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Updated: June 9, 2025
Several centuries after they had been shown in Rome and Constantinople, it was stated that hippopotami could not be transported alive to a foreign country; but the progress of civilisation has refuted this erroneous hypothesis, and the harsh, heavy sound of its voice, since May, 1850, has been familiar to the frequenters of a London park.
The paths in all these forests are so zigzag that a person may imagine he has traveled a distance of thirty miles, which, when reckoned as the crow flies, may not be fifteen. This is a stream of thirty yards wide, and, like the Quilo, Loange, Chikapa, and Loajima, contains both alligators and hippopotami. We crossed it by means of canoes.
Their reason for making this arrangement was, that throughout the whole of the Caffre country, with the exception of lions and elephants in the forest, and hippopotami in the rivers, there was little or no game to be found, the Caffres having almost wholly destroyed it.
This teasing proved pretty successful; for when the tide had run clean out, only pools and reaches, connecting by shallow runnels the volume of the natural stream, remained for the hippopotami to sport about in; and my manoeuvring in these confined places became so irritating, that a large female came rapidly under water to the stern of the canoe, and gave it such a sudden and violent cant with her head or withers, that that end of the vessel shot up in the air, and sent me sprawling on my back, with my legs forced up by the seat a bar of wood at right angles to my body; whilst the poler and the big double gun were driven like a pair of shuttlecocks, flying right and left of the canoe high up into the air.
The hippopotami of the Nile differ considerably from each other and also from the species known as Sea-cow in South Africa; while a smaller kind than either has been observed in the rivers of Western Africa.
In these pools, some of which may be a mile in length, are congregated all the inhabitants of the river, who as the stream disappears are forced to close quarters in these narrow asylums; thus, crocodiles, hippopotami, fish, and large turtle are crowded in extraordinary numbers, until the commencement of the rains in Abyssinia once more sets them at liberty by sending down a fresh volume to the river.
And they were, indeed, these thick-skinned animals, with a big head, a large, swollen snout, a mouth armed with teeth which extend a foot beyond it animals which are squat on their short limbs, the skin of which, unprovided with hair, is of a tawny red. Hippopotami in America! They continued to march during the whole day, but painfully. Fatigue commenced to retard even the most robust.
Behold why the caoutchouc trees, the quinquinas, the products of South America were missing in this country, which was neither the plateau of Atacama nor the Bolivian pampa! Yes, they were giraffes, not ostriches, which had fled away in the opening! They were elephants that had crossed the thick underwood! They were hippopotami whose repose Dick Sand had troubled under the large plants!
The perseverance of the party was finally crowned with success; for on the 18th of April they discovered Lake Shirwa, a considerable body of bitter water, containing leeches, fish, crocodiles, and hippopotami. From having probably no outlet, the water is slightly brackish, and it appears to be deep, with islands like hills rising out of it.
Now dining with a king off the strangest of viands; now holding "palaver" with another; now spending a day with a chief and his numerous wives; now visiting a French barracoon, where, under a fiction of law, the victims were collected to be shipped as unwilling apprentices, not slaves, to be returned to their native wilds, if they lived long enough; now ascending a river dangerous for boats, where, if the boat had capsized, himself and crew would but have served a morning's meal to the hungry sharks held as fetich by the natives along the stream, who yearly sacrifice young girls reared for the purpose to their propitiation; now scouring the bush in pursuit of the gorilla or shooting hippopotami by the half-dozen, and other adventures and exploits wherein duty, excitement, and gratified curiosity were intermingled with danger and hairbreadth escape that few would care to tempt.
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