Bored to death
Big-game hunting was part of the lore of empire, but the pursuit of trophies was often tedious and disappointing. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, loved to hunt, and a picture of him standing over a dead tiger (above) helped cement his reputation as a man of action who could tame the natural world – and presumably India as well. Tiger hunting, however, was rarely so successful. On one occasion, Curzon sat in a tree for hours and saw nothing bigger than a frog. On another eight-day expedition he fired his rifle only once.
Nor was this unusual. A century earlier, Lord Hastings complained that on several occasions he had gone looking for tigers, but that despite his best efforts, he did not find any. Emily Eden reported that her brother George, Lord Auckland, who served as governorgeneral from 1836– 42, had gone out tiger-hunting several times but “never had a glimpse of a tiger, though here and there… saw the footprints of one”.
Frank Swettenham had a similar experience in Malaya in the 1870s. He went on several hunting expeditions “but to very little avail”, even though the region was “much frequented by elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, and wild buffaloes”. On one excursion he saw nothing more exciting than a pig and some jungle fowl before rain forced him back.
Although there were numerous books about big-game hunting in Africa, the reality, at least in Asia, was rather more boring than the fantasy.