Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
called Maputo, at Komatipoort. As it followed the river through the Crocodile River gorge, the
road had to ascend the twists and turns over the mountains because the gorge walls were too
steep to allow for a road at the time. During the 7 year construction of the railway line, many
of the workers died from malaria and man-eaters. Indeed the heaviest ever wild lion was a
man-eater shot at Jeppes Reef next to Shongwe in 1936 and weighed 690 pounds. The lion had
killed several people and cattle in the shadows of Kamhlabane and probably was well fed
although according Lennox Anderson's grandson, the stomach was empty and despite this
weighed 690 pounds when weighed on the railway station scales at Hectorspruit. Given that
lions can eat 40 to 60 pounds of meat at a sitting, the lion would have weighed even more if it
had recently eaten. The lion was shot with a 9mm Mauser that is still in the family. Lennox
Anderson, an occasional gold prospector at the Lomati River and Jeppes Reef, owned the
Hectorspruit “Hotel” (really a small corrugated roofed boarding house, the only other
buildings being the railway station, the post office - where we had our mail picked up in a
Private Bag - and the butchery and later a gas “petrol” station). He also shot a rogue buffalo
that harassed people in town and also a buffalo in 1963 at Tenbosch that at one time had the
largest Rowland Ward listed spread of 50 5/8 inches that now hangs over the bar in the
updated hotel now called the Buffel (Buffalo) Hotel. President Paul Kruger gave his last
speech here before escaping from the British to Europe via Komatipoort and Lorenzo
Marques. The longest lion was shot in Southern Angola in 1973 and measured 12 feet from tip
of nose to tip of tail. Generally, Etosha lions are bigger than Kruger lions, which are in turn
larger than East African lions. There were no baobab trees along the Crocodile River for
workers to escape up but when building the Zambezi Bridge below the Victoria Falls near
Livingstone, laborers cut steps that can still be seen into the trees so they could climb into the
branches at night to sleep and escape marauding lions, just like earlier Australopithecus
species. During the building of the Uganda railway line in the Tsavo area, man-eaters killed
many laborers. Two were made famous by Col Patterson as the Man-eaters of Tsavo and the
later movie The Ghost and the Darkness. Patterson was, in reality, Chief Game Warden for the
British East African Protectorate. These animals were shot by Patterson and are now in the
Field Museum in Chicago. Patterson went on to have an affair with his batman's wife (Effie
Blyth, wife of Cpl James Audley Blyth), and under strange circumstances James was found
shot in the head the morning after Effie had spent the night in Paterson's tent; shot either by
himself or her, as she was seen standing in the door of the tent when the .450 pistol went off.
Churchill considered him a murderer. Hemingway's topic The Short Life of Francis Macomber
was based on this event and the power play between Macomber and his wife over his courage
in the face of dangerous game hunting. The white hunter model was a mixture of his PH Philip
Percival and womanizer Bror Blixen, the latter that travelled with a double wooden bed.
There were no built up villages on the Lebombo plain when I was growing up apart from
Komatipoort, Nelspruit and Barberton, and railway sidings for the steam trains at Hectorspruit
and Kaapmuiden the latter to pick up coal and water. This was largely because of malaria and
heat keeping Europeans away and lack of water irrigation for large scale farming. When I went
to boarding school at Treverton Preparatory School and College, it took two nights and a day
by steam engine to get from Hectorspruit to Mooi River. We were required to travel in our
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