Theodore Roosevelt Abroad

by J. Lee Thompson

  Over the previous months, TR had been busy himself. At Nairobi on August 3, 1909, before an audience of two hundred settlers and officials, he gave the first of many public preachments to follow over the next ten months on a variety of topics, ranging from his view of Britain’s imperial mission to world peace, taking to the wider world the “bully pulpit” he had made famous at home. The Colonel told his Nairobi audience that he had come on a pleasure trip and any ex-president or ex-statesman who desired “an antidote for the pleasures or troubles of the past,” would do well to “have recourse to lion shooting” for then they would live “in the immediate present.” Without detracting from the lion, hunting buffalo in a papyrus swamp was also “unrivalled for distracting the attention of the mind from the past.” In addition to being “the most attractive playground in the world,” Roosevelt believed the country had a great agricultural and industrial future. From the first time he stood on the Kapiti Plains, conditions in British East Africa struck him as similar to those he knew in the American West years earlier and, though times were hard at present, he believed that eventually the same wealth that came West during the last quarter century would come to the protectorate.

  Men of means and business should be encouraged, but in TR’s view for the colony to prosper most newcomers must settle on the land, and be of the right type, farmers, and ranchers from “tough fighting stock” like those who had gone to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains thirty years before. Such settlement was now possible because of the Uganda Railroad. The construction of this he compared to the Panama Canal and railways in the American West, both built for future needs and not in terms of whether they would pay or not. He had not the “slightest sympathy” with those at home in the Liberal government who expected an immediate return. Not many people outside of Africa realized that this was one of the few regions in the world fit for new white settlement and that the protectorate was in fact “a real white man’s country.” He had been told that white children could not prosper, but had seen them “as sturdy as anyone could wish to see” and as “healthy as any in America or the British Isles.”

  Up to this point, TR had been preaching to the choir and his comments roundly applauded, but he warned his audience that he was now going to speak “at the risk of not receiving so much sympathy.” In ma k ing this a “white man’s countr y,” Roosevelt asked them to remember that “not only the laws of righteousness but your own real and ultimate self-interest demand that the black man be treated with justice, that he be safeguarded in his rights and helped upward, not pressed downward.” However, he had no patience with “sentimentalists,” who he believed did more damage than did brutality. In his view, the native tribes were “hopelessly incompetent to better themselves or to utilize this country to advantage, without white leadership and direction.” Neither did he have any patience for those at home who “prate of selfgovernment” for people who have “not governed themselves and never could.” The white population must “occupy a position of unquestioned mastery and leadership,” but with a “deep sense of all the responsibility which it entails.” This was why Roosevelt believed in helping the missionary, of whatever creed, who labored “sincerely, disinterestedly, and with practical good sense in his fieldwork.” He judged men by their conduct, not by creed or origin.

  In the difficult task of building this new nation, TR told his audience, “you are entitled to the heartiest support and encouragement” from the “men who stay at home.” Responding to those who had asked for his aid on this front, he went on that he meant to “speak frankly” when he reached London. The Colonel concluded with an exhortation to “stand by each other” and to remember that “time spent in back biting” was wasted, and to “work heartily together” so that they would soon “turn this region into a real and prosperous white man’s country.” As the rest of the speech, this peroration was greeted with prolonged and loud applause.7

  Roosevelt really liked the men he met in British East Africa and he found all the officials to be “most kind.” He commented to Lodge that the day was past when an American was regarded as a poor relation and “if we remain self-reliant and powerful it will never return.” TR was interested to see how extensive American influence was and in how many directions it was felt. For example among the novels in the houses no English ones were more common than those of the American authors Edward Noyes Westcott and Winston Churchill, adding, “I mean of course our Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill the gentleman.” Their hunter Tarlton, an Australian, was fond of books and among his favorites were Longfellow, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain, and he felt towards the United States “just about as he feels towards England—if anything more warmly.”8 He told Lodge that half the people he met looked as though they had walked out of the pages of Kipling, but they greatly resented his saying so as they looked upon Kipling “much as Californians look upon Bret Harte.”9

  Two days after the Colonel’s Nairobi speech, the congressional insurgents who had waved TR’s progressive banner in the tariff fight finally lost their battle as Taft signed into law the Payne-Aldrich Tariff. The measure in fact changed things little overall, but it was seen as an upward revision and this perception ruled the day, to the detriment of Taft’s political future. Archie Butt, however, reported to his old chief on the tariff, in his opinion the only important matter that had come up since Roosevelt left, that he would be pleased to learn that Taft had “whipped the old-timers” such as Aldrich and Cannon. Though not pleased with the bill, the president had got “certain fundamentals incorporated in it” which he felt made the measure “one he could sign.” Butt also reported that he had been playing golf, a game he had never liked, with Taft and was beginning to suspect it had “charms of which I have been ignorant.” In their old White House days he had “corns on my right hand from tennis.” Now his right hand was as “delicate as that of a girl,” while there were corns on his left hand, “the change of hands showing the change of administrations.”10

  Roosevelt departed Nairobi August 8 for a month’s elephant hunting at Mount Kenya and beyond. Decades of ivory hunting had driven the herds to more and more remote areas and led the British to extend protections from extermination. No cows were allowed to be shot except by special license for museums and no bulls with ivory weighing less than thirty pounds. In Roosevelt’s opinion, too much praise could not be given the “government and the individuals who had brought about this happy result” as it would be “a veritable and most tragic calamity if the lordly elephant, the giant among existing four-footed creatures, should be permitted to vanish from the face of the earth.”11 Wherever he had gone, no other animal, not even the lion, was so widely spoken of and respected as the great pachyderm. “Not only to hunters,” TR wrote, “but to naturalists, and to all people who possess any curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of nature” the elephant was the “most interesting of all.” This was because of the unrivalled combination of its “huge bulk, its singular form, the value of its ivory, its great intelligence—in which it is only matched, if at all, by the highest apes, and possibly by one or two of the highest carnivora—and its varied habits.” In line of descent and physical formation the elephant stood by itself, “wholly apart from all the other great land beasts, and differing from them even more widely than they differ from each other.”12

  Rejoining Mearns and Loring at Lake Naivasha, the party trekked sixty miles northeast through Kikuyu country across the high plains of the Aberdare range to Neri in the foothills of 17,000-foot Mount Kenya, eighty miles north of Nairobi. Their last camp, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, was so cold that the water froze in the basins. At Neri, they were greeted by the District Commissioner, who organized a great Kikuyu dance in their honor. Two thousand naked and half-naked warriors took part in the celebration. Some carried “gaudy blankets, others girdles of leopard-skin; their ox-hide shields were colored in bold patterns, their long-bladed spears quivered and gleamed.” Many wore head-dresses made of a lion’s mane or
the black and white pelt of a Colobus monkey. Their faces were painted red and yellow. Those of the young men about to undergo the rite of circumcision were “stained a ghastly white, and their bodies fantastically painted.” The women, “shrilled applause, and danced in groups by themselves.”13

  The next day the clouds lifted and they were able to see the high rock peaks of Kenya, one of the rare glacier-bearing mountains of the equator. Mearns and Loring stayed in the area to make a thorough survey, while Roosevelt, Heller and Cunningham spent a week tracking down elephant. This hunt was carried out in a great forest, from which a thick screen of wet foliage largely shut out the sun. It was only passable, single file, on the elephant paths that wound up hill and down and on which the men had to duck under flower covered vines and scramble over fallen timber. The rain-soaked ground forced Roosevelt to wear his hob-nailed boots. On the second day they came upon the fresh trail of a herd of a dozen or so elephants, including two big bulls, which it took another day’s tramping to overtake. First came their “savage” ‘Ndorobo guides, then Cuninghame followed by his gun bearer, Roosevelt and his own, with Heller and a dozen porters and skinners bringing up the rear. They left their first night’s camp intact and traveled with food for three days and carried two small tents.

  Before they could see them, they could hear the elephants as they moved through the forest, the boughs cracking under their weight. TR was also struck by the clearly audible and “curious internal rumblings of the great beasts.” He tried when possible to step in the footprints of the huge animals where there were no unbroken sticks to crack under his feet. It “made our veins thrill,” he wrote, “thus for half an hour to creep stealthily along, but a few rods from the herd, never able to see it because of the extreme denseness of the cover.” Finally, thirty yards in front of them, the head of a big bull with good ivory, resting its tusks on the branches of a young tree, came into view. Using the Holland & Holland, TR aimed a little to one side of the left eye, hoping for a brain shot and a clean kill. The first bullet, however, only stunned the bull, and it took the second barrel to dispatch it. Before he could reload, the thick bushes parted before him and “through them surged the vast bulk of a charging bull elephant” so close he could have “touched me with his trunk.” TR dodged aside as Cuninghame opened fire, driving the wounded bull into the forest. He “trumpeted shrilly, and then all sound ceased.”14

  Pursuing the wounded animal would have to wait as they had first to preserve the skin of Roosevelt’s bull, which would take some time and had to be done immediately. The tusks of his first elephant weighed a respectable one hundred and thirty pounds and the gun bearers and porters wildly celebrated the kill. The workers were soon “splashed with blood from head to foot” by the skinning which continued until stopped by darkness. One of the ‘Ndorobo trackers took off his blanket and “squatted stark naked inside the carcass the better to use his knife.” All the men cut off strips of meat for themselves, hanging them in “red festoons from the branches round about.” Until late that night, around the camp fires, the men feasted and sang “in a strange minor tone.” The flickering light left them “at one moment in black obscurity, and the next brought them into bold relief their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleaming eyes and flashing teeth.” In a primitive rite his own Pleistocene ancestors would have appreciated, the Colonel feasted on slices of elephant heart roasted on a pronged stick. He found it “delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold.”15

  Leaving Cuninghame and Heller behind to finish the preservation, and to track down Cuninghame’s wounded bull, Roosevelt returned to Neri to organize a hunt of his own for the first time. It took several days to find enough Kikuyu porters, and in this he enlisted the help of two young Scots who spoke the language. While he waited, Acting Governor Jackson arrived at Neri and Roosevelt was able to tell him of his bull elephant as well as the birds and mammals they had trapped. A great “ingowa” or war dance was organized in Jackson’s honor, the sight of which TR found “one of interest and a certain fascination.”16 Since the fifty Kikuyu finally assembled could not handle the loads of the regular porters, the Colonel hired donkeys to carry the food required to the elephant camp. Continuing the quest for elephant and other game, in the end he pushed almost a hundred miles further north to the headwaters of the Guaso Nyero River. Though it was supposed to be the dry season, the weather continued very wet and during one evening’s violent storm a funnel cloud snaked its way across the skies in sight of their camp, luckily moving away from them.

  On this solo hunt they encountered no elephant but many antelope, in particular eland, the “king of the antelope,” and the “strongly built and boldly colored” oryx, with long, black, rapier-like horns. A good bull eland head was among the few trophies Roosevelt desired for himself and he was pleased to be able to shoot, at three hundred yards, a “magnificent bull” with a fine head of the variety called Patterson’s eland. Trying to find a similar specimen for the museum, Roosevelt came upon a herd of the large antelope, no faster than the range cattle he was used to, in open country. He galloped towards the herd on his brown zebra-shaped horse and, for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, felt as though he was a youth again in the “cow camps of the West, a quarter century ago.” Twice he rounded up the herd, just as once in Yellowstone he had rounded up a herd of elk for John Burroughs to look at. Among the eland, however, there were no big bulls, only cows and young stock. He nevertheless “enjoyed the gallop.”17

  Next TR turned to oryx, which proved maddeningly elusive. Finally, after missing at four hundred yards, and feeling “rather desperate,” he unleashed a fusillade, emptying his magazine “on the Ciceronian theory, that he who throws a javelin all day must hit the mark some time.” This stratagem yielded an oryx cow with a handsome dun gray coat, long tail and horns, and bold black and white markings on its face. Roosevelt assigned four Kikuyu to skin the animal and carry in the meat. He was amused at the condescension with which his four regular attendants, his gun-bearers and sais, treated “their wild and totally uncivilized brethren” whom they called “shenzis,” savages or bush people, and would not associate with in any way.18

  Though the Colonel claimed to thoroughly enjoy “being entirely by myself, as far as white men were concerned” for this period of more than two weeks, he was pleased when, on the afternoon of September 3, Cuninghame, Heller and the main safari caught up with his party.19 The combined expedition then set out for Meru boma, a small settlement in the snowy northeast slopes of Mount Kenya, directly under the equator, where three days later they were reunited with Kermit and Tarlton, who had been exploring the lower reaches of the Guaso Nyero. They also had found no elephant, but did kill lion, cheetah, oryx, and buffalo, and collected examples of several new animals including the aard-wolf, a miniature hyena; the gerenuk, a small giraffe-like antelope; and Grévy’s zebra, as big as a small horse.

  Roosevelt wanted another cow and bull elephant for the National Museum and they were fortunate at Meru boma to receive a report of three cows raiding the fields of the local people that had charged when an attempt was made to drive them away. The party found the animals in a practically impenetrable jungle of ten-foot tall “rank growing bushes” which was not good ground for hunters. They could only travel on the elephant trails while their prey could move in any direction, “with no more difficulty than a man would have in a hayfield.” Luckily the party came upon the trunk of a great fallen tree and scrambled up it to a platform six feet above the ground. Balanced on this perch, TR was able to get a glimpse of the elephants. At sixty yards he opened fire at the largest with the Holland & Holland, the blast of which, he recorded, was “none too pleasant for the other men on the log and made Cuninghame’s nose bleed.” It was even less pleasant for the stunned animal, which he finished with his Springfield. The elephant turned out to be, not a cow, but a herd bull with forty-pound tusks. This specimen TR gave to the University of California.20

  Back at Meru boma, Roos
evelt repor ted to L odge t he “great comfor t” the pigskin library gave him. The same was true, he said, about writing his own book, which he must finish before he reached Khartoum, for “I am now too old to be able contently to spend a year living only as a hunter and with my brain lying fallow.” He told his friend that he and his wife Nannie would be amused to hear that in Africa he had “come into my inheritance of Shakespeare.” He had never before cared for more than one or two of the plays, but for some reason the “sealed book was suddenly opened to me on this trip.” Roosevelt supposed that when a man who was fond of reading was for long periods in a wilderness with but a few volumes he “inevitably grows into a true appreciation of the books that are good.” He still balked at three or four of the plays, but most of them he had read over and over again.21

  While the Colonel rested at Meru boma, a native runner brought the news that Captain Robert Peary had succeeded in reaching the North Pole. At Oyster Bay a year before, TR had gone on Peary’s ship, The Roosevelt, to wish him “God-speed” for the effort. Several months later the Captain had sent to the White House what young Quentin called “treasures” from the arctic. These included a narwhal horn for the President, “wonderful and beautiful” fox skins for Edith and whale’s ears for Quentin, who was, Roosevelt explained to Peary, the “first individual who recognized what those last treasures were.”22 On September 12, 1909 TR instructed Foran that if the news about Peary’s reaching the North Pole was “unquestionably authentic,” to have the following published for him: “I rejoice over Captain Peary’s great achievement. Too much credit cannot be given to him; he has performed one of the great feats of the age, and all his countrymen should join in doing him honor.” About the safari, Roosevelt added that since he had written last he had killed two more elephants and Kermit one. Soon Kermit was going off west towards Lake Harrington and across to the Guaso Nyero. He asked Foran to share this with the Reuters news service people.23