Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  As fate would have it, Taft was further isolated in May 1909 by the stroke which incapacitated his wife Nellie. She, along with TR, had pushed him into the presidency and was a close confidant and advisor. The seriousness of her condition was kept from the press and consequently Edith Roosevelt only sent consolations the next month, assuring Taft that she would have written sooner had she known the truth of Nellie’s illness which she had only learned from Captain Butt’s recent visit to Sagamore Hill. Edith also told Taft, who had had no contact with her husband since his departure, that her letters from Africa were full of accounts of good hunting and that “Theodore feels that already the trip has been immensely successful, beyond all his hopes.”56 Hearing news of TR’s African triumphs, while he was alone in Washington beset by beasts of another sort, cannot have been pleasant for the president.

  Though Roosevelt did not write directly, he did ask their mutual friend Elihu Root, his former secretary of state who had taken a New York seat in the senate, to give his warm regards to Taft, whom he had heard from Lodge was “doing excellently.” Of course, TR went on, “Fixing up a Tariff” was much more important than his present occupation, but “not nearly so alluring.” Taft was bound to have “his little problems and worries” as president, but that simply was to be expected and things would be all right. TR also confided to Root his worries over the finances of the expedition, which had proved much more expensive than envisioned and after only two months had already used up much of its original funding. Unless Walcott at the Smithsonian could arrange more, the naturalists, who had been doing really remarkable work, would have to go home that summer. He and Kermit would have to finish the trip “on a hunter basis—which would be a pity” for he did not think a chance like this would ever occur again.57 To keep the naturalists on board, in the end Roosevelt was forced himself to send a plea to Andrew Carnegie, who supplied a further $20,000. In return he would expect a grateful TR to use his inf luence in Europe to further the millionaire’s dreams of international arbitration, disarmament and a league of peace.

  From the parched Sotik, the party marched north four days to the lush shores of Lake Naivasha, where hippopotamus was again the prey. They camped near Saigo Soi Ranch, the home of the Attenborough brothers, who provided a steam launch, and big heavy rowboat to use in the hunt. Once again tall green papyrus groves fringed the lagoons, which were covered by water lilies, bearing purple or pink flowers. Across the lilies ran richly colored birds called “lily-trotters” with toes so long and slender the lily pads supported then without sinking. In the lagoons there were also a number of hippo that bellowed and roared at night when they came ashore to feed. On land TR found them “astonishingly quick in their movements for such shapeless-looking, short-legged things.” In the water they were also unexpectedly quick, particularly in the shallows where they could “gallop very fast on the bottom under water.” After several frustrating days in the launch and rowboat, Roosevelt finally shot a hippo on shore which, in its attempt to get back into deep water, charged the boat “with jaws open bent on mischief.” Kermit snapped photos while his father stopped the hippo with a brain shot.58

  At Lake Naivasha the Colonel received the upsetting news of the dismissal from the Paris embassy of his friend Henry White, a mere three months after Roosevelt had assured White that Taft would keep him in place. Now an embarrassed TR confided to his friend in Paris that the “last thing he wanted to do was criticize his successor,” but he wanted him to know that “everything I could do for you was done,” not out of his affection for White, “but because as I told Taft I regard you as without exception the very best man in our diplomatic service.” Though he had not made a personal request of Taft, he had told him that there were “certain men whose qualifications were of so high an order that I felt I ought to dwell on them and that conspicuous among these was yourself.” Taft had told TR and Lodge that he meant to keep White, but he added, ominously for the future, that of course, it was “not a promise any more than my statement that I would not run again for President was not a promise.”59

  More lighthearted news came from Jusserand, to whom Roosevelt had reported that he was as usual having a grand time. The French Ambassador replied that had seen various reports over the previous four months, but doubted the veracity of most of them, and was delighted to hear from TR “direct.” Now he knew the “truth of it; all is as it should be, and you are having, ‘The Time of Your Life,’ just as you had it at the White House, Oyster Bay, Cuba, North Dakota, etc.” For the Colonel’s amusement, the Frenchman enclosed a newspaper cartoon which showed TR in pith helmet writing on a “Mombasa Souvenir Postcard” addressed to the U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, with the message: “Every time I shoot something I think of you.” Jusserand told his friend to continue, “but not too long and mind the mosquitoes.” And if the Smithsonian did not have enough room for all his “Rhinos and Hippos” he enclosed another drawing by Clifford Berryman (whose 1902 TR cartoon had inspired the Teddy Bear), which showed a parade of fashionable ladies wearing elephant, rhino and antelope heads, lion muffs and antelope stoles, outside a shop. In its window a sign declared “Latest importations from our agent in East Africa” and another in front of a male lion head stated: “This superb specimen killed by Bwana Tumbo (T.R.).”60

  Among the many requests sent to Roosevelt from home was one for the permission needed to trademark a “Bwana Tumbo: Hunting in Africa” children’s game, but youngsters needed no official rules to take themselves off into the woods pretending to be intrepid hunters in mock safaris of their own. This trend gave fodder to one critic, Dr. William J. Long, whose “nature faker” writings TR had attacked mercilessly while he was president. In a New York Times article, Long declared that the “worst feature in the whole bloody business” was not the “killing of few hundred wild animals in Africa,” but the “brutalizing influence” which TR’s reports of this from Africa had on thousands of American boys. While tramping through some woods only the previous week, Long claimed to have come across “half a dozen little fellows,” the oldest calling himself “Bwana Tumbo,” who were “shooting everything in sight, killing birds at a time when every dead mother meant a nest full of young birds slowly starving to death.” How could he convince them that their work was “inhuman,” Long asked, when “the great American hero” was “occupied at this time with the same detestable business?” And why should they not also “be heroic and make a few fine shots” since “faunal naturalists and other game butchers have killed off all our buffaloes?”61

  All the interest at home, good and bad, led TR to call for action from his editor at Scribner’s, Robert Bridges. Roosevelt instructed Bridges that he ought to publish the two additional chapters he had sent from Lake Naivasha as articles as soon as possible. Further, his trip had attracted, not only the avid attention of the country, but also the competition. He had been told that no less than eight books were in preparation on hunting and traveling in British East Africa and scheduled to be published by the beginning of the following year. The object, of course, was to “forestall our book.” Therefore, to get the first article out by October or November would be “from every standpoint advisable.” TR also told Bridges that he thought Kermit had done very well with the photographs and “from the zoological standpoint they are the most important of all” and they ought to use “quite a number of them.”62 The Scribner’s articles began running in the October 1909 issue and finished the following September, just before the book was published.

  On Lake Naivasha searching for a bull hippo to complete the group, chance took the Colonel’s rowboat smack into a school of hippo which bumped the bottom several times in their panic to flee after Roosevelt opened fire. The first jar caused them all to sit down. They were struck again, and, he recorded:

  the shallow muddy water boiled, as the huge beasts, above and below the surface, scattered every which way. Their eyes starting the two rowers began to back water out of the dangerous neighborhood, while I shot an an
imal whose head appeared on my left, as it made off with frantic haste. I took it for granted that the hippo at which I had first fired . . . had escaped. This one disappeared as usual, and I had not the slightest idea whether or not I had killed it. I had small opportunity to ponder the subject, for twenty feet away the water bubbled and a huge head shot out facing me, the jaws wide open. There was no time to guess at its intentions, and I fired on the instant. Down went the head, and I felt the boat quiver as the hippo passed underneath . . . a head burst up twenty yards off, with a lily-pad plastered over one eye, giving the hippo and absurd resemblance to a discomfited prize fighter, and then disappeared with great agitation.63

  Within an hour four dead hippos appeared on the surface, a big bull and three big cows.

  This unwanted carnage occurred simultaneously with an onset of the fever Roosevelt had been subject to since his days in Cuba and the combination sent him into a depression such as Warrington Dawson, who was at the base camp, had not seen. A distraught TR told Dawson that he greatly regretted the hippo incident but had been forced by circumstances to fire into the herd, never dreaming he would kill so many. He went on, “I don’t know what to do about it. We shall have to let the papers know. And this is not a game-slaughtering expedition.”64 The Colonel was painfully aware of the articles being published at home alleging just such butchery. A week earlier he had written to Captain Foran, who had been lion hunting himself, about the proper response. Before he sent anything TR wanted to discuss the matter, but he told Foran that he thought all that was necessary to say was that “not an animal has been shot except for food or to be preserved for the National Museum, and that as a matter of fact almost all have been thus preserved.”65 As it fell out, the press response to the incident on Lake Navaisha did not prove as violent as feared and within a few days Roosevelt had rebounded, both from the fever and his depression.

  In Nairobi for a refit, and to ship the second lot of specimens, TR again enjoyed the considerable hospitality of the McMillans, this time at their house, Chiromo, “with its broad, vine-shaded veranda, running round all four sides, and its garden, fragrant and brilliant with innumerable flowers.”66 The mail waiting at Nairobi included a letter from Lodge, who passed along a comment of their mutual friend Elihu Root, now occupying the New York senate seat previously held by “Boss” Thomas Platt who in 1900 had maneuvered the troublesome TR out of the governor’s chair into the vice presidency. About one of the newspaper dispatches on the hunt, Root jibed: “Of course Theodore shot three lions with one bullet and Kermit shot one lion with three bullets.”67Roosevelt instructed Lodge to tell Root that he did not “at all like his hardened skepticism about the lions” and if this sort of thing continued he would have to “lead an insurrection” to put Tom Platt back in Root’s New York seat when his “term expires—if as I anticipate the worthy Platt at that period still continues to exist in a condition of wicked and malevolent mummification.”68

  Back on safari Roosevelt wrote to his friend Spring Rice, “Here I am, way out in the desert with nobody but the hunter Cuninghame—a trump—and the funny grasshopper-like blacks.” Sometimes, he went on, “I have shot well, sometimes badly; and I am now an old man, and wholly unable to make exertions which once I should not have regarded as exertions at all.” But still on the whole he felt he had done pretty well, and from the scientific standpoint the trip would be of value as no such collection of complete skins of big game had ever been sent out of Africa by any one expedition. TR looked forward to seeing Spring Rice in England and talking to him about what he had seen in “your African colonies.” He greatly liked and admired “your officials, and your settlers seem to me in all essentials just like our westerners.” It was in fact difficult for him to remember that he was “not a fellow countrymen of theirs”; and they certainly acted as if they thought he was “an especial friend and champion who sympathized and believed in them.” TR concluded by telling Spring Rice that he was “dreadfully homesick for Mrs. Roosevelt. Catch me ever leaving her for a year again, if I can help it.”69 While he lived out his dream of Africa Edith, equally homesick for Theodore, had struck out on an expedition of her own to Europe.

  Chapter 3

  A Lion Roars in East Africa

  While Theodore stalked British East Africa with Kermit, Edith took three of the children, Ethel, Archie, and Quentin, on an expedition of their own to Europe. They sailed on the S. S. Crete and she brought along $10,000 to finance a five months “endless sightseeing tour,” for the children’s education.1The voyagers arrived on July 12, 1909 at Genoa where Edith’s maiden sister, Emily Carow, awaited them. By nightfall they were all ensconced seventy miles away at Emily’s tiny house, Villa Magna Quies (Villa of Great Quiet), outside Porto Maurizio. Though small, the villa in the Ligurian Hills featured breathtaking views of olive groves and the Mediterranean. For a few restful weeks the children rode bicycles and took daily French, Italian, and Latin lessons at the nearby Franciscan monastery. Edith ignored the journalists who snapped their pictures while they strolled on the pebbly beach or the donkey trails, protected by a Secret Service Agent. At the end of July, Ethel and Archie embarked for a tour of Provence with the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, and his wife. On Edith’s forty-eighth birthday, August 6, she and Quentin explored the Palais Des Papes and saw a play at the amphitheatre at Orange before traveling to Lyons to be reunited with Ethel and Archie. Edith confided to her aunt Lizzie that she was beginning to feel “a little more confident in my powers of looking out for myself.”2

  A week later the family was back together in a Paris apartment in the Rue Gabriel. Over the next month they carried out an intensive campaign of museums, palaces, and cathedrals from their Paris base. Their friend Henry Adams, who summered there and had written an important book on French cathedrals, joined them for sightseeing. He complained of playing “dancing bear to Mrs. Roosevelt,” but in fact the curmudgeonly Adams admired her and enjoyed his time with the children. He was particularly fond of Quentin and on Ethel’s eighteenth birthday gave her a party at the ornate Le Petit Palais on the Left Bank, built for the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition. Her father was happy to hear (some weeks later) that the party had been such a success and that Ethel’s mother had become a real “pretty miss dimples” when she thought of his struggles with “my one chicken” Kermit. TR reported to Ethel that the “one chicken” was off on “his own hook now” with a “haggard deputy hen” in the shape of Tarlton, but he was much less anxious than he had been about the risks. His chief concern at present was that Kermit, because he was so keen and active, did not understand that TR had to take the first chance at the game, “because a large part of the value to the museum vanishes if I do not shoot it myself.” Kermit could not bear to think the trip would ever end while TR looked forward to the last of March and being reunited at Khartoum with his wife and daughter.3

  On September 11, to return to their schoolwork, Archie and Quentin took ship home accompanied by an adult chaperone, Ward Theron. That day Edith confided to Spring Rice that “for the last six months my life has been made up of partings which seemed more or less inevitable.” She reported that Warrington Dawson had come to Paris from Africa with “many tales of the hunters.” There was nothing left to them now but “white rhino and a few rare species with unheard of names.” She did rather dread the long trip through the less healthy climate of Uganda, but knew that precautions would be taken. Dawson had reported that TR was in perfect health and that Kermit was “absolutely tireless.” Of the whole safari of 200 there was no one who could keep up with him. She asked Spring Rice if he remembered “what a frail little midget” Kermit was as a boy, “with a great iron brace on his leg.” Edith told Spring Rice to write to her and not to mind saying things about sleeping sickness as she knew “all about it” and did not need to “pretend to you that I think Africa is a Paradise, in any case it is less dangerous to life than the White House!”4

  The departure of the boys left Edith and Ethel fre
e to visit Switzerland, Milan, Verona, Venice, Padua, and Turin before returning to Porto Maurizio on 8 October. Later in the month they added Florence, Siena, and Rome to their itinerary. At the last, in the early hours of November 6, Edith was awakened by news of “a terrible rumor” circulating that Theodore had been killed in Africa. Only at five that afternoon did a cable finally arrive from TR’s friends in Nairobi confirming that the report was false. An immensely relieved Edith nevertheless told their friend Spring Rice that the fright, “took something out of me which can’t come back until I see him.”5When he learned of his wife’s distress over the false report, Roosevelt moved up his arrival in Khartoum by two weeks, to mid-March. On November 12, 1909, Edith and Ethel sailed for New York.

  The same day, from their camp on the ‘Nzoi River, near Mount Elgon in British East Africa, TR poured out his heart to Edith in one of the few love letters she attached enough importance to not to later destroy in an attempt to protect their privacy. “Oh sweetest of all sweet girls,” he wrote, “last night I dreamed that I was with you, and that our separation was but a dream; and when I awoke it was almost too hard to bear. Well, one must pay for everything. You have made a real happiness in my life; and so it is natural and right that I should constantly [be] more and more lonely without you.” He went on, “Darling, I love you so. In a little over four months I shall see you, now.”

  Of his present situation, Roosevelt explained that the ‘Nzoi, a rapid muddy river with crocodiles and hippos in it, was one of the streams that made up the headwaters of the Nile. Its banks were fringed with strange trees, and the surrounding country was covered with grass so high as to make it hopeless to look for lions. But they had killed many antelope of kinds new to them, and whose names would mean little to her—bohor, sing sing, oribi, lelwel, kob. It seemed to be a healthy country for men but half their horses had died and they might have to go on to the railway by foot. He worried whether his Scribner’s articles had been well received but hoped at least “you have liked them” and confessed that it had been “a very real resource to have them to do.” He reassured her that he never would have taken the safari as “merely a pleasure trip, a mere hunting trip.” He signed the letter “Your Own Lover.”6