4 bore
elephant gun and African spear, 1870s.
Hunting icon Selous is remembered for his powerful ties, such as those with Theodore Roosevelt and
Cecil Rhodes, as well as for his military achievements and the books that he left behind. However, he is best remembered as one of the world's most revered hunters, as he pursued
big-game hunting in his southern African homelands and in wildernesses worldwide. Accounts of his youth are filled with stories of trespassing, poaching, and brawling, almost all within romanticized and humorous portrayals, but one in particular from 1870 stands out as more serious. In
Wiesbaden,
Prussia, he knocked unconscious a Prussian game warden who tackled him while he was stealing
buzzard eggs for his collection, and he had to leave the country at once to avoid imprisonment. Then, he moved to
Austria, and in
Salzburg, he went big game hunting for the first time in the nearby
Alps, where he shot two
chamois. On 4 September 1871, at the age of 19, he left England with £400 in his pocket and was determined to earn his living as a professional elephant hunter. By the age of 25, he was known across South Africa as one of the most successful ivory hunters of the day. Selous journeyed in pursuit of big game to Europe (
Bavaria, Germany in 1870,
Transylvania, then
Hungary but now
Romania in 1899,
Mull Island,
Scotland in 1894,
Sardinia in 1902,
Norway in 1907), Asia (
Turkey,
Persia,
Caucasus in 1894–95, 1897, 1907), North America (
Wyoming,
Rocky Mountains in 1897 and 1898,
Eastern Canada in 1900–1901, 1905,
Alaska and
Yukon in 1904, 1905) and the "dark continent" in a territory that extends from today's
South Africa and
Namibia all the way up into central
Sudan where he collected specimens of virtually every medium and large African mammal species. On 2 May 1902, Selous was elected Associate Member of the
Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt and
George Bird Grinnell in 1887. In 1909–1910, Selous accompanied American ex-president Roosevelt in his famous African safari. Contrary to popular belief, Selous did not lead Roosevelt's
1909 expedition to
British East Africa, the
Congo, and
Egypt. While Selous was a member of this expedition from time to time and helped organize the safari's logistics, the excursion was in fact led by R. J. Cunninghame. Roosevelt wrote of Selous: In 1909, Selous co-founded the
Shikar Club, a big-game hunters' association, with two other British Army Captains, Charles Edward Radclyffe and P. B. Vanderbyl, and regularly met at the
Savoy Hotel in London. The association's president was
The 5th Earl of Lonsdale; another founding member included the artist, explorer, and Selous biographer
John Guille Millais. In 1910, he represented Britain at the Congress of Field Sports in
Vienna. He was a rifleman icon and a valued expert in firearms. Early in his hunting career, in the mid-1870s, Selous favored a
four bore black powder muzzleloader for killing an elephant, a short-barreled musket firing a bullet with as much as of black powder, one of the largest hunting calibers fabricated. Between 1874 and 1876 he killed seventy-eight elephants with that gun, but eventually, there was a double loading incident together with other recoil problems from it, and he finally gave it up as too "upsetting my nerve". He used a ten-bore muzzleloader to hunt lions. After black powder muzzleloader firearms became
obsolete, he adopted a breech-loading 10 bore as shown in "A Hunters Wanderings in Africa" and by 1880 he was using his favorite, black powder breech-loading rifle a
.461 No 1 Gibbs / Metford / Farquharson single shot later he was approached by both Birmingham and London gunmakers in hopes of his endorsement, with Holland and Holland providing two Holland and Woodward patent single-shot rifles (often confused in photos as Farquharson's) in the two calibers: a 303 and a 375 2 1/2" and later a .425
Westley Richards bolt-action rifle. There are quotes as to how Selous was not a crack shot, but a rather ordinary marksman, yet most agree that was just another personal statement of modesty from Selous himself. Regardless, he remains an iconic rifleman figure and, following in the tradition of others, the German gunmaker
Blaser and the Italian gunmaker Perugini Visini chose to name their top line safari rifles the Selous after him.
Naturalist Many of the Selous trophies entered into museums and international taxidermy and natural-history collections, notably that of the
Natural History Museum in London. In their
Selous Collection they have 524 mammals from three continents, all shot by him, including 19
lions. In the last year of his life, while in combat in 1916, he was known to carry his butterfly net in the evening and collect specimens, for the same institution. Overall, more than five thousand plants and animal specimens were donated by him to the Natural History section of the
British Museum. This collection was held in 1881 in the new Natural History Museum in South Kensington (which became an independent institution in 1963). Here, posthumously in 1920, they unveiled a bronze bust of him in the Main Hall, where it stands to this day. Selous was a member of the
British Ornithologists' Union, and collected bird eggs from across Europe, including
Iceland; and the
Ottoman Empire. He was awarded the
Royal Geographical Society's
Founder's Medal in 1893 "in recognition of twenty years' exploration and surveys in South Africa". In 1896, British zoologist
William Edward de Winton (1856–1922), named a new African small
Carnivora,
Paracynictis selousi or the Selous mongoose, in his honour. Also, a subspecies of the African
Sitatunga antelope, (
Tragelaphus spekii selousi), bears his name.
Conservationist Selous noticed over time how the impact of European hunters was leading to a significant reduction in the amount of game available in Africa. In 1881, he commented that: This realization led Selous, and other big game hunters of his time, to become keen advocates of faunal conservation. Eventually, colonial governments passed laws enforcing hunting regulations and establishing game reserves, with the aim of preventing the outright extinction of certain species and of preserving animal stocks for future white sportsmen. The
Selous Game Reserve in southeastern
Tanzania is a hunting reserve named in his honor. Established in 1922, it covers an area of along the rivers
Kilombero,
Ruaha, and
Rufiji. The area first became a hunting reserve in 1905, although it is rarely visited by humans due to the significant presence of the
Tsetse fly. In 1982 it was designated a
UNESCO World Heritage Site due to the diversity of its wildlife and undisturbed nature. ==Selous as man and character==