Vivienne de Watteville - Out in The Blue (1927)

Out in The Blue (1927)

In 1923 Vivienne and her father set off on an eighteen-month safari through Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo, hunting for trophies for the natural history museum in Bern, Switzerland, without the help of a professional hunter. When her father was killed by a lion, Vivienne finished the trip alone, hunting the remaining species on their license, including a white rhinoceros. In her first book, Out in the Blue (i.e. in the far country), published in 1927, she describes her experiences on safari. The de Wattevilles had been troubled by marauding lions through much of their safari. Lions had attacked the mules in the kraal and Bernard had shot several of the big cats. One, on the verge of starvation, had stormed their camp and raced off with a canvas bathtub, which it had tried to eat. Sometime later they found nails and torn bits of canvas in its droppings. At the start of the safari, Bernard de Watteville had missed most of what he shot at; by the time he and his daughter reached the Congo, he had bagged an impressive number of trophies, with his daughter as tracker. Their collection included a giraffe, elephant, lion, cape buffalo, and even a male bongo. With the help of Pygmy trackers they approached gorillas in the Virunga Mountains but were unable to bag one. They also wanted a white rhino and had obtained special permission from the Belgian authorities to shoot the animal. The young and enterprising Vivienne, though only 23 years old, handled all the taxidermy, working to preserve whatever her father shot for the museum. She was, in addition, the camp nurse, relying heavily on Epsom salts and quinine powder, her cure-all remedies.

"My father went down with jaundice and I was crippled by veld sores (Africa's worst kind of boil). How I dreaded the wet branches that sprang back like a whip-lash against my festering shins. We all of us had septic throats, and the porters and cook went down with fever."

Towards the end of the safari Bernard shot and wounded a lioness with cubs. Believing no wounded animal should be abandoned, he followed the lioness on foot into a bed of reeds where she lunged at him and swatted him to the ground. Unharmed, Bernard jumped to his feet and fired at the retreating lioness, causing her to whirl around and in just a few bounds attack him once again. The angry cat mauled him until he was able to shoot it while it was on top of him. The lioness' claws were buried in the man's body and had to be pulled out one by one before he could get to his feet. Two hours later Bernard staggered into camp where he collapsed in his daughter's tent. Vivienne did her best to save her father, but even after treating his infected wounds with raw crystals of permanganate, the bleeding couldn't be stopped. Though suffering from spirillum fever and shock, and though before her father's death she had shot no animals, Vivienne buried her father, continued the safari and completed the mission, shooting both for the pot (she hd a team of native porters to feed) and for the collection. The de Watteville trophies, mounted, were exhibited from 1936 in the dioramas of the new Musée d'histoire naturelle at Bern.