The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Beresford
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.
{541}
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.
{544}
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