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.
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.
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
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.”
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