Maneaters of Tsavo: sifting facts from fiction

Maneaters of Tsavo: Doubts, doubts 

and more damned doubts?

 I CAN’T remember the number of conversations I had growing up in Kenya about the authenticity of the Colonel Patterson account of the Maneaters Tsavo and I suspect that debate will continue forever! I thoroughly enjoyed Col Patterson’s historical aspects of his book and his stories and photos of people and places of that untamed Kenya era are as fascinating today as they were during those early pioneering days.  The hunters, the historians, safari connoisseurs, the anthropologists and others who might have had a more scientific input at the time of the Maneaters of Tsavo are all gone. We who have followed are left with nothing but the legend and whatever Col. Patterson wrote.

I AM indebted to this online comment by EVAN RWT: Some parts of the story may be exaggerated or uncertain. For example, a couple of researchers at the Field Museum in Chicago did a study of contemporary sources and say that the number of dead may be exaggerated. Patterson himself made conflicting claims on that, from 14 to 135. The Field Museum researchers think it may have been 28.

That doesn't mean Patterson necessarily lied. Part of the problem was accurate record keeping. They kept good counts of the dead Indians, but there were no accurate counts of the number of dead Africans. And it's hard to establish whether kills in neighbouring villages were made by the same lions or different lions. As they point out, man-eating lions were a constant presence in that area, having killed people long before the Tsavo lions appeared, and continued killing people until WWI, long after the Tsavo lions were dead. The Tsavo man-eaters weren't the only man-eaters around.

However, even the high numbers like 135 are not crazy high for man-eaters, though they may be inaccurate for the Tsavo lions. The Champawat tiger in India/Nepal killed over 400 people, and its kills are well-documented in newspapers and public records of the time. The Rudraprayag leopard in India killed over 125 people.

Specific details of what Patterson did can't always be independently corroborated outside his own writings. The story of the trap you mentions is among them. But I wouldn't pass it off as incredibly unlikely.

First, the details of the trap are very sketchy in Patterson's account. He mentions fashioning it out of railway sleepers (the wooden slabs on which rails are laid), rails and chain. We see someone's imaginary view of what it might have looked like in the Val Kilmer movie, where it looks pretty solid and sophisticated. But nothing Patterson actually says describes it in that much detail, and if you look at what he does say (such as shooting holes in rails with his rifle because he had no drill), it appears that it was very crudely made, and may not have afforded as much protection to the men as you might think. Then there is weird stuff like putting the lights (the lanterns) on the human side of the trap rather than the lion side. If you want to shoot something, you should arrange lights to illuminate the target rather than arranging them to blind yourself in the dark.

So it's not surprising to me that a couple of guys sitting alone in the night behind a precarious barrier might shoot poorly at a known man-killer on the other side. How much light was there to shoot by, how many lanterns? Were these good lanterns or smoke dulled crappy lanterns? Were the two guys even trained to shoot? A lot of "sepoys" were people who'd never handled a gun, or were given token training on some ancient blunderbuss. Did they take such people and give them a couple modern rifles just for this occasion? So many details are missing.

Even the best of shooters may be confused in the semi-dark with a man eater raging behind a "wall" of hanging railway sleepers and odd bits of chain. The story does say they found some blood on the other side, so they didn't miss the lion entirely, they wounded it.

I don't think we can dismiss the story over the trap account. He may be wrong about the number of people killed by the tigers, but that's a matter of guesswork on everyone's part, he had no way of knowing exact numbers. EVAN RWT.

 

DoctorDanDrangus

OP•9 yr. ago

I believe he says he gave them Martini rifles (he mentions his own .303, so I'm guessing they were .303 as well) and I believe they were Sheiks (or as I understood - the Indian overseers/warriors). A cursory google search tells me that Martini rifles were lever action, but single shot? I'm confused by that. Does that mean they had to reload after every shot (if so - why the lever action?). If they did, I could understand how they might be so wildly inaccurate -- they would have been obviously terrified and probably struggling to reload quickly and so opting (I'd imagine) to shoot from the hip, rather than taking proper aim.

 

 

The sounds of drilling and blasting amid the big rock cliffs over the Tsavo River for the Kenya-Uganda Railroad didn’t scare off the big cats of Africa — it did just the opposite. At night when the bridge construction stopped, and the laborers slipped away into their rickety palm huts to rest, the silence was often punctuated by screams.

MARCH 26, 2021 By Matt Fratus

It was March 1898 when the terror became too much. Construction of the British colonial railroad under the hot African sun stopped. The disappearances of workers paralyzed all work. And the hunters lurking in the darkness of the Kenyan savannah became known as the “Man-eaters of Tsavo” for their nine-month-long reign of terror. Here, humans were not at the top of the food chain. The two male lions, which went mostly unseen, were named the Ghost and the Darkness.

The man-eating lions had no manes.

For eight years, Bruce Patterson, the curator of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, researched why the man-eating lions of Tsavo were maneless and discovered a hypothesis. 

“Mane length and density were inversely correlated with temperature; colour variation was unrelated,” he concluded in his research paper. “Mane development was correlated with January but not July conditions, suggesting a stronger response to cold than to heat. Climate-induced variation in manes of captives accounted for up to 50% of variation seen.”

In layman’s terms, the lions of this region do not have manes because it was hot. Damn hot. It’s an interesting variation, as elsewhere manes are believed to help lions survive territorial disputes with other males, as a kind of head and neck armor. 

In the lions’ rampage, 135 humans were reported eaten.

That’s a lot of eating of humans. Lt. Col. John Patterson (no relation to the Field Museum curator) published the book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures in 1907. He perhaps sensationalized the numbers — to as high as 135 humans eaten, which likely helped sell copies of his book and led to three Hollywood movies. The Ugandan Railway Co., however, reported 28 dead workers. More than a hundred years after the story, using chemical analysis of the lions’ hides, the Field Museum suggested the more accurate number to be 35 people eaten, 11 by one lion and 24 by the other. 

Scientists claim the lions hunted humans because they were easier to chew.

Not only are we humans easier to catch, but the very makeup of our bodies is more appealing to lions who want to put in less work to kill and chew their prey. The Field Museum’s Bruce Patterson and Vanderbilt University’s Larisa DeSantis published a study in the journal Scientific Reports of the teeth and jaws of known man-eating lions compared with wild-caught lions. At a microscopic level, they found that for the man-eaters, hunting live humans might have been preferred over gnawing the bones of dead animals, which is much harder on the teeth. 

Patterson further examined the skull of one of the man-eaters from Tsavo, and it showed a severe tooth abscess. Broken teeth are the norm for lions, as their faces are the target of defensive kicks by prey. The pus pocket might have made it too painful for the lion to take on larger prey.

Other factors included a severe drought in the region, a virus called rinderpest that killed prey like buffalo — and a caravan route that the railroad followed. “This caravan trail would have left a steady trail of dead and dying slaves,” Bruce Patterson noted. So, the lions may have learned to eat human flesh by scavenging the bodies. Zoologists in 2001 wrote a report in the Journal of East African Natural History stating that when lions attack people, they typically eat the “large fleshy parts, including the buttocks, thighs and arms.”

Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson with the first of two Tsavo man-eating lions he killed in December 1898. Photo courtesy of the Field Museum.

Lt. Col. Henry Patterson stopped work to kill them.

“Give me snuff, whiskey, and Swedes, and I will build this railroad through hell,” Minnesota railroad baron James J. Hill once famously said. Lt. Col. Henry Patterson might have said the same. Patterson had a lion problem delaying his railroad, but the British military officer, with experience killing

tigers in India, had a plan.

In December 1898, Patterson’s first attempt at killing the lions was unsuccessful. Summoning the workmen at their camp to gather tin cans and noisy instruments, he had them form a semicircle and advance into the bush. Patterson positioned himself behind an ant hill and waited for the lion to walk past. The lion came within 15 yards of his position, but Patterson’s double-barreled rifle misfired. Flustered, he hadn’t fired the left barrel. But the noise created by the workmen had disoriented the lion, giving Patterson enough time to shoot again. This shot hit its target but didn’t wound or even kill the lion.

Upon nightfall, Patterson built an improvised treestand with a chair perched above the ground and set a dead donkey carcass as bait. He killed the first man-eater with two bullets from his rifle. The second man-eater’s death was perhaps even more dramatic. Patterson used goats as bait, but in the pitch dark, he fired bullets wildly. He set up another blind above goats and waited again. When the lion approached, he fired his smoothbore and connected. The lion dashed into the bush and died. When the story got out, Patterson became an international hero.

You can still see the man-eaters in Chicago.

Patterson initially used the two dead lions as exotic floor ornaments. In 1924, he sold the skins and skulls to the Field Museum of Natural History in exchange for $5,000. Since the hides had been made into rugs, when it came time for a Field Museum taxidermist to full-body mount them, the lions ended up much smaller in size than they were in real life. The beasts that once led a reign of terror in Kenya now delight children and museum visitors in Chicago, Illinois. 

People are still being eaten alive in Tsavo and across Africa to this day.

In 2010, Paul Raffaele wrote a piece for the Smithsonian Magazine about his travels following Bruce Patterson to Kenya to explore the real story. When he arrived in the capital city of Nairobi, a lion had just killed a woman, and only weeks earlier a cattle herder was killed and eaten.

“That’s not unusual at Tsavo,” said Samuel Kasiki, the deputy director of biodiversity research and monitoring with the Kenya Wildlife Service. It’s not unusual for the continent of Africa either. A study published in Nature in 2005 counted nearly 600 deaths and 300 people injured by lions in Tanzania alone since 1990. “There’s really something about ‘man-eaters’ that puts people in their rightful place,” said Bruce Patterson. “Not at the helm but a couple of notches down.”