Produced by Karen Fabrizius, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE
BY
LORD FREDERIC HAMILTON
TO MY GALLANT CANADIAN FRIEND GERALD RUTHERFORD, M.C. OF WINNIPEG
FOREWORD
So kindly a reception have the public accorded to "The Days Before
Yesterday" that I have ventured into print yet again.
This is less a book of reminiscences than a recapitulation of various
personal experiences in many lands, some of which may be viewed from
unaccustomed angles.
The descriptions in Chapter VIII of cattle-working and of
horse-breaking on an Argentine estancia have already appeared in
slightly different form in an earlier book of mine, now out of print.
F. H.
_London, 1921._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace-Our Australian Jehu--The
shooting camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur Mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar
CHAPTER II
Mighty Kinchinjanga--The inconceivable splendours of a Himalayan
sunrise--The last Indian telegraph office--The irrepressible British
Tommy--An improvised garden--An improvised Durbar hall--A splendid
ceremony--A native dinner--The disguised Europeans--Our shocking
table-manners--Incidents--Two impersonations; one successful, the
other the reverse--I come off badly--Indian jugglers--The
rope-trick--The juggler, the rope, and the boy--An inexplicable
incident--A performing cobra scores a success--Ceylon "Devil
Dancers"--Their performance--The Temple of the Tooth--The uncovering
of the Tooth--Details concerning--An abominable libel--Tea and
coffee--Peradeniya Gardens--The upas tree of Java--Colombo an Eastern
Clapham Junction--The French lady and the savages--The small Bermudian
and the inhabitants of England
CHAPTER III
Frenchmen pleasant travelling companions--Their limitations--Vicomte
de Vogue--The innkeeper and the ikon--An early oil-burning steamer--A
modern Bluebeard--His "Blue Chamber"--Dupleix--His ambitious scheme
--A disastrous period for France--A personal appreciation of the
Emperor Nicholas II--A learned but versatile Orientalist--Pidgin
English--Hong-Kong--An ancient Portuguese city in China--Duck junks--A
comical Marathon race--Canton--Its fascination and its appalling
smells--The malevolent Chinese devils--Precautions adopted
against--"Foreign devils"--The fortunate limitations of Chinese
devils--The City of the Dead--A business interview
CHAPTER IV
The glamour of the West Indies--Captain Marryat and Michael
Scott--Deadly climate of the islands in the eighteenth century--The
West Indian planters--Difference between East and West Indies--"Let us
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die"--Training-school for British
Navy--A fruitless voyage--Quarantine--Distant view of Barbados--Father
Labat--The last of the Emperors of Byzantium--Delightful little Lady
Nugent and her diary of 1802--Her impressions of Jamaica--Wealthy
planters--Their hideous gormandising--A simple morning meal--An
aldermanic dinner--How the little Nugents were gorged--Haiti--Attempts
of General Le Clerc to secure British intervention in Haiti--Presents
to Lady Nugent--Her Paris dresses described--Our arrival in
Jamaica--Its marvellous beauty--The bewildered Guardsman--Little trace
of Spain left in Jamaica--The Spaniards as builders--British and
Spanish Colonial methods contrasted
CHAPTER V
An election meeting in Jamaica--Two family experiences at contested
elections--Novel South African methods--Unattractive Kingston--A
driving tour through the island--The Guardsman as
orchid-hunter--Derelict country houses--An attempt to reconstruct the
past--The Fourth-Form room at Harrow--Elizabethan Harrovians--I meet
many friends of my youth--The "Sunday" books of the 'sixties--"Black
and White"--Arrival of the French fleet--Its inner
meaning--International courtesies--A delicate attention--Absent
alligators--The mangrove swamp--A preposterous suggestion--The swamps
do their work--Fever--A very gallant apprentice--What he did
CHAPTER VI
The Spanish Main--Its real meaning--A detestable region--Tarpon and
sharks--The isthmus--The story of the great pearl "La elegrina"--The
Irishman and the Peruvian--The vagaries of the Southern Cross--The
great Kingston earthquake--Point of view of small boys--Some
earthquake incidents--"Flesh-coloured" stockings--Negro hysteria--A
family incident, and the unfortunate Archbishop--Port Royal--A sugar
estate--A scene from a boy's book in real life--Cocoa-nuts--
Reef-fishing--Two young men of great promise
CHAPTER VII
Appalling ignorance of geography amongst English people--Novel
pedagogic methods--"Happy Families"--An instructive game--Bermuda--A
waterless island--A most inviting archipelago--Bermuda the most
northern coral-atoll--The reefs and their polychrome fish--A
"water-glass"--Sea-gardens--An ideal sailing-place--How the Guardsman
won his race--A miniature Parliament--Unfounded aspersions on the
Bermudians--Red and blue birds--Two pardonable mistakes--Soldier
gardeners--Officers' wives--The little roaming home-makers--A pleasant
island--The inquisitive German naval officers--"The Song of the
Bermudians"
CHAPTER VIII
The demerits of the West Indies classified--The utter ruin of
St. Pierre--The Empress Josephine--A transplanted
brogue--Vampires--Lost in a virgin forest--Dictator-Presidents, Castro
and Rosas--The mentality of a South American--"The Liberator"--The
Basques and their national game--Love of English people for foreign
words--Yellow fever--Life on an Argentina _estancia_--How cattle
are worked--The lasso and the "bolas"--Ostriches--Venomous toads--The
youthful rough-rider--His methods--Fuel difficulties--The vast
plains--The wonderful bird-life
CHAPTER IX
Difficulties of an Argentine railway engineer--Why Argentina has the
Irish gauge--A sudden contrast--A more violent contrast--Names and
their obligations--Cape Town--The thoroughness of the Dutch
pioneers--A dry and thirsty land--The beautiful Dutch Colonial houses
--The Huguenot refugees--The Rhodes fruit-farms--Surf-riding--Groote
Schuur--General Botha--The Rhodes Memorial--The episode of the sick
boy--A visit from Father Neptune--What pluck will do
CHAPTER X
In France at the outbreak of the war--The _tocsin_--The "voice of
the bell" at Harrow--Canon Simpson's theory about bells--His
"five-tone" principle--Myself as a London policeman--Experiences with
a celebrated Church choir--The "Grill-room Club"--Famous members
--Arthur Cecil--Some neat answers--Sir Leslie Ward--Beerbohm Tree and
the vain old member--Amateur supers--Juvenile disillusionment--The
Knight--The Baron--Age of romance passed
CHAPTER XI
Dislike of the elderly to change--Some legitimate grounds of
complaint--Modern pronunciation of Latin--How a European crisis was
averted by the old-fashioned method--Lord Dufferin's Latin
speech--Schoolboy costume of a hundred years ago--Discomforts of
travel in my youth--A crack liner of the 'eighties--Old travelling
carriages--An election incident--Headlong rush of extraordinary
turn-out--The politically-minded signalman and the doubtful
voter--"Decent bodies"--Confidence in the future--Conclusion
INDEX
HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE
CHAPTER I
An ideal form of travel for the elderly--A claim to roam at will in
print--An invitation to a big-game shoot--Details of journey to Cooch
Behar--The commercial magnate and the station-master--An outbreak of
cholera--Arrival at Cooch Behar Palace--Our Australian Jehu--The
Shooting Camp--Its gigantic scale--The daily routine--"Chota Begum,"
my confidential elephant--Her well-meant attentions--My first
tiger--Another lucky shot--The leopard and the orchestra--The
Maharanee of Cooch Behar--An evening in the jungle--The buns and the
bear--Jungle pictures--A charging rhinoceros--Another rhinoceros
incident--The amateur mahouts--Circumstances preventing a second visit
to Cooch Behar.
The drawbacks of advancing years are so painfully obvious to those who
have to shoulder the burden of a long tale of summers, that there is
no need to enlarge upon them.
The elderly have one compensation, however; they have well-filled
store-houses of reminiscences, chests of memories which are the
resting-place of so many recollections that their owner can at will
re-travel in one second as much of the surface of this globe as it has
been his good fortune to visit, and this, too, under the most
comfortable conditions imaginable.
Not for him the rattle of the wheels of the train as they grind the
interminable miles away; not for him the insistent thump of the
engines as they relentlessly drive the great liner through angry
Atlantic surges to her far-off destination in smiling Southern seas.
The muffled echoes of London traffic, filtering through the drawn
curtains, are undisturbed by such grossly material reminders of modern
engineering triumphs, for the elderly traveller journeys in a
comfortable easy-chair before a glowing fire, a cigar in his mouth,
and a long tumbler conveniently accessible to his hand.
The street outside is shrouded in November fog; under the steady
drizzle, the dripping pavements reflect with clammy insistence the
flickering gas-lamps, and everything, as Mr. Mantalini would have put
it, "is demnition moist and unpleasant," whilst a few feet away, a
grey-haired traveller is basking in the hot sunshine of a white coral
strand, with the cocoa-nut palms overhead whispering their endless
secrets to each other as they toss their emerald-green fronds in the
strong Trade winds, the little blue wavelets of the Caribbean Sea
lap-lapping as they pretend to break on the gleaming milk-white beach.
It is really an ideal form of travel! No discomforts, no hurryings to
catch connections, no passports required, no passage money, and no
hotel bills! What more could any one ask? The journeys can be varied
indefinitely, provided that the owner of the storehouse has been
careful to keep its shelves tidily arranged. India? The second shelf
on the left. South Africa? The one immediately below it. Canada?
South America? The West Indies? There they all are, each one in its
proper place!
This private Thomas Cook & Son's office has the further advantage of
being eminently portable. Wherever its owner goes, it goes, too. For
the elderly this seems the most practical form of Travel Bureau, and
it is incontestably the most economical one in these days when prices
soar sky-high.
There is so much to see in this world of ours, and just one short
lifetime in which to see it! I am fully conscious of the difficulty of
conveying to others impressions which remain intensely vivid to
myself, and am also acutely alive to the fact that matters which
appear most interesting to one person, drive others to martyrdoms of
boredom.
In attempting to reproduce various personal experiences on paper, I
shall claim the roaming freedom of the fireside muser, for he can in
one second skip from Continent to Continent and vault over gaps of
thirty years and more, just as the spirit moves him; indeed, to change
the metaphor, before one record has played itself out, he can turn on
a totally different one without rising from his chair, adjusting a new
needle, or troubling to re-wind the machine, for this convenient
mental apparatus reproduces automatically from its repertory whatever
air is required.
Having claimed the privilege of roaming at will far from my subject, I
may say that ever since my boyhood I had longed to take part in a
big-game shoot, so when the late Maharajah of Cooch Behar invited me
in 1891 to one of his famous shooting-parties, I accepted with
alacrity, for the Cooch Behar shoots were justly famed throughout
India. The rhinoceros was found there, tigers, as Mrs. O'Dowd of
_Vanity Fair_ would have remarked, "were as plentiful as cabbages";
there were bears, too, leopards and water buffaloes, everything, in
short, that the heart of man could desire. It was no invitation to
travel five hundred miles for two days' shooting only, there were to be
five solid weeks of it in camp, and few people entertained on so
princely a scale as the Maharajah. It was distinctly an invitation to
be treasured--and gratefully accepted.
The five-hundred-mile journey between Calcutta and Cooch Behar was
unquestionably a varied one. There were four hours' train on the
broad-gauge railway, an hour's steamer to cross the Ganges, ten hours'
train on a narrow-gauge railway, three hours' propelling by poles in a
native house-boat down a branch of the Brahmaputra, six miles of swamp
to traverse on elephants, thirty miles to travel on the Maharajah's
private two-and-a-half-feet-gauge toy railway, and, to conclude with,
a twenty-five-mile drive.
Cooch Behar is now, I believe, directly linked up with Calcutta by
rail.
We left Calcutta a party of four. My nephew, General Sir Henry
Streatfeild, and his wife, another of the Viceroy's aides-de-camp,
myself, and a certain genial Calcutta business magnate, most popular
of Anglo-Indians. As we had a connection to catch at a junction on the
narrow-gauge railway, an interminable wait at a big station in the
early morning was disconcerting, for the connection would probably be
missed. The jovial, burly Englishman occupied the second
sleeping-berth in my compartment. As the delay lengthened, he, having
some official connection with the East Bengal State Railway, jumped
out of bed and went on to the platform in Anglo-Indian fashion, clad
merely in pyjamas and slippers. Approaching the immensely pompous
native station-master he upbraided him in no measured terms for the
long halt. Through the window I could hear every word of their
dialogue. "This delay is perfectly scandalous, station-master. I shall
certainly report it in Calcutta." "Would you care, sir, to enter
offeecial complaint in book kept for that purpose?" "By George! I
will!" answered the man of jute and indigo, hot with indignation. He
was conducted through long passages to the station-master's office at
the back of the building, where a strongly worded complaint was
entered in the book. "And now, may I ask," questioned the irate
business man, "when you mean to start this infernal train?" "Oh, the
terain, sir, has already deeparted these five minutes," answered the
bland native. Fortunately there was a goods train immediately
following the mail, and some four hours afterwards our big friend
alighted from a goods brake-van in a furious temper. He had had
nothing whatever to eat, and was still in pyjamas, bare feet and
slippers at ten in the morning. We had delayed the branch train as no
one seemed in any particular hurry, so all was well.
During a subsequent journey over the same line, we had an awful
experience. Through the Alipore suburb of Calcutta there runs a little
affluent of the Hooghly known as Tolly Gunge. For some reason this
insignificant stream is regarded as peculiarly sacred by Hindoos, and
every five years vast numbers of pilgrims come to bathe in and drink
Tolly Gunge. The stream is nothing now but an open sewer, but no
warnings of the doctors, and no Government edicts can prevent natives
from regarding this as a place of pilgrimage, rank poison though the
waters of Tolly Gunge must be.
A party of us left Calcutta on a shooting expedition during one of
these quinquennial pilgrimages. We found the huge Sealdah station
packed with dense crowds of home-going pilgrims. The station-master
was at his wits' end to provide accommodation, for every third-class
carriage was already full to overflowing, and still endless hordes of
devotees kept arriving. He finally had a number of covered trucks
coupled on to the train, into which the pilgrims were wedged as
tightly as possible, a second engine was attached, and we started.
Next morning I was awakened by a nephew of mine, who cried with an
awestruck face, "My God! It is perfectly awful! Look out of the
window!" It was a fearful sight. The waters of Tolly Gunge had done
their work, and cholera had broken out during the night amongst the
densely packed pilgrims. Men were carrying out dead bodies from the
train; there were already at least fifty corpses laid on the platform,
and the tale of dead increased every minute. Others, stricken with the
fell disease, were lying on the platform, still alive, but in a state
of collapse, or in the agonising cramps of this swift-slaying scourge.
There happened to be two white doctors in the train, who did all that
was possible for the sufferers, but, beyond the administration of
opium, medical science is powerless in cholera cases. The horrors of
that railway platform fixed themselves indelibly on my memory. I can
never forget it.
The late Maharajah of Cooch Behar had had a long minority, the soil of
his principality was very fertile and well-cultivated, and so
efficiently was the little State administered by the British Resident
that the Maharajah found himself at his majority the fortunate
possessor of vast sums of ready money. The Government of India had
erected him out of his surplus revenues a gigantic palace of
red-brick, a singularly infelicitous building material for that
burning climate. Nor can it be said that the English architect had
been very successful in his elevation. He had apparently anticipated
the design of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and had managed to
produce a building even less satisfactory to the eye than the vast
pile at the corner of Cromwell Road. He had also crowned his edifice
with a great dome. The one practical feature of the building was that
it was only one room thick, and that every room was protected by a
broad double verandah on both sides. The direct rays of the sun were,
therefore, powerless to penetrate to the interior, and with the double
verandahs the faintest breath of air sent a draught through every room
in the house.
We reached Cooch Behar after dark, and it was somewhat of a surprise
to find the Maharajah and his entire family roller-skating in the
great central domed hall of the palace, to the strains of a really
excellent string band. The Maharajah having a great liking for
European music, had a private orchestra of thirty-five natives who,
under the skilled tuition of a Viennese conductor, had learnt to play
with all the fire and vim of one of those unapproachable Austrian
bands, which were formerly (I emphasise the _were_) the delight
of every foreigner in Vienna. These native players had acquired in
playing dance music the real Austrian "broken time," and could make
their violins wail out the characteristic "thirds" and "sixths" in the
harmonies of little airy, light "Wiener Couplets" nearly as
effectively as Johann Strauss' famous orchestra in the "Volks-Garten"
in Vienna.
The whole scene was rather unexpected in the home of a native prince
in the wilds of East Bengal.
The Maharajah had fixed on a great tract of jungle in Assam, over the
frontier of India proper, as the field of operations for his big-game
shoot of 1891, on account of the rhinoceros and buffaloes that
frequented the swamps there. As he did not do things by halves, he had
had a rough road made connecting Cooch Behar with his great camp, and
had caused temporary bridges to be built over all the streams on the
way. Owing to the convenient bamboo, this is fairly easy of
achievement, for the bamboo is at the same time tough and pliable, and
bamboo bridges, in spite of their flimsy appearance, can carry great
weights, and can be run up in no time, and kindly Nature furnishes in
Bengal an endless supply of this adaptable building material.
Our Calcutta party were driven out to the camp by the Maharajah's
Australian trainer in a brake-and-four. I had heard before of the
recklessness and skill of Australian stage-coach drivers, but had had
no previous personal experience of it. Frankly, it is not an
experience I should care to repeat indefinitely. I have my own
suspicions that that big Australian was trying, if I may be pardoned a
vulgarism, "to put the wind up us." Bang! against a tree-trunk on the
off-side. Crash! against another on the near-side; down a steep hill
at full gallop, and over a creaking, swaying, loudly protesting bamboo
bridge that seemed bound to collapse under the impact; up the
corresponding ascent as hard as the four Walers could lay leg to the
ground; off the track, tearing through the scrub on two wheels,
righting again to shave a big tree by a mere hair's-breadth; it
certainly was a fine exhibition of nerve and of recklessness redeemed
by skill, but I do not think that elderly ladies would have preferred
it to their customary jog-trot behind two fat and confidential old
slugs. One wondered how the harness held together under our Australian
Jehu's vagaries.
The Maharajah had chosen the site of his camp well. On a bare
_maidan_ overhanging a turbulent river a veritable city of white
tents gleamed in the sunshine, all neatly ranged in streets and lanes.
The river was not, as most Indian rivers in the dry season, a mere
trickle of muddy water meandering through a broad expanse of stones
and sand-spits, but a clear, rushing stream, tumbling and laughing on
its way as gaily as any Scotch salmon river, and forming deep pools
where great mahseer lurked under the waving fringes of water-weeds,
fat fish who could be entrapped with a spoon in the early morning.
Each guest had a great Indian double tent, bigger than most London
drawing-rooms. The one tent was pitched inside the other after the
fashion of the country, with an air-space of about one foot between to
keep out the fierce sun. Indeed, triple-tent would be a more fitting
expression, for the inner tent had a lining dependent from it of that
Indian cotton fabric printed in reds and blues which we use for bed
quilts. Every tent was carpeted with cotton dhurees, and completely
furnished with dressing-tables and chests of drawers, as well as
writing-table, sofa and arm-chairs; whilst there was a little covered
canvas porch outside, fitted with chairs in which to take the air, and
a small attendant satellite of a tent served as a bath-room, with big
tin tub and a little trench dug to carry the water away. Nothing could
be more complete, but I found my watchful old "bearer" already at work
raising all my trunks, gun-cases, and other possessions on little
stilts of bamboo, for his quick eye had detected signs of white ants.
By the end of our stay in camp I had reason to congratulate myself on
my faithful "bearer's" foresight, for none of my own things were
touched, whilst every one else was bemoaning the havoc the white ants
had played with their belongings. The guest-tents formed three sides
of a square facing the river, and in the centre of the open space
stood a large _shamyanah_, or flat-roofed tent with open sides,
which served as dining-room and general living-room. There are
certainly distinct advantages in a climate so settled that periods of
daily sunshine or of daily rain really form part of the calendar, and
can be predicted with mathematical certainty.
It so happened that the Census of 1891 was taken whilst we were in
camp, so I can give the exact number of retainers whom the Maharajah
brought with him. It totalled 473, including mahouts and
elephant-tenders, grooms, armourers, taxidermists, tailors,
shoemakers, a native doctor and a dispenser, and boatmen, not to
mention the Viennese conductor and the thirty-five members of the
orchestra, cooks, bakers, and table-waiters. The Maharajah certainly
did things on a grand scale. One of the English guests gave, with
perfect truth, his place of birth as required in the Indian Census
Return as "a first-class carriage on the London and North-Western
Railway, somewhere between Bletchley and Euston; the precise spot
being unnoticed either by myself or the other person principally
concerned."
The daily routine of life in the camp was something like this: We men
all rose at daybreak, some going for a ride, others endeavouring with
a spoon to lure the cunning mahseer in the swift-running river, or
going for a three-mile walk through the jungle tracks. Then a bath,
and breakfast followed at nine, when the various _shikaries_ came
in with their reports. Should a tiger have made a "kill," he would be
found, with any luck, during the heat of the day close to the body of
his victim. The "howdah" elephants would all be sent on to the
appointed rendezvous, the entire party going out to meet them on "pad"
elephants. I do not believe that more uncomfortable means of
progression could possibly be devised. A pad elephant has a large
mattress strapped on to its back, over which runs a network of stout
cords. Four or five people half-sit, half-recline on this mattress,
hanging on for dear life to the cord network. The European, being
unused to this attitude, will soon feel violent cramps shooting
through his limbs, added to which there is a disconcerting feeling of
instability in spite of the tightly grasped cords. Nothing, on the
other hand, can be more comfortable than a well-appointed howdah,
where one is quite alone except for the mahout perched on the
elephant's neck. The Maharajah's howdahs were all of cane-work, with a
softly padded seat and a leather-strap back, which yielded to the
motion of the great beast. In front was a gun-rack holding five guns
and rifles, and large pockets at the side thoughtfully contained
bottles of lemonade (the openers of which were _never_ forgotten)
and emergency packets of biscuits.
The Maharajah owned about sixty elephants, in which he took the
greatest pride, and he was most careful in providing his guests with
proved "tiger-staunch" animals. These were oddly enough invariably
lady-elephants, the males being apt to lose their heads in the
excitement of meeting their hereditary enemies, and consequently apt
to run amok.
My particular elephant, which I rode daily for five weeks, was an
elderly and highly respectable female named "Chota Begum." Had she
only happened to have been born without a tail, and with two legs
instead of four, she would have worn silver-rimmed spectacles and a
large cap with cherries in it; would have knitted stockings all day
long and have taken a deep interest in the Church Missionary Society.
I soon got on very friendly terms with "Chota Begum." She was
inordinately fond of oranges, which, of course, were difficult to
procure in the jungle, so I daily brought her a present of
half-a-dozen of these delicacies, supplementing the gift at
luncheon-time with a few bananas. Chota Begum was deeply touched by
these attentions, and one morning my mahout informed me that she
wished, out of gratitude, to lift me into the howdah with her trunk. I
cannot conceive how he found this out, but I naturally was averse to
wounding the elephant's feelings by refusing the proffered courtesy,
though I should infinitely have preferred getting into the howdah in
the ordinary manner. The mahout, after the mysterious manner of his
kind, was giving his charge minute directions to be very careful with
me, when I suddenly felt myself seized by Chota Begum's trunk, lifted
into the air, and held upside down at the extreme length of that
member, for, it seemed to me, at least five minutes. Rupees and small
change rained from my pockets to the ground, cigar case, cigarette
case, matches and cartridge extractor streamed down to earth in
clattering showers from their abiding places; the blood rushed to my
head till I was on the very verge of apoplexy, and still Chota Begum,
remembering her instructions to be careful, held me up aloft, until
slowly, very slowly indeed, she lowered me into the howdah, dizzy and
stupid with blood to the head. The attention was well-meant, but it
was distinctly not one to be repeated indefinitely. In my youth there
was a popular song recounting the misfortunes of one Mr. Brown:
"Old man Brown, upside down,
With his legs sticking up in the air";
but I never imagined that I should share his unpleasant experiences.
I never enquired too minutely as to how the "kubber" of the
whereabouts of a tiger was obtained, but I have a strong suspicion
that unhappy goats played a part in it, and that they were tethered in
different parts of the jungle, for, as we all know, "the bleating of
the kid excites the tiger."
A tiger being thus located by his "kill," the long line of beating
elephants, riderless except for their mahouts, goes crashing through
the burnt-up jungle-growth, until a trumpeting from one of the
elephants announces the neighbourhood of "stripes," for an elephant
has an abnormally keen sense of smell. The various guns are posted on
their elephants in any open spot where a good view of the beast can be
obtained when he breaks cover. I have explained elsewhere how I
personally always preferred an ordinary shot-gun loaded with a lead
ball, to a rifle for either tigers or bears. The reason being that
both these animals are usually shot at very close quarters whilst they
are moving rapidly. Time is lost in getting the sights of a rifle on
to a swift-moving objective, and there is so little time to lose, for
it is most inadvisable to wound a tiger without killing him; whereas
with a shot-gun one simply raises it, looks down the barrels and fires
as one would do at a rabbit, and a solid lead bullet has enormous
stopping power. I took with me daily in the howdah one shot-gun loaded
with ball, another with No. 5 shot for birds, an Express rifle, and
one of the Maharajah's terrific 4-bore elephant-rifles; this latter's
charge was 14-1/2 drachms of black powder; the kick seemed to break
every bone in one's shoulder, and I was frightened to death every time
that I fired it off.
On that Assam shoot I was quite extraordinarily lucky, for on the very
first day the beating elephants announced the presence of a tiger by
trumpeting almost at once, and suddenly, with a roar, a great streak
of orange and black leaped into the sunlight from the jungle straight
in front of me. The tiger came straight for my elephant, who stood
firm as a rock, and I waited with the smooth-bore till he got within
twenty feet of me and I knew that I could not possibly miss him, and
then fired at his shoulder. The tiger fell dead. This was a very easy
shot, but it did me great service with my mahout. These men, perched
as they are on the elephant's neck, carry their lives in their hand,
for should the tiger be wounded only, he will certainly make a spring
for the elephant's head, and then the mahout is a dead man.
Incidentally the "gun" in the howdah will not fare much better in that
case. The mahout, should he have but small confidence in his
passenger's marksmanship, will make the elephant fidget so that it
becomes impossible to fire.
Two days later we were beating a patch of jungle, when, through the
thick undergrowth, I could just see four legs, moving very, very
slowly amongst the reeds, the body above them being invisible. "Bagh"
(tiger), whispered the mahout, turning round. I was so excited that I
snatched up the heavy elephant-rifle instead of the Express, and fired
just above those slow-slouching legs. The big rifle went off with a
noise like an air-raid, and knocked me with mangled shoulder-blades
into the seat of the howdah. I was sure that I had missed altogether,
and thought no more about it, but when the beat came up half an hour
later, a huge tiger was lying there stone dead. That, of course, was
an absolute piece of luck, a mere fluke, as I had never even seen the
brute. As soon as the Maharajah and his men had examined the big
tiger's teeth they at once pronounced him a man-eater, and there was
great rejoicing, for a man-eating tiger had been taking toll of the
villagers in one of the jungle clearings. I believe that tigers only
take to eating men when they are growing old and their teeth begin to
fail them, a man being easier to catch than a bullock or goat. The
skins of these two tigers have lain on my drawing-room carpet for
thirty years now.
On our second day the Maharajah shot a leopard. He was only wounded,
and I have never seen an animal fight so fiercely or with such
indomitable courage. Of course, the whole cat-tribe are very tenacious
of life, but that leopard had five bullets in him, and still he roared
and hissed and spat, though his life was ebbing from him fast. We must
have worked round in a circle nearer to the camp, for whilst we were
watching the leopard's furious fight the strains of the Maharajah's
orchestra practising "The Gondoliers," floated down-wind to us quite
clearly. I remember it well, for as we dismounted to look at the dead
beast the cornet solo, "Take a pair of sparkling eyes," began. There
was such a startling incongruity between an almost untrodden virgin
jungle in Assam, with a dead leopard lying in the foreground, and that
familiar strain of Sullivan's, so beloved of amateur tenors, that it
gave a curious sense of unreality to the whole scene.
This admirable orchestra made the evenings very pleasant. We put on
white ties and tail-coats every night for dinner in the open
_shamyanah_, where the Maharajah provided us with an excellent
European repast served on solid silver plates. As the endless
resources of this wonderful camp included an ice-making machine, he
also gave us iced champagne every evening. As an example of how
thorough the Maharajah was in his arrangements, he had brought three
of his _mallees_, or native gardeners, with him, their sole
function being to gather wild jungle-flowers daily, and to decorate
the tables and tents with them.
Neither the Maharajah nor his family ever touched any of the European
food, though, as they were not Hindoos, but belonged to the
Bramo-Somaj religion, there were no caste-laws to prevent their doing
so. Half-way through dinner the servants brought in large square
silver boxes, some of rice, others of various curries: hot curries,
dry curries, Ceylon curries, and green vegetable curries; these
constituted their dinner, and most excellent they were.
I really must pay a tribute to the graceful and delightful Maharanee,
who presided with such dignity and charm at these gatherings. I had
first met the Maharanee in London, in 1887, at the festivities in
connection with Queen Victoria's Jubilee. The Maharanee, the daughter
of a very ancient Bengal family, was then quite young. She had only
emerged "from behind the curtain," as natives of India say, for six
months. In other words, she had just emancipated herself from the
seclusion of the Zenana, where she had lived since her marriage. She
had then very delicate features, and most lovely eyes, with
exquisitely moulded hands and arms. Very wisely she had not adopted
European fashions in their entirety, but had retained the becoming
_saree_ of gold or silver tissue or brocade, throwing the end of
it over her head as a veil, and looking perfectly charming in it.
Everything in England must have seemed strange to her, the climate,
the habits, and the mode of living, and yet this little Princess
behaved as though she had been used to it all her life, and still
managed to retain the innate dignity of the high-caste native lady.
As one travels through life certain pictures remain vividly clear-cut
in the memory. The evenings in that shooting-camp are amongst these. I
can still imagine myself strolling with an extremely comely lady along
the stretches of natural lawn that crowned the bluff above the river,
the gurgle and splashing of the stream loud in our ears as we looked
over the unending expanse of jungle below us, vast and full of mystery
under the brilliant moonlight of India. In India the moonlight is
golden, not silvery as with us. The great grey sea of scrub, with an
occasional prominent tree catching this golden light on its clear-cut
outline, had something awe-inspiring about it, for here one was face
to face with real Nature. A faint and distant roar was also a reminder
that the jungle had its inhabitants, and through it all came the
quaintly incongruous strains of the orchestra playing a selection from
"The Mikado":
"My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time,
To make the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime."
The moonlit jungle night-scene, and the familiar air with its London
associations were such endless thousands of miles apart.
On the floor of my drawing-room, in Westminster, the skin of a bear
reposes close to those of two tigers. This is how he came there: We
were at breakfast when _kubber_ of a bear only two miles away was
brought in. The Maharajah at once ordered the howdah-elephants round.
Opposite me on the breakfast-table stood a large plate of buns, which
the camp baker made most admirably. Ever since my earliest childhood I
had gone on every possible occasion to the Zoological Gardens in
Regent's Park, and was therefore in a position to know what was the
favourite food of the ursine race. That they did not exist on buns in
the jungle was due to a lack of opportunity rather than to a lack of
inclination, so I argued that the dainty would prove just as
irresistible to a bear in the jungle as it did to his brethren in the
big pit near the entrance to the Zoo, and ignoring the rather cheap
gibes of the rest of the party, I provided myself with half-a-dozen
buns, three of which I attached by long strings to the front of my
howdah, where they swung about like an edible pawnbroker's sign. The
bear was lying in a very small patch of bamboo, and broke cover at
once. As I had anticipated, the three swinging buns proved absolutely
irresistible to him. He came straight up to me, I shot him with a
smooth-bore, and he is most decorative in his present position, but it
was all due to the buns. The Maharajah told me, much to my surprise,
that far more natives were killed by bears than by tigers in that part
of India.
The jungle was very diversified: in places it consisted of flat
tablelands of scrub, varied with broad open spaces broken by thick
clumps ("topes" they are called by Anglo-Indians) of bamboo. In other
parts there were rocky ravines covered with forest growth, and on the
low ground far-stretching and evil-smelling swamps spread themselves,
the home of the rhinoceros and water buffalo.
I had no idea of an elephant's climbing powers. These huge beasts make
their way quite easily up rocky ascents no horse could negotiate. In
coming down steep declivities, the wise creatures extend their
hind-legs, using them as brakes. Cautious old Chota Begum would never
ford any river without sounding the depth with her trunk at every
step. On one occasion two of the Maharajah's fishermen were paddling
native dug-outs down-stream as we approached a river. Chota Begum, who
had never before seen a dug-out, took them for crocodiles, trumpeted
loudly with alarm, and refused to enter the water until they were
quite out of sight. The curious intelligence of the animal is seen
when they are ordered to remove a tree which blocks the road. Chota
Begum would place her right foot against the trunk and give a little
tentative shove. Not satisfied with the leverage, she would shift her
foot again and again until she had found the right spot, then,
throwing her whole weight on to her foot, the tree would snap off like
a wooden match.
There was a great amount of bird-life in the jungle. It abounded in
peacocks, and these birds are a glorious sight sailing down-wind
through the sunlight with their tails streaming behind them, at a pace
which would leave any pheasant standing. As peacocks are regarded as
sacred by Hindoos, the Maharajah had particularly begged us not to
shoot any. There were plenty of other birds, snipe, partridges,
florican and jungle-cocks, the two latter greatly esteemed for their
flesh. I shot a jungle-cock, and was quite disappointed at finding him
a facsimile of our barndoor game-cock, for I had imagined that he
would have the velvety black wing starred with cream-coloured eyes,
which we associate with the "jungle-cock wing" of salmon flies. The
so-called "jungle-cock" in a "Jock Scott" fly is furnished by a bird
found, I believe, only round Madras. An animal peculiar to this part
of Assam is the pigmy hob, the smallest of the swine family. These
little beasts, no larger than guinea-pigs, go about in droves of about
fifty, and move through the grass with such incredible rapidity that
the eye is unable to follow them. The elephants, oddly enough, are
scared to death by the pigmy hogs, for the little creatures have
tushes as sharp as razors, and gash the elephants' feet with them as
they run past them.
I think that we all regretted the Maharajah's keenness about
water-buffalo and rhinos, for this entailed long days of plodding on
elephants through steamy, fetid swamps, where the grass was twenty
feet high and met over one's head, where the heat was intolerable,
without one breath of air, and the mosquitoes maddening. A day in the
swamps entailed, too, a big dose of quinine at bedtime. Between
ourselves, I was terrified at the prospect of having to fire off the
heavy four-bore elephant-rifle. The "kick" of fourteen-and-a-half
drachms of black-powder is tremendous, and one's shoulder ached for
two hours afterwards, though I do not regret the "kick" in surveying
the water-buffalo which has hung now in my hall for thirty years. I
have only seen two wild rhinoceroses in my life, and of the first one
I had only a very brief glimpse. We were outside the swamp, when down
a jungle-track came a charging rhinoceros, his head down and an evil
look in his eye. One look was enough for Chota Begum. That most
respectable of old ladies had quite evidently no love for rhinos. She
lost her nerve completely, and ran away for two miles as hard as her
ungainly limbs could lay leg to the ground. It is no joke to be on a
runaway elephant maddened with fright, and it is extremely difficult
to keep one's seat. The mahout and I hung on with both hands for dear
life, the guns and rifles crashing together with a deafening clamour
of ironmongery, and I was most thankful that there were no trees
anywhere near, for the terrified animal's first impulse would have
been to knock off both howdah and mahout under the overhanging branch
of a tree. When Chota Begum at length pulled up, she had to listen to
some terrible home-truths about her ancestry from the mahout, who was
bitterly disappointed in his beloved charge. As to questions of
lineage, and the morals of Chota Begum's immediate progenitors, I can
only hope that the mahout exaggerated, for he certainly opened up
appalling perspectives. Any old lady would have got scared at seeing
so hideous a monster preparing to rip her open, and under the
circumstances you and I would have run away just as fast as Chota
Begum did.
The only other wild rhinoceros I ever saw was on the very last day of
our stay in Assam. We were returning home on elephants, when they
began to trumpet loudly, as we approached a little dip. My nephew,
General Sir Henry Streatfeild, called out to me to be ready, as there
was probably a bear in the hollow. Next moment a rhinoceros charged
out and made straight for his elephant. Sir Henry fired with a heavy
four-bore rifle, and by an extraordinary piece of good luck hit the
rhino in the one little spot where he is vulnerable, otherwise he must
have been killed. The huge beast rolled over like a shot hare,
stone-dead.
One evening on our way back to camp, we thought that we would ride our
elephants ourselves, and told the mahouts to get down. They had no
fancy for walking two miles back to camp, and accordingly, in some
mysterious manner of which they have the secret, gave their charges
private but definite orders. I seated myself on Chota Begum's neck,
put my feet in the string stirrups, and took the big _ankus_ in
my hand. The others did the same. I then ordered Chota Begum to go on,
using the exact words the mahout did. Chota Begum commenced walking
round and round in a small circle, and the eight other elephants all
did the same. I tried cajoling her as the mahout did, and assured her
that she was a "Pearl" and my "Heart's Delight." Chota Begum continued
walking round and round in a small circle, as did all the other
elephants. I changed my tactics, and made the most unmerited
insinuations as to her mother's personal character, at the same time
giving her a slight hint with the blunt end of the _ankus_. Chota Begum
continued stolidly walking round and round. Meanwhile language most
unsuited to a Sunday School arose from other members of the party, who
were also careering round and round in small circles. Finally an Irish
A.D.C. summed up the situation by crying, "These mahouts have us beat,"
whereupon we capitulated, and a simultaneous shout went up, "Ohe,
Mahout-log!" It is but seldom that one sees a native of India laughing,
but those mahouts, when they emerged from the cover of some bamboos,
were simply bent double with laughter. How they had conveyed their
wishes to the elephants beats me still.
The best of things must come to an end, and so did the Cooch Behar
shoot. It is an experience that I would not have missed for anything,
especially as I am now too old to hope to be able to repeat it.
The Maharajah was good enough to invite me again the next year, 1892,
but by that time I was seated in an editorial chair, and could not
leave London. In the place of the brilliant sunshine of Assam, the
grimy, murky London atmosphere; instead of the distant roars from the
jungle, the low thunder of the big "machines" in the basement, as they
began to revolve, grinding out fresh reading-matter for the insatiable
British public.
The memories, however, remain. Blazing sunlight; splendid sport;
endless tracts of khaki-coloured jungle; princely hospitality;
pleasant fellowship; cheery company.
What more can any one ask?