Terry Wieland On Ammo

Jul 19, 2019 | News

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]FATHER OF THEM ALL

Thanks to Zulu, the classic 1964 movie starring Michael Caine, the Martini-Henry rifle enjoys a celebrity among citizens at large that is rare among military weapons. Tens of millions of people have seen that movie and, if nothing else, learned about rifle drill in the British Army in 1879.

For anyone who might have missed it, Zulu depicts, with quite admirable accuracy, the battle of Rorke’s Drift, in Natal in 1879. The army awarded 11 Victoria Crosses; in my opinion, there could have been a twelfth, for the Martini-Henry certainly played a heroic role.

The old Martini is one of the lesser-sung military rifles in history. It was not used for long — about 15 years — and was really a transitional weapon between the muzzleloader and the repeating cartridge rifle. Still, it had an enormous impact in several different ways. After it was officially retired in favor of the bolt-action Lee-Metford in 1888, stocks of Martini-Henrys were distributed to colonial troops, militia battalions, hunters, and target shooters throughout the Empire — and that meant, literally, throughout the world. For a century afterwards, you could walk into a farmhouse in Kenya, Rhodesia, Natal, Saskatchewan, New Zealand, or New South Wales and find a Martini-Henry behind the door, ready for action.

Over the long term, its cartridge, the .577/.450, was even more influential than the rifle itself. For one thing, its 480-grain bullet set the standard for .45-caliber dangerous-game cartridges that lasts to this day. Subsequent nitro-express cartridges, starting with the .450 NE in 1898, used 480-grain bullets. When .450s were banned in India and the Sudan around 1905, to keep ammunition out of the hands of insurgents, it was because there were so many old Martini-Henrys in the hands of the would-be rebels. Substitutes for the .450 NE included the .470 Nitro Express, .475 No. 2 NE, and Holland & Holland’s .500/.465. More often than not, the standard bullet weight was 480 grains.

The Martini-Henry proved to be so durable, reliable, and adaptable that many were rebarreled to .303 British after 1888, and thousands of new Martinis were also made in .303. Many of these continue in service to this day. With .303 British ammunition one of the most common calibers to be found from Cairo to the Cape, it was natural to arm everything from game scouts and park rangers to camp guards and farm workers with them.

The flip side of that coin is that untold numbers of African animals have been either poached, or wounded, by a Martini-Henry, whether chambered in .577/.450 or .303 British, but that is hardly the rifle’s fault.

A lesser known negative of the old Martini is its horrid recoil. Viewers of Zulu might contest that statement, since every shot fired in the movie appeared to have no recoil at all, nor was there much in the way of black-powder smoke. Of course not – they were using blanks. The real-life Martini was noted for brutal recoil, mainly because of the shape of the stock. For its time, however, it was extremely fast to operate — tests showed trained infantrymen capable of maintaining a rate of fire of 20 rounds per minute. The roughly 140 defenders of Rorke’s Drift fired more than 20,000 rounds during the battle. Considering there were 4,000 Zulu attackers, the Martini’s rate of fire evened the odds somewhat.

The rifle is also enormously strong. Tests at the Providence Tool Company in Rhode Island, at the time they were fulfilling a contract to supply 600,000 Martini-Henrys to the Ottoman Empire, proved the action to be a beast. At one point, they put five (5) 480-grain bullets in the barrel ahead of a double charge of gunpowder. The rifle took it without a whimper.

It’s no wonder, then, that the Martini-Henry is still relatively common to find in use, 140 years after it was retired from the British service as obsolete. A 480-grain, hard-cast bullet, in the right place, will still stop virtually anything, and there is little in the way of plains game that can’t be taken with the .303.

To the best of my knowledge, Kynamco in England is the only company that now manufactures .577/.450 Martini-Henry ammunition. Finding some would be the difficulty. If you want to shoot one, handloading is about the only real option. Fortunately, with a little work, brass can be fashioned from .577 cases, which will take Boxer primers; the Martini can handle smokeless-powder pressures with no problem, and cast bullets are common as dirt.

In fact, loading some ammunition and trying to match the 20 rounds a minute record of a Victorian infantrymen would be an interesting challenge. Let me know how you make out.

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One for the Road

Jul 17, 2019 | News

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“Hurry, Hurry! Shoot! SHOOT!

(And other helpful comments.)

Towards the end of his career in Africa, Robert Ruark had one particular tracker named Metheke without whom, he wrote, “I feel naked in the bush.” He does not make it clear exactly who Metheke worked for when Ruark was not around. Presumably, it was one of the Ker & Downey professional hunters, but Metheke always seemed able to detach himself to accompany Ruark, no matter who he was hunting with at the time. Or so Ruark would have us believe. He was Man Friday to Ruark’s Robinson Crusoe.

Ruark was very adept at creating ideal situations that embed themselves in your mind, making you seek out such perfection on every hunting trip henceforth. Alas, perfection in hunting — and especially in hunting companions — is a very scarce commodity. On rare occasions I have met trackers in Africa who compare favorably with the sainted Metheke. Lekina Sandeti, a Masai who works for Robin Hurt in Tanzania, is one. Cuno, who worked for Chris Dandridge in Botswana, is another; I never did know Cuno’s surname. Nor did I know Charles’s surname, who was Clive Eaton’s tracker and always dressed in a shirt and hat more in keeping with a beach in Hawaii than on the track of a Cape buffalo. His attire belied his ability, however, which was second to none when it came to finding game and tracking it.

Books and stories from old Africa often depicted trackers and gun bearers in less than flattering terms. Some were outright racist to a point which, in this day and age, causes even the most non-politically-correct to cringe. Even those who purported to like and respect the safari staff were often condescending in their treatment of native people and their foibles. Most wrote about their trackers the way a wingshooter writes about a particularly gifted bird dog. Ruark, I hasten to add, did like and respect them. At times he was critical, but never condescending.

I don’t claim to be any less inherently racist — or at least, race-conscious — than other men of my age and background, but I have always tried to write about Lekina, Cuno, Charles, and the others in the same terms I wrote about the white professionals who headed up safaris. Perhaps this is because, 20 years before I ever went on safari in Africa, I went there as a freelance foreign correspondent and spent long periods living in grass huts, mud huts, and, on occasion, refugee and guerrilla camps. (Grass huts, by the way, are the most comfortable, and you become fond of the lizards that scurry around.)

In the course of that and later such expeditions, I learned enough Swahili to get by, or at least enough to show the trackers I was making the attempt, and this always seemed to put them on my side. Earning the respect of your trackers is, of course, the best case. Failing that, not incurring their enmity is something to be desired. One time, I was told about a client in Botswana, hunting with some Bushmen, who made the mistake of treating them badly, constantly denigrating them and generally being a boor. It has been my experience that people respond in kind, and that a little politeness goes a long way. At any rate, the Bushmen determined on some revenge. Knowing they could go long periods without water, while the fat American needed a drink every fifteen minutes, they took him out one morning and did a long, looping circle under the hot sun, with no water. Hours later, dehydrated, hallucinatory, and almost dead with fatigue, they delivered him back to camp. I don’t know whether he changed his ways, but the guides certainly got a bit of their own back.

Sometimes it’s not a matter of respect, mutual or otherwise, but simply competence. For every superb Lekina or Cuno, I have met trackers and other staff that seem to have been hired at short notice out of the local saloon, and have no more idea about hunting than if they’d been hired to teach quantum physics. One time, I was trying to locate a wounded wildebeest in the thick bush of Natal. With no tracks or blood trail, going back the next day to search for it was like looking for the proverbial needle, but we had to try.

We split up, with the PH and one tracker going one way, and a tracker and me going the other. By some miracle, a lone wildebeest bull appeared on an open slope about 200 yards distant. We had no shooting sticks, and no convenient tree. I was studying the bull in my binoculars while the tracker gesticulated wildly, insisting it was the wounded animal. My only chance was an offhand shot.

“Hurry!” he shouted. “Shoot! Shoot!”

Already out of breath, nervous, I tried to place the dancing crosshairs somewhere near the shoulder, and yanked the trigger with predictable results. The bull melted into the undergrowth. My guide looked at me, practically in tears. “Why you not shoot?” he asked, obviously thinking that killing an animal with a rifle required nothing more than pointing it in more or less the right direction and pulling the trigger. The wounded bull — if it was our bull — was gone, then and for all time. I should add that it was a hell of a head.

Guides like that make you even more nervous and likely to miss. Others, like Lekina, know that their own chances of survival go up considerably if they keep you calm in a tight situation, and try to make things easier rather than harder. Shouting “Shoot, shoot!” when the client is either not ready, or not in a good position to do so, accomplishes all the wrong things.

I’ve heard of, although I’ve never experienced, the extreme case of a guide running on ahead to try to spot a wounded animal, and then turning around and shouting to the hunter to “Shoot!” when he can’t even see it from where he is. And, naturally, the shout then spooks the beast to make tracks.

On my first safari in Botswana, my professional hunter was a Tswana by the name of Patrick Mmalane, a Sandhurst graduate and captain in the Botswana Defence Force. He had signed on as a professional hunter with Safari South. Naturally, he being black as the ace of spades, I insisted on referring to him as my “white hunter,” which caused great mirth among the trackers. Since Patrick and I both held the Queen’s Commission, we declared our end of the dining table to be the officers’ mess. We became quite good friends, and I went back the following year for a four-week odyssey wherein we drove around Botswana, wingshooting, seeing the sights, and setting a number of local beer-drinking records.

Patrick eventually left hunting and rejoined the BDF, and the last I heard he was a lieutenant-colonel. I mention all this because it was interesting to see his relationship with our trackers. They were Bushmen, in whole or in part, and as at home in the bush as Patrick and I were on a drill square. While Patrick was good with a rifle, and held command in an easy grip, he was not a tracker, and game spotting was not his long suit. The trackers treated him with the same somewhat bemused respect that an experienced sergeant-major accords to a newly appointed young officer.

In the end, we all proved ourselves to each other — and earned whatever respect we had — through our own abilities, and by the end of the week, one Cape buffalo bull and several lesser species later, we all got along with a kind of easy familiarity. Everyone did his job, no one screwed up, and we had a pretty happy ship.

It would be nice to be able to say that eventually I ended up with one tracker who did for me what Metheke did for Ruark, but those were other days. A tracker/gun bearer/factotum of the Metheke stamp is either a distant memory or, more likely, an ideal that never really existed — certainly not for visiting client-hunters like Ruark, or me.

One of my most treasured memories of hunting in Africa, however, is when, on my second safari with him, Lekina Sandeti invited me to be a guest in his hut, and to drink a cup of the buttermilk-like concoction that is a staple of Masai life. This was, I was told by my PH, a great honor. Whether Metheke ever did the same for Robert Ruark, I don’t know. As I say, those were different times[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_btn title=”View article in Ezine” color=”chino” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fafricanhuntinggazette.com%2Fjuly-aug-sep-2019%2F%23africanhuntinggazette-ezine-july%2F146-147|||”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Loxodonta Africana

May 27, 2019 | News

Loxodonta Africana

What a powerful name for the world’s greatest land animal.

Today, the landlocked, small southern African country of Botswana, with a little over a million people took arguably the biggest decision in living memory (or mine anyway) regarding how it manages its own wildlife.

This is an arid country, with an average rainfall of 440mm, less than half the world’s average. It is dependent on exporting some of the world’s best diamonds, hugely reliant on beef exports and in particular, exporting its ecotourism experience as it showcases the world’s greatest wetland – the Okavango Delta. But the cross it has to bear is the unenviable task of managing a natural behemoth. A monster that consumes 26 000 (twenty-six thousand) tons, or 58 000 000 (fifty-eight million) pounds of foliage a day!

This is the herd of Botswana’s African elephants and Africa’s largest by miles. Conservatively speaking at 130 000 animals – number many questions being too low, they consume 200kg of leaves and grass, each …a day!

Some of the variables and factors this country has had to grapple with include:

1. Listening to, consulting with, empathizing, working out how to compensate the rural communities who have the ongoing challenge of the human-wildlife conflict to deal with. These beasts raid and destroy their crops and livelihoods and when working with and for the safari operators in the remote rural areas – they stood to benefit from this challenging dilemma. They are at the centre of where this is all happening.
2. Pleasing photo tourists who want to experience these beasts up close and personal on foot, on a boat or on the back of a land cruiser and seldom understand the concept of sustainable utilization or the challenges of human-wildlife conflict.
3. Keeping ivory poachers away as they’ll do anything to satisfy the demand for illegal ivory markets, particularly when they have no resistance.
4. Hunters who are prepared to pay handsomely for a limited number of trophy bull elephants each year through operators that manage the more remote areas not utilized by tourists.
5. A lucrative side industry from the management of elephant numbers, call it culling. This benefits thousands of local inhabitants with arguably one of the purest forms of a renewable, sustainable utilization of resources, that after all is theirs.
6. Animal rightists who want zero hunting anywhere – let alone in Botswana. They start petitions and campaign for eco-tourists to boycott Botswana should they opt to lift its ban on hunting.
7. Photographic safari operators, who are disguised animal rightists, working with National Geographic of all companies, who want everything on their terms and even went into business with the ex-President as a tactic to close down hunting and are still today, very powerful eco-tourism players.
8. You have ‘editors’ and journalists bringing out books, one most recently called the Last Elephant – (as if these animals are on the verge of extinction) that conveniently sideline Namibia’s elephant success story who coincidently work with communities in an even drier country with way less elephant to manage and it is prospering.

All this is happening while there is a tsunami of international pressure, from ‘Conservation bodies,’ interested groups, countries, politicians, celebrities, all seeking their moment in the sun – around a topic they know nothing, at worse, or very little at best, about.

This is a Botswana problem – not a global, African, or a southern African problem.

And so, as the press conference starts at 1400 on the 23^rd of May 2019, explaining why they have lifted the ban on hunting elephant, I salute this great country.

What a bold decision, taken for the right reasons, in the face of such adversity. What a lesson for us all.

Click here to view the letter of The Botswana Lifting of Ban