volume 14.2

No continent has so rich a literature of exploration and hunting as Africa, and no literature enjoys, a century and more later, so devoted a tribe of enthusiasts.

Africa lovers are also book lovers (and magazine lovers, hence the popularity of this publication).  For some, books are their only window into the life and times of this fascinating world; for others, it is a way of filling in the long winter nights, either remembering the last safari or looking forward to the next one.

The history of African hunting literature generally dates from the publication, in 1839, of William Cornwallis Harris’s The Wild Sports of Southern Africa.  Since Harris, literally thousands of books have been published about Africa – hunting, exploring, fighting the slave trade, converting the heathen, studying animals, and anthropology.  These books were written by hunters, soldiers, missionaries, pious do-gooders and outright villains, educated, uneducated, and a bit of both.

For most of these authors, their book on Africa would be their one literary effort; for every Richard Burton (who published scores of books, was a household name in Victorian England, and whose fame endures to this day) there would be a Frederick Roderick Noble Findley.  Findley published but one book, and his fame was not quite as lengthy as his name.  Little is known about the man or his career.

Findley is not alone.  Thousands of such shadowy figures haunt the history of Africa and the dusty bookshelves that house their works.

David Chandler is a collector of Africana who lives in New England.  His book collection numbers in the thousands, from the famous to the obscure.  In the mid-1990s, he struck on the idea of writing an encyclopedia of African characters, and this year his book – Legends of the African Frontier – was published by Safari Press (www.safaripress.com).

More than 400 pages long, Legends lives up to its subtitle – The Life and Times of Africa’s Most Unforgettable Characters, 1800-1945 – with entries on some 1200 people, arranged in alphabetical order and topped off with a glossary of terms and a (necessarily truncated) bibliography.  The thought of tackling such a mammoth task is daunting, to say the least, and Chandler admits to spending 12 years in its completion.  As an author, however, one knows it took far longer than that; in reality, the research began that day in his far-off childhood when he opened his first book on Africa and became hooked.

* * *

Legends of the African Frontier is a book you should keep close to your favourite reading chair, available to be consulted at the drop of an unfamiliar name.  It is also the kind of book you can open casually to any page and start to read.  Hours later, you will look up and wonder where the time went.  The stories are all fascinating.

Whether intended or not, however, any book arranged like an encylopedia is likely to be treated as one, and judged on the accuracy of its entries.  While I did not set out to find fault with Chandler on that score, it happened all on its own as I consulted entries on people about whom I have particular knowledge or familiarity.  Extrapolating from that experience, if I found what I consider obvious errors in the entries on Hemingway, Ruark, Burton and others, how many lie in the entries about which I know nothing, and upon which I might depend for information?

For example, Chandler refers to Robert Wilson as the professional hunter in Green Hills of Africa.  In fact, Wilson was the PH in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.  In the Ruark entry, he refers to him striking it rich writing about Africa and says the money he made from Something of Value allowed him to buy a castle in Spain; in fact, Ruark was very successful before he ever went to Africa; he bought his villa in Spain and moved there two years before Something of Value was published.

In the case of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Chandler refers to his great “success in warfare...languages...and, of course, hunting.”  On the contrary, Burton was unusual for the time in that he abhorred hunting.

Considering the amount of time and effort required to write a book such as this one, and the (often contradictory) information available about these people, some errors of fact are understandable.  Chandler goes a considerable way toward making up for it through the sheer scope of the work he has devoted to entries about people who are found nowhere else.

Every African library owns its share of books written by unknowns.  If we like the book and value the content, we are naturally curious about the author.  One very famous, and oft-quoted book, is Major H. C. Maydon’s Big Game of Africa (Lonsdale, 1935), the first book ever devoted not just to safari, but how to go about mounting a safari, what equipment to take, and so on.  Information on Maydon himself is decidedly sketchy, and his own book does not even tell you what the initials ‘H.C.’ stand for.  That information – Hubert Conway – is found in Chandler’s book, along with a brief biography, sketch of Maydon’s military career, and even notable animals he submitted to Rowland Ward.

John ‘Pondoro’ Taylor is an author who wrote two books that belong on the bookshelf of everyone who hunts big game with a rifle:  Big Game and Big Game Rifles and African Rifles and Cartridges (both published around 1948).  Taylor is not exactly an unknown:  He wrote an autobiography and this was followed in recent years by a couple of biographies.  Still, he’s a controversial figure and even today it is not clear what is fact, what is fiction, and what might be outright libel.

As a life-long admirer of John Taylor as a hunter and rifle expert, I really don’t care about his sexual proclivities.  In the sexual glass house that was Kenya in the 1930s, there were few who could afford to throw stones anyway.  Chandler handles Taylor’s life with admirable discretion and considerable sympathy.

Another of Africa’s enigmatic heroes, J.H. Patterson, is covered in less than salacious detail.  Patterson, author of The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, went on to lead a controversial and sometimes scandalous life.  His 1908 expedition to northern Kenya, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. James Blyth, became legend and served as the basic plot for Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.  On the expedition, which Chandler points out was a surveying party, not a hunting safari, James Blyth became ill and shot himself.  His wife had spent that night in Patterson’s tent (allegedly because of her husband’s illness), and the death was followed by a sequence of questionable events.  Although exonerated by an inquest in Nairobi and an enquiry in Britain’s House of Lords (Blyth’s father was a peer), Patterson left Kenya Colony.  He served with distinction in the Great War and died in California in 1947.

Not all the characters in Chandler’s book are authors, by any means.

One notable ruffian about whom I have been curious for years is Quentin Grogan, an elephant hunter in the Lado Enclave who was encountered by the Roosevelt safari when it passed through the area in 1909.  Grogan was the brother of the better-known Ewart Grogan, who is noted for walking from the Cape to Cairo to win a bride, and ended up owning a large part of what is now central Nairobi.  Ewart was born in 1873 and died in 1966 at the remarkable (considering his life) age of 93; Quentin lived from 1883 to 1962.  The Grogan brothers survived the Lado Enclave, countless wars, the Mau Mau, elephant hunting, malaria, and each other.  They don’t make them like that anymore.  Chandler devotes almost three full pages to Ewart, and one column-inch to Quentin, which gives some idea of their relative notoriety.

If you are one of those people who find Mycroft Holmes more interesting than his brother Sherlock, you might want to consider this book just to learn more about famous brothers who weren’t.

David Livingstone had a brother Charles, also a missionary, who from the sound of him was one of the less admirable people ever to grace the Dark Continent.  He was part of his brother’s 1863 Zambezi expedition, and distinguished himself by delaying the journey because of his poor physical condition, fabricating evidence against the artist, Thomas Baines, and the geologist, Thornton, in an attempt to get them fired, and brutally attacking a native chief.

Then there is Valentine Baker, the younger brother of Sir Samuel.  If Sam was ‘Baker of the Nile,’ Valentine was known as ‘Baker of the 10th’ for his service as colonel of the 10th Hussars.  If Samuel was almost unrelentingly admirable, Valentine was unrelentingly puzzling – a man of great ability who just could not stay out of trouble.  In 1875, on a train from the army base at Aldershot to London, Valentine assaulted a young woman in the train carriage.  She resisted and ended up outside the train, clinging to the carriage as it swept along, with Baker inside holding onto her.  He was acquitted of attempted rape but convicted of assault, cashiered from the army, lost his membership in the Marlborough Club (of which he was a founder) and ended up, with the help of influential friends, holding a command in the Turkish army.

Queen Victoria took a personal interest in his case – and not a sympathetic one – and at strategic times blocked attempts to reinstate Baker.  After the death of Hicks Pasha at Kordofan in 1883, Baker took command of the campaign against the Mahdi in Sudan and lost almost three-quarters of his force of 3,500 at the battle of Tokar.  He was finally forgiven, but died before he received the news.

While Valentine was engaged in his amatory and military pursuits, Samuel Baker was busy doing the right thing and becoming the greatest of all Victorian heroes in the process.

Baker’s life story is well known, but one aspect of it remains to this day one of the enduring romantic mysteries of the Victorian Age:  Baker’s rescue in the Balkans of a young Hungarian slave girl, Florence Szasz (or von Sass) who became his second wife, boon companion, and great love.

The basic facts are known:  Baker was touring Europe with Prince Duleep Singh and found himself at a slave auction inside Turkish territory in the Balkans.  The teenage Florence was to be auctioned for a harem.  Baker entered the bidding, obtained the girl, and got her to safety.  Early accounts said he bought her; the latest credible account, based on previously inaccessible family papers, says he lost the bidding but bribed a guard and absconded with the girl into Christian territory.

Baker was 38 years old, Florence barely 15, but they became inseparable, eventually married, and Florence Szasz became Lady Baker.  Together, they explored Africa, searched for the source of the Nile, ruled part of the Sudan, and battled the slave trade.

Although Pat Shipman’s 2004 book, To the Heart of the Nile:  Lady Florence Baker and the Exploration of Central Africa, answers many questions, it never answers the central and most compelling one – the question that never will be answered – and that is, what was in Samuel Baker’s heart that night when he escaped with Florence Szasz from under the noses of the harem guards of the Pasha of Viddin?

If they don’t make men like the Grogans any more, even less do they make them like Samuel Baker – or women like Florence Szasz.

David Chandler’s Legends of the African Frontier, admirably, keeps the memory of many of them alive.

Oddly enough, the aforementioned Frederick Roderick Noble Findley is not among them.  He is not there, between Finaughty (fascinating!) and Firmin (who?)  His obscurity remains intact.

David Chandler’s ‘Legends of the African Frontier’ is available from Safari Press (www.safaripress.com) for $49.95 plus shipping.