that have come down to us from the primeval past--the vast stores
of coal buried deep in the bosom of the earth. The expert can now
calculate with certainty that in a few hundred, at the very farthest
in a thousand, years these stores will be exhausted. When it comes to
this, the triumphant progress of industrial science will no doubt give
us some substitute, perhaps even something better; but no technical
knowledge, no science, can ever give us back anew those highly
developed organisms of the plant and animal world which man to-day
is recklessly sweeping out of the list of living things. They cannot
restore to us the green woods and their animal life. We preserve with
punctilious precision every vestige of the art of the past. The older
the documents of earlier historic times are, the more eagerly they
are coveted, the more highly they are valued. Our collectors gladly
pay the largest sums for an old papyrus, an old picture, an object of
decorative art, or a marble statue. And, as has been rightly remarked,
what warrant have we that some new Phidias, some new Michael Angelo,
some new Praxiteles will not arise, and give us something of as high
value as these, or even much more perfect? Unreservedly to deny this
would be the same thing as to give the lie to the progress of the human
race.
But the same man who, in this respect, acts so reverently, so
conservatively, looks on with folded arms while treasures are
destroyed that ought to be guarded with special affection and care, in
these times when the great value of all natural science is so fully
recognised.[16]
We organise, at an extremely high cost, expeditions to survey and
explore far-off regions. We sink into the greatest depths of the sea
our cunningly devised trawl-nets, and study with ceaseless diligence
the smallest organisms that they bring up into the light of day. We
consider the course of the stars, and calculate with precision their
remote orbits. We daily discover new secrets, and have almost ceased
to feel surprised at each day bringing us something new, something yet
unheard of. Much that is thus done to secure the treasures of the past
_might equally well be done in coming years. But much that we neglect
to do can never be made good_, for we are permitting the slaughter,
up to the point of extinction, of the most remarkable, the most
interesting, and the least known forms among the most highly organised
of the creatures that dwell with us on our earth!
An example that appeals to us with terrible force is that of South
Africa (taking the country in its widest limits), a region now so
largely peopled by Europeans. There has been an almost complete
disappearance of the larger animals that once lived in their millions
on its wide plains. If one studies the trustworthy narratives of the
earlier explorers, one reads that, hardly a century ago, it was not a
rare sight to see in one day a hundred, or even a hundred and fifty
rhinoceroses, hundreds of elephants that showed little fear of man,
and countless antelopes; and one asks oneself, How can it be possible
that all this abundance of life has vanished in so short a time? A
specimen of the “white” rhinoceros, which in those times was still
living in large numbers, is in our day worth a small fortune; it is to
be found _in no museum in Germany_, and is simply almost impossible to
obtain. This former abundance is now known only to few, and these only
specialists engaged in studies of this kind. But to them it is also
plain and terribly certain that, where the like conditions come into
being, the same process that was at work in South Africa will produce
the same results.
There can be no doubt about it. In a hundred years from now wide
regions of what once was Darkest Africa will have been more or less
civilised, and all that delightful animal world, which to-day still
lives its life there, will have succumbed to the might of civilised
man. That will be the time when the fortunate possessors of horns and
hides of extinct African antelopes, and the owners of elephant tusks,
skulls, and specimens of all kinds will be selling all this for its
weight in gold. And no one will be able to understand how it was that
in our day so little thought was given to preserving as far as possible
all this valuable material in abundant quantities at least for _the
sake of science_, instead of sacrificing it wholesale to the interests
of trade, and to the recklessness of the new settlers in those lands.
For these men, who have to struggle hard with the new conditions of
life and its necessities, can scarcely act otherwise than heedlessly
and short-sightedly. They will always take possession of a district
before settled conditions are introduced, and before the Government is
in a position to enforce the observance of its regulations, however
well-intentioned these may be. So it will come to pass that it will
suddenly be found no longer possible to provide European collections
with even a pair of specimens of the mighty elephant, or to procure
other large animals for exhibition in these establishments. And this
will be the case not only with regard to the larger species, but the
same thing will happen to all others.
[Illustration:
_C. G. Schillings, phot._
A SCENE IN THE CAMEROONS (GERMAN WEST AFRICA), SHOWING THREE LARGE
GORILLAS SHOT BY CAPTAIN DOMINICK. (PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED BY CAPTAIN
DOMINICK.)]
The Queen of England has lately expressed the wish that no lady shall
come into her presence wearing osprey plumes in her hat. This act of
hers should be most heartily welcomed, for the bird world is being
destroyed in a way of which only a few experts have any idea. If our
ladies only knew that whole species of birds have become extinct,
thanks to the fashion of wearing hats trimmed with birds’ feathers,
doubtless they would no longer pay allegiance to this destructive
fashion. The massacre of birds is carried on in some such way as
this. The leading firms agree to make this or that bird fashionable.
It is thus that the death-sentence of many rare species of birds is
pronounced. The traders scattered all over the world give the hunters
who engage in this kind of business directions, for instance, to bring
in osprey feathers. And how are they obtained? The royal heron, a
timid and beautiful bird, is not easy to stalk. But the businesslike
hunter knows what to do. He simply kills the herons in thousands and
thousands _at their nesting-places_. Love for its offspring brings
the beautiful creature within range of the gun-barrel of the lurking
hunter, who kills thousands of the birds in cold blood when they are
gathered together in the breeding season. Countless thousands must be
killed, countless thousands more of young helpless nestlings, bereft
of the parent birds, must starve to death before enough of these
little plumes has been collected to make a load heavy enough to be put
on the bearers’ shoulders. And now the dealers of the whole civilised
world lay in a stock, so that full provision may be made for a form
of fashion-mania that may probably last only a few months. Even in
the farthest swamps of America, in the lands beyond the Caspian, and
wherever the royal heron breeds, one can follow the bird hunter, and
see him at his horrible and murderous work. The end is everlasting
silence. A rare species is soon utterly destroyed. In the last
century alone about two dozen species of birds became extinct. And in
these days nearly a dozen more species of birds are threatened with
extinction! According to the Reports of the Smithsonian Institute this
is notably the case in America with regard to quite as many species.
The wonderful birds of paradise are going; the latest “trimming” for
the hats of American ladies, these dwellers in remote islands of the
Southern Seas are to be threatened in a more serious degree, and
probably to a great extent exterminated. Everywhere we have the same
lamentable facts! It is certainly high time to interfere effectively.
I myself think that the best results would follow from appeal to all
noble-minded women.
In Africa I have already observed an example of the disappearance of
one species of bird[17]--every European takes a lot of trouble to get
possession of some of the much-prized marabou feathers. Now, as long
ago as the year 1900, at London, as a member of the International
Conference for the Protection of Wild Animals, I did my best to obtain,
at least on paper, some measure of protection for the marabou. This
bird had not only quite won my heart by its extraordinary sagacity,
but for the same reason it was a general favourite even in the times
of classical antiquity. My efforts were in vain. And this will mean
nothing more or less than the extermination of a large and handsome
bird, which is comparatively easy to hunt down, and the rate of
increase of which is exceptionally small.
From all these points of view the support of the “League for the
Protection of Bird Life in Germany” is to be warmly recommended. In
England these reasons have brought about the formation of the
“Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire,” which
devotes itself to the protection of animal life in general throughout
the world-wide British dominions.
[Illustration:
XXIX. FELIS LEO, THE LION.
ONE OF CORNWALLIS HARRIS’S SKETCHES, SHOWING HOW HALF A CENTURY
AGO NUMBERS OF LIONS WERE TO BE FOUND TOGETHER IN BROAD
DAYLIGHT IN SOUTH AFRICA. I HAVE SEEN SIMILAR GATHERINGS IN
EAST AFRICA, NOTABLY ON JANUARY 25, 1897. HARRIS’S SKETCH SHOWS
THE GREAT DEVELOPMENT OF THE MANE IN THE NOW NEARLY EXTINCT
SOUTH AFRICAN LION, A CONTRAST TO THE ALL BUT MANELESS LIONS OF
EAST AFRICA.]
Let us now follow a little more closely, under the guidance of English
writers, the process of the extermination of the South African animal
world. This lamentable work was completed very rapidly in the course of
only something like a hundred years. From numerous English authorities,
as well as from the publications of the Society already named, I
have been able to ascertain that the last “blaauwbok” was killed by
the Boers in Cape Colony about the year 1800. From extant sketches
of this wild animal, it appears that it was a smaller species of the
splendid horse-antelopes still to be found in other parts of Africa.
During the following seventy-five years the extermination of several
other kinds of animals was systematically carried out; and exactly
eighty years later the last quagga, a kind of zebra (_Equus quagga_)
was killed by the Boers. In England there is only one single specimen
preserved, and that in a very poor condition. It is to be found in the
British Museum. A further sacrifice to the advancing Europeans was the
giant, wide-mouthed, “white” rhinoceros (_Rhinoceros simus_, Burch.),
a mighty creature, that formerly ranged in thousands over the grassy
plains of South Africa. The length of a horn taken from one of them is
given as 6 ft. 9 in., English measurement! Even as late as the year
1884, a single trader was able to pile up huge masses, small hills,
of these rhinoceros horns by equipping some four hundred tribesmen
of the Matabele race with guns and ammunition and sending them out
rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few specimens of
this animal for the museums, and they are almost worth their weight in
gold. Information lately obtained seems to indicate that a very small
number of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five in
all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible swamps
in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on account of its
deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. However, the Government
of Natal has, I am pleased to say, made the killing any animal of this
species, without legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of
£300.
An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William Cornwallis Harris,
is an authoritative witness as to the extermination of wild animals in
South Africa in 1836, though it must have been going on for a long time
before that without any written record. The Boers must have slaughtered
hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that date we have no first-hand
written evidence on the subject.[18] Their proceedings were precisely
of the same character as the events that have occurred in our own day
in connection with the destruction of the elephant, the rhinoceros,
and other animals throughout Africa. This destruction goes on silently,
and only a few men who have a special knowledge of the circumstances
bring some information about it to the world at large. The rest keep
silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing.
The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, C. J. Anderson and
their contemporaries give some idea of what enormous multitudes of
wild creatures then wandered over the plains of South Africa. We are
inclined to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier epochs.
The process of animal-destruction by the hand of man has been going on
from immemorial times. For thousands of years man has been continually
pressing the animal world back more and more, and it has had to give
way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going on so slowly
and so imperceptibly that it is only by the scanty remnants left
from earlier times that we can form some estimate of the wealth that
has disappeared. These are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off
islands of the world’s seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all
the uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of this. Not
only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but also from some of his
contemporaries, we have descriptions of the former abundance of wild
life in the Cape districts of South Africa. At that time the country
was, in the literal sense of the word, covered with countless herds
of Cape buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras,
quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse-antelopes,
oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, springbocks, and
ostriches. Herds of hundreds of elephants were to be seen. Every marsh,
every river-bed, was literally overcrowded with hippopotami. All other
kinds of animals that are now so scarce, such as the large and handsome
kudu, and all the different kinds of small wild animals, were to be
met with in vast numbers. Although since the year 1652 South Africa
had been to a continually increasing extent occupied by the Boers,
all these wonderful things had managed to survive in rich profusion
up to the moment when, about a hundred years ago, the great war of
extermination began. Various causes contributed to bring this about:
the increasing numbers of the settlers, their continual penetration
farther and farther into the interior, and, above all things, the
improvement of firearms.
The natives, although very numerous in South Africa, had, as happens
everywhere, left the animal life of the country in its abundance to
the Europeans, who were overrunning the land in increasing numbers. It
was reserved for these to bring the war of extermination to an end in
a short time. Truly a melancholy spectacle!
Wilhelm Bölsche describes all this in fitting words:[19] “In Africa,”
he says, “a wonderful drama is to-day unfolding itself before our eyes.
It is the downfall of the whole of a mighty animal world. What is being
destroyed is the main remnant of the great mammalian development of
the Tertiary period. Once it spread in the same fulness over Europe,
Asia, and North America. Now in its last refuge this most wonderful
wave of life is rapidly ebbing away. Everything contributes to this
result--human progress, human folly, and even disease among the animals
themselves.”
[Illustration:
SKETCH OF A HERD OF ELEPHANTS IN SOUTH AFRICA, BY HARRIS.
IT GIVES AN IDEA OF THE ABUNDANCE OF ELEPHANTS IN THE CAPE
DISTRICTS SIXTY YEARS AGO. THIS EXPLORER’S SKETCHES GIVE A TRUE
PICTURE OF THE LANDSCAPE AS WELL AS OF THE ANIMALS.]
To give an example: Through the trifling fact that we have ivory balls
for billiards, the African elephant goes to destruction. The individual
cannot stop this; but what he can do is to secure more material for
each special branch of science before the door is closed, and to once
more observe in their primeval surroundings the last elephants, wild
buffaloes, giraffes--those last living vestiges of the Tertiary period.
But above all, the sketches of Le Vaillant, a French explorer, who,
about 1780, set out from Cape Town on his travels into the interior,
are of great importance for our study of the former abundance of animal
life in South Africa. They are all the more interesting for German
readers because he traversed part of what is now German South-West
Africa, and gives in his book an account of its condition at that
time. He, too, tells of absolutely incredibly great multitudes of
wild animals; on the banks of the Orange River he comes upon great
herds of elephants and giraffes, and he cannot find enough to say
of the astonishing wealth of animal life. For those who know German
South-West Africa, his narrative is of special interest. He formed
collections which he brought back with him to his native country, and
to all appearance is a fairly trustworthy authority, though at the same
time, like many contemporary and later travellers, here and there he
makes assertions that are clearly unwarrantable. For instance, in one
place he tells how he once rode a zebra, that he had wounded, for a
considerable distance, back to his camp.
Some fifty years later, at the period of the journeys of Captain
William Cornwallis Harris,[20] as I have already remarked, the same
conditions prevailed, with regard to the abundance of wild animals,
as in the days of Le Vaillant. It was almost a daily experience for
the traveller to be molested by lions. The Vaal River then teemed with
hippopotami. What is now the site of Pretoria was inhabited by a number
of rhinoceroses, that were absolutely an annoyance to the explorer:
“Out of every bush peeped the horrible head of one of these creatures.”
Of the neighbourhood of Mafeking he tells us that the gatherings of
zebras and white-tailed gnus literally covered the whole plain; that
with his own eyes he had at one time seen at least fifteen thousand
head of wild animals! In another place he tells us of an absolutely
overwhelming spectacle. He saw at the same time more than three hundred
elephants; to use his own expression, the plain looked like one
undulating mass.
William Cotton Oswell, whom I have mentioned in my earlier work, and
who died as lately as 1893, knew the countries of South Africa in
the days of Livingstone, and gives the same account of them as his
predecessor Harris. He once came upon more than four hundred elephants
gathered together in one herd on the open velt. Unfortunately, like so
many others, he published very few sketches.
Gordon Cumming, a traveller well known to the German public through
Brehms’ _Tierleben_, has also left us sketches of those days that
corroborate the descriptions given by his contemporaries. He tells
how, in the year 1860, a great drive was organised in the Orange
Free State in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh, afterwards Grand Duke
of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The number of wild animals driven together by
the natives, which included zebras, quaggas, gnus, cow-antelopes,
blessbock, springbocks, and ostriches, was estimated at five-and-twenty
thousand. The number killed on this one day was reckoned at about six
thousand animals, and a number of natives were trampled to death by the
herds of wild beasts.
At this time there were still Europeans in South Africa who made
elephant-hunting their ordinary business. Now there are neither
elephants nor indeed any other kind of wild animal in numbers worth
mentioning in these once rich hunting grounds. They have all been
killed off in the course of a hundred years. Where once hundreds of
thousands of gnus lived their life, there are now only a few hundred
specimens carefully preserved and guarded. And the same is the case
with all other wild animals. Many species are gone completely and
for ever. _A similar process will go on slowly but surely throughout
the whole of Africa, wherever civilisation penetrates. There is only
one chance of the beautiful wild life of Africa being permanently
preserved, and that lies in the hunters themselves consenting to
protect and spare it._
It has been rightly remarked by such a competent authority as A. H.
Neumann (who is, moreover, one of the most experienced of English
elephant hunters) that the continued existence of many wild African
species is not incompatible with the progress of civilisation. He
points out that we can only reckon with some degree of certainty on the
effective preservation of wild animals, where not only reservations
have been established for them, but where also a considerable amount
of control can be exercised over both Europeans and natives. In his
opinion, for instance, a mere regulation forbidding the shooting of
female elephants is impracticable: “I should like,” he says, “to see
one of those who have drawn up such a regulation come into the African
bush, and there show us how we are to distinguish between female and
bull elephants in these impenetrable thickets.”
In the British colonies in Africa reservations for wild animals have
been established with most successful results. Those of British East
Africa, the Sudan and Somaliland, and finally of British Central
Africa, taken together, have about five times the area of the Victoria
Nyanza.
[Illustration:
_C. G. Shillings, phot._
GROUP OF WILD ANIMALS AT HAGENBECK’S ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS AT
STETTINGEN, NEAR HAMBURG. THE ANIMALS LIVE IN OPEN SPACES
ARRANGED TO REPRESENT THEIR NATURAL SURROUNDINGS, AND THE
SPECTATORS ARE PROTECTED BY WIDE TRENCHES AND GRILLES. HERR
HAGENBECK IS SEEN ON THE LEFT.]
By means of reports made as carefully as possible by the district
authorities, estimates have been obtained of the numbers of existing
wild animals. In the laying out of the reservations the very migratory
habits of the African fauna have been taken into consideration as far
as is practicable, and by strict protective regulations of various
kinds most satisfactory results have been secured. In the Transvaal
Colony, too, a reservation has been marked out in the Barberton
district between the Olifant River and the Portuguese frontier. Any
one shooting in this reservation without a permit is liable to a fine
of £100, or six months’ imprisonment. There is a very interesting
official report as to the wild inhabitants of this reservation. “It
contains one old rhinoceros (with shot-marks on its hide), a small herd
of elephants, a considerable supply of ostriches, from five to nine
giraffes, a satisfactory quantity of gnus, and also of ‘black-heeled’
or impallah-antelopes, two or three small herds of buffaloes, several
herds of zebras, numerous waterbuck and kudus, and a small number of
horse-antelopes. On the other hand, whether oryx-antelopes and eland
are still to be found there appears to the author of the report in the
highest degree doubtful.”
However, in the extensive reservations that have been established
in other British possessions in Africa, and especially in those of
the Sudan, a large number of the beautifully formed dwellers of the
wilderness still live their life, and this must be a delight to the
heart of every sportsman.
It is to be hoped that through thus establishing “sanctuaries” (as the
English call them), with the consequent supervision, a means has been
found of protecting the indigenous wild life of Africa, as well of
America, for a long time to come.