Part 3 (1/2)
At present the chief revenue of the government is derived from shooting parties, and the officials are doing all they can to encourage the coming of sportsmen. Each man who comes to shoot must pay two hundred and fifty dollars for his license as well as employ at least thirty natives for his transport. He must buy supplies, pay ten per cent.
import and export tax, and in many other ways spend money which goes toward paying the expenses of government. The government also is encouraging various agricultural and stock raising experiments, but these have not yet pa.s.sed the experimental stage. Almost anything may be grown in British East Africa, but before agriculture can be made to pay the vast herds of wild game must either be exterminated or driven away.
No fence will keep out a herd of zebra, and in one rush a field of grain is ruined by these giant herds. Experiments have failed satisfactorily to domesticate the zebra, and so he remains a menace to agriculture and a nuisance in all respects except as adding a picturesque note to the landscape.
Colonel Roosevelt, in a recent speech in Nairobi, spoke of British East Africa as a land of enormous possibilities and promise, but in talks with many men here I found that little money has been made by those who have gone into agriculture in a large way. Drought and predatory herds of game have introduced an element of uncertainty which has made agriculture, as at present developed, unsatisfactory.
Colonel Roosevelt has become a popular idol in East Africa. Everywhere one meets Englishmen who express the greatest admiration for him. He has shrewdly a.n.a.lyzed conditions as they now exist and has picked out the weak spots in the government. For many years prior to the arrival of Sir Percy Girouard the country has been administered by weak executives, and its progress has been greatly r.e.t.a.r.ded thereby. The last governor was kind, but inefficient, and some months ago was sent to the West Indies, where he is officially buried. Roosevelt came, sized up the situation, and made a speech at a big banquet in Nairobi. Nearly two hundred white men in evening clothes were there. They came from all parts of East Africa, and listened with admiration to the plain truths that Theodore Roosevelt told them in the manner of a Dutch uncle. Since then he has owned the country and could be elected to any office within the gift of the people. He talked for over an hour, and it must have been a great speech, if one may judge by the enthusiastic comments I have heard about it. When an Englishman gets enthusiastic about a speech by an American it must be a pretty good speech.
Newland and Tarlton is the firm that outfits most shooting parties that start out from Nairobi. They do all the preliminary work and relieve you of most of the worry. If you wish them to do so, they will get your complete outfit, so you need not bring anything with you but a suitcase.
They will get your guns, your tents, your food supplies, your mules, your head-man, your cook, your gunbearers, your askaris (native soldiers), your interpreter, your ammunition, and your porters. They will have the whole outfit ready for you by the time you arrive in Nairobi. When you arrive in British East Africa, a-shooting bent, you will hear of Newland and Tarlton so often that you will think they own the country.
Mr. Newland met us in Mombasa, and through his agents sent all of our London equipment of tents and guns and ammunition and food up to Nairobi. When we arrived in Nairobi he had our porters ready, together with tent boys, gunbearers, and all the other members of our _safari_, and in three days we were ready to march. The firm has systematized methods so much that it is simple for them to do what would be matters of endless worry to the stranger. In course of time you pay the price, and in our case it seemed reasonable, when one considers the work and worry involved. Most English sportsmen come out in October and November, after which time the shooting is at its height. Two years ago there were sixty _safaris_, or shooting expeditions, sent out from Nairobi. When we left, late in September, there were about thirty.
[Photograph: By courtesy of W.D. Boyce. The Great White Way in Nairobi]
[Photograph: By courtesy of W.D. Boyce The Busiest Place in Nairobi]
[Photograph: Umbrella Acacias]
[Drawing: _The New Governor Looks Something Like Roosevelt_]
Each party must have from thirty to a couple of hundred camp attendants, depending upon the number of white men in the party. Each white man, requires, roughly, thirty natives to take care of him. In our party of four white people we had one hundred and eighteen. One would presume that the game would speedily be exterminated, yet it is said that the game is constantly increasing. After one day's ride on the railway it would be hard to conceive of game being more plentiful than it was while we were there. Mr. Roosevelt carried nearly three hundred men with him, collected a great quant.i.ty of game, and necessarily spent a great deal of money. It is said that the expenses of his expedition approached ten thousand dollars a month, but the chances are that this figure is much more than the actual figure.
At the time of our arrival there was a shortage in the porter supply, and we were obliged to take out men from a number of different tribes.
Swahili porters are considered the best, but there are not enough to go round, so we had to take Swahilis, Bagandas, Kikuyus, Kavirondos, Lumbwas, Minyamwezis, and a lot more of a.s.sorted races. Each porter carries sixty pounds on his head, and when the whole outfit is on the trail it looks like a procession of much importance.
The Norfolk Hotel is the chief rendezvous of Nairobi. In the course of the afternoon nearly all the white men on hunting bent show up at the hotel and patronize the bar. They come in wonderful hunting regalia and in all the wonderful splendor of the Britisher when he is afield. There is nearly always a great coming and going of men riding up, and of rickshaws arriving and departing. Usually several tired sportsmen are stretched out on the veranda of the long one-storied building, reading the ancient London papers that are lying about. Professional guides, arrayed in picturesque Buffalo Bill outfits, with spurs and hunting-knives and slouch hats, are among those present, and amateur sportsmen in crisp khaki and sun helmets and new puttees swagger back and forth to the bar. There is no denying the fact that there is considerable drinking in Nairobi. There was as much before we got there as there was after we got there, however. After the arrival of the European steamer at Mombasa business is brisk for several days as the different parties sally forth for the wilds.
[Drawing: _At the Norfolk Hotel Bar_]
On our s.h.i.+p there were four different parties. A young American from Boston, who has been spending several years doing archaeological work in Crete, accompanied by a young English cavalry officer, were starting out for a six-weeks' shoot south of the railway and near Victoria Nyanza.
Two professional ivory hunters were starting for German East Africa by way of the lake. Mr. Boyce and his African balloonograph party of seven white men were preparing for the photographing expedition in the Sotik, and our party of four was making final preparations for our march.
Consequently there was much hurrying about, and Newland and Tarlton's warehouse was the center of throngs of waiting porters and the scene of intense activity as each party sorted and a.s.sembled its mountains of supplies.
Seager and Wormald got off first, going by train to Kijabe, where they were to begin their ten days' march in the Sotik. Here they were to try their luck for two or three weeks and then march back, preparatory to starting home.
The professional ivory hunters were slow in starting. There was delay in getting mules. One of them had shot three hundred elephants in the Belgian Congo during the last four years, and it was suspected he had been poaching. The other had been caught by the Belgian authorities on his last trip, lost all his ivory and guns by confiscation, but was ready to make another try. The ivory game is a rich one and there are always venturesome men who are willing to take chances with the law in getting the prizes.
The Boyce party with its two balloons and its great number of box kites and its moving picture equipment and its twenty-nine cameras and its vast equipment was slow in starting, but it expected to get away on September twenty-fourth, the day after we left. They planned to fill their balloon in Nairobi and tow it at the end of a special train as far as Kijabe, where they were to strike inland from the railway. They were encamped on a hill overlooking the city, with their two hundred and thirty porters ready for the field and their balloon ready to make the first ascension ever attempted in East Africa.
Throngs of natives squatted about, watching the final preparations, and doubtless wondered what the strange, swaying object was. On the evening of the twenty-second the party gave a moving picture show at one of the clubs for the benefit of St. Andrew's church. A great crowd of fas.h.i.+onably dressed people turned out and saw the motion picture records of events which they had seen in life only a couple of days before.
There were moving pictures of the arrival of the governor's special train, his march through the city, and many other events that were fresh in the minds of the audience. There were also motion pictures taken on the s.h.i.+p that brought us down from Naples to Mombasa, and it was most interesting to see our fellow pa.s.sengers and friends reproduced before us in their various athletic activities while on s.h.i.+pboard. Mr. Boyce gave an afternoon show for children, an evening show for grown-ups, and was to give another for the natives the following night. The charities of Nairobi were much richer because of Mr. Boyce and his African Balloonograph Expedition.
While in Nairobi we visited the little station where experiments are being made in the ”sleeping sickness.” An intelligent young English doctor is conducting the investigations and great hopes are entertained of much new information about that most mysterious ailment that has swept whole colonies of blacks away in the last few years.
In many little bottles were specimens of the deadly tsetse fly that causes all the infection. And the most deadly of all was the small one whose distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic was its wings, which crossed over its back. These we were told to look out for and to avoid them, if possible. They occur only in certain districts and live in the deep shade, near water. They also are day-biting insects, who do their biting only between eleven o'clock in the morning and five o'clock in the afternoon.