Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [13]
He signs it “Your own lover.”
Moving on to Londiani on the last day of the month, he disbands the main body of his safari. He has already spent almost all of the $75,000 Andrew Carnegie and a few other American sponsors have lavished upon the expedition. It has collected all it needs in British East Africa—indeed, more than it is officially entitled to: almost 4,000 mammals large and small, plus 3,379 birds, 1,500 reptiles, frogs, and toads, and 250 fish. In addition there are uncounted numbers of crabs, beetles, millipedes, and other invertebrates, and several thousand plants.
From now on, he and Kermit will hunt in Uganda Protectorate and the Sudan with a much smaller retinue of porters and horse boys. Heller, Loring, and Dr. Mearns insist on staying with him. They are insatiable for more specimens, and airily confident that the safari will stay in business for another three very expensive months. This worries him. He is generous by nature, but also improvident, with little understanding of the real value of money. He has insisted on paying his and Kermit’s own way so far, not dipping into sponsor funds. Edith is bound to remind him, if the funds run out, that he has two more sons to put through Harvard—with Quentin unlikely to graduate until the spring of 1919. He is by no means financially secure. His entire presidential salary went toward entertaining, and his Nobel Peace Prize award, totaling almost $40,000, has been placed at the disposal of Congress, as something he feels he has no right to keep. Nor is he likely ever again to negotiate a publishing contract as big as his current one.
“ ‘OH, SWEETEST OF ALL SWEET GIRLS.’ ”
Edith Kermit Roosevelt in 1909. (photo credit p.5)
He is therefore relieved to hear that Carnegie will be sending him a check for $20,000 for the naturalists, along with a promise of further cash if needed. “I am now entirely easy as to the expense of the scientific Smithsonian part of the trip,” he writes, emphasizing that he and Kermit will continue to finance themselves. He does not want to become personally indebted to anyone. His experience as a professional politician has been that donors always look for repayment in the coin of their choice. What Carnegie craves is influence over affairs of state. Already there have been indications that the steelmaker, an ardent pacifist, wants to draft him into the international arms control movement—a cause he has never much cared for.
Revisiting Nairobi in mid-December, he sends off another plump envelope to his publisher. He is pleased to hear from Robert Bridges, the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, that the first installment of his safari story has been a runaway publishing success. “The very large edition of the October number (much the largest we have ever printed) is completely exhausted.” Subsequent print runs are to be even larger. With eleven installments already mailed, he has only two more to write, and can look forward to publication of his complete African book in less than a year.
In Nairobi’s little bookstore, he amplifies the Pigskin Library with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, nine volumes of Julian Huxley’s Essays in Popular Science, and every classic he can lay his hands on: Cervantes, Goethe, Molière, Pascal, Montaigne, Saint-Simon. Then, on 18 December, he takes the Uganda Railway to Lake Victoria, and sails in a small steamer for Entebbe. As he does so, he crosses the equator and reenters his home hemisphere.
CHRISTMAS DAY FINDS him marching northwest toward Lake Albert, parallel with the Victoria Nile. It is elephant country, and he cannot