Buch lesen: «The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Beresford», Seite 37

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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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. 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 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.

CHAPTER LV
SPORTING MEMORIES (Continued)

III. FISHING

When, as a youngster, I was sea-fishing at Ascension, my boat made fast to a buoy, I had used all my bait without getting a fish, when a booby gull kindly came and sat on the buoy. I knocked him over with an oar, used his remains for bait, and caught lots of fish.

In nearly every ship in which I have served, I had a trammel, a trawl and a trot. As a midshipman, I used them myself; when I became a senior officer, I lent them to the midshipmen.

Upon visiting the island of Juan Fernandez, while I was a midshipman in the Clio, we found three men living in the home of Robinson Crusoe. They subsisted chiefly upon crayfish. We used to fish for these Crustacea, using for bait a piece of a Marine's scarlet tunic. The fish used to take the crayfish while we were hauling them up. In a few hours we caught enough to feed the whole ship's company.

Off the Horn, and in the South Pacific, I have killed many albatross in calm weather, or when the ship was proceeding very slowly under sail. I made a hook out of several hooks like a paternoster. If the bird touched the bait, he was always caught. The upper mandible of the albatross has a curve like the beak of a parrot, and that curve is all there is to hold the hook. When the bird is being hauled on board, the lower mandible catches the water and drives him underneath. When he comes on board he is full of water, and is immediately very sick. Both the first and second pinion bones make beautiful pipe stems about fourteen inches long. I brought many home for my friends. The feet, dried, cleaned and manufactured into bags, make excellent tobacco pouches.

Many a shark have I caught in the old days. I have had two sharks on my hook at once. One had taken the hook, which, barb and all, had pierced right through his jaw; and another shark went for it and got the end of the hook into his mouth. They were both on the hook for some little time, and eventually I killed the first one hooked. I made a walking-stick out of his backbone.

The biggest shark I ever killed measured 12 feet 2 inches long.

I bought my shark hook from a man in an American whaling; schooner at the Sandwich Islands. I filed a little notch on the shaft of my hook whenever I killed a shark. To my great annoyance, someone stole my hook in after years.

I was once towing a cod-line astern for dolphin, when a shark took the bait. I took the line round a cleat and played him, or he would have carried it away; got him close enough to get a bowline over his tail, and hauled him on board. This method is generally used for getting a shark on board. Until his tail is cut off with an axe, a shark plays ballyhooly with all around him. A shark's heart is so muscular, and expands and contracts so violently after death that it is impossible to hold it in the hand. Sharks are bad eating, but in those salt-horse days we relished them.

My record in salmon fishing was made in Norway, when together with Lord Wolseley, Mr. Bayard, and Mr. Abram Hewett, I was a guest on board the yacht of my friend, Mr. Fred Wynn. In one night's fly-fishing, I killed forty-one fish. I gave eight of them to the fishermen who worked the canoe for me, and brought thirty-three back to the yacht.

Tarpon fishing is the acme of sea-fishing. Whereas a salmon is killed by a rod and delicate handling, a tarpon is killed by the line and herculean strength. The rod used is short and thick. The line is made of cotton, thinner and lighter than a salmon line, but extraordinarily strong. It is from 300 to 400 yards long, with four brakes, two on the reel, and two of thick leather placed on the thumbs. When the tarpon is struck, he invariably jumps into the air from six to ten feet, and shakes his head to shake the hook out, an effort in which he often succeeds. He has no teeth, but the upper part of his mouth is as hard as a cow's hoof, and it takes a tremendous strike to get a hook into it past the barb. The biggest tarpon I killed was 186 lb. I think Lord Desborough holds the record with a tarpon of 240 lb., 7 feet 6 inches long, 42 inches girth. Lord Desborough killed 100 tarpon in ten days.

Some years ago, I was most kindly invited by my old friend, Colonel Robert M. Thompson, to stay with him in his houseboat Everglades on the coast of Florida. The houseboat was driven by a motor and drew one foot of water. When it came on to blow, Colonel Thompson used to run her up on the beach.

But upon one occasion, we went upon an adventurous voyage, right out into the Atlantic, making a point from Florida to the north; the wind freshened; and the houseboat had all the weather she cared for. Colonel Thompson tells me that while securing loose gear and generally battening down, I remarked that probably no British admiral had ever before found himself in a houseboat drawing one foot of water 50 miles out on the Atlantic in a seaway.

I never had such wonderful sport as I had with Colonel Thompson in the Everglades. We killed tons of fish all with the rod. One night, with a small tarpon rod I killed seven sergeant fish, average 28 lb. This fish takes two long runs, and then turns up on his back, dead. Upon another night I had on an enormous tarpon; the boatman declared it to be the biggest he had ever seen (it always is when one fails to land it). I had just got into the shore after over an hour's work at the tarpon, when it went off again slowly, with the appearance of a fish, but the methods of a steam roller.

The boatman said:

"Try to check it from going into that current; it is full of sharks."

But the tarpon steadily proceeded. On getting into the current, it suddenly took a run and jumped into the air. When it was half out of the water, a shark's head appeared and bit it in two. I hauled only the head and shoulders home. The shark was so large that we tried to catch him next day, and hooked either him or another. He was so heavy that we could make nothing of him. He took us where he liked, but never left the current. So we bent a line on to the one by which we held him, took it to the capstan of a yacht lying near by, hove him up to the side, and shot him with a rifle. He was then triced up by the tail by a tackle from the mast. He was a hammer-headed shark over 18 feet long.

He disgorged soap, bottles, sardine-tins, Armour meat-tins, a number of large crab shells, some small turtle shells, pieces of fish, and the midship section of a large tarpon, which was supposed to have been the piece bitten out of my failure of the previous night.