Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (14 page)

Roosevelt’s final host in British East Africa was also the protectorate’s most colorful character and largest landholder—Hugh Cholmondeley, the Third Baron Delamere. Since 1897 Delamere had poured a fortune in borrowed money into his one hundred thousand acre ranch in the Njoro District, trying and failing at various agricultural experiments, from sheep to cattle. Only recently, after many missteps, had he succeeded in producing a hybrid strain of wheat that would become the staple crop. Since 1904 the baron had been President of the Colonial Association and the spokesman for the settler community in Nairobi and London. He was a tireless champion of the idea of British East Africa as a “white man’s country” and a prospective miniature dominion on the lines of New Zealand.
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An unusual aristocrat, Delamere allowed his red hair to grow down to his shoulders and crowned his locks with an enormous sun helmet, the largest in East Africa, that both obscured his face and accentuated his slight figure. Roosevelt became very fond of the eccentric baron, who, eschewing British upper-class decorum, did not dress for dinner and whose usual costume was a worn pair of khaki pants and a wool sweater. His ranch house was not as grand as that of the McMillans, but TR enjoyed its well-stocked library containing the books of Delamere’s wife Florence, a daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen.

In the deep forests of the Delamere ranch, Roosevelt and his host went after the rare and elusive bongo antelope, which no white man had ever shot. Along the way TR was amused to find that the tree hyraxes, “squat, wooly, funny things” that lived in hollows high in the big trees and produced an eerie moaning wail at night, were dubbed “teddy bears” by the locals. Delamere hoped to produce a bongo for his guest, but failed. Kermit, however, hunting on his own with Barclay Cole, Delamere’s brother-in-law, had more luck. Not only did he bag several bongo, but also jet-black sable with scimitar-shaped horns, considered after the koodoo the most beautiful of the antelope. Though TR was disappointed in the hunting on Delamere’s land he described the baron as the “most useful settler, from the standpoint of the all-around interests of the country, in British East Africa.” Though an accomplished big game hunter, the baron went beyond being a “mere sportsman” to become a “leader in the work of taming the wilderness, of conquering for civilization the world’s waste spaces.” In Roosevelt’s view, no career could be “better worth following.”
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Returning to Nairobi for the final time, TR dispatched a report on the success of the expedition’s British East African leg to Walcott at the Smithsonian. The naturalists were shipping home a treasure trove of 550 large mammals, 3,379 small mammals, 2,784 birds, about 1,500 reptiles and amphibians, and about 250 fresh water and marine fish. The shipment also contained a large number of mollusks and other invertebrates, several thousand plants, 2,000 photos, and anthropological material gathered by Mearns.
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The specimens collected after they left British East Africa would be dispatched from Khartoum.

At Nairobi TR was also able to compare views on imperialism with the newly arrived Governor, Sir Percy Girouard, who had spent many years in Africa, the last as Governor of Northern Nigeria. After a dinner with the Governor and his wife, Lady Girouard reported to her father in London, Sir Richard Solomon, that she had a “perfectly delightful evening” and that TR, though “extraordinarily ugly,” was “one of the most stimulating, clever and vital” men she had ever met, as keen and full of enthusiasm as a boy. She went on that Roosevelt claimed his politics were “Radical internally, tremendously imperial externally.” They had a long serious talk after dinner and the rest of the time TR regaled them with “thrilling stories of Texas and the war and his regiment.” Roosevelt, Lady Girouard told her father, really was “a man to meet” and she was “so thankful” to be there when he came.
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Sir Percy was at first inclined to view Roosevelt as a busybody and a threat to his authority, but after several encounters the Colonel’s energy, astounding breadth of knowledge, and sympathetic view of the British Empire, won over the Governor, who read aloud to him parts of his own manuscript, “The Imperial Idea.” The Colonel later told Girouard that this was the “best presentation of the case” he had seen and gave a coherent policy for what the Governor called “Democratic Imperialism” and TR called “Democratic Nationalism.”
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Along these lines, Roosevelt reported to Arthur Lee that he was, as he had expected he would be, “a pretty good imperialist!” And when he saw Lee in England he would have lots to tell him about the possessions through which he was passing. In most points the British administration was admirable, and he had a genuine respect for the officials, but he wished to make one or two suggestions from the point of view of the actual settlers, who reminded him so much of his beloved westerners that he felt “absolutely at home among them.” And unless he was mistaken they in turn cordially received him “as a natural friend.”
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Before TR got to England one such “friend,” Florence Delamere, confided to him that he could “help us back here by telling the people at home” to support Governor Girouard, whom she and her husband thought was doing well, “and let him have a free hand.” Everyone believed in Girouard and thought he had “done a lot towards putting things straight already” and would do “wonders if encouraged.” She was sure that Roosevelt would “try to make the people at home understand that this has got to be a White Man’s country and not an Indian preserve.” Churchill would “talk nonsense to you about the Indians being here first regardless of the facts” but in her view adding an increased Indian population to the existing black/white balance would be “folly.” However, she was sure he could “see it all twice as clearly as I can,” so there was “no sense in writing pages about it.”
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TR replied that he would do his part and knew “that you and D. have the large outlook, that your own success comes second to the feeling that you have taken the lead in adding to the Empire the last province that can be added to the white man’s part of it.” In his opinion, her husband Delamere had “rendered to East Africa and therefore to Greater Britain a literally incalculable service.” He only wished “that in England there was a fuller appreciation of the service.”
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On December 18, 1909 Roosevelt’s party boarded a train at Nairobi for Lake Victoria and the last leg of the safari, into the British Uganda Protectorate and brief ly the Belgian Congo, to be followed by a journey down the Nile through the Sudan and Egypt to Cairo.

On December 19, 1909, Roosevelt’s party arrived at Port Florence on Lake Victoria Nyanza. In this last leg of the African adventure, the aim was to hunt first the legendary white rhinoceros, and then the little-known giant eland. These were sought over the following two months in forays from Uganda into the Lado region of the Belgian Congo, the safari’s only detour outside the British Empire. Twentyfour hours in a “smart little steamer” took the party across the smooth surface of the immense lake to Entebbe on its northern shore. Along the way, TR pointed out the grebe and cormorants to Mearns and they passed many green and forested islands, “empty with the emptiness of death” from the scourge of the sleeping sickness which had killed at least two hundred thousand people before what remained of the population was relocated. The Colonel found Entebbe a “pretty little town of English residents, chiefly officials; with well-kept roads, a golf course, tennis-courts, and an attractive club-house.” The whole place was “bowered in flowers, on tree, bush and vine, of every hue—masses of lilac, purple, yellow, blue and fiery crimson.”
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At Entebbe, the headquarters of the British administration in Uganda, they were the guests of Acting Governor Boyle.

Two days later TR and Kermit left for Kampala, seat of the native king and council, where Cuninghame was organizing the new safari. The houses of Kampala had mud walls and thatched roofs, and the gardens were surrounded by braided cane fences. All the people were very polite and ceremonious, both to one another and strangers. Now and then they met parties of Sikh soldiers, “tall, bearded, fine-looking men with turbans”; and there were also Indian and Swahili and even Arab and Persian traders. The first night, in a torch-lit ceremony accompanied by pounding drums, Roosevelt called on the boy king, who was being trained by an English tutor and whose comfortable house was furnished in British fashion. He also met the king’s native advisors, “shrewd, powerful-looking men”; and was greeted by the council of “substantial looking men, well-dressed in the native fashion, and representing all the districts of the kingdom.”
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TR reported to his daughter Ethel that he found the little king’s prime minister “exceedingly competent” and “gorgeously dressed.” The man reminded Kermit of a “rather civilized Umslopagaar—if that is the way you spell Rider Haggard’s Zulu hero.” Roosevelt went on that in the native town they were driven around in rickshaws, “each with four men pushing and pulling,” who uttered a “queer, clanging note of exclamation in chorus, every few seconds, hour after hour.”
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Kampala was also headquarters of the Church of England and Roman Catholic missions both of which TR made a point of visiting. The people of Uganda had proved the most receptive to Christianity of any in tropical Africa and made it the dominant creed. At the Anglican mission, Bishop Tucker greeted them, and at the two Catholic establishments, bishops Hanlon and Streicher. At all of these the American and British flags were unfurled and TR was amused by native children’s phonetic renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner.” He was much impressed by the high school and the admirable medical mission he toured, as he was by the handsome cathedral built by the native Christians themselves without outside help or money. At Hanlon’s mission he had lunch with a fellow New Yorker, Mother Paul, whom he had promised to see in Africa before he left the United States. She was involved in industrial training, “taking especial pains” to develop those industries natural to the Ugandans that would be useful when they returned to their own homes. Both the Catholic missions were teaching the native men to cultivate coffee, and various fruits and vegetables.
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In TR’s view it was fortunate for the Ugandans that the British had established a protectorate over them and that both the government officials and missionaries were wisely “developing them along their own lines, in government, dress and ways of life, constantly striving to better them and bring them forward.” In this the British were not “twisting them aside from their natural line of development, nor wrenching them loose from what was good in their past, by attempting the impossible task of turning an entire native population into black Englishmen at one stroke.” It was plain to Roosevelt that Uganda could never be a “white man’s country” as was hoped for the highlands of British East Africa, where the primary need was to build up a “large healthy population of true white settlers” who would “take the land as an inheritance for their children’s children.”
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Uganda’s geography, climate and population made it a “black man’s country” and the task of the “intrusive and masterful” British “must be to bring forward the natives, to train them, and above all to help them train themselves, so that they may advance in industry, in learning, in morality, in capacity for self-government.” It was “mere folly” in TR’s opinion to talk of “ ‘giving’ a people self-government; the gift of the forms,” when the inward spirit was lacking. All that could be done was “patiently to help a people acquire the necessary qualities—social, moral, intellectual, industrial, and lastly political—and meanwhile to exercise for their benefit, with justice, sympathy and firmness, the governing ability which as yet they themselves lack.”
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Before they left Kampala the district commissioner, Frederick Knowles, arranged a successful situtunga hunt in the nearby marshes. This antelope was a larger relative of the bushbuck with very long hooves and shaggy hair like a water-buck. The following day, Christmas Eve, the newly formed expedition marched out of Kampala to begin its trek northwest more than a hundred miles to Lake Albert Nyanza. To the handful of men they brought from British East Africa, Cuninghame had added Ugandan porters and askaris from the local constabulary. One of the new porters carried nothing but a big Ugandan drum that he beat at the head of the column in company with the flag bearer.

On New Year’s Day 1910, TR reported to his friend Lodge that they were on the “final stretch of our journey” and he might get no more mail before reaching Khartoum, while the chance for writing would be small. They were between the two great Nyanza Lakes just north of the equator in a strange and interesting land. After so long in the cool highlands, TR was now in “a bit of the true tropics” filled with palms, monkeys, parrots, deadly snakes, and man-eating crocodiles. It was a beautiful country, but also the country of the spirrilum tick, whose bite brought paralysis, and of the sleeping sickness and black water fever. They were taking great care and he did not anticipate any serious sickness, in fact he and Kermit were in perfect health, the only members of the party who had not had a touch of trouble in Uganda. The natives were “semi-civilized and Christian of a sort,” quite unlike the naked, warlike savages they encountered in British East Africa. It was all “most picturesque and interesting” and Kermit had “certainly had a wonderful experience.”
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Ten days out from Kampala the safari crossed the Kafu River and entered the native kingdom of Unyoro, still part of the British Protectorate, but a separate kingdom. They stopped for a day at the capital, Hoima, where the Christian king lived and the British officials and the missionaries all had outposts. TR gave tea to the king and the British commissioner. On January 5, 1910, the party reached the village of Butiaba on Lake Albert Nyanza where they boarded a “crazy little steam-launch,” two sailboats, and two large rowboats for their trip across the lake and down the White Nile. Two days later the flotilla landed on the west bank of the parched Lado Region of the Belgian Congo and made camp in a thin grove of scattered thorn trees. The next morning, led by Quentin Grogan, a young British guide, they set off in pursuit of the great square-mouthed, called white, rhinoceros. Their goal was to collect one family group for the Smithsonian, another for the American Museum in New York, and a head for the National Collection of Heads and Horns started by William Hornaday at the New York Zoological Gardens.