Hero of Kumaon: The Life of Jim Corbett

By Duff Hart-Davis

 Jim Corbett became the hero of thousands of impoverished local families in the remote Indian region of Kumaon when, throughout the 1920s and 30s, he answered their pleas to rid them of the man-eating tigers and leopards which were ravaging their populations. Man-eaters roamed a region of hundreds of square miles over several years, killing the defenceless villagers at will: for example the Champawat man-eater had killed over 434 people in six years, the Panar maneater over 400. 
   
 Jim, one of 15 children, was born in 1875 to the local post-master in Nainital, and taught himself as a barefoot boy in his local jungle to become, in his spare time one, of the most skilled trackers of his day, fluent in the local dialects, patient beyond endurance and an excellent shot. 
   
 Duff Hart Davis' biography threads together the life of this very private, unassuming Indian railway clerk. Often through Jim's own written words, Duff sets out the highlights of Jim's adventures in sequence and in context, thus thowing light on Jim's remarkable character. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Merlin Unwin Books
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913159412

Duff Hart-Davis

Duff Hart-Davis joined the Sunday Telegraph on its inception in 1961 and later travelled extensively as a feature reporter in India, Nepal, Turkey, Caribbean, Norway, South Africa, Ascension Island. Shooting trips took him to Siberia, Poland and Hungary. Duff wrote the Country Matters column in the Independent 1986-2001. A distinguished biographer, naturalist and journalist, he is author of 17 non-fiction books on subjects ranging from Hitler's Olympics, the adventurer Peter Fleming, to a history of the mid-Atlantic island of Ascension. He has also had eight novels published. Duff was brought up on a farm in Oxfordshire. He did his National Service in Germany and read Classics at Oxford. He is married with two children and now lives on a farm in the Cotswolds.

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Introduction

Illustration

When, as a boy of fourteen, I won a form prize at school, I was lucky enough to be presented with a copy of Man-Eaters of Kumaon. Immediately gripped by Jim Corbett’s life-and-death encounters with tigers and leopards in the Indian jungle, I read the book from end to end, again and again. Its magic has never faded.

Half a century later, on a glorious winter’s day in Chitwan, the great forested wilderness south of the Himalayas in Nepal, I was decanted from elephant-back into the branches of a tree, along with Hemanta Mishra, then Head of the country’s Wildlife Department. Half a mile away, ten more elephants had lined out, ready to drive a huge block of ten-foot grass towards us. The aim of the operation was to anaesthetise a particular tigress and fit her with a radio collar which would reveal the pattern of her movements.

Although the objective was research, the manoeuvre was strikingly similar to the Victorian and Edwardian shoots in which tigers were driven to riflemen safely mounted on machans (raised platforms) or elephants. The difference was that Hemanta had no lethal weapon – only a dart gun with an effective range of about forty yards, with which he hoped to anaesthetise the tigress as she crossed the open glade beneath us.

Perched in our tree, we waited breathlessly. At first only the harsh calls of hornbills broke the silence. Then, in the distance, an amazing cacophony started. Each driving elephant bore a cargo of four or five men, and at a signal all began to yell, howl, hoot, whistle and rattle tin cans full of stones. The moving wall of noise, faint at first, gradually drew closer. Soon we could hear the swish and crash as the heavyweight beaters cleared passages for themselves by swatting down the coarse grass with their trunks. Then, to our left front, an elephant screamed. Seconds later, another let fly from the middle of the beat, then one to our right. Our quarry was there, sure enough, ranging along the line, trying to break back.

Swish, crash went the elephants. The closer the beaters came, the greater the pressure on the tigress, the higher the tension up our tree. We hoped that she would come forward slowly and pause to get her bearings in the open space beneath us – but no: when at last she came, she came all-out, a lithe streak the colour of apricot jam, covering the ground in great bounds, and was gone in a flash, giving Hemanta no time to aim or pull the trigger. The drive had failed – but by heaven it had been exciting.

That experience, along with other tiger close-encounters, made me feel that, although I never met Jim, I had caught glimpses of the world that he had known, and they left me eager to help perpetuate his memory. In this book I have quoted his own narratives at length, because it is his skill with words, combined with his extraordinary prowess as naturalist and hunter, that has enthralled many million readers.

CHAPTER ONE

Barefoot Boy

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He was born on 25 July 1875 in Nainital, a lovely hill-station in north-west India, 6,500 feet above sea-level, on the southern fringes of the Himalayas, in the district of Kumaon*. The fourteenth child in a family of Irish immigrants, he was christened Edward James, and always known as Jim. By the time of his birth, his family was well established in India: his grandfather Joseph Corbett had sailed from Dublin in July 1814, and although he was only 5′ 4″ tall, had served in the artillery until his death in 1830. He and his wife Harriet had seven children, the last of whom, Thomas, was tied to a tree and burned to death by insurgents during the siege of Delhi in 1857.

Christopher, Jim’s father, was the third child. He had served in the first Afghan War, the Sikh wars of the 1840s, and the Mutiny, perhaps as an Army doctor. He then set up as an apothecary, or assistant surgeon, in Mussoorie, and later became the postmaster in Nainital – not, one would guess, a very demanding position. With his first wife, Mary Anne Morrow, he had three children, and after her death in 1859 he married Mary Jane Doyle, a widow with three children of her own (another had died in infancy). She had first been married when only fourteen, and during the Mutiny she and her young family had joined other whites in the safety of the fort at Agra; but in 1858 her husband Charles was killed fighting the mutineers with the local conscripts at the battle of Harchandpore.

Thus Mary Jane had been widowed at twenty-one. With her Christopher proceeded to father nine more children, of whom Jim was the last but one. The siblings with whom he identified most closely were his step-brother Tom, fifteen years his senior, and his sister Margaret, always known as Maggie, eighteen months older than him. She was short, dumpy and snub-nosed, and rarely left home, but she and Jim remained devoted to each other throughout their lives, neither marrying, and she supported all his ventures with unstinting devotion.

A grant of ten acres of land from Sir Henry Ramsay, the Commissioner of Kumaon (known as the King of Kumaon), enabled Christopher to build a spacious house, made of locally-fired bricks and stone retrieved from the river. Known as Arundel, the house stood on a south-facing slope in the village of Kaladhungi, thirteen miles south of Nainital and 3,000 feet lower, at the base of the hills, in a modest community sustained by an open-cast iron ore working and a charcoal-burning business. Water for the house came from the river Boar, via a canal which ran along the northern boundary of the plot. A keen gardener, Christopher surrounded the dwelling with shrubs and an orchard of mango and other fruit trees, and there the family lived during the winter. In a lovely passage written late in life Jim described the scene:

The white line at the foot of the village is the boundary wall, which took ten years to build, and beyond the wall the forest stretches in an unbroken line until it merges into the horizon. To the east and to the west as far as the eye can see is limitless forest, and behind us the hills rise ridge upon ridge to the eternal snows.

Wildlife abounded in the jungle all round, and the variety of birds was phenomenal, especially when, in spring and autumn, migrants passed through on their way to and from the high mountains. In summer, from April to November, the family also migrated, and moved up to Nainital, to escape the burning heat of the plains. In the early days there was no motor road between the two: women were conveyed for most of the way in a contraption called a doolie dak – a large box suspended from poles borne by eight men – but for the final ascent they transferred to a dandy, a hammock slung from a single pole. Men and boys had to walk a steep, stony track through jungle, travelling at night as well as by day, lighting fires to scare off tigers and leopards.

Nainital was, and is, a beautiful place. Tree-covered hills slope down to the shores of a pear-shaped lake, two miles long, half a mile across at its widest, and sacred to Hindus. Legend related that the first Europeans who found it resolved to keep the secret of its existence to themselves, so attractive did it seem. ‘Forests came sweeping down to its shores, and deer drank fearlessly from its edge,’ wrote Audrey Baylis, whose family came to live there in 1912; and in the far distance, sixty miles beyond the head of the valley to the north, the snow-summits of Trisuli and Nanda Devi gleam among other giants on the horizon.

The first European settler had reached the valley in 1841, and more houses, built on plinths, with roofs of corrugated iron painted bright red, had quickly gone up as British soldiers and colonial officials discovered the beauty of the place and its climate. Then on 18 September 1880 the little town was hit by a natural disaster, as heavy rain – over fifty inches in two days – set off a mud-slide which swept away many of the houses and buried most of the shops, a hotel, a Hindu temple and the Assembly Rooms, killing 151 people, including forty-three Europeans.

Undeterred, the survivors dug in, but only six months later Christopher Corbett was struck down by a heart attack, and after a few days died, aged 58. His widow Mary Jane had already bought a plot of land on Ayaparta Hill, opposite the scene of the disaster, and now supervised the construction of a dwelling there. A two-storey structure with four bedrooms, it was called Gurney House, and it became the family’s summer home.

Nainital was then the summer capital for the British administration of the United Provinces. The Governor would arrive by the end of April, and remain in residence until the end of September. Government House was perched on the summit of Ayaparta hill, and residential houses clung to the surrounding slopes. The whole place had a strongly English air, and society was strongly colour-conscious: only privileged Indians were allowed to use the Upper Mall, which connected the ends of the lake. In contrast, Kalahundi had only two white families, and Jim – who at first was looked after by an ayah (or nurse) – grew up with the village boys, speaking Hindi and learning country dialects, so that he became able to communicate with illiterate folk at work and in the hills – an indispensable asset when he went after the man-eating tigers and leopards which were the curse of rural communities.

He loved his mother, and was fascinated to hear how, as a girl of six or seven, she had travelled by bullock cart and boat from Calcutta to the Punjab – a journey of more than 1,000 miles that took several months. In one of his few descriptions of her Jim wrote that ‘she had the courage of Joan of Arc and Nurse Cavell combined,’ and that she was also ‘as gentle and timid as a dove.’

His sister Maggie (known in the family as ‘Maggs’) gave a fuller account:

In appearance she was very small, with delicate features, lovely colouring and beautiful blue eyes. She was utterly unselfish, and never felt that any self-denial or self-sacrifice on her part was too great where her children were concerned. I have often thought that Jim inherited many of her characteristics: bravery, courage, generosity and kindness combined with a strong sense of duty.

In a room set aside for the purpose, she taught the children basic spelling, arithmetic and singing. Jim had a clear treble voice, which later developed into a tenor – a gift which helped him imitate the calls of birds and animals. Maggie became an accomplished musician, and later taught piano to hundreds of pupils in Nainital. In Kalahundi she ministered tirelessly to the sick, no matter whether they were Christian, Hindu or Moslem; she treated ten or a dozen patients a day for injuries and ailments ranging from malaria to hiccoughs, from ear-ache caused by ticks to gore wounds inflicted by bullocks. She also grew into a botanist of considerable fame in the Kumaon hills, and she loved birds, particularly those of the jungle round the village.

Over a period of ten years Jim went to three different schools in Nainital, among them the Philander Smith College; but the one he liked best was run by the American Methodist Mission, whose teachers introduced him to the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper. He read The Last of the Mohicans again and again – and maybe the American’s easy, natural style influenced his own writing later in life. He was often buried in a book, and in the dormitory at boarding school the boys would cluster round his bed while he read aloud to them.

School was tolerable; but he far preferred to be out of doors, for from his earliest days a powerful hunting instinct burned inside him – so much so that he was constantly wandering off into the jungle that surrounded Kaladhungi, often going barefoot to make sure that he could move silently, and to facilitate the climbing of trees – a skill rendered difficult by leather shoes. Later he remarked that being brought up in the hills made him as sure-footed as a goat.

His first weapon was a catapult, given him by his brother Tom, to help him recover from a dangerous bout of pneumonia; and with this primitive equipment he became a deadly shot, killing dozens of small birds which he skinned to mount and add to his collection, or to give to his cousin Stephen Dease, who was writing a book about the birds of Kumaon. He then graduated to a pellet bow, which had a small square of webbing fixed between its twin strings. This weapon was more powerful than a catapult, but less accurate, and Jim never really liked it. All the same, he became proficient enough with it to defeat the havildar (sergeant) of the Gurkha detachment that guarded the Nainital treasury, in a contest aiming at a match box set on a post twenty yards away. When the deficiencies of the pellet bow became too annoying, he made himself a bow and two arrows, basing their design on hints picked up from reading the Fenimore Cooper novels, and setting out to emulate the Red Indian warriors depicted in the books. Conceiving an ambition to be a lumber-man in Canada, he became so skilled with an axe that (it was said) he could split a match-stick.

He was also a gifted mimic, and learnt to imitate the birds that lived in or passed through the forests – crow pheasants, golden orioles, bulbuls, rosy pastors, scimitar babblers, drongos, parrakeets, laughing thrushes, kingfishers, jungle fowl, hoopoes and peacocks, among many others. He would go off into the jungle for days at a time, accompanied by an old gardener to carry his bedding roll and a small bag of atta (wholemeal flour) with which to make chapattis. At night they would keep a fire burning, for warmth and as a deterrent to tigers.

Soon, from bird calls, from the alarm cries of deer and monkeys, from the way vultures were circling in the sky, he could divine the movements of predators, and in time he became so skilled that he could call leopards and tigers up to him. Later in his life a legend grew up that he could converse with animals – and even if they never answered in words, they certainly responded to his overtures. ‘Animals who live day and night with fear can pinpoint sounds with exactitude,’ he wrote, ‘and fear can teach human beings to do the same’.

Sounds that are repeated – as for instance a langur [monkey] seeing a suspicious movement, or a peafowl calling at a tiger – are not difficult to locate, nor do they indicate immediate danger calling for instant action. It is the sound that is heard only once, like the snapping of a twig, a low growl or the single warning call of bird or animal... that is of immediate danger and calls for instant action. Having acquired the ability – through fear – of being able to pinpoint sound, I was able to follow the movement of unseen leopards and tigers, whether in the jungle by daylight or in bed at night.

He later reckoned that from his experience he ‘absorbed’ jungle lore, rather than ‘learnt’ it, and he went on doing so for the whole of his life. One key skill which he gradually mastered was that of tracking. At first he found it hard to distinguish between the pug-marks of a tiger cub and those of a leopard, which were much the same size; then experience showed him that he could differentiate by concentrating on the imprint of the toes, for those of a young tiger are larger, and out of proportion to those of a leopard. In the same way, he learnt the difference between the prints of a wild pig and the similar indentations left by a young sambar deer. An even more arcane skill was his ability to deduce, from its track, the identity of a snake and the direction in which it had been moving. ‘When you see the track that shows excessive wriggling,’ he wrote, ‘you can be reasonably sure it is the track of a poisonous snake.’

At the age of eight one of his duties was to chaperone the girls of the family when they went swimming in the canal which formed one boundary of the Corbetts’ land in Kaladhungi. They went every day of the week except Sunday, and he found the task intensely embarrassing, for decorum obliged the young women, between nine and eighteen, to wear their nightdresses while they swam, and as they entered the water, the flimsy cotton garments were liable to float up round their heads – to the edification of villagers walking along the far bank of the canal to collect firewood from the forest. ‘When this happened, as it very frequently did,’ Jim wrote later, ‘I was under strict orders to look the other way.’ Some commentators have suggested that glimpses of pubescent girls’ bodies may have left him with inhibitions about women which made him a lifelong bachelor.

His earliest experience with a gun was nearly his last. One day Dansay Fleming, a burly young Irishman who had been disinherited by his father (a general) for refusing to join the army, took him into the jungle to shoot a tiger, carrying not only a muzzle-loading rifle, but also a muzzle-loading shotgun slung on his shoulder. Luckily they found no tiger, but on the way home Dansay suggested that Jim should try the shotgun on a flock of white-capped laughing thrushes which were scratching up dead leaves in search of ants. Obeying instructions, he took aim, gently squeezed the trigger of the ancient weapon – and was blown backwards, heels over head, not injured but severely shocked.

Soon he had a weapon of his own – a double-barrelled, muzzle-loading shotgun that had seen better days. Someone had split the right-hand barrel by over-loading it, and the hand-grip, cracked in the explosion, was held together by lapping of brass wire. The budding hunter formed a close association with Magog, a liver-and-white spaniel, who doted on him. While he was still small, the dog was strong enough to carry him about, and later he took the boy for walks in the jungle. From this useful companion Jim learnt a great deal – not least that it was unwise to pass close to thick cover in which animals might be asleep. Magog also taught him how to walk noiselessly – and they had some stirring adventures together.

Once, when they were out after peacock, the spaniel followed a covey of the birds into thick cover, out of which there suddenly erupted the angry roar of a disturbed tiger. ‘Magog, after his first yelp of fear, was barking furiously and running,’ Jim remembered:

The tiger was emitting roar upon roar and chasing him, and both were coming towards me. In the general confusion a peacock, giving its alarm call, came sailing through the trees and alighted on a branch just above my head, but for the time being I had lost all interest in birds, and my only desire was to go somewhere, far away, where there were no tigers. Magog had four legs to carry him over the ground, whereas I had only two; so, without any feeling of shame – for deserting a faithful companion – I picked up my feet and ran as I had never run before.

Another day, stalking a cock jungle fowl, he got another bad fright. As he put a bare foot down into some long grass that grew in a hollow, he trod on the coils of a python. That made him jump ‘as no boy had ever jumped.’ Clearing the depression, he whipped round, fired a shot ‘into the writhing mass’ and ran – for pythons, he knew, could reach a length of eighteen feet, and a diameter of over two feet, and if this one had caught him, it could easily have crushed him.

Many years later he recalled the fear that accompanied his early forays into the forest:

After a lifelong acquaintance with wild life, I am no less afraid of a tiger’s teeth and claws today than I was the day that a tiger shooed Magog and me out of the jungle in which he wanted to sleep. But to counter that fear and hold it in check, I now have the experience that I lacked in those early days. Where formerly I looked for danger all around me and was afraid of every sound I heard, I now knew where to look for danger, and what sounds to ignore or pay special attention to. And, further, where there was uncertainty where a bullet would go, there was now a measure of certainty that it would go in the direction I wanted it to. Experience engenders confidence, and without these two very important assets, the hunting of a man-eating tiger on foot, and alone, would be a very unpleasant way of committing suicide.

Among the skills which he gradually perfected was that of sleeping up trees – an expedient to which he frequently resorted when sitting over a man-eater’s kill. As a boy he would often go up a tree with a book, and sit happily on a branch, reading. Also, by constant practice, he became a skilled fisherman. Maggie told how he once caught a 60lb mahseer in the lake at Nainital: ‘It was so big we felt it should go to an institution where there were a lot of people to eat it, so took it to the YWCA, and they said it was one of the best they had ever eaten. I took it up with two men carrying it slung from a pole.’

After the death of their father in 1881, when Jim was only six, his stepbrother Tom, whom Jim hero-worshipped, took over as head of the family and looked after his tribe. It was he who fostered his young brother’s hunting instincts most keenly – but was it not dreadfully irresponsible of Tom to initiate a bear hunt when Jim was only ten? In spite of protests from their mother, off they went together, with Tom carrying two weapons – his own rifle and a double-barrelled shotgun. When they came to what Jim described as ‘a deep, dark and evil-looking ravine’, Tom left his young companion sitting on a rock with the shotgun while he himself went off to perch in a solitary oak tree on the side of a mountain half-a-mile away. If Jim saw a bear approaching his brother’s position, he was to go and tell him. As Jim recalled,

A wind was blowing, rustling the dry grass and dead leaves, and my imagination filled the jungle round me with hungry bears... That I would presently be eaten, I had no doubt whatever, and I was quite sure the meal would prove a very painful one for me. Time dragged on leaden feet, each moment adding to my terror, and when the glow from the setting sun was bathing the mountainside in red, I saw a bear slowly making its way along the skyline a few hundred yards above Tom’s tree... The opportunity I had been praying for to get away from that terrifying spot had come... So, shouldering the gun, which after my experience with Dansay’s muzzle-loader I had been too frightened to load, I set off to tell Tom about the bear and to re-attach myself to him.

Jim soon became more proficient with weapons, for, still at the age of ten, he joined the school cadet company of the Nainital Volunteer Rifles, and on the range began firing a .450 Martini carbine – a heavy rifle with a notoriously vicious kick, quite unsuitable for a boy of his age. Then the sergeant-major in charge, seeing his eagerness, lent him a muzzle-loading .450. Armed with this clumsy weapon, he would go off on solo hunting expeditions into the dense jungle round Kaladhungi, shooting birds for the pot. This required no mean skill, for the rifle had only iron sights – no telescope – and unless he managed to decapitate a jungle fowl or partridge, rather than hitting it amidships with one of his heavy bullets, there would be nothing left for his mother to cook. As he himself wrote later, he ‘revelled in the beauty of the jungle,’ and rejoiced whenever he gained access to ground that he ‘loved and understood.’ Time spent in the jungles ‘held unalloyed happiness for me.’

His own reminiscences reveal this as a slight exaggeration, for he also had moments of sheer terror – not least when he shot his first leopard. He was out after jungle fowl with his .450, and was sitting on a rock on the edge of a steep little ravine when he saw a leopard bounding towards him. Seconds later it appeared on the lip of the gully, only fifteen feet away. Taking careful aim, he fired at its chest. A cloud of smoke from the black powder cartridge blocked his view, and he caught only a fleeting glimpse of the animal as it sailed over his head, leaving splashes of blood on his clothes. Following up, he made his way along a steep hillside dotted with rocks and bushes, behind any of which the wounded animal might be sheltering.

Moving with the utmost caution, and scanning every foot of ground, I had