ELEPHANT HUNTING, ETC. 197 



the idea may have been that by faUing on its tusks the ele- 

 phant broke them off, but this is not clearly or definitely 

 expressed.* 



When Master William Towerson, merchant of London, 

 sailed along the Guinea Coast, in 1556 and 1557, he, on sev- 

 eral occasions, secured elephant tusks from the natives, 

 and he tells us that for one weighing thirty pounds he 

 gave in exchange six "of our basons." On January 4, 1557, 

 he made an essay of elephant hunting on his own account, 

 taking with him thirty men equipped with arquebuses, 

 pikes, longbows, crossbows, partisans, and swords and 

 bucklers. They sighted two elephants and succeeded in 

 wounding them several times, but the hunt was a failure, 

 for the animals escaped after injuring one of the hun- 

 ters, f 



The Portuguese traveller, Duarte Lopez, who went to the 

 Congo in 1576 and resided in Loanda until 1587, describes 

 the pits dug by the natives to capture elephants in much the 

 same terms as are used by the travellers of our day. They 

 were broad at the top and gradually narrowed as the depth 

 increased, so that the animal falling into one of them became 

 so tightly wedged in that escape, and even movement, was 

 impossible. They were hidden by a covering of grasses 

 and leaves of a kind that the elephants habitually chose for 

 food. In this connection, Lopez relates that on one occasion 

 a female elephant accompanied by her young came near one 

 of these pits, and the baby elephant fell in. The mother 

 trumpeted wildly and made frantic efforts to drag him out; 

 but when she saw that this was impossible, she determined 

 to assure him a quick death and preserve him from the tender 

 mercies of human kind. So she filled up the pit with earth, 



*Konrad von Megenberg, "Buch der Natur," ed. by Dr. Franz Pfeiffer, Stuttgart, 1861, 

 p. 134. 



fSee "Hakluyt's Voyages," Vol. V, Glasgow, 1904, pp. 155, 215. 



