Safari Without Hemingway

JUNGLE MAN (256 pp.)--P. J. Pretorius --Duffon ($3.75).

During the second year of World War I, a fleet of British warships anchored off the mouth of the Rufiji River in German East Africa and proceeded to bombard an unseen target. When the shelling was over, the 3,400-ton cruiser Koenigsberg, camouflaged and in hiding 17 miles upstream, was an unrecognizable mass of twisted steel. She was to Germany in World War I what the Bismarck was in World War II: a ghostly, arrogant lone raider that had sunk British warships, transports and merchant vessels and gotten cleanly away after each kill. On the bridge of the British admiral's flagship that day stood the man who had found the Koenigsberg, a slender, malaria-sallowed big-game hunter named P. J. Pretorius. A Briton raised in the Transvaal, he had spent his life in the jungle. When he had completed his war chores (he became chief scout to Field Marshal J. C. Smuts, who has written a foreword for this book), he slipped back into the jungle for more of the kind of adventures that would make a Hemingway hero itch with envy.

A Gift at the Gate. Jungle Man, Pretorius' autobiography (he,died in 1945), could have done with a dash of the Hemingway talent. It is competently written, but with a calm matter-of-factness that makes a commonplace of every act of fantastic nerve and daring. Pretorius spent years in unexplored territory and established precarious friendships with cannibals and tribes openly committed to the exclusion of whites. He had a good ear for their dialects, which he learned, and a nice inquiring eye for aboriginal customs. In one tribe he found what must have been the simplest form of courtship and marriage short of caveman seizure. The boy picked his girl, left a goat in front of her father's hut and got his wife. No words spoken, no fuss, no marriage ceremony. And if the bridegroom was too poor to own a goat, a bundle of firewood did the trick.

From a tribe of cannibals whom he saw eating human flesh, Pretorius courteously asked and got the recipe: soak the body in hot water, scrape off the skin, stuff with plantains, cover with leaves and roast over night in a bed of coals. The lucky hunter who had made the kill "was entitled to the fingers and toes, which he cut off and ate raw." Pretorius once gave a tribe of pygmies a goat; they set to it by slicing tidbits from the live animal.

Elephants for a Fee. It was by hunting that Pretorius made his living and his legendary reputation. His lifetime bag for elephants alone was 557; and after one six-month safari his take for ivory was worth -L-3,600. Once when hundreds of rogue elephants ran wild in Cape Province, killing people and destroying property, the administrator of the province asked Pretorius to take on the job of extermination. Naturalist Sir Harry Johnson and two famous hunters had already given their opinions: the terrain and the danger made it impossible. "For a satisfactory fee" Pretorius went into the bush and did the job, killing as many as five a day.

After that came elephant-hunting for the films, and one job for the camera that not even the author can understate. The stunt: to shoot a lion as he leaped at the hunter from ten yards or less.

He had to do it three times: on the first two tries the cameraman ran before he got his shot. Jungle Man is crammed with such incidents, all told with the kind of professional detachment that makes this autobiography a handbook for big-game hunters. It is that same detachment, a peculiar lack of imagination in the telling, that keeps this from being one of the great books of African adventure.

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