Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [58]
The Zoological Society of London – the first of its kind in the world – was an imperial invention, founded by the creator of Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, in a marriage between the nineteenth-century thirst for knowledge and the accumulation of British colonies. By the middle years of the century, ‘nature study’, from pressed flowers to shell and butterfly collecting, had become a fashionable, improving activity, and as the empire grew fatter, ‘the zoo’ developed as one of the most popular places of entertainment in London. Greater and greater grew the number of explorers, colonial officials, scientists and retired sea-captains among its members, more abundant and stranger the specimens shipped to Britain. The zoo was imperial exploration for everyone. Its Handbook suggested that the weekend visitor exercise his imagination. ‘In his mind’s eye he may track the pathless desert and sandy waste; he may climb amid the romantic solitudes, the towering peaks, the wilder crags of the Himalayan heights … or peer among the dark lagoons of the African rivers, enshrouded by forests whose rank green foliage excludes the rays of even a tropical sun.’ The caging of wild and exotic animals in the middle of London brought the conquest of wild and exotic lands to the heart of safe and ordered Britain.* The world was stranger and more exotic than ever might have been imagined. But all of its creatures, whether magnificent and menacing or small and cuddly, could be brought before the people of London, caged and displayed for their entertainment, amid cropped lawns and gravel paths.
The greatest attraction among the animals on show was a celebrity hippopotamus named Obaysch which had been brought to the zoo with much pomp. He was named after the island on the White Nile where he had been captured as a baby in 1849 before being offered as an ingratiating gift to the British by the ruler of Egypt. Obaysch was shipped down the Nile with a guard of Nubian soldiers, installed in the British Consul’s garden, lured on to a Pacific and Orient steamer by his keeper and a couple of professional snake charmers and taken to Southampton. On the train journey from there to London, crowds at every station clamoured for a glimpse of the beast, but generally had to make do with the sight of his Egyptian keeper, Hamet, who, because he slept with Obaysch, was understandably keen to get an occasional breath of fresh air. Once installed in the zoo, Obaysch was a sensation. Thousands of people lined up at weekends to see what Punch dubbed ‘HRH’ – His Rolling Hulk. ‘The long lines of carriages which are daily to be seen at the entrance of the society’s garden are conclusive evidence that the hippopotamus … is the great icon of the day,’ observed the Illustrated London News in 1850. Indeed he was. Attendances at the zoo soared – even Queen Victoria took her children. The following year, the magazine was still burbling with excitement about Obaysch – it was a millennium and a half since an animal like him had been seen in Europe, a comparison which explicitly compared the British with the Roman Empire – at the expense of the latter, considering that Pliny believed that hippos walked backwards to confuse anyone trying to track them. Obasych did not really do much at the zoo, just lying around on the edge of his pond, ministered to by Hamet and occasionally grunting. The zoo authorities soon acquired a female hippo from the Nile, with whom, after sixteen years of indifference, Obaysch eventually produced a calf. Charles Dickens wrote an article arguing for other zoo animals to be given parity of esteem. But in vain. Obaysch was the zoo’s superstar, celebrated in souvenir models and, most unlikely of all, in the newly composed ‘Hippopotamus Polka’.
Chapter Six
‘Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live’
John Milton, 1645
It was the last thing he expected to see.
In 1896, a parched American explorer reached the banks of the Tana River in northern Kenya. Arthur Donaldson Smith, a doctor and big-game hunter, had