Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online

is over. The herd swings out of the danger zone.’ The hunters then retraced their trail, gathering and cleaning carcasses for the wagon.
    Lewis lived long enough to see the civilised world recoil from the slaughter of African game. What men such as he did in the early years of the century came to be regarded with revulsion. The breech-loading rifle and improvements in transport enabled hunters to kill and market animals on an industrial scale, accomplishing in the first thirty years of the twentieth century an unprecedented depletion of the continent’s wildlife. In fairness to Lewis and his generation, over the ensuing eighty years habitat loss – the consequence of exploding human populations – has proved an even more fatal foe of Africa’s game than were the massacres committed by the old white hunters. But Lewis, looking back later, confessed that he regretted the wholesale killings of elephant and buffalo in which he participated so eagerly – by which, indeed, he made his living – in the years before 1914.
    Around 1911, he became fired with the new craze for aviation. He formed a friendship with a man named John Weston, who brought the first aeroplane to South Africa – the usual double-kite contraption of the period, laced with piano wire and christened the ‘Weston-Farman biplane’. Lewis adored his flights with Weston: ‘The pilot occupied a flimsy sort of box open on all sides, and his passenger a kind of Madeira chair, just behind and above him. The sensation for anyone conveyed in this way, when the unwieldy machine drooped its nose earthwards, was terrific. No modern passenger can have any conception of the ecstasies of horror and rapture induced by a trip in a thing like the Weston-Farman.’ Weston the pioneer was so obsessed by the beauty of mechanical science that when a daughter was born to him, he insisted that she should bedressed in dungarees, and play only with nuts and bolts, in the hope that she might grow up into an aviatrix. In this he was disappointed, but unlike most of the early airmen, he survived to die in bed.
    Weston’s plane and his own beloved Greener .303 falling-block rifle were the only examples of modern technology which Lewis enthusiastically embraced. Despite his use of firearms for hunting, he applauded the fact that the many quarrels in the Kimberley diamond diggings were settled with bare knuckles. He himself was a keen boxer, with or without gloves. In South African mining towns, he said, ‘the flourishing of guns was a mortal offence. I remember one case where a gentleman newly arrived from Western America, in the course of an argument in one of the canteens, drew a six-shooter. That was the end of him. A dozen willing hands cast him and his weapon into the muddy Vaal River. The diggings never saw him again. And yet, oddly enough, years afterwards in the Kalahari Desert during Botha’s campaign, I recognised this same American filibuster in the ranks of one of our mounted regiments. So his heart must have been in the right place, after all.’
    Lewis became intimately acquainted with a host of buccaneers and freebooters such as Leander Starr Jameson of Jameson Raid notoriety, and the bandit-smuggler Scotty Smith. Far from harbouring any dislike for the Boers – the English war with them, remember, was not long finished – Lewis admired the hardy Dutch farmers. Courage and uncomplaining fortitude were the first qualities which he sought in a man, and most Afrikaners possessed them. He also warmed to black Africans, especially Khama, paramount chief of Bechuanaland – modern Botswana. Lewis was once hunting, with the chief’s permission, in remote bush five days’ march from Khama’s capital. A native runner appeared, bearing in a cleft stick a message written at the chief’s dictation by his European-trained secretary: ‘Please to take great care now on the Shoshong, for it is this month the breeding season of the black mamba.’ Lewis was enchanted by the