Introduction

Summary

In his 1861 bestselling tale of Africa, The Gorilla Hunters, the Scottish adventure writer R. M. Ballantyne describes a wounded elephant's final moments at the hands of the novel's heroes:

Peterkin instantly sprang forward, but Jack laid his hand on his shoulder.

‘It's my turn this time, lad,’ he cried, and, leaping towards the monster, he placed the muzzle of his rifle close to its shoulder and sent a six ounce ball right through its heart.

The effect was instantaneous. The elephant fell to the ground, a mountain of dead flesh.

Ballantyne depicts the scene with evident relish. Peterkin and Jack, men in their early twenties, vicariously enact the author and his readers' pleasure in the hunt's successful climax. The untamed jungle the sportsmen traverse is a byword for adventure and excitement; the elephant's monstrosity emphasises their fortitude and prowess and forecloses any interest in its welfare. This mountain of flesh befits the ‘rifle’ and the ‘six ounce ball’, ontologically remote from the hunters; an object to be practiced on.

Ballantyne never himself visited the West-Central Africa of The Gorilla Hunters, but he was to travel to Southern Africa in 1876. In his nonfictional account of that journey, Six Months at the Cape, he delineates a different kind of ‘animal’ encounter when he comes across a hut on the veldt resembling a ‘gigantic beehive’:

There was […] a hole in one side partially covered by a rickety door. Close beside it stood a little black creature which resembled a fat and hairless monkey. It might have been a baboon. […]