The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects.

Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The menageries : quadrupeds, described and drawn from living subjects. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    138/412 (page 128)
    clothing. Mr. Burchell saw a party of twenty men, with a train of women and children, that had brought about a thousand pounds weight of elephants’ teeth to Cape Town, thus to barter for manufactured articles*. In the interior he met with a Hottentot who had bought twenty elephants’ tusks of the Bachapins, at the rate of a sheep for a tusk. These people offered to Mr. Burchell himself, two oxen, and two elephants’ tusks (each of which was too heavy to be carried by one man), in exchange for a gun. The Bichuana nations (Bachapins), whose forests abound with elephants, conduct their trade in elephants’ teeth principally by barter with the Hot- tentots. There is no regulated trade in ivory; and Mr. Burchell urges the establishment of a joint-stock company for carrying on this profitable commerce, by means of caravans, with these people. They are far enough removed from civilization to furnish ivory in abundance. The elephants and the poor savages share the forests. It is a necessary condition of the commerce in ivory, that the European must pene- trate farther and farther into the wilds to search for it. Ivory was once common enough on the coasts of Loango ; but in a century or so the negroes had to bear it three hundred miles on their heads to the European market f. When Thunberg travelled in Cafiraria, in 1773, he saw an elephant hunter, who told him that he had shot twelve elephants in a day, close to Cape Town. It would be now difficult to find a herd within many miles. Wild elephants, how- ever, sometimes approach very near to the abodes of man. In the year 1700, an immense elephant quietly walked into the town of Mina, on the Gold Coast; and paid so little attention to the shots which * Vol. i. p. 154. f Hist, Gen, des Voyages, tom, iv, p, 592.