to be exterminated, as they soon will be, in our new African empire. The
argument, that because South African negroes have not tamed them, we
should not attempt to do it, is of little force. The African keeps cows
to give _milk_; meat was supplied in inexhaustible quantities by the
wild antelopes and other game, and with far less trouble than
domesticated animals give, until the white man with guns destroyed them.
We are too apt to forget that England owes the best of her trees,
vegetables, and animals to other countries. All are now so good that we
are prone to believe that neither can be added to or improved. Perhaps
Admiral Rous was right when he declared that it made him “simply sick”
when an Arab cross was proposed for our English thoroughbreds. But why
should we not save the eland, the harness antelope, and the koodoo, and
other large African species from extermination? America has almost
allowed the bison to perish. Shall we not take warning, and preserve for
our own use the splendid African antelopes, which, within the memory of
man, were a thousand times more numerous than they are to-day?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AN EXPERIMENT IN ANIMAL PRESERVATION.
WHEN the founders of our Zoological Gardens formed plans for
acclimatizing foreign animals in England, they could scarcely have
imagined that the Gardens might form almost the last preserve of animals
then living in enormous numbers in America. Yet it is not beyond the
limits of possibility, that our Zoological Gardens may within a few
years contain the last living specimens of the American bison. It is
said that thirty of the surviving herd in Yellowstone Park were recently
killed by poachers for the sake of their hides and horns, and the
chances of their survival in the United States are thus further
diminished. If they do not disappear altogether, it will be in a great
degree due to an experiment in the preservation of wild animals and
natural scenery, undertaken by a wealthy American, Mr. Austin Corbin.
The story of the enterprise, so far as it has yet appeared, is given in
a connected form in the last report of the Smithsonian Institution of
Washington. Mr. Corbin is a “railway king,” who owned a property on Long
Island. There he amused himself by keeping a few deer at his home-farm,
not in a park, but much as antelopes, elands, and bison are kept in the
Queen’s stock-yard with the domestic cattle at Windsor. This was in
1886. Six years later Mr. Corbin conceived and carried out an idea for
extending his deer-farm on a scale which a comparison with some of the
forest areas most familiar to Englishmen, scarcely enables us to grasp.
He bought twenty-two thousand acres in a compact block, and to these he
subsequently added an adjacent territory of eight thousand acres more,
and reserved them as a sanctuary for all such of the large game of North
America—with the exception of bears, pumas, wolves, and foxes—as could
be obtained to stock the ground. The area so reserved is larger by a
quarter than the twenty-two thousand acres of the Forest of Dean.
Windsor Forest contains barely fourteen thousand acres, and the New
Forest alone of the ancient game-preserves of the Crown exceeds it in
dimensions. But all these are forests in the proper sense, not enclosed
parks, the animals of which are fenced in and protected. The Corbin
preserve is a true park, surrounded with a fence high enough to confine
a wapiti, and strong enough to resist the charge of a bull bison, and
entered by nine gates, each under the supervision of a resident warder.
Contrasted with an English park, it differs alike in dimensions and
general purpose. Here the object of the enclosure is to surround the
mansion with a wild domain in which deer may run wild within certain
limits, and trees reach their finest proportions without formality. The
park and its contents are really subordinate to the daily pleasure and
convenience of the resident owner, though in some cases, notably that of
Warwick Castle, small and ancient deer-parks exist at a distance from
the mansion, and form preserves much in the spirit of Mr. Corbin’s
forest. But this enclosure of thirty-five square miles in a ring-fence
must be without a rival either in modern or ancient history, though
perhaps the “paradises” of the Persian satraps, “filled with all kinds
of wild beasts and trees,” watered by numerous streams and enclosed by
walls—parks like that in which Xenophon and the Greek captains were led
to expect that the army of the great king was lying in wait to destroy
them—may have approached it in size.
The modern “paradise” lies in New Hampshire, almost the northernmost of
the old States, on the Atlantic slope, between Vermont and Maine, and
incloses a portion of the “White Mountains” and hill-lands, running
northwards from the Alleghanies to the banks of the St. Lawrence, east
of Montreal. It is a temperate and well-wooded region, and water is
abundant. The park itself contains two large pools of twenty and thirty
acres, and nearly two miles of streams, with timber of all sizes, and
good pasture-land. Bison, beaver, and deer should all find favourable
conditions in such a spot. The work of stocking the park was doubtless
made easy by the owner’s indifference to expense; £80,000 were laid out
on the purchase of the land and the costly fencing alone; but Mr. Corbin
was fortunate in being able to obtain twenty-five bison from the few
survivors of the wild herds to start his “buffalo ranch.” Those bred in
the paddocks of England during the last fifteen years have steadily
deteriorated in size and stamina, the cows growing yearly more “weedy”
and less prolific; but there must be some source, not generally known,
from which they can still be bought, though at a high price. Cross, the
Liverpool dealer, is said to have sold ten cows two years ago, and those
in Mr. Corbin’s preserve show a disposition to increase and multiply.
The history of the Chillingham and Chartley wild cattle, which, though
inbred for generations, remain vigorous and prolific when allowed to
live their natural life in parks not a tenth of the area of that in
which the bison now roam, gives good ground for hoping that the
existence of the bison may now be prolonged for such time as American
sentiment may think fit to preserve them. Besides the bison, the
original stock in the Corbin Park includes sixty wapiti deer, or “elk,”
as they are called throughout North America; seventy deer, probably the
black-tailed deer of the Rocky Mountains; six cariboo, the American
reindeer; six of the rare prong-horned antelopes; twelve moose, or elk
proper; eighteen wild boars, and by this time, it is hoped, a colony of
beavers. Of these, the moose, the antelope, and the beaver must soon be
extinct species, unless protected by some such means as Mr. Corbin has
chosen to preserve them. The cariboo seems to have migrated beyond the
extreme margin of human habitation. Though rapidly disappearing in the
North-West, immense herds were seen last summer by explorers in the
almost unknown “barren lands,” fringing the Arctic Sea, and the mouths
of the Coppermine and Fish rivers. The hunters employed in the capture
of the various deer were fortunate enough to discover a “moose yard” in
the deep snows of northern Canada, in which three hundred animals were
collected on the area which they had stamped down and made safe for
movement amidst the snow. Six of these were found isolated from the
herd, and adroitly frightened into the deep snow, in which they were
easily captured, the weight of the animals breaking through the crust of
ice above, and leaving them helpless. These were sent with others a
distance of two thousand miles by train in four days; but neither they
nor any of the deer would feed while in the train, and several of them
died either in transit or after their arrival. Twenty deer were also
killed in a railway collision. But more than two hundred animals were
before long collected in what is to be their permanent home, and the
wapiti alone have already doubled in number.
The limits to be set to the increase of each species, should the
experiment prove successful in all or most cases, will no doubt be
matter for careful inquiry. Large as the area is at their disposal, the
space required by wild animals is far larger than that which suffices
for domestic creatures. The three acres of good land which is supposed
to suffice for the poor man’s cow, expands to twenty-five acres of the
best deer-forest as the yearly keep of a single stag; and, setting the
increased size of bison, moose, and wapiti against the better pasturage
of the New Hampshire hills, it is probable that the proportion of game
to acreage in Corbin Park cannot safely be increased beyond the limits
which experience shows to be necessary in the forest of Blair Athole.
Two of the species, the moose and the beaver, live entirely on the
branches of trees. The beavers are far more destructive than the moose,
and will soon level all the timber near the streams. A single family in
the Island of Bute cut down one hundred and eighty-seven large trees in
ten years, and it is not likely that they will be less industrious in
what was once their native home. Twenty thousand hawthorn-trees have
been imported from England to be planted, not as a vast and beautiful
feature in the landscape of the park, an experiment well worthy of the
author of the enterprise, but as a hedge to take the place of the wire
fencing which now surrounds the enclosure. The beavers will soon convey
the thorn-trees to their “lodges,” and make an easy road for the escape
of the rest of the colony.
Nothing is said of the removal of human occupiers from this area, though
it seems improbable that such favourable soil should be void of
inhabitants, even if the exhaustion of the land in the old States, and
the movements of the inhabitants westward, has been as rapid as recent
observers would have us believe. New Hampshire is a small state; yet we
hear no protests against the exclusion of population from an area
one-third of that of the New Forest. On the contrary, the project seems
welcomed as suggesting a new employment for millionaires. Preservation
of every kind is costly, and, as a rule, makes no return in a case in
which sentiment, and not prudence, suggests it. When States intervene,
it is generally too late, and there is always a suspicion that the
rights of the poor may in some way be interfered with, just as in the
case of preservation by ancient land-owners, whether of game or trees,
or streams or mountains. But though Mr. Corbin’s enterprise provokes no
suspicion, and seems to have gratified American sentiment, he is
evidently aware that time and continuity are essential for its success.
The association of his son with the fortunes of the park gives a
guarantee of permanence not perhaps equal to the traditions that have
maintained Chillingham and Chartley, but sufficient to insure a fair
trial for the experiment.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“JAMRACH’S.”
“JAMRACH’S,” the ancient and original centre of the wild-beast trade in
London, lies in what is now called St. George Street, but was until late
years known as Ratcliffe Highway, not many minutes’ walk beyond the
Tower. It existed when the King’s lions were kept in the Tower itself,
and was established thirty years before Sir Stamford Raffles conceived
the notion of the Zoological Society. The shop itself is almost the
oldest building in the street, far older than the docks and their lofty
warehouses opposite, and dating back as far as some of the later work in
the Tower itself. The main bulk of the traffic from the docks which line
the river for miles below rolls past its doors, which open to receive
the ship-captains’ ventures of birds and wild beasts, armour and
“curios,” idols and fetishes, mummy and Dyak skulls, weapons and
snake-skins, and the odd zoological _bric-à-brac_ which are part of the
minor stock-in-trade of the “naturalist” salesman. The front of the shop
in which these are displayed looks like an old picture. Time and
varnish, with the dust of the docks, have given a rich mellow colour
both to frame and contents, in curious contrast to the brilliant hues of
the parrots and lories which fill the cages in the adjacent window. In
the little office at the back the steady traffic in wild beasts has gone
on for a hundred years, between the Jamrachs and the ship-captains in
the first instance, and later with the buyers employed by Zoological
Gardens and menageries. Frank Buckland, Van Ambrugh, and Mr. Bartlett,
and most of the great circus and menagerie proprietors, have sat in the
old Windsor chairs, and discussed the merits of new purchases, or
schemes for the capture of rare and valuable animals.
Few even of the most ancient business houses of that most picturesque
and characteristic part of London, the City, and the eastern wards which
cluster round the Tower, have retained their old form so entirely as
this. Some of the old back parlours and lobbies are still provided with
the racks of blunderbusses and bayonets, which the traditions of the
Gordon Riots suggested as a terror to daylight robbers, and a guarantee
of security to timid depositors. Others keep upon their walls the
charters and firmans granted to adventurous merchants by sultans and
chieftains whose territories are now well-regulated provinces of the
British Empire. But the trade of Jamrach’s has this peculiarity, that it
always deals in commodities which as a rule disappear before advancing
civilization, and must be drawn from beyond the ever-encroaching limits
of common commerce; from the regions where the half-armed savage still
robs the cubs of the Gætulian lioness, and barters his barbaric spoils
for the wares of the civilized West. So in the old room at Jamrach’s,
the barbaric settings have gathered almost without intention round the
spot which the _nexus_ of commerce links with the rough outside edge of
the white man’s world, and the dusty shields and assegais, the bolas and
bows, the matchlock and two-handed swords of the rhinoceros-hunting
Arabs, are mingled with sharks’ and crocodiles’ skulls, scalps and
tomahawks, wampum and Indian relics, and whatever in the unnumbered
lumber of the world of savage sport and warfare corresponds to the tamer
accessories of the “gun-room” in our English country houses. The place
of the favourite dog before the fire, to continue the simile, is of
course taken by some foreign pet which is the favourite of the moment.
At the time of the writer’s first visit to this naturalist’s sanctum the
goddess of the hearth was a lovely little Japanese pug puppy. The little
creature was covered with the long silky black and white hair which in
the Japanese pug, like the Japanese bantam, takes the place of the
shorter and less elegant covering of the Western breed. It was carefully
clothed in a neatly-fitting flannel jacket, and apparently had all the
fondness for English habits which distinguishes the cultivated classes
of modern Japan. It sat up and begged, and wagged its tail like an
educated little British dog, and carefully measuring the appreciation
and temper of its visitor, suddenly dropped ceremony and bounded into
his lap. There, after an apologetic wriggle, it curled itself up, and
its master discussed the present and future of the animal trade.
[Illustration:
JAPANESE PUG AND CAT. _From a Japanese Drawing._
]
A great revival in this ancient industry has recently taken place, and
at the time of the writer’s visit Carl Hagenbeck, the largest owner of
wild beasts in the world, and exhibitor of the model Zoological Gardens
at the World’s Fair, was making a rapid inspection of the stock of
animals on view, in order to make purchases for his new gardens in New
York. In most forms of live-stock buying, the necessary acquaintance
with the points of two or three species is sufficiently difficult to
master. In the present case it was necessary not only to judge the
merits of the animal, but to identify the species with certainty. But
once among the stalls and cages, the “deals” for a dozen different
species were made in less time and with less discussion than a Berkshire
farmer would feel due to the merits of a litter of pigs. The “stables,”
as the wild-beast store is called, lie away from the shop and the main
street, up a narrow court, like those which run back from the north of
Fleet Street. Up this passage every animal must be either driven or
carried before it can be deposited in safe quarters in the store, and
though its length and want of breadth lend themselves to blocking the
escape of any creature which might succeed in breaking out, it must
offer considerable difficulties to the transit of a large iron cage, or
of a refractory camel or elephant. The lower storey of the “stables”
resembles a large, well-warmed London cow-house, with antelopes, deer,
or kangaroos tethered to the walls and mangers, or stalled in loose
boxes, instead of Alderneys and shorthorns. An immense aoudad,[5] with
wild yellow eyes, horns curving in an almost complete circle, and a
thick shaggy beard continued into a fringe down its chest, and sweeping
the ground between its feet, occupied the first loose-box. Most of the
other pens were vacant, as a large shipment had left that day for the
United States.
Footnote 5:
The Barbary sheep.
A steep flight of steps leads to the second and third storeys, in which
the animals are stored, not for exhibition, but just as they have come
from the ships in the docks close by. There are no fixed rows of cages
for the carnivora, or wooden pens for the large birds and harmless
quadrupeds, because the former are delivered in their sea-cages, and the
latter have grown used to confinement, and are either tethered or
confined by wattle hurdles in corners or against the walls. The gallery
is warm and dark, an important element in the comfort of the nervous,
night-feeding animals, and of the more savage _felidæ_, lighted only by
one or two gas-jets, and redolent of sweet-scented clover-hay. The floor
is encumbered with boxes of various dimensions, with all kinds of
inmates, from squirrels and civet cats to pumas and panthers. The small
size of the box or cage in which a large leopard or panther will live in
fairly good health for several weeks makes their transport an easy
matter. They curl up like a cat in a basket, and if kept quiet and in
the dark, do not greatly suffer in condition. The semi-darkness, and the
position of the boxes on the floor, make it difficult to see the full
beauty of the prisoners within. Nor is it desirable to approach the
roughly-constructed cages too closely. The animals at Jamrach’s are not
the half-domesticated creatures of the Lion House at the Zoo, but the
wild and savage denizens of tropical jungles, captured but not yet
cowed, or even reconciled to the proximity of man. As parts of the
fronts as well as the sides and backs of the cages are boarded over, the
visitor naturally seeks a view from a point somewhat close to the
bars—an approach which is at once converted into a sudden movement in
retreat, as the animal inside appears to _explode_. A crash of claws
upon the bars, a sharp, throat-splitting blast of growls, and a glimpse
of white teeth and yellow-green eyes in the darkness, is the
instantaneous expression of the panther’s dislike to intrusion. If the
shutters are removed, and the light admitted, the beautiful creature
shrinks slowly backward and downward, its soft and elastic body slowly
contracting and flattening with the fluid suppleness of a python’s
folds. A pretty pair of young African cheetahs in another box spat and
bared their teeth with a show of high resentment which would not have
discredited wild beasts of a far larger growth, and maintained a
bickering sputter of repugnance and hostility till the offending gaze
was withdrawn. Two large and richly-coloured Patagonian pumas, a pair of
leopards, and several striped hyenas, and small jungle and civet cats
occupied the same gallery. Of these, the pumas were perfectly tame, as
safe to caress and as willing to be petted as a cat. They do not even
catch the infection of ill-temper from other animals; and the writer
observed a puma arching its back and rubbing its face against an
attendant’s hand, quite unmoved by the hostile growls of the panther,
its neighbour. These pumas had probably been domesticated for some time,
and a certain proportion of the fiercer animals which arrive at the
docks must have been in captivity for some time previous to shipment.
Men who habitually deal with wild animals are quick to see the
difference between the savage and the half-tamed beast. Van Ambrugh, the
celebrated lion-tamer, is said to have called at Jamrach’s to purchase a
leopard. He soon selected one from the boxes, and when asked how he
would like it to be sent, produced a steel chain and collar from the
pocket of his greatcoat. He then opened the box, dragged the leopard
out, put on the collar, and hauled it down the passage and into a
four-wheeled cab, in which he drove off to Astley’s with his purchase.
The strange medley of animal forms in the upper chambers, the gleam of
green and yellow eyes in their dusky recesses, and the juxtaposition of
creatures whose natural instinct is inveterately hostile, with others
which are their common prey, give to the chance menagerie at Jamrach’s a
character quite distinct from any exhibited collection. The creatures
are there for sale, not for show, and meantime are kept as quiet and as
close together as due attention to health permits. The panthers’ room
was shared by an African black-buck from the Cape, a black-tailed
jackal, various kangaroos and wallabies, and a pair of demoiselle
cranes. On another storey were a happy family of monkeys, lemurs, and
Chinese dogs, a pair of cassowaries, a viscacha, foxes large and small,
“native companion” cranes, a brown Tasmanian opossum, coatimundis, a
beautifully-marked civet cat, and two small Siamese porcupines. This
list, though apparently no bad nucleus for a Zoological Garden, is only
a fraction of the number which is usually stored in the depôt by the
docks. There is a sudden and unprecedented increase in the demand for
wild animals at present, not only for the Continent, but for the United
States. The stocks in most of the European Zoological Gardens have
decreased of late—a shrinkage partly caused by the closure of the Soudan
by the Dervishes. In America the popularity of the great menagerie at
the World’s Fair has created a sudden demand for wild animals of all
kinds. Circuses and private menageries are competing with the Zoological
Gardens and scientific societies for rare and interesting animals, and
the demand for America is far greater than for the continent of Europe.
After five or six years of neglect, there is such a “boom” in the
wild-beast trade as is hardly remembered. Until the expeditions which
Hagenbeck and others have despatched into Central Africa, _viâ_ Berbera,
and into Borneo and the West Coast of Africa, return, there is little to
fall back upon but the average supply which arrives without system and
in chance ships. A single purchase by an agent from the Philadelphia
Zoological Gardens included a leopard, a hyena, a pair of cheetahs, a
Bornean bear, antelopes, emus, and other birds. Other Zoological Gardens
are being laid out and built in New York and the cities of the West; but
it may be doubted whether, even from Jamrach’s, the inhabitants will
readily be found to occupy them.