The Elephant r 



Bengula or shot by Europeans. I also saw in 1874 many tons of ivory 

 which had been traded from Sipopo, then the paramount Chief of the 

 Barotsi, and think, therefore, that I am justified in expressing an opinion 

 as to the average size that the tusks of elephants used to reach in the 

 interior of South Africa, before the herds had been decimated and all the 

 finest tuskers destroyed. The ivory brought from the country immediately 

 to the north of the Central Zambesi averaged somewhat larger than that 

 obtained in Matabeleland, where the tusks of big full-grown bulls weighed, 

 as a rule, from 40 lbs. to 60 lbs. Tusks weighing over 60 lbs. were not 

 uncommon, though not at all numerous ; but tusks over 70 lbs. in weight 

 were certainly few and far between, whilst anything over 80 lbs. was 

 very rare. 



Many thousands of bull elephants have been killed in South 

 Africa during the last sixty or seventy years, but out of all that number 

 probably less than fifty carried tusks weighing upwards of 100 lbs. each. 

 Some few, however, of very abnormal size have been recorded. One was 

 brought to Bamangwato from the Lake N'gami district in 1873 by a 

 Boer hunter named Bernhard Bauer, which weighed 174 lbs. This was 

 a single tusk and was bought from the natives, and whether it originally 

 belonged to a one-tusked elephant, or its fellow was broken or had been 

 disposed of elsewhere, is not known. An elephant carrying enormous 

 tusks, too, was wounded and lost late one evening in 1868 or 1869 by 

 a Boer hunter named Potgeiter in the thick bush between the Vungo 

 and Gwelo rivers within seventy miles of the present township of 

 Bulawayo. This animal was found dead a few days later by a native 

 hunter, and its tusks came into the possession of a trader at Bulawayo. 

 They measured 9 feet in length and the pair weighed a little over 

 300 lbs. A very similar pair of tusks of about the same weight was 

 obtained in barter from Umzila, the king of the Gaza Zulus, in 1874, 

 by Mr. Reuben Benningfield of Durban, Natal. The largest tusked 



