“…Mr. L. K. Rankin, of the Belgian Elephant Expedition in Africa, has made a statement of the probable value of the practical service that may be expected from elephants if their introduction as carriers is attempted in that continent. When the expedition reached Mpwapwa, a report was drawn up to be sent to the King of the Belgians, which stated that "the elephant expedition has now been proved a complete success." This assertion was justified by Carter, the head of the expedition, now deceased, on the three counts of—1. The immunity of the elephants against the tsetse-fly after twenty-three days of exposure to that insect; 2. Their maintenance during one month mostly upon the uncultivated food of the country, and therefore at little cost (only about twenty-five rupees, or fifteen dollars, for four); and, 3. Their ability to march over all kinds of ground, soft, stony, sandy, boggy; to conquer all eccentricities of topography—hill and dale, river and jungle—while laboring under double their due weight of baggage, some fifteen hundred instead of seven hundred pounds; and this in a style that no other beast of burden could hope to emulate. This brilliant forecast received a seeming bitter contradiction in less than a week, when the largest and most valuable elephant, returning from a day's expedition, in apparently good health, suddenly lay down and died. Mr. Rankin believes that the death, which was followed shortly afterward by that of another elephant, was caused by exhaustion brought on by imposing too heavy loads and too severe labors upon the animal, combined with too great a change from the strong food it had enjoyed in India to the wild grasses of Africa. The animals had been stall-fed in India, "on the fat of the land," while in Africa they were turned out to forage for themselves, and very little corn and rice was bought for them. Whereas, according to Sanderson, seven hundred pounds is the limit-weight an elephant should carry on flat ground for a prolonged time, these animals bore at first twelve hundred, then fifteen hundred, and at one time seventeen hundred pounds; while they daily climbed the most tremendous hills. These views are enforced by the fact that, while the elephants were fat and round at starting, they had lost so much flesh by the time they reached Mpwapwa, that their backbones stood up six or seven inches from their flanks! These facts resulted from faults in management, in insufficiency of preparations for the expedition, and mistaken views of economy, and should not be allowed to prevail against the competency of elephants, under good management, to endure reasonable service, on which hardly any doubt is thrown. Dearly bought experience, Mr. Rankin suggests,-would another time remove the risks that were incurred; and he has not the shadow of a doubt that there is yet a great future in Africa for the elephant, especially when the stage of capturing and taming the native species has been reached….”
( ‘The Elephant Experiment in Africa; A Brief Account of the Belgian Elephant Expedition on the March from Dar-es-Salaam to Mpwapwa’ for Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography May 1882)
Adam Hochschild, 'King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa', 1998 :
"...Even before making his deal with Stanley, Leopold had begun reaching for his slice of the African cake from the other side of the table, by financing an attempt to reach the Congo basin from Africa's east coast. Three more such expeditions, all well-publicized but inept, followed.
One of them included four baggage-carrying Indian elephants with the suitably exotic names Sundergrund, Naderbux, Sosankalli, and Pulmalla.
Even getting the elephants to land proved a near-disaster. The ship that brought them from India lowered them over the side in slings, but instead of swimming obediently to the beach, the elephants tried to climb back on board. When the ship's boats attempted to tow them toward shore, the elephants started to pull the boats out to sea.
The elephants, it turned out, required fifty laborers with
axes and machetes to precede them, clearing trees and branches so that they and
their loads could pass through. But before dropping heavily and prematurely
dead of various ailments, the elephants proved a journalist's dream. The
European readers who followed each stage of the animals' unhappy journey failed
to realize that the real story lay on Africa's other coast, where Stanley was
quietly working on his road around the Congo River rapids..."
Barnaby Phillips, TLS, Feb 2025:
"...Set in the 1870s, Sophy Roberts’s A Training School for Elephants is a story of folly and hubris in which King Leopold II of Belgium and an Irish adventurer, Frederick Carter, plan to domesticate the African elephant in order to use it as a beast of burden on the great caravans from the East African coast into the interior. This would have freed Europeans from dependence on Arab traders and led to a more efficient extraction of Africa’s resources (among which, ironically, ivory was prominent). “There is a great future in store”, Carter wrote to a friend. “We may both together be leading a caravan of 100 or 200 elephants across the Dark, very Dark Continent, as there is not the slightest doubt that elephants are the baggage carriers of Africa.”..."
James McConnachie, The Sunday Times, March 9 2025:
“…What an incredible, improbable story this is. In 1879, four domesticated Indian elephants with their mahouts were led by an Irish captain in the merchant navy all the way from the east African coast to Lake Tanganyika, following the caravan routes for slaves and ivory….
… Three of the four died during the six-month-long trek. They were underfed and overworked, carrying weights of 500kg — up to seven times the normal load. Sundar Gaj made it barely halfway, his backbone standing up six inches from his flanks. Naderbux died over six horrible hours while vultures circled, before Carter “rid him of his ills with a shot”. Sosankalli fell just 200 tragic yards short of the lake. Only Pulmalla, who was more used to carrying dignitaries up the “elephant stairs” to Pune’s Parvati temple, made it….”
when Albert Edward the VII, the Prince of Wales, visited Parvati in 1875 on an elephant, the pachyderm tripped at stair number 56 causing the Prince to have an embarrassing fall.
(courtesy : Saili K Palande-Datar of Hindustan Times , August 2021)
Is this elephant Pulmalla?
