TANGANYIKA TUSKERS
Land of the leather-sided giants
TANGANYIKA (now Tanzania) was always known for elephants bearing ivory of exceptional weight. Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, which goes back almost 130 years, reveals among its top ten savanna elephant trophies, three from Tanzania – more than any other country.
History’s biggest recorded tusks came from an elephant shot with a muzzleloader in 1898, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanganyika, by a slave of the ivory trader Tippu Tib, aka Shundi. Books usually describe Tippu Tib as an Arab, but ‘Karamojo’ Bell, who knew him personally, described him as African. Shundi told Bell that he’d begun life as a “naked pagan Kavirondo” who was sold as a slave but earned his freedom by embracing the Islamic religion. These world-record tusks, weighing 226 and 214lbs, are now in the British Museum. Incredibly, they are almost perfectly symmetrical and both of their tips are pencil-pointed, showing virtually no wear whatever. This must have been a giant of an elephant to keep such lengthy tusks from scraping the ground as it walked; doubtless it would also be recorded as the tallest, had it been measured.
Rowland Ward’s new measuring system combines the weights of both tusks, creating a new No 2 in the book – also a Tanzania tusker – poached in Ruaha Park by a policeman in 1971. Their original
wet weight was 198 and 188lbs, but when officially recorded for Rowland Ward (RW), they weighed 192 and 189lbs. Jon Speed (the Mauser man) who was a game ranger in Tanzania’s Game Department, is shown here squatting between these two tusks. The original weights, written on the tusks, remained in evidence.
Most tusks taper rapidly from the hollow rear section, where the nerve is, down to the much thinner solid section toward the end. These tusks, however, remain thick all the way to their ends, providing much more solid ivory, hence their immense weight. Dr Allen Rodgers, Tanzanian Game Dept Ecologist and Director of the Selous Ecology Research Facility, measured their circumference (at the point where the ivory shaft exited the bull’s lips) to be just over 24 inches (Jon Speed confirmed this when taking this photo). Rodgers gave their dried out weights as 192 and 186lbs.
There was talk that these tusks had mysteriously disappeared from the warehouse, but Tony Sanchez-ariño subsequently visited the Tanzania Game Department and had a photograph taken of himself standing between them (see Tony’s book Africa’s Greatest Tuskers). They are indisputably the same tusks. However, for Tony’s photo, the tusks were swapped around, the bigger tusk is on the left (i.e. on Tony’s right). Also, the tusks were photographed at an angle, and apparently with a slightly wide-angle lens which distorts perspective, making the nearer (smaller) tusk appear bigger and thicker relative to its mate. But the large black stain near the tip of the heavier tusk (on Tony’s right/jon’s left) is identical in both photos, as is the small black horizontal stain further down (below Tony’s belt and Jon’s left hand). Likewise, the same black striation running up past the left side of this small stain appears in both photos.
It is simply not possible to accurately estimate tusk weight from photos. Apart from optical distortion due to camera angle and lens design, much depends on the length and thickness of the tusk nerve, which differs from bull to bull according to age, region and other factors. The longer the nerve, the longer will be the hollow section within the drawn tusk, hence the lighter the tusk.
The weight lies in the length and thickness of the solid ivory beyond the nerve.
Tanganyika’s third-biggest tusks are registered in RW at 180 and 168lbs under the name ‘Signor Sibilia’ (Edmund Sunde) who shot the bull east of the Malagarasi River in 1958. They ranked No 7, but now that the Manners tusks, which ranked No 4, have been expunged, the Sibilia tusks will rank No 6.
Tanganyika’s fourth-heaviest on record, 165 and 165lbs, were shot by Basil Reel in Masailand around 1930. Ranking 13th in RW’S 30th edition, these will now move up to 12th position. Basil Reel was a renowned ivory hunter and safari outfitter of the 1920s and ’30s. David Chandler’s book, Legends of the African Frontier (Safari Press 2008) has the following entry: “Reel, Basil... was a professional hunter based in Tanga, Tanganyika, during the 1920s. He took the biggest elephant ever shot in British Tanganyika, with tusks of 168 and 160 pounds.” Chandler was apparently unaware of the Sibilia tusks. Other than this, his statement is accurate given that, when the world record was shot in 1898, Tanganyika was not British (besides, the world record tusks weren’t entered in RW until 1962).
Little was known of the Tippu Tib tusks when Basil Reel shot this bull around 1930, so it’s understandable he was credited with shooting ‘Tanganyika’s biggest elephant’. And Tanganyika/ Tanzania was no longer British in 1971, when the policeman poached the Ruaha Park 190-pounder. Chandler’s weights were probably those recorded by the Game Department when Reel first brought in the ivory. The tusks were re-weighed for RW. In White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris, Brian Herne says Tanganyika professional, Clary Palmer-wilson, named Reel as his mentor.
Current Magnum contributor, Royce Buckle, remembers Basil Reel as a family friend. Royce was born in Tanganyika in 1937. His father, a hunter, was friends with Basil Reel, Mickey Norton (who shot some 2 000 elephant doing control work) and George Rushby, an ivory hunter who later became Deputy Game Warden for the whole of Tanganyika.
In 1953, Royce, then aged 16, first met Basil Reel in Tanga, Tanganyika, when Reel was aged around 65 or 70. Royce clearly remembers his father asking Reel why he used a .600 Nitro Express; Reel’s answer was, “Because they don’t make anything bigger”. Sometime in the 1950s, Basil Reel gave Royce the two photos shown over the page. I
can’t say for certain which tusks in the photos are the 165-pounders recorded in Rowland Ward’s; it could be the single set or possibly the outermost tusks of those in the other photo.
I had never before seen a photo of Basil Reel or his famous tusks. Neither Royce nor I know how Reel’s tusks – each recorded as weighing 165lbs – came to be entered in Rowland Ward’s. It is highly unlikely that Reel himself registered them, since this entry does not appear in my 1992 edition of RW, when Reel would have been at least 104 years old. I am missing the 1995 edition, but Reel’s entry appears in the 1998 edition, registered under J Basil-reel, perhaps a descendant who owned the tusks at the time of registration. Royce says Reel always referred to himself as Basil Reel, and the name hand-written on the back of the photos is Basil Reel.
Royce Buckle quit farming to become a professional hunter, and several of his clients shot hundred-pounders in Tanganyika. He tells me he did see one set of tusks shot in Tanganyika that were heavier than Basil Reel’s. One day, an Arab hunter/trader brought Royce his Cogswell & Harrison .404 which had started shooting “to one side” and asked Royce if he could fix it. As with many sporting rifles, the permanent standing leaf of the rear sight had a central vertical line engraved on it precisely beneath the point of the ‘V’. After sighting the rifle in at the factory, the gunsmith would stamp a small line on the barrel or sight-ramp, precisely to coincide with the position of the vertical line on the sight blade. If the rear sight element got bumped to one side, you could tap it back again until the two lines met, thereby correctly re-aligning the sight without expending ammunition. Royce immediately noticed that the two lines on the Arab’s rifle did not coincide – the sight had shifted laterally in its dovetail. Without firing the rifle, Royce tapped the rear sight back into position, handed the rifle to its owner and said, “Try it now”. The Arab went off, and Royce forgot the incident.
Sometime later, Royce was in town when the same Arab appeared, inviting him to come and see something at the Game Department offices. Royce walked in to see a set of monstrous tusks which the Arab had just brought in to be weighed and registered on his licence. The tusks were freshly shot; they still had blood and traces of meat on the bases. Royce personally witnessed these tusks being weighed – both registered over 170lbs. They were never entered in Rowland Ward – the Arab immediately sold them to a trader who sawed them up into armlength sections for crating and shipped them off to London.
Imust tell of one other set of very big Tanganyika tusks which never got into RW. I recently met Pat Rundgren, nephew of the famous game ranger and professional hunter, Eric Rundgren (Pat’s father was Eric’s brother) and we chatted about his uncle. Eric Rundgren was a highly controversial figure in East Africa – people either loved or hated him. He was known to be ill-mannered, boorish, bullying and rude. However, all agreed that he was the most successful hunter in East Africa, known to have personally shot, and found his clients, more 100lb-plus elephants than any other hunter. Once he’d spotted a big tusker, nothing deterred him, no amount of time, effort, discomfort, pain, hunger or thirst would make him give up until he or his client had bagged it.
Rundgren’s biggest known elephant was a 178-pounder. While on a hunting holiday in Kenya, he saw the 178pounder close to the Tanganyika border and went after it with all his usual grim determination. He followed it for two days without eating, and drank only from fouled waterholes. Unfortunately, the bull crossed the border into Tanganyika. Whether Rundgren was unaware that he’d crossed the unmarked border, or was aware but did not care, is unknown. He claimed he shot the bull in Kenya, where he held a licence. However, in White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris, Brian Herne (a renowned Kenya professional of those times) states that Tanganyika’s chief game warden, Jerry Swinnerton, personally went to inspect the carcass, and then asked John Alexander, a warden at Tsavo National Park and qualified land surveyor, to verify the carcass’s position. Anderson confirmed that Rundgren had crossed the border and shot the bull 1½ miles inside Tanganyika. To get rid of the evidence, Rundgren sold the tusks to an Asian dealer who, fearing confiscation sawed them up and shipped them off. Rundgren was heavily fined.
In Africa’s Greatest Tuskers, Tony Sanchez-ariño writes that Rundgren’s biggest tusks ever were 160lbs a side. Tony knew Rundgren, and feels sure that if Rundgren had shot a 178-pounder, he would have told him. Perhaps Rundgren simply wanted the matter kept quiet. The photo of Rundgren shown here, I got from Stephen J Smith in the early 1990s, when he was editor of Rowland Ward. He’d also been a personal friend of Rundgren. Steve put this photo in his own book, The Hunter and the Go-away Bird; his caption states the tusks to weigh 160/160 and 172/174 lbs (these are not the illegal Tanganyika tusks).
All this leaves me wondering how many giant tuskers went unrecorded. Sportsmen accounted for comparatively very few, and of these, fewer yet were recorded. Far more were shot by ivory hunters who knew nothing or cared nothing about record books. Poachers shot yet more and secretly sold them to local dealers who cut them up and shipped them off to become carvings, piano keys and billiard balls.
Today, 100-pounders are extremely rare outside of game reserves. Imagine the Eden Africa was in the 1800s…