Naturalist at Large: For Richer for Poorer

by THOMAS BARBOUR

1

I WAS married on the first of October, 1906. When I had won a yes from Rosamond, in the face of countless competitors, I softpedaled the fact that I planned to leave for the Dutch East Indies as soon as we were married. This news, when it broke, caused a bit of a surprise. My wife had once been west of the Adirondacks, once south to New York, and once north to North Haven.

She had lived in Brookline, surrounded by untold cohorts of Bowditches, Higginsons, and Cabots, all kin, and many of them what in Charleston would be called “kissin’ kin.” I do not have to enlarge upon the fact that she is a strong-minded and masterful person; if you belong in these clans you are that automatically. I cry at funerals and at movies and at certain types of music, particularly “The Flowers of the Forest” on a good pipes band. She always had her emotions completely in hand. She is as bold and daring, especially in facing misfortune, as I am shrinking and cowardly.

The day after Rosamond and I were married we sailed on the Ivernia for Queenstown. My father’s family came from Northern Ireland, and in 1906 a number of his uncles were still alive and were keen to have a look at my bride. I cannot remember now which one gave the party, but a celebration was staged in honor of our arrival. A big barrel of Jamieson’s, not too old, was put out on the lawn for the benefit of all and sundry. The next day I met Danny Ferris, one of the gardeners, and asked him if he had had a good time. He said, “Oh, God, Mr. Tommy, I could neither stand up, nor sit dowm, nor roll on the ground.” He must have been really tight. Pat Dooley told me that his wife had bitten him. And he added, “I was only bit but twice in me life, once by me ass and once by me woman. And yesterday I wished to God the ass had swallowed me.”

My Uncle James’s two old gardeners, bosom friends, walked down the road after the party, one saying to the other, “Don’t say it,” and the other muttering, “I must! I must!” This was repeated over and over again until one blurted out, “To hell with King William.” And his colleague, who was a Protestant, promptly picked up a cobblestone, knocked him on the head, and kicked him into the gutter. For those are fighting words indeed in that lovely land.

The blame for the fighting is evenly divided. On the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne the Orangemen parade with the whole idea of insulting their Catholic neighbors. They sing: —

Of course preparation has been duly made and the housetops are well piled with cobblestones and brickbats. The great Linen Thread Works, which have been operated by my family since the middle of the eighteenth century, expect to close down for a few days twice each year — once after the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne and again after St. Patrick’s Day.

Father told a story which well illustrates the unbelievable agility of the Hibernian mind. It ran something like this: —

Ireland is a rainy country, but there are spells of dry weather. At such times an elderly retainer was employed to bring water from a pond near-by for the garden or for sprinkling the driveway. Father asked this old man in a bantering way what capacity his cart had. The old man told him. “How many trips do you have to make in the course of a year?” And the old man told him how many. “Well,” said Father, “I have a sovereign for you if you can figure out how many gallons of water you haul from one end of the season to the other.” “Oh,” replied the old man, “that’s too easy. I haul all the water you don’t see in that pond there now.”

We are inclined to laugh at the Irish, to be impatient with them sometimes, but deep in our hearts we love them and admire them for their bravery, their loyalty, their love of poetry and flowers, their kindness to animals, and their unfailingly warm hearts. In the words of the old song, “Who then can blame us if Ireland is famous for murther and whiskey and beauty and love? ”

After our visit to Ireland, we crossed over to London for a few days before taking the express from Calais to Brindisi to catch the boat for Egypt. At London I went to the office of Thomas Cook and bought a skeleton ticket which covered a good many of the inevitable steamship runs, such as Port Said to Aden, Aden to Bombay, Calcutta to Rangoon, Yokohama to San Francisco. This consisted of amass of coupons pinned together which were to be exchanged for steamship tickets. These coupons I inadvertently put in Rosamond’s trunk. Then this trunk caused our first marital argument. It was a veritable leviathan of a trunk. I have never seen another one so large. I said, “Buy ten little trunks that can be easily handled and let’s ship that white elephant of yours home.”

Rosamond finally agreed. Our warm clothing and heavy overcoats, which we had needed for the North Atlantic crossing and were not likely to need again, and sundry purchases made in England filled it up. Father’s agents in London arranged to handle its transfer to Boston, and I mailed the key about two hours before train time. Just as we were ready to leave for the station, it occurred to me that all those coupons were in the trunk. I rushed downstairs in a frenzy. In the old Metropole Hotel, where this affair took place, there was a letter box right by the door of the elevator. By inexpressible good fortune I reached the bottom step just as the postman, key in hand, was unlocking the box. I spotted the letter and made a grab for it, pushed a half sovereign into the bewildered postman’s palm, and jumped for the elevator. Before the postman could yell “Stop thief,” I had the key extracted. We just made the train.

2

By nature I am a timorous person. Physical bravery is no part of my make-up and all my life I have dodged trouble rather than looked for it. For this reason, while I have traveled a good deal, I have few adventures to recount. My friends often counter with the statement, “But you catch poisonous snakes with your hands.” This, of course, is only partially true. You need the right sort of stick and then, when you know how, picking up snakes, whether harmless or poisonous, is no trick at all.

My wife and I, however, made one trip in 1906 which for some reason was crowded with thrills. A family friend, Sir Frederick Palmer, Chief Engineer of the Port of Calcutta Authority, gave us one of the Survey vessels for a trip to the Sunderbunds. At certain times of the year, when the water is high, the shifting sands of the Hooghly River make it necessary to revise pilot charts every few days, and a number of vessels are constantly employed in this work. But in the dry season they are not so busy, and one was available for our use.

We sailed from Calcutta down into the vast network of waterways which make up the double delta, for the Hooghly River and the Brahmaputra River flow into the Bay of Bengal near together. This region, called the Sunderbunds, is a maze of islands, and at low water each of these is fringed by wide marginal flats grown with grass and bushes, which are flooded at the height of the rainy season.

On these open maidans, as they are called, the axis deer, or chital, swarm at night to graze. Tigers abound and feed on the chital, and there is an abundance of wild life of other sorts. We spent several nights in a machan, a platform high in a tree, with tethered goat for bait. We wanted to kill a tiger, but there was too much wild food about, and while we saw fresh tracks and heard tigers, we never saw one.

Late one morning, after we had slept for some hours following our night’s vigil, I took my net and Rosamond her box of papers, and we set to collecting butterflies. There were clumps of flowering shrubs three or four feet high, the plants looking something like our buttonbush. A good many butterflies were coming to these flowers, and the collecting was good. A boy followed us with my double-barreled Manton Express rifle on his shoulder. I looked back to speak to him for some reason, and saw that he had disappeared. Just then a perfectly magnificent tiger walked out from one of these clumps of bushes and stalked away over the open grass as if he were crossing a lawn, his tail straight in the air, its tip flicking from side to side. Since there was no particular object in running away, nor any place to run to, we stood and watched him walk majestically out of sight behind another thicket.

A few days later the captain of our little vessel went out with us to get some snipe for the pot. We got widely separated, and I heard him shoot from time to time, but naturally I paid no particular attention. Later on, circling about to return to our meeting place, I heard a snort, and a giant wild boar which he had wounded charged me on three legs with an unbelievable alacrity. I realized, however, that I held a deadly weapon in my hand if I only shot straight. I waited until he was about ten feet away and then put a charge of snipe-shot straight in the middle of his forehead. He fell dead and skidded almost to my feet. The charge of shot entered his skull like a solid slug, and the pressure on his brain popped out both his eyes, so that they hung by their optic nerves. He never moved. Then our gunbearer turned out to be a Mohammedan, so I had to skin out the saddle and hindquarters and carry them back to the boat. Luckily we had a Hindu cook of a caste which allowed him to handle pig. In due season we dined sumptuously.

The third event — and mind you, all this happened within ten days — almost ended tragically. I was standing in a flat skiff called a panchi, the butt of my doublebarreled Express rifle resting on the thwart in front of me. The searchlight of our boat played on a group of chital, and I was being paddled up under the beam of light with the idea of shooting one. The skiff hit a submerged stump, and bounced the stock of the heavy gun off the thwart. As it dropped, the hammers caught. The weight of the gun sprung them enough to fire both barrels.

The great lead slugs passed through my hands as they slid off the barrel of the gun, burning my palms badly, and cut the brim of my pith helmet, curiously enough, without knocking it off. My face was filled with black powder grains. I sat down, considerably shaken, and went back to the boat, where my wife and the captain helped me aboard. The gun was badly damaged, so there was nothing to do but return to Calcutta, which we did at once, and there Major Camalliri, surgeon of the Coldstream Guards, picked the powder grains out of my face. A few days’ rest set everything to rights. In my usual hypochondriacal way, I wasted a lot of mental energy awaiting tetanus, but in due time there was too much else to think about and this nonsense got pushed out of mind.

While Rosamond and I were resting at Darjeeling, after I had pretty nearly blown my head off in the Sunderbunds, we met an interesting character, a Mr. Mueller. He collected all sorts of objects, from Tibetan bronzes to butterflies, and was in touch, by correspondence, with museum directors everywhere. He had for sale some of the material picked up by members of the Younghusband expedition to Lhasa, and Rosamond proceeded to get a few mementos of our visit.

He remarked casually to me that this was the season of year when his professional butterfly collectors worked most successfully. These men were Lepchas, a tribe of hillmen from Bhutan who were born naturalists. I had often heard of the wonderful variety of butterflies to be found in the deep tropical valley of the Teesta River.

The upshot was that he agreed to hire for me several of his very best collectors, and Amir Hassein immediately set out to get ponies and supplies. We set forth early one morning, I on a sturdy gray pony, for I was slender and light in those days. Collecting along the road as we went, we arrived at nightfall at the Dak Bungalow near the bridge over the Teesta River.

On this trip I first had a chance to see really fine, high tropical rain forest. I also had my first sight of a troop of monal pheasants with an enormous cock leading his harem across the narrow road — a glittering mass of metallic golden bronze and green, the sun striking his back as he moved proudly on his way. He certainly topped my experience observing wild life up to that moment.

Then, of course, there were many other birds, jungle fowl, and other species of pheasants, and lastly, the butterflies. These were in astonishing variety, The Lepchas were keen as mustard and extraordinarily skillful with their long-handled nets. We caught and papered butterflies until we had a magnificent collection.

After several days of continuous excitement and enjoyment we returned to Darjeeling, where I joined Rosamond, who was waiting for me there. I supplemented the collection we had made ourselves with material purchased from our friend Mr. Mueller and sent the whole collection back to the Museum. There, by the most inexcusable carelessness, it was mislaid and so badly eaten by Dermestes that few of the specimens ever finally reached the collection.

3

At Lucknow, in India, we went out to a village with a friend of our bearer, Amir Hassein. This friend lived in a village within easy driving distance. Amir had spoken of the fact that his master (meaning me) was obviously crazy, as he was interested in snakes and other loathsome creatures. It seemed that a giant cobra lived in an abandoned rodent burrow near a path between the friend’s village and a stream where the women went to draw water. In passing along this way at night, because it was cooler then, several people had trod on this cobra. Only a few days before, a child had been bitten and had died.

Now of course they could not kill the cobra. You remember that when Buddha was asleep under the Bo tree, the cobra came up and spread its hood to shade his sleeping eyes. The Master blessed the cobra then; and if you don’t believe it, how do you explain the fact that the two finger marks are to be seen on the cobra’s hood? So naturally the cobra is sacred, and no native was going to risk his prospects of the hereafter by killing it. But no one cared a rap about my chances in the hereafter, and if I killed the cobra, so much the better.

We trudged out across the dusty plain and came at last to the little hole where the villagers said the cobra lived. I had an old entrenching tool which I used to dig insects out of rotten logs, and with this I commenced to enlarge the hole, cutting down in the hard-baked earth. I got down about a foot before I saw what was obviously skin of either a lizard or a snake. I strongly suspected snake. I gave it a poke with the tip of my digger and out came the most magnificent cobra you ever saw.

We subsequently preserved any number of them for specimens, but none so “manner-gorgeous” as this one. It came out, reared up, its beady eyes peering from side to side as it moved its head inquiringly, its tongue flashing. I had to have a picture of it. I had no long-focus camera in those days and I wanted a picture of this cobra which would fill the whole plate. I got it (I have the picture framed on my wall at this moment) by lying down on the ground and edging up until I was right in front of the snake. My wife stood by with an open parasol, and when he saw fit to make a nip at the camera, which meant coming pretty close to my face and hands, she would lower the parasol in front of him and he would sway back and straighten up again. I took a number of excellent snapshots and then carefully shot the snake with a charge of dust-shot in a .38 cartridge so as to damage him as little as possible.

We got an earthenware jar from the village near-by, coiled our treasure down in it, and went back to Lucknow. Rosamond refused to have the snake in our room because, as she wisely maintained, snakes have a way of coming to life after they have apparently been killed. The upshot was that a jackal sneaked up on the low clay porch in front of the room and carried off the cobra while we were having supper. But I still have the photograph, and I am still just as convinced as I was then that I am fortunate in having a wife who is not only beautiful but brave. I had stepped into great good fortune.