted this rising landscape, loaded with the public threat of what would happen if you crossed the line. In the Stekkjargiá Gorge was the Scaffold Cliff, an islet on the Öxara River formed part of the Execution Block spit. Another place, Brennugjá, held the Stake Gorge, where sorcerers died in the blistering heat of an auto-da-fé. And then there was the Whipping Islet.
These were hard punishments for hard times. Such public displays of state violence left their mark so deeply on the collective consciousness that by the nineteenth century Icelandic justice had less and less need to instil fear – a social contract seemed to have been born. Things become progressively less punitive. By 1928 the death penalty was done away with. And today a life sentence with eligibility for parole after sixteen years is the most extreme punishment dispensed.
State punishment, something so brutal it once marked its name on the landscape, became infused with humanism. And this shift has impacted the whole of society. Today Icelandic police officers do not routinely carry any guns.34 In the first decade of the Icelandic drug courts, about 90 per cent of the cases were settled with just a fine.35
It was as if justice had proven itself here, where it was understood that heavy-handed violence was never going to work things out – by either state or people – where executing someone was never going to stop murders; and where state-sanctioned use of guns inflamed, rather than reduced, their threat.
None of this, of course, explains entirely why Iceland has so many guns but so little gun violence. I’m sure there is something about the hypnotic landscape or the sheer isolation that touches and pacifies people’s lives here. But tolerance, liberal state punishment, the right to public dissent, gun control – they must all play a part in a world where civilians can own guns without bloodshed and sorrow.
There was one final kind of civilian gun owner worth looking at: the ardent collector of guns, someone who collects not for self-defence but for the love of history and design. He belongs to a breed of men (and it seems only to be men) who can afford to spend £60,000 on a pair of duelling guns. He lives in a luxurious apartment in Paris or London, has a grand country home and a hidden Swiss bank account. He collects in secret, in part because it is a little gauche to display one’s wealth to the masses – that’s the best way to pique the interest of the tax man – and partly because telling someone you have a million pounds’ worth of firearms in your living room is a sure way to get burgled.
I had gone to the British Shooting Show, a few miles out of Birmingham, to catch a glimpse of this world. It was, in many ways, a gun-lite show. There were, of course, guns aplenty, but it had none of the paranoia of an American show – none of the tactical police garb, no black semi-automatics, no hyper-militarism. Instead it was all hunting dogs and tweed, wellies and country sports, ruddy-faced pastimes that spoke of a bygone age and honey still for tea.
In one corner were rows dedicated to the sale of antique guns, and there one name stood out from the others: Bonhams, one of the world’s oldest auction houses. The stand was manned by Patrick Hawes, the head of department of its modern sporting guns section, but he was too busy evaluating guns to talk to me.
Robin Hawes, though, was able to talk. He was Patrick’s father and had the look of a charming Georgian parson, or an officer in the Crimean War. He had a trim figure, a strong, creased face and, beneath it all, a roguish glint. This raconteur was one of those special sort of old Etonians who never really grows up and who is universally liked. To me, he summed up the spine of the shooting classes and the heart of Middle England’s lower upper classes – a very specific niche which he personified perfectly. He was also clearly in love with the allure of guns and history.
‘It’s a fascinating subject,’ he said, ‘essentially a lot of “boy’s toys”.’
Such things ran in his blood. His father had a pair of renowned Purdeys, the best of the best British shotguns, and on his eleventh birthday Robin had shot a squirrel with one of them. He remembered the recoil being so strong that he fell flat on his back. From then on his life was touched by gunmetal. He spent time in the Grenadier Guards, then at the London Stock Exchange, then at a wine merchants, before ending back with his one true love – antique gun trading. He worked at Holland and Holland, William Evans and Bisley, the cream of Britain’s shooting world, and clearly, with his charm and his Eton-Army officer provenance, he was the type of chap you’d like to have with you on a shoot, if that’s what you are into. Today he collects for both pleasure and investment. And they make good returns: valuations for hand-crafted English shotguns climb at almost 5 per cent a year, a safe equity market bet by traders’ reckoning.36 So I asked him what guns people liked in this world, what they looked for.
‘Some people desire wheellocks, flintlocks, percussion guns. But the provenance of the weapon is really the major factor. If it has belonged to a king or a queen there would be much interest. And that’s what makes the antique arms and armour trade worth many millions.’
This was no surprise. I’d already read that Hitler’s golden 7.65mm Walther PP sold for $114,000 at a 1987 auction to an anonymous bidder. Today it would be worth many times that. I also knew that Teddy Roosevelt’s double-barrelled shotgun once went for $862,500. That gun certainly had provenance. The moment Roosevelt left office in March 1909 he had set off on a year-long African hunting expedition, with an entourage of 250 porters and guides. Thirteen months later, his party had killed and trapped about 11,400 animals, including six rare white rhinos, eleven elephants and seventeen lions; many of the kills with this gun.37 Teddy called it ‘the most beautiful gun I have ever seen’, and its sale generated massive press interest, not least because it came with some interesting cleaning cloths: torn slivers of Teddy’s pyjamas. Never underestimate the allure of the American hunting legend.
But perhaps the most expensive gun out there is the tiny 6 inch derringer that ended the life of Abraham Lincoln. His killer, John Wilkes Booth, paid about $25 for it in the mid 1800s, but it now resides at the Ford Theatre, where it changed the course of history. Its value is referred to as ‘priceless’.
In front of us Bonhams had set up its stall – an empty square of glass-topped tables. Robin beckoned me forward with a nod and began to show off some of the guns on display: a pair of ugly Danish breech-loading percussion guns; some German wheellocks and flintlocks. The displays here were not the only draw. Others came to sell. They sidled up surreptitiously, reached into gun bags and pulled out ancient shotguns for an evaluation. Robin was polite, but his eye was quick to see quality, and there was not much here.
I asked him if he was expecting a gem to turn up today, and he waggled his head in indecision.
‘Not really, but you never know. There are certainly fewer earrings, tattoos and pot bellies than a few years ago.’
With those few words Robin summed up to me a nuanced world of class and desire, where the British landed gentry sought heritage and quality not only in their horses and marriages, but also in their guns. Provenance was everything.
It was also a thought that leads me next towards another class-steeped world: that of the hunter, a world where money, breeding and guns seem entirely to define a lifestyle.
10. THE HUNTERS
Somaliland – the ancient art of hunting revealed in a cave – an outdoor sh
ow in Germany’s Bavaria – meeting hunters, sellers and killer dogs – the trophy-lined showroom of one of the oldest gun companies in the world in London – on safari in South Africa’s Eastern Cape – a death and remorse
This stony, arid land had once teemed with wildlife: spotted hyenas and hyraxes, leopards and Barbary lions, cheetahs, oryx and dik-diks. But then the guns of civil war had sounded in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and these animals were hunted and hunted again to feed the Somali troops that fought in these ochre desert lands. Now the plains were silent.
The war had been a brutal one. Somaliland, seeking to liberate its people from the brutal governance of Siad Barre, Somalia’s vicious dictator, had begun to establish itself as an autonomous republic in the far north of the Horn of Africa. Barre had responded with hard force; about 350,000 people died from the violence and the famines that followed. Countless animals died too.1
So today you see mainly bush pigs and camels roaming the desert sands, and the only reason the pigs survived was because Somalia is a Muslim country, and the pigs were considered haram.
We weren’t interested, though, in the hunted of the present. The hunters of the past drew us here. We were speeding across this thirsty earth to see some of the oldest rock art in northern Africa and, as the tourism minister of Somaliland, Mohammed Hussein Said, was with me, it was not proving to be your conventional tourist trip. First, there were no other tourists here, and had not been any for months. There were also six men with AK47s guarding us.
There was an underlying fear that Islamic groups would target Westerners here, wanting to grab a hostage or make a theological point in blood. A few days before, working on a BBC documentary, the crew and I had met a group of suspected terrorists in the main prison in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. They had been paraded in loose manacles before us, and all had refused to return our gaze. They were said to be Al-Shabab gunmen, responsible, a few months before, for the shooting and killing of Richard and Enid Eyeington, a British aid couple in their sixties. The Eyeingtons were good people who, according to their friend, film director Richard Attenborough, were ‘an inspirational couple, selfless and courageous’.2 If affiliates of Al Qaeda would do that to a gentle couple, what would they do to a bunch of journalists?
The tourist minister was taking no chances; our escorts went armed.
After an hour’s drive, the dust blinding and coating, we saw a smooth granite escarpment rising from the north-east. Up there, after a scramble across ancient boulders, the minister showed us caves that contained some of the earliest paintings known to man, some dating back 11,000 years. Ten caves contained scenes of striking antediluvian beauty: animals captured in elaborate ceremonial robes, necks embellished with white plastron, hunting dogs and wild animals crouched beside them and hunters stood beneath them all, their arms outstretched.
‘Under here,’ said the minister, ‘you can see the person. That means they were praying. They say these pictures are the best they’ve seen.’
He was right, this intense and refreshingly unpolitical man: the paintings were impressive, and not just to archaeologists. Here was art speaking to us of ancient hunting skills and the deities that watched over the kill. In these dry lands, and to the south-west in modern-day Tanzania and Kenya, man had first learned to hunt for his meat, long before he had learned to paint for his gods. Even today Bushmen hunters taint their arrows with the poisonous exudate of the Diamphidia beetle – so powerful a mere scratch can kill a kudu or a man.
Africa’s history is, in this way, not revealed through soaring cathedrals or brooding sky-framed fortresses. Rather, dry and secluded caves reveal the continent’s historical past in bones laced with stone-tool cut marks. Other caves revealed how the bow and arrow or spear were first used here tens of thousands of years ago. And in those caves, where there were remnants of painted animal gods, you saw man’s love of meat, hunted and cooked.
What these vermillion and citrine paintings really showed me was just how deep-set hunting is on our collective psyche; how it has been intrinsic to the evolution of societies, cultures and religions; and how man, underneath our civilized carapace, is a hunter to his core.
The way religions around the world approach the issue of hunting reveals how societies see the world. Many Buddhists and Jains believe that every life is sacred, so they do not hunt. Jews and Muslims do hunt, but generally only for food, not for sport. And they are both forbidden to hunt other trained hunting animals, such as birds of prey, possibly echoing doctrinal views that food needs to be kosher or halal before it is eaten. Christians can hunt, the only exception being Catholic priests, who are not allowed to – a position that sounds very similar to the Vatican’s attitude to sex.3 And Hindus are positively encouraged to hunt, their scriptures describing it as a sport of the kingly. Even the god Shiva is called Mrigavyadha, ‘the deer hunter’.
As with religion, hunting reflects people’s own views of what is right and wrong. Very few argue that societies which need to hunt for their basic survival are morally wrong for doing so.4 But many have a problem with people who go hunting for leisure or pleasure. The social-media storms of bile that ensued after an American huntress was photographed posing with a downed lion testify to that.5
I take the middle ground. I cannot see why you need to hunt a leopard that is not posing a direct threat to your community. But I have little problem with hunting bountiful, normal game, provided the meat is for the pot. I certainly can’t understand those who gladly eat flesh but object to those who hunt properly husbanded animals.
Having seen the ugly, mechanised slaughter of modern abattoirs up close, I see no moral difference between meat butchered there and meat that’s been hunted.6 Both, admittedly, are not necessary for survival, but vegetarianism is one virtue I’ve yet to embrace.
Of course, I’m not alone in my love of meat. Fifty years ago global meat consumption was 70 million tonnes. By 2007 it was 268 million tonnes, a rise of almost 300 per cent. In 1961 we ate about 22 kilograms of meat per person; by 2007 we were eating 40 kilograms.7 This rise in meat consumption occurred as the world saw a huge shift in urbanisation. Today over 50 per cent of the world’s population live in towns and cities,8 and given that some cities have only 8 per cent of the bird species and 25 per cent of the plant species to comparable undeveloped land,9 it’s clear that billions of people are consuming meat without really living in sight of the natural world from where it comes. Despite our deep ancestral links to a shared hunting past, the death of animals for food in many parts of the world is witnessed only by those who work in slaughterhouses or by those who hunt.
I count myself among those who know neither world. I live in a large city and do not have a garden. I only really see nature when I escape the chokehold of an urban ringway.
This is not to say I had never hunted before. I had sought to catch sharks with lassos in Papua New Guinea. I had been on crocodile expeditions armed with spears. And I had butchered ewes and pigs. I had never, though, shot an animal for the sport as well as for the meat. The other worlds of the gun had shown their faces to me long before this book was conceived. The world of the rifle hunter, though, was totally new to me. I had much to learn.
There is the battue, or the beating of sticks, where you drive animals into a gun’s range. You can go calling – the art of mimicking animal noises to lure them to you. There is blind hunting, which involves waiting for animals from a concealed hide. There is stalking, the practice of quietly searching for your prey. Persistence hunting is done by running your prey to exhaustion. And then there is netting, trapping, spotlighting and glassing.
These things I did not know, but I was trying to learn them as I battled with an immense German breakfast of Aufschnitt und Käse, in a functional hotel on the outskirts of the Bavarian town of Nuremberg. In an hour the IWA Outdoor Classics – an international show for hunting guns and a wide range of shooting sports – was opening. Given it was filled with huntsmen, it felt appropri
ate to fill myself with heavy meat and to learn the secret language of poachers and trackers while so doing.
About 40,000 hunters from over 100 countries had travelled to this town in southern-central Germany, and it was, simply, the best place for a novice like me to be introduced to the worlds of chasers and deerstalkers.
Finishing my plate of sliced sausage, I headed to the subway. Nuremberg’s metro was teutonically punctual and shifted smoothly through this quiet town. The air was brisk and cold, the sky a blank white. Outside, large functional and faceless office buildings sped past. From time to time men in smart suits pulling petite roller briefcases joined the train; they were on the way to the shooting show, too. Gun sellers.
A Frenchman boarded, wearing a light-brown moleskin jacket and fox tie, as if the Revolution had never happened. Behind me two Englishmen with broad faces and even broader Cornish accents talked about profits. The train slid to a stop.
As we stepped out, the sprawling convention centre lay on all sides, up a covered slope. It was a broad cathedral to commerce, struck in minimalist white and glass and steel. Thousands of people were striding with intent, and a pianist played the Roberta Flack classic ‘Killing Me Softly’ inside. Armed with a press-tag lanyard, I walked in.
The first stall was not discreet, despite its attempts to be so. J. P. Sauer & Sohn. Established in 1751, it was clearly a gun manufacturer that wanted you to know where you stood in the order of things. A large and largely empty VIP section was cordoned off behind a line of glass cabinets, in which stood the manufacturers’ history in gunmetal – shotguns from 1899, 1894 and 1885, the earliest a Kal.12 Perkussion-Doppelflinte from 1835. It had an exquisite hunting scene engraved on its stock, and these detailed intricacies spoke of privilege and clear class lines. Yet, for all their implied elitism and advertised good taste, J. P. Sauer & Sohn were still willing to make tat. There stood a Steampunk rifle, decorated with fanciful flourishes in an attempt to capture a sense of apocalyptic industrialism, sold to a man whom the Sauer rep disdainfully called ‘an Arab buyer’ for €140,000. Beside it lay a bespoke ‘Genghis Khan’ hunting rifle, engraved with mystical symbols from the East, its stock a maze of Chinese exotica. It was mounted on a dais beside a Moorish helmet laid out upon a bed of desert sand. It had the price tag of €108,000 and looked like a Disney nightmare.
