Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

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Despots are the best collectors; and from the fall of the Roman Empire till the arrival of those placed in the Zoological Gardens in 1836, the rare appearances of the giraffe in Europe were in each case due to the munificence of Eastern Sultans and Pashas. The Prince of Damascus gave one to the Emperor Frederick II. in 1215; and the Soldan of Egypt presented another to Lorenzo the Magnificent, which became the pet of Florence, and used to be allowed to walk in the streets, and take the presents of fruit and cakes extended to it from the balconies. From this time the giraffe was not seen in Europe until, in 1827, the Pasha of Egypt sent four to Constantinople, Venice, England, and France respectively. The giraffe sent to England was in bad health, and soon died; but the Parisians went wild with excitement over the Pasha’s present. It had spent the winter at Marseilles, and throve there on the milk of the cows which the Pasha had sent over for its use from Egypt. The Prefect of Marseilles had the arms of France embroidered on its body-cloth, and it entered Paris escorted by a Darfour negro, Hassan, an Arab, a Marseilles groom, a mulatto interpreter, the Prefect of Marseilles himself, and a professor from the Jardin des Plantes, while troops kept back the crowd. Thousands came every day to see it, and men and women wore gloves, gowns, and waistcoats of the colour of its spots. But the successful expedition by which, in 1836, M. Thibaut procured a stock of giraffes for the Zoological Society, owed nothing to the patronage of the Pasha of Egypt, beyond permission to enter the Soudan. The caravan left the Nile near Dongola, and thence passed on to the desert of Kordofan. There M. Thibaut engaged the services of the Arab sword-hunters, whose skill and courage were of such service to Sir Samuel Baker in his expedition thirty years later to the sources of the Nile tributaries; and in two days they sighted the giraffes. A female with a fawn was first pursued by the Arabs, who killed the animal with their swords, and next day tracked and caught the fawn in the thorny mimosa scrub. For four days the young giraffe was secured by a cord, the end of which was held by one of the Arabs; at the end of that time it was perfectly tame, and trotted after the caravan with the female camels which had been brought to supply it with milk. The Arabs were excellent nurses, and taught the young creature to drink milk by putting their fingers into its mouth and so inducing it to suck. Four others which M. Thibaut caught died in the cold weather in the desert. But he replaced three of these, and brought four, including that first taken, down the Nile to Alexandria, and then by ship to Malta. “Providence alone,” he wrote, “enabled me to surmount these difficulties.”