The Overloaded Ark

A WORD IN ADVANCE

THIS is the chronicle of a six months’ collecting trip that my companion and myself made to the great rain forests of the Cameroons, in West Africa. Our reasons for going on this trip were twofold: firstly, we wanted to collect and bring back alive some of the fascinating animals, birds, and reptiles that inhabit this region; secondly, we had both long cherished a dream to see Africa: not the white man’s Africa, with its macadam roads, its cocktail bars, its express trains roaring through a landscape denuded of its flora and fauna by the beneficial influences of civilization. We wanted to see one of those few remaining parts of the continent that had escaped this fate and remained more or less as it was when Africa was first discovered.

This was to be our first collecting trip. John Yealland’s interest lay with birds, while mine lay with mammals and reptiles. Together we had planned and financed the trip; for a venture such as this you need a great deal of capital, as you are not financed by the zoos you collect for. However, they help you in every way they can, and supply you with lists of the specimens they would like from the area you are going to, so you know before you start which animals you particularly want.

There has been quite a bit written about the collecting of wild animals, and most of it gives a very untrue picture. You do not spend your time on a trip risking death twenty times a day from hostile tribes or savage animals; on the other hand you do not sit in a chair all day and let the “blacks” do all the work for you. Naturally, doing this sort of work, you are bound to run certain risks, but they have been greatly exaggerated: nine times out often any dangers you encounter are of your own making. Without the help of the natives you would stand little chance of catching the animals you want, for they know the forest, having been born in it; once the animal is caught, however, it is your job to keep it alive and well. If you left this part of it to the natives you would get precious little back alive. Ninety per cent of your time is spent tending your captures, and the rest of your time in tramping miles through the forest in pursuit of some creature that refuses to be caught. But in writing a book about a collecting trip you naturally tend to stress the highlights rather than the dull routine work. After all, you don’t want to write two hundred and fifty pages on how you cleaned out monkey cages, or cured diarrhoea, or any one of the odd things you had to do every day. So, if the following pages contain mainly descriptions of the more interesting adventures we had, it does not mean to say that there were not the dull and unpleasant periods, when the world seemed to be full of uncleaned cages or sick specimens, and you wondered why you ever came on the trip at all.

Finally, I would like to exonerate my companion from any blame in foisting this history upon the public. Having suffered much at my hands in the tropics, he now has to suffer once more in print; that he will do this with his usual placidity, I have no doubt. But I would like to place it on record that when I told him I was writing a book about our trip he made the following statement: “Take my advice, old boy,” he said earnestly, “and don’t. . . .”