Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (16 page)

Back in Africa, there was still hunting to be done. While the sick members of the party recovered at Gondokoro, TR and Kermit struck off across the Nile again into Belgian territory for eight days spent in pursuit of the giant eland, not only one of largest and handsomest, but also the least known of African antelopes. The Belgian commandant of the Lado supplied seven askari to accompany the party, which had sixty Ugandan porters in train. The weather was very hot and the terrain a “waste of barren desolation.” They saw elephant, giraffe, and buffalo along the way before, after three days, Roosevelt at last got a chance for a giant eland, a big bull with horns twisted almost like a koodoo’s and a finely modeled head and legs. After a long stalk, at the end of which he had to crawl on all fours across the baked ground, TR shot his bull at one hundred yards with his Springfield. In the following days Kermit shot a bull and a cow. Eight days hunting yielded only these three of the elusive prey.

Their last major big game animals bagged, the hunters returned to Gondokoro, where they found waiting the steamer
Dal
, which Sir Reginald Wingate, the Sudan’s governor-general, had arranged to take them on the two week voyage down the Nile to Khartoum and civilization. Along the way, at Lake No and near the Nile, and on short side trips down its tributaries—the Bahr el Ghazal and Bahr el Zeraf, the final few specimens collected included white-eared kobs and saddle-marked lechwes, commonly called Mrs. Gray’s water-buck. When the numbers were totted up at the end of the safari, more than 11,000 specimens, large and small, had been captured and preserved. Many of the almost 5,000 mammals, 4,000 birds, 500 fish, 2,000 reptiles, and many invertebrates, remain in the Smithsonian and other museums and are still used regularly today for research and study.
²⁴
The naturalists discovered new genera, species, and sub-species. To many of these, including shrews, rodents, monkeys, deer, antelope, gazelle, birds, and even a conch shell, they gave the name roosevelti. Outside big game, the expedition had been the first systematic and comprehensive investigation undertaken of the flora and fauna of the areas visited. From this the Smithsonian garnered the most complete collection of East African species in the world.

Roosevelt and Kermit personally accounted for 512 big game trophies, of which they kept only a dozen for themselves.
²⁵
TR’s bag included nine lions, eight elephants, thirteen rhinos, six buffaloes and fifty-three other species, 296 animals in all collected over nearly as many days. Game was so numerous that, had they been willing, they could have killed ten, or a hundred, times as many. In all the hunting, only two wounded animals that Roosevelt knew of were left unaccounted for in the field. Of all the letters he received applauding the expedition, the one the Colonel perhaps most cherished came from Selous, who congratulated TR on the “marvelous, unbroken success of your African journey.” More than “anything else he had got,” Selous envied him the giant eland trophy.
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TR’s and Kermit’s achievements in Africa had placed them amongst the greatest big game sportsmen in the world. However, Roosevelt had had enough. The safari was meant to be the adventure of a lifetime and he had done a lifetime of shooting in ten months. He told his sister Corinne, “I do not care if I do not fire off my rifle again.” He was also overjoyed at the prospect of seeing Edith and confessed he would “never go away from her again if I can help it.”
²⁷

On March 10 the
Dal
reached Kodok, where the British had faced down a French imperial incursion a decade before in the so-called Fashoda Incident. Just before this they met the steamer of Sir William Garstin, a British engineer who had built the Aswan dam and for two decades had overseen the massive irrigation projects that ensured Egypt’s prosperity. Garstin and the Colonel were able to talk for some time of Sudanese and Egyptian affairs. Roosevelt greatly admired the constructive work of Garstin, as well as that of Sir Reginald Wingate, both of whom he saw as fellow imperialists toiling in the vineyard without much support, particularly from the elected leaders at home. While still president he had written to Wingate that his own colonial experiences made him appreciate the governor-general’s complaint that he was not getting the money that he needed for development in the Sudan. There was much TR would have liked to do in the Philippines that was impossible because Congress denied him the necessary funds. Roosevelt had years before read Wingate’s 1891 book
Mahdism and the Egyptian Sudan
and, in addition to the hunting, he had written Wingate that he looked forward “with eager interest” to see what his people were doing in his domain, as in all the British possessions.
²⁸

On his journey down the great river, at village after village that had been “touched by the blight of the Mahdist tyranny,” Roosevelt was struck by the lack of men of middle age, and by the children, all of whom were under twelve and known as “Government children” because under the previous regime most of them had been killed or died of starvation.
²⁹
In his opinion, during the twelve years of British rule since the Khalifa’s defeat at Omdurman, no place else in the world had shown “such astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity.” By putting an end to the “wolf-pack” rule of the Mahdi, and his successor the Khalifa, the British had ended a “tyranny which for cruelty, blood-thirstiness, unintelligence, and wanton destructiveness surpassed anything which a civilized people can even imagine.” Under such rule millions had died in an atmosphere of religious intolerance, slavery and murder.
³⁰

What he saw along the Nile in the Sudan made a strong imprint on TR, who came to equate the bloody jihadist regime of the Mahdi with Muslim rule in general. When he reached Khartoum, the Colonel told the American missionaries there that he felt they owed “a peculiar duty” to the Government under which they lived “in the direction of doing your full worth to make the present conditions perpetual.” It was “incumbent on every decent citizen of the Sudan to uphold the present order of things; to see that there is no relapse; to see that the reign of peace and justice continues.”
³¹
This meant continued British rule.

Lodge had warned TR that at Khartoum at least eight or ten newspapermen, some very hostile to Taft, would attempt to “rouse your indignation against him by what they say.” Lodge thought it of the “first importance” that Roosevelt should stay “entirely aloof” and say “absolutely nothing” about American politics before he got home, where they could talk and TR could judge the facts himself. Edith had written to Lodge about those who wanted Theodore to stay away another year. With this Lodge disagreed, and he told his friend to “carry out your plans just as you intended” and come home in the summer.
³²
The Colonel would heed Lodge’s advice as best he could, but the journalists would not wait until Khartoum for their interviews. They hired boats and came up the Nile to intercept him on the way down.

Figure 1
TR, seated, with his mountain lion statue and “Tennis Cabinet.” Notables include Captain Archie Butt at far left; Gifford Pinchot, fifth from left; French Ambassador Jules Jusserand, thirteenth from left; Elihu Root, behind TR’s left shoulder; James Garfield to Root’s left; Seth Bullock next to Garfield; John Callan O’Laughlin, fourth from right. Jack Abernathy is in a light colored suit. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

Figure 2
TR and his chosen successor William Howard Taft at the 1909 Inaugural. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

Figure 3
The Roosevelt family, Christmas 1908. From left, Ethel, Kermit, Quentin, Edith, Ted, TR, Archie, Alice, and her husband Nicholas Longworth. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

Figure 4
TR, Sir Frederick Jackson, Frederick Selous, and Dr. Edgar Mearns on an engine platform en route to Kapiti. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.

Figure 5
TR with his first elephant, in Kenya. Courtesy the Theodore Roosevelt