In Closed Territory

“CLOSED TERRITORY” is a phrase that inspires longings and expresses conditions of the sort that, in one form or another from the days of Adam, have served out to mankind most of the sweetest pleasures and bitterest pains experienced between earliest sentient childhood and feeblest senile age. Never are we so old or so young that we are entirely safe from the allurements it suggests, the novel charms and new intoxications with which our imagination close hedges every sinuous turn of forbidden paths. The pitfalls it holds, alike for toddling infancy, firm-treading prime, and halting, stumbling age, we never think of until into them we are deeply and more or less hopelessly plunged.


Happy indeed, then, he who may be so fortunate as to win free franchise to “Closed Territory,” to traverse it untainted, and to leave it unscarred.


A personal acquaintance with the British East African Protectorate can scarcely fail to make any observant, thoughtful Briton or American proud of his Anglo-Saxonhood, of its boldness, its actual audacity.


This newest of British Colonies comprises 400,000 square miles of territory. It has a native black population of 4,000,000, divided among something over a dozen different tribes, each widely differing in language and tribal customs from all the others, all warrior races perpetually battling with each other until brought under measurable discipline by British authority, the most powerful the Kikuyu, the Masai, and the Wakamba.


And yet this vast new apanage of the Empire is occupied and held for the Crown by a numerically puny handful of about two hundred and fifty Englishmen!


This includes the Governor and his staff, the various administrative departments, the military and police departments — in fact, the entire civil list of the Protectorate, except the Post, Telegraph, and Railway Departments.


Troops? No troops? Oh, yes; but what? A few companies of East Indian Sikh infantry, doing police duty along the Uganda Railway, and two battalions of native Soudanese and Nubian Askaris! That is all!


And of this little group of two hundred and fifty white men charged with the task of holding four million raw, savage blacks in check, nearly four-fifths are stationed at Mombasa, Nairobi, Kisumu, and other railway points, while the outlying districts are held by a scant sixty men, posted in little bomas (garrisons) scattered along the coast and parallel to and never more than seventy-five miles from the Uganda Railway, divided up into “bunches” of three, two, or often no more than one white man to each boma, often remote from support, never with more than a handful of native troops under their command!


It is a distinctly sporting proposition in government, is that of British East Africa, with every man in the game playing against what would appear superficially to be, and what may at any time become in cruel fact, hopelessly overwhelming odds. And yet one never hears a hint of a thought of anything of the sort from the men themselves. Quietly, coolly, and usually most efficiently are they doing their work. “Playing the game,” they themselves to be the duty of every right-minded gentleman-sportsman, who shoots wisely and not too much, to publish an account of his observations, no matter whether he includes his shooting records or not. From such dreadful tales of sordid slaughter as those of Neumann, the ivory-hunter, all people who care for the beasts of the field may well pray to be spared.


Mr. Bronson’s story is very much to my mind; and on hearing that it was to appear in permanent form, I was heartily glad. Through the chapters previously published I had followed him with interest and delight. He gratifies my desire to know the on-the-spot impressions of the explorer and hunter; for it is this personal equation that always brings the reader in closest touch with the hunter and his surroundings. His careful and clear descriptions of landscapes and the component parts of his African geography are delightful; and his frequent touches of humor, — phenomenally rare in books on Africa, — are most welcome exceptions to the African rule. Surely, a story of the Dark Continent need not by necessity be sombre.


In perusing this and other recent tales of the great game herds of the East African plains, the reader naturally asks the question, What has the future in store for the game? Will the onslaughts of sportsmen and residents soon reach such a point of frequency that the game will be killed more rapidly than it breeds?


It is upon the answer to this last question that the future of the big game depends. As a rule, it is not by any means the gentlemen-sportsmen, taking a modest toll of the wilds, who exterminate the game. In the first place, they are easily checked and regulated; for all their acts are known. In about ninety per cent of all the extermination cases that are fully known, the commercial hunters, and the resident hunters who kill game all the year round, are the real exterminators. I think that in most localities one case-hardened resident who is determined to live on the country can be counted upon to destroy more animal life each year than five average sportsmen who visit the same territory for brief periods.


In those portions of the East African plateau region that are suited to agriculture, stretching from Bulawayo to Uganda, the wild herds are bound to be crowded out by the farmer and the fruit-grower. This is the inevitable result of civilization and progress in wild lands. Marauding herds of zebras, bellicose rhinoceroses, and murderous buffaloes do not fit in with ranches and crops, and children going to school. Except in the great game preserves, I think that the big game of British East Africa is foredoomed to disappear, the largest species first.


Five hundred years from now, when North America is worn out, and wasted to a skeleton of what it now is, the great plateau region of East Africa between Cape Town and Lake Rudolph will be a mighty empire, teeming with white population. Giraffes and rhinoceroses are now trampling over the sites of future cities and universities. Then the game herds, outside of the preserves, will exist only in memory, and in the pages of such books as “In Closed Territory” by Bronson, and in other books by hunters who shoot for themselves and write for the pleasure of their friends. For myself, I am glad that I live in the days of big game, in Africa and elsewhere; and as a natural corollary to a sportsman’s life, A. D. 1910, it is his solemn duty to do his level best to insure that a good supply of wild life is left for the sportsmen of 2010.


W. T. HORNADAY.


New York, January 1910.