Gerald Durrell - The Overloaded Ark

Cover illustration by Paxton Chadwick

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

Sabine Baur

BOTH John Yealland and I would like to thank the following people, who, while we were in the Cameroons, helped and advised us in many ways.

Of the United Africa Company: Mr Baker and Mr Milsome of Mamfe, and Mr Coon at Victoria, who dealt with the many problems of supplies and transport.

The Elders and Fyffes representatives at both Victoria and Tiko who helped us to secure return passages for ourselves and our animals, and the Captain and crew of the ship we travelled back on, who did their utmost to make our voyage easy.

To the various District Officers in the Cameroons who helped us in many ways, and in particular Mr Robins, District Officer for the Mamfe Division, who did much to smooth our difficulties for us. We are deeply indebted to the Reverend Paul Schibler and his wife, of the Basle Mission in Kumba, who perhaps did more than anyone else in helping us in our work when we stayed with them at Kumba.

We would also like to thank all those Africans personal staff, hunters, guides, and carriers without whose work and help we should have achieved very little.

Finally, I would like to thank Miss Sabine Baur for the trouble and care she has taken over the illustrations for this book, and my wife, who helped in the preparation of the manuscript and who bravely undertook the dangerous task of criticizing my work.

I MUST first of all thank Mr Durrell for his very helpful sketches and photographs.

Dr L. Forcart and Dr E. Sutter, members of the staff of the Museum of Natural History of Basle, very kindly sought out much useful material for me; and I am particularly indebted to Dr A. Portmann for his criticisms and suggestions and for his most valuable help in producing the necessary documents for my drawings.

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 mans 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 Yeallands 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 dont 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 dont. . . .

THE ship nosed its way through the morning mist, across a sea as smooth as milk. A faint and exciting smell came to us from the invisible shore, the smell of flowers, damp vegetation, palm oil, and a thousand other intoxicating scents drawn up from the earth by the rising sun, a pale, moist- looking nimbus of light seen dimly through the mists. As it rose higher and higher, the heat of its rays penetrated and loosened the hold the mist had on land and sea. Slowly it was drawn up towards the sky in long lethargically coiling columns, and gradually the bay and the coastline came into view and gave me my first glimpse of Africa.

Across the glittering waters were scattered a handful of tiny islands, each a cone-shaped mass of vegetation, so overloaded that it seemed they must topple into the waters under the weight of this climbing tower of leaves Behind them the coastlands climbed upwards, covered with a thick, unbroken quilt of trees, to where, dim and gigantic, Mount Cameroon crouched, gilded by the morning light. The colours of this landscape, after the pale pastel shades of England, seemed over- bright, almost garish, hurting the eyes with their fierce intensity. Over the islands flocks of grey parrots wheeled in strong, rapid flight, and faintly their clownish screams and whistles came to us. In the glistening wake of the ship two brown kites circled in an anxious search for something edible, and out of the remaining skeins of mist being drawn up into the sky a fishing eagle suddenly appeared, heavy and graceful, its black and white plumage shining. Over all this, the land and sea seen obscurely through the shifting, coiling mist, lay the magic smell we had noticed before, but now it was stronger, richer, intoxicating with its promise of deep forest, of lush reedy swamps, and wide magical rivers under a canopy of trees.

We landed as in a dream, and were rudely brought bath to earth by a nerve-shattering half-hour with the Customs, trying to explain our eccentric baggage. At last we were speeding along the road to Victoria, a red earth road lined with hibiscus hedges aflame with flower, and copses of the yellow, feathery, pungent-smelling mimosa. We arrived at the little white rest-house on the hill where we were to live for a week, and proceeded to look around. We had much to do, and in any other place it would probably have seemed irksome; as it was we were interviewed, our numerous papers stamped, we purchased vast quantities of stores, went to dinner with numbers of kind people, swam in the sea, and did a great many other things in a sort of dream-like trance. Everywhere we went there was something new to see. The straggling town lay along the side of the bay, filled with rustling palms, hibiscus and bougainvillaea hedges glowing with flowers, and in every compound and garden stood sedate rows of canna lilies, like vivid flames on thin green candlesticks. It was an enchanting place, but even so we yearned for the day when we should move up-country. At last it dawned.