CHAPTER LIV

SPORTING MEMORIES (_Continued_)

II. SHOOTING

There are few kinds of beasts which I have not shot; and among those few are lions and giraffes.

When I was at Vancouver as a midshipman, I went out after deer upon a pouring wet day. I fired at a deer; the gun, a muzzle-loader, missed fire; I set the stock on the ground in order to ram home the charge; and the gun went off. The bullet cut the button off the top of my cap: a narrow escape.

I shall never forget the excitement of three of us midshipmen of the _Clio_, when, being out after tree grouse in the bush, we put up a big spotted deer. It was close to us, and we killed it; we cut it up, and tramped the miles back to the ship, laden with the haunches, shoulders and head. Arriving on board with our clothes soaked with blood, we were hailed as splendid sportsmen, and for days thereafter the gun-room feasted upon venison.

When the _Clio_ was off Juan Fernandez in February, 1865, we sent a party of seamen across to the island to beat up the wild goats towards the shore. The cliffs are steep-to, and along the face of them winds a narrow path worn by the goats themselves. The pathway itself is inclined at a steep angle. I took the cutter and hung off and on, waiting for the goats. Presently they came down, about thirty of them, in single file, slipping a good deal, but recovering their footing with marvellous agility. We fired {536} at the line and knocked over three. They fell on the rocks below. There was so much seaway that we were unable to get the boat in. I therefore took a line and swam to shore, collected the goats, toggled their legs together, secured them with the line, and they were pulled off to the boat. But when I tried to swim off, the sea was so rough that the breakers beat me back. I was hurled against the rocks; all the wind was knocked out of me, and I was much bruised and cut. A bluejacket swam off with a line, and although he did not toggle my legs, he and I were hauled off to the boats, like the goats. We brought all three goats safely on board. One of them was a billy-goat, the other two nanny-goats, in which there was no sign of any bullet, so that they must have been carried down with the billy-goat.

While I was serving in the _Sutlej_ as sub-lieutenant, the chief engineer, James Roffey, who was a splendid shot, and myself, went upon hunting expeditions in Vancouver. We took two horses and a couple of dogs. At night we slept on waterproof sheets under a lean-to shelter made of branches. We shot many partridge--as these birds are called. Having treed them, we shot the lower birds first, and so on to the top. The report of the guns did not disturb them, but if a bird fell from the upper branches, the rest would take flight. I have shot these birds in the same way, during recent visits to Canada.

During the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to India in 1870, I accompanied his Royal Highness upon the great elephant hunt in Ceylon. For months beforehand the wild elephants had been gradually driven towards the kraal by an army of native beaters. The kraal is constructed of huge trunks of trees, lashed together and buttressed, making a strong stockade. In plan, covering about eight acres, it is shaped like a square bottle, the neck representing a narrow entrance, from which the stockade on either side runs at a wide angle, like jaws. The elephants are driven down the narrowing jaws and through the entrance, which {537} is closed behind them with a gate made of logs. Once inside the kraal, the wild animals are tackled by the tame elephants ridden by mahouts, and are secured with hide ropes to the trees of the stockade, which is formed of stout timber for the purpose.

Upon the occasion of the Duke's visit, I was in the arena, mounted upon a tame elephant amid a wild heaving mob of animals. One huge beast defeated the tame elephants, throwing the whole lot into confusion. He suddenly charged, knocking over the tame elephant next to me, the mahout breaking his leg in the fall. Things were looking very ugly, when someone--against orders--fired and killed the rebel elephant, the bullet entering his temple.

If the day of the great elephant hunt in India, arranged in honour of the Prince of Wales, was the hardest run of my life, hanging on to the back of a swift pad elephant which went through the jungle for fourteen hours like a runaway locomotive, the hardest day I ever had on foot was in Ceylon, during the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to that superb country, in 1870. I have found Irishmen in most places under the sun; and I found one in Ceylon. His name was Varian, and he was a famous hunter of elephants. Rogue elephants were his favourite game; he stalked them on foot; walked up to his quarry and shot it. He was I think, eventually killed by a rogue elephant. His gun, which had belonged to Sir Samuel Baker, was a curiosity among hand-cannon. This formidable engine was so heavy that it was as much as a powerful man could do to heave it up to his shoulder. The recoil--but I will relate what kind of recoil it exercised. The gun was a single-bore muzzle-loader, having two grooves cut within the barrel, into which was fitted a spherical belted bullet.

We started at three o'clock in the morning, taking with us two native bearers to carry the guns. The bearers were little men, fragile to all appearance as pipe-stems, and save for a loin-cloth, naked as they were born. For seven hours we travelled ere we found fresh spoor, following the elephant {538} trails, paths which the huge animals had cloven through the dense jungle. The heat was intense, the walking an extraordinary exertion; for at every few yards the soft ground was trodden by the elephants into pools of water three or four feet deep, through which we must plunge.

It was blazing noon when we struck fresh tracks; and Varian halted to load the heavy rifle. I contemplated the operation with amazement. He poured the powder into his hand, and tilted three or four handfuls down the muzzle. Then he wrapped a piece of waste round the projectile, and hammered the ramrod home with a hammer. It occurred to me that if ever a gun ought to burst in this world, that gun ought to burst.

We tracked the elephant out of the jungle; and there he was in the open _maidan_, placidly pulling up great tufts of grass with his trunk, and swishing himself with them.

"We must bend down," says Varian in a whisper, "and he may take us for pigs."

He held me by the arm; and bending down, we advanced directly upon the elephant, Varian's bearer loaded to the earth with the great gun.

"If he puts his ears forward and drops his trunk--fire! For he'll either charge or run away," whispered Varian.

And with the graceful courtesy of his race, he handed me the miniature cannon.

We were within twelve yards or so of the huge beast when his ears jutted forward, and with his trunk he flicked the ground, producing a hollow sound. I braced a leg backwards, and with a strong effort, hove the gun to my shoulder, aimed at the wrinkles just above the trunk, and fired. The elephant and I toppled over at the same moment. I thought my shoulder was broken to pieces; but as I staggered to my feet, I saw the elephant lying over on its side, its legs feebly waving. Varian ran up to it and fired several more shots into its head, and it lay motionless.

In 1874, I was appointed to the _Bellerophon_, temporarily. {539} She had sunk a steamer which had crossed her bows, and her senior officers had been ordered home to attend the inquiry into the matter. When I joined her, my old mess-mate in the _Marlborough_, Swinton C. Holland (now admiral), was in sole command; although he was only second lieutenant of the ship; a curious illustration of the incidents of naval life.

Another example of the anomalies of those days was my own position: I was on full pay and on active service, and I was also a member of Parliament. The dual capacity was not in itself conducive to discipline, because it gave naval officers on full pay the opportunity of criticising, as members of Parliament, their superior officers. I do not think it was abused; in my own case, I think the solitary advantage I took was to obtain a pump, which was a sanitary necessity, for the _Thunderer_, when I was her commander: a threat of publicity moving the Admiralty to action which previous applications had failed to produce. In the old days, the Sea Lords used to serve in the dual capacity of members of the Board of Admiralty and of Parliament.

As no one had any precise idea where the _Bellerophon_ was, I took passage to Halifax and stayed in the receiving hulk _Pyramus_, fifth-rate, stationed at Halifax, in the hope that the _Bellerophon_ would come north. In the meantime, I went for a shooting expedition with a trapper. We went up into the forests of Nova Scotia, camping out, and living upon what we could secure with our guns. We shot bear and deer and prairie chicken. In the depth of the forest I found an Irishman dwelling in a clearing with his wife and family. He was a bitter Orangeman, who (so he told me) had been expatriated for shooting at a priest.

"I had a gun," said he, "but it was a rotten gun. I drew a bead on the priest, and, God forgive me, the gun missed fire!"

I remember saying to him:

"Why the devil can't you leave another man's religious convictions alone? He has as much right to his convictions as you have to yours. If there were no religious wrangles {540} in our country, it would be the happiest country in the world."

His nearest neighbour, dwelling 20 miles away, was a Roman Catholic; and although my friend cursed him for a Papist, their relations with each other were quite friendly. The Irishman told me how he had once fought to save the life of his child from a bear. He was working in the clearing; near by, his little girl was sitting on the trunk of a felled tree; when a bear suddenly emerged from the forest, and made towards her. The man had for his only weapon a huge handspike, as big as a paviour's rammer. He showed me the thing; it was so heavy that I could scarcely realise that he could have used it as he did use it. But with this formidable club he fought the bear for an hour. Several times he beat the animal to the earth; but the beast returned to the attack; and the man thought his strength must surely fail him. At last, both man and beast were so exhausted that they stood and looked at each other with their tongues hanging out. Then, with a growl, the bear turned tail and rolled back into the forest. The Irishman never saw it again; and he cherished the belief that the brute died of its wounds.

Shooting black buck in the plains of Central India, with the Duke of Portland's party, in 1883, I had been out in a bullock-cart for hours. The method is to describe a wide circle round the black buck, and slowly driving round and round, gradually to diminish the circle. The sun was very hot; I was very tired of the business; and I determined to risk a shot. As I emerged from the cart into the open, a herd of black buck galloped past in the distance in single file, passing behind two tufts of high grass. Sighting between the tufts, I fired right and left, and heard the bullets strike. The _shikari_ would not believe that I had hit anything at that range. But there were the bodies of two black buck; the distance from where I had fired to one of them was 220 yards, and to the other, 240 yards. The heads are in my collection of sporting trophies.

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I had been twice round the world before I ever saw a really wild man. At last I met one when I was shooting grouse on my own property in Cavan. His voice was a squeaky, husky whisper, like the creaking of an old wooden frigate in a gale of wind. If I hit a bird hard and it passed on, the wild man would say:

"Well, that fellow got a terrible rap anyway!"

If I killed the bird, he would say, "Well well, he has the fatal stroke, with the help of God!"

And if I missed a bird, he would say, "Never moind, Lord Char-less! Ye made him quit that, annyhow."

The incident of the Glenquoich stag occurred many years ago, when I was staying at Glenquoich with the Duke of Marlborough. We had had a hard day, without sighting a warrantable stag, when the stalker spied, far on the skyline of the opposite hill, the grandest head he had ever seen. We stalked up to him until we came to the edge of a valley. There was the noble head scarce fifty yards away. We could see the stag's ears moving. But he did not rise. We lay on that hill-top for an hour and a half; the midges were eating me in platoons; and still the stag did not get up. I could stand it no longer; and I said to the stalker:

"Either you must get him up or I must shoot him through the heather."

The stalker begged me not to shoot; he whistled; then turned upon me a face of utter bewilderment, for the stag lay where he was, moving his ears to keep off the midges. The stalker whistled again. Still the stag lay quiet; and the man looked at me with a countenance of such amazement that I can see it before me as I write. It must have struck him that here was the supernatural; for never in his life had he seen a live stag which would stay to hearken to his whistling.

Then the stalker shouted; then he stood upright and shouted again; and still the stag lay where he was; and the man stared at me in silence with consternation in his eyes. {542} I delayed no longer. I shot the stag through the heather, and he leaped up, and fell dead.

We found that the poor beast had a hind fetlock cut nearly through by a bullet. The wound must have been inflicted some considerable time previously, for it had mortified and the haunch had withered. Thus wounded, he must have strayed from another forest, for he was a German stag, marked with slits on both his ears; and there were no such stags in Glenquoich forest.

The late Kiamil Pasha, Governor of Salonika, was an old friend of mine. I first knew him when I was in command of the _Undaunted_, in which ship he lunched with me several times. He was a grand specimen of a fine old Turkish gentleman, one of the best among Turkish statesmen, intensely interested in the welfare of his country. I often went out snipe-shooting with the Turkish commander-in-chief round about Salonika. On these occasions, the Pasha invariably wore full uniform; and when we arrived at the shooting ground, we were always met by a squadron of cavalry. I imagined that the guard was furnished as a compliment to myself; and eventually I said to the Pasha that while it was very good of him to pay me the courtesy of a guard, I should be quite as happy if we went out shooting without it.

He replied that the guard was not intended as a compliment, but was ordered for my safety.

"What is the danger?"

"Brigands," said the Pasha.

"But there are no brigands here now."

"Are there not?" said the Pasha. "I killed fourteen yesterday."

And afterwards he showed me where he had rounded them up.

I have seen two whales killed. I saw a whale killed in the Pacific by an old sailing whaler. She sent four boats out and they hunted the whale, after it was harpooned, for eight hours before they killed it. A boat rowed close to {543} the whale, the harpooner flung his harpoon, the whale sounded, his tail swung up like a flail and struck the water with a report like the report of a gun, and out flew the line from the boat. The man who eventually killed the whale was armed with a long flexible knife, which he plunged into the whale behind the fin. The vast carcase was towed alongside the ship, than which it was longer; men wearing spiked boots and using sharp spades went upon the whale; and as they sliced into the blubber, making cuts across the carcase, the piece called the "blanket piece" was hoisted inboard by means of a tackle, the whale thus turning gradually over until its whole circumference was stripped.

Many years afterwards, I saw a whale killed off Norway by a modern steam whaler. She steamed slowly after a school of whales, and fired a gun whose projectile was a shell attached to a harpoon. The shell burst inside the whale, killing it. The carcase was then towed alongside the steamer by boats, the operation taking about an hour and a half, and was then towed by the steamer to the whaleries. The whaling master told me that 850 whales had been killed off Norway during that year; and that among them was a whale with an American harpoon in it; wherefore he supposed that the whale must have voyaged round the Horn, or else north about beneath the ice.

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