Ivory's Ghosts : the White Gold Of History And The Fate Of Elephants

311 Pages·2010·1.88 MB·English

by  Walker

IVORY’S GHOSTS
Also by John Frederick Walker
A Certain Curve of Horn: The Hundred-Year
Quest for the Giant Sable Antelope of Angola
IVORY’S GHOSTS
THE WHITE GOLD OF HISTORY AND THE
FATE OF ELEPHANTS
J F W
OHN REDERICK ALKER
Copyright © 2009 by John Frederick Walker All rights reserved. No part of this
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-55584913-9
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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for Elin
C
ONTENTS
Prologue: 1898
Part 1: Shapes in Tusks
1. Mammoth Teeth
2. Tribute and Treasure
3. The Master Carvers’ Medium
Part 2: Ivory Under the Saw
4. Piano Keys and Billiard Balls
5. “A Tooth of Ivory and a Slave to Carry It”
6. Ivory Hunters
Part 3: The Elephant Dilemma
7. Researchers and Poachers
8. The Ivory Ban
9. Elephant Dreams, Elephant Realities
Epilogue: 2007
Notes
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
P : 1898
ROLOGUE
An African slave belonging to Shundi, the Kavirondo ivory trader and dealer in
human chattel, killed the ancient elephant on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.
That much is certain.
Shundi’s slave was a Chagga tracker, and when he came across the
elephant’s trail he knew the impressive footprints—each two hand spans across
in the soft earth—had been left by a large bull. The crumbled dung piles of half-
digested forage spoke of the worn molars of a m’zay, an old one, weary and
slow-moving, the kind that often carried good ivory. Shundi would want to
know if that was so. The Chagga slipped quietly through the sparse bush and
kept the wind in his face.
Not long after he found dung mounds still warm to a probing finger, he
spotted the bull’s gray bulk, humped like the shadow of a hill in the growing
dusk. From bush to tree to bush and back again the Chagga drew close and saw
how wizened with age the elephant was, his back sloping like a hyena’s to his
hindquarters, the withered hide sagging over his knees, his temples deep, dark
hollows. In this shrunken state his thick tusks, which swept all the way to the
ground, looked enormous. The old one swung his trunk listlessly at the grass and
ripped up a clump, then paused as if trying to remember something before
raising it slowly to his mouth.
As the sinking sun gilded Kilimanjaro’s snowcap, the tracker took the one
chance he had left in the dying light. Fumbling with his muzzleloader, he clicked
back the hammer and pointed the shaking barrel at the bull’s turning head just as
its ears flared to fix the sound. At the shattering blast, dust spurted in a jet off his
forehead, monkeys and birds shrieking as he turned rigid, trunk flung up in a
questioning curl. The Chagga dropped his smoking weapon and ran in a lather of
terror, feet racing over the grass, daring to slow only when no trumpeting scream
rang out to signal doom about to overtake him.
No one really knows how the elephant fell. Had he been shot in the chest he
might have stumbled for a mile or more before crashing to earth in a final
exhalation, legs bent as if trying to swim sideways. If the thumb-sized lump of
lead had punched through the skull he might simply have collapsed where he
lead had punched through the skull he might simply have collapsed where he
stood. Then the old one would have sunk back on his hindquarters as his head
dropped, burying the tusk points in the earth and assuming the posture of a
sphinx; the heavy brow would have been propped high by the ivory posts, trunk
flopped lifelessly between.
The slave, heaving for breath and slick with sweat, surely must have been
sick with fear for leaving behind a firearm doubtless more valuable to his master
than his own miserable self before reaching camp and flinging himself at the feet
of Shundi to gasp his tale. We know that the next morning he led Shundi and his
men back to the slopes of the mountain where the ancient elephant lay, watched
by vultures waiting in the branches of nearby trees for other scavengers to
breach the tough hide. Over the next several hours the men chopped at the head
with hand axes to free the two tusks, supreme examples of the great natural
treasure that had been sought since ancient times. Shundi had the thick white
crescents carried to the coast by slaves staggering under their weight and
transported by dhow to the ivory market of Zanzibar.
The year was 1898. Photography had come to Africa by then, and a formal
portrait was taken of the immense pair of tusks, posed together in a tall ornately
carved doorway in Zanzibar City’s old quarter. Two Africans in fezzes and
white tunics steady the upright curving columns of ivory that tower over them,
their tips turned outward in an enticing splay implying the continent’s
extravagant and seemingly inexhaustible riches. They would come to be known
as the Kilimanjaro tusks and remain to this day the largest pair ever recorded.
Their size makes it difficult to think of them as elephant teeth but that is what
they were. The bigger one weighed 236 pounds; the other 228. Each was more
than ten feet long and as thick as a man’s thigh.
From their tips, worn smooth from ripping tree bark and gouging water
holes, to the thin, chipped edges of the deeply hollowed bases that once held
each tusk’s nerve pulp, a palimpsest of stains, nicks, and fissures told of a long
life in the bush. All this long-burnished, mysterious braille would have felt cool
to the hand, even in the African climate, for ivory absorbs sweat.
The carved doorway where the tusks were photographed was the entrance to
Nyumba Pembi—“Ivory House”—a high-walled American compound that
housed in its courtyard a giant scale for the weighing of elephant teeth. Over the
years, many who shaped Africa’s colonial history walked through those doors:
explorers and adventurers, including Richard Burton, John Speke, and Henry
Morton Stanley, the infamous slaver Tippu Tip, Arab traders, Indian merchants,
and a succession of American consuls who helped secure the lucrative trade.
There, the agent for Arnold Cheney and Company, the powerful New York
ivory importing firm, purchased the Kilimanjaro tusks for £1,000 sterling—