2 
ELEPHANT-HUNTING IN EAST AFRICA 
CHAP. 
date seaport town in South Africa, when I first landed there 
early in 1869 it was a comparatively primitive place. Never¬ 
theless I always felt that I had come too late, and listened 
with envy to the tales of those who were then old colonists 
about elephants in the Berea 1 bush when they first were 
“Jimmies” or newcomers. The elephants had been driven 
far beyond the borders of the colony by the time my foot 
first sank into the deep sand which served for streets then, 
and I never overtook them in South Africa. The last buffalo 
even Natal contained was killed a year or two after my arrival. 
Not but what I did find my way, during the many years I 
wandered in South-Eastern Africa, to where the latter were 
still in possession—big herds of them ; and other game, of 
every kind peculiar to the country with the one notable ex¬ 
ception above mentioned, yet swarmed. Some of those old 
days might be worth recalling at another time ; but they never 
satisfied me thoroughly. I hankered after the untouched 
wilds which I knew still existed in Equatorial Africa : where 
the elephant yet roamed as in primeval times ; where one 
would never see the wheel-mark of a Boer’s waggon nor hear 
the report of any gun but one’s own. 
But circumstances—largely connected with a certain 
emptiness of the pocket—kept me back for something like 
twenty years from attempting to penetrate into the interior 
of the continent from another and more favourably situated 
point. Even when in 1888 I made my first passing acquaint¬ 
ance with Mombasa (before the days of the Imperial British 
East Africa Company), as well as other African ports, in the 
course of a voyage up the east coast, I was deterred by the 
heavy cost which such an expedition as was said to be neces¬ 
sary to enable one to go any distance inland would entail. 
Two years later I was there (Mombasa) again ; but still the 
difficulties in the way of making an independent trip after 
elephants, and the lack of encouragement to undertake it in 
1 The Berea is the fashionable suburb overlooking the harbour. 
