Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [1]
A few archaic capitalizations, such as Government and Nation, have been dropped. Other spellings that have changed only slightly since 1919 are updated without comment: Czar becomes Tsar, Servia, Serbia, and Moslem, Muslim. Punctuation marks are altered for clarity only in transcripts of oral remarks.
PROLOGUE
The Roosevelt Africa Expedition, 1909–1910
SITTING ABOVE THE COWCATCHER, on an observation bench rigged for him by British East Africa Railway officials, he feels the thrust of the locomotive pushing him upland from Mombasa, over the edge of the parched Taru plateau. He has the delightful illusion of being transported into the Pleistocene Age.
His own continent recedes to time out of mind. Is it only seven weeks since he was President of the United States? His pocket diary indicates the date is 22 April 1909—not that the calendar matters much in this land of perpetual summer, with equal days and nights. Nor will many of its natives be able to read, let alone recognize the name THEODORE ROOSEVELT, prominently stenciled on a gun case riding behind him in the freight car. They are more likely to be impressed by what the case contains: a “Royal” grade .500/.450 double-barrel Holland & Holland Nitro Express, the most magnificent rifle ever made. (It contrasts with a portable library of about six dozen pocket-size books, ranging from the Apocrypha to the Pensées of Pascal, all bound in pigskin and shelved in a custom-made aluminum valise.)
He gazes through eager pince-nez at the prehistoric landscape opening ahead. Waves of bleached grass billow in all directions. Baobab trees, pale gray and oddly elephantine, writhe amid anthills the color of dried blood. Black men and women, naked as the stick figures in cave paintings, stare expressionlessly as he bears down upon them. He will have to get used to that opaque scrutiny wherever he treks in Africa. It is a look that neither absorbs nor reflects, the stone face of savagery.
Less disconcerting, but just as foreign, are the birds that flap and flash around the locomotive’s progress: tiny, iridescent sunbirds, green bee-eaters, yellow weavers and rollers, a black-and-white hornbill rising so late from the track he could catch it in his hands. Much as he loves all feathered things, the zoologist in him is distracted by horizon-filling herds of wildebeest, kongoni, waterbuck, impala, and other antelope. Errant zebras have to be tooted off the rails. Long-tailed monkeys curlicue from tree to tree. A dozen giraffes canter alongside in convoy, their tinkertoy awkwardness transformed into undulant motion.
Polish his lenses as he may, he cannot see the Tsavo reserve, “this great fragment of the long-buried past of our race,” through twentieth-century eyes. The word race, with its possessive pronoun, comes easily to him, connoting not color but culture. Even when culture is at its most primitive, as here, something in him thrills at the prospect of soon being where there is no culture at all.
EITHER THESE FLORA and fauna are reluctantly giving way to him, as an armed intruder from the future, or he is, in a sense, regressing into them, finding again the Dark Continent he embraced as a child, in a copy of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. Before he could read that book, let alone manage its weight, he had dragged it around his father’s Manhattan townhouse, begging adults to “tell” him the pictures: elephants spiked with assegais; surging, snap-jawed hippos; a lion mauling a white man.
From then on, the rule of tooth and claw in nature seemed as supreme as his own success at becoming “one of the governing class.”
At puberty he had set out to prove that it was possible for the frailest of small boys, nearly dead at three from asthma and nervous diarrhea, to