3-052-375 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Hippopotamus hunting in Angola, West Africa, 1880. The huge beast's mouth '...is furnished with a terrific array of gleaming tusks and oblique protruding incisors. These are...intended...for tearing up and chewing the grass and weeds and aquatic plants in the Central African rivers, the Nile or the Congo, anywhere from Nubia to Angola, or to the borders of our Colonial Kaffirland. The traveller who has moored his canoe or boat to the river-bank at night...will be very likely kept awake by the tumultuous sound of gurgling and snorting from all the waters that flow or spread over the plain for many miles around him; and, if one of the big brutes should happen to swim that way, it is quite possible that the canoe may suddenly be upset, or even crunched by the jaws of the playful monster. A herd of twenty or even thirty of these animals is frequently met with together, but half of them will be under water, so it is not easy to count the precise number. The hunter's first endeavour is to separate one from the herd, and then he gets a shot at it with his large elephant rifle, using an explosive shell instead of a bullet. His native servants and followers are much pleased by his killing a hippopotamus, from which they cut plenty of fat meat'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.