3-011-923 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mode of capturing wild elephants in Ceylon: the alarm, 1864. Engraving of a photograph '...of the great elephant-catching expedition to a place called Ebbewellepittia...so as to afford the utmost sport and entertainment to the European visitors...the Cingalese huntsmen were keeping up a ring of watch-fires, at intervals of ten yards, all round the herd of wild elephants in the neighbouring forest. Sometimes an alarm would be raised when the noble beasts turned and seemed about to break through the circle at any particular point; the men would drive them back with shouts and noise of firing guns, but without killing or wounding any of them. A group of huntsmen, in the attitude they would assume at these exciting moments, is portrayed in our Illustration...The jungle was so thickly overgrown with underwood, as well as forest trees, that it was impossible to see more than twenty yards ahead'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.