Free Theodore Roosevelt Abroad by J. Lee Thompson

and a 500/450 Holland & Holland royal grade double-barreled elephant gun donated by a group of English friends and admirers, led by Edward North Buxton. 16
    Roosevelt described the Holland & Holland, which had the presidential seal and his initials engraved in gold on the buttstock, as the “prettiest gun I ever saw, and the mechanism as beautiful as that of a watch.” 17 Their own rifles, TR told Buxton, looked “coarse and cheap and clumsy beside it.” He had only fired it a half a dozen times as the recoil was heavy and it “made my ears sing.” 18 Buxton was in turn delighted that the Colonel found the gun “so much to your taste.” He knew it to be effective and trusted it would “prove a good friend to you at interesting moments.” 19 To complement this heavy weaponry, Roosevelt brought a customized Ansley H. Fox No. 12 shotgun for birds. This “beautiful bit of American workmanship” was also capable of being loaded with ball as back-up gun for lions. Kermit had his own Winchester 405, as well as a 30–40 Winchester, and for the biggest game a 450 Rigby double-barreled elephant gun. To find the game and study their habits TR carried a telescope given him on the Admiral by an Irish Hussar Captain going out to India. To weigh the game he brought an ingenious beam scale given to him by his friend Thompson Seton.
    The Colonel also had two “saises,” Hamisi and Simba, who looked after his horses, for which he brought his Whitman tree army saddle. He had made special arrangements for a selection of mounts to be on hand and chose two, a sorrel and a brown, which he dubbed Tranquility and Zebra-shape. The natives soon assigned Roosevelt a similarly descriptive name, “Bwana Tumbo” (Mr. Portly Man), while Kermit became “Bwana Mtoto” (Mr. His Father’s Sprout). 20 In his account TR records another, more flattering, title for himself, “Bwana Makuba” (Great Master), and for Kermit “Bwana Merodadi” (the Dandy Master). 21
    Outfitted in khaki safari gear and sun-helmet, hob-nailed or rubber-soled boots depending on conditions, and with the nine extra pairs of eye glasses Edith had packed distributed throughout his gear for safe keeping, Roosevelt could now begin his personal quest to bag the five most dangerous African animals: elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, leopard, and lion. The larger aim of the expedition was to collect family groups for museum display and research of all the major, and minor, species of interest they encountered. Before they were finished ten months later, this would amount to more than 11,000 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, plants and even invertebrates. For big game, the rule established was that the expedition would shoot only what was needed for museum specimens or food. At night and on days of rest which also allowed the taxidermists to catch up, TR sat at his portable writing table scribbling installments on a special two carbon pad for the Scribner’s magazine series published the next year as African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American HunterNaturalist . The two copies were dispatched in separate blue canvas envelopes to insure one made it to New York. He sent off the first article, titled “A Railroad Through the Pleistocene,” on May 12.
    As had been planned, after two days of preparation Roosevelt began his hunt on the way to Kitanga, the seven thousand acre ranch on the Athi River of Sir Alfred Pease, who had met the train at the Kapiti Plains station and, TR reported to his sister Anna, was a “perfect trump.” Theodore, Kermit, Pease, and another settler, Clifford Hill, set forth with gun bearers, sais, and a few porters to carry the game, while the rest of the heavily laden safari followed behind. Nearby were herds of hartebeest, wildebeest, and Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelles. The last, called “tommies,” the Colonel recorded, were “pretty, alert, little things” half the size of the American prongbuck. They had one