KACHALOLA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20792, 7 February 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

KACHALOLA.

PRINCE OF VENTURERS.

BY KOTARE.

Salute to adventurers! And an extra salute to tho greatest of them all. He turned up in London a year ago. Ho had left England in 1868, a young medical student who had just finished his course in Edinburgh. But the life of a practitioner in a small country town, or a big city for that mhtter, could wait till he had seen something of the world. So Sidney Spencer Broomfield set forth 011 his incredible wanderings and landed on the East Coast of Africa sixty-two years ago; twenty-one years old, a few lines of trade goods, a gross of muskets, and a battery of hunting rifles—thus equipped ho flung his challenge to fortune and the Dark Continent. He does not mention the fact, but David Livingstone had come forth from tho heart of Africa, and lectured in Edinburgh while Broomfield was a medical .student there. The chances are that the pictures of African life drawn by the great missionary and -explorer decided young Broomfield's destiny. He has wandered everywhere since those days, but somehow he seems always to have come back to his first love. When Africa puts her spell on a man he always comes back. There is no incantation potent enough to counteract her dark magic. Broomfield was eighty-three years old when England saw him again. The intervening years have been packed with adventures varied and exciting enough to keep a menagerie of romance writers supplied with material. He set out with tho idea of doing a little trading and a lot of hunting. He was shrewd enough to make the trading side of the enterprise pay handsomely. And ho must be the world's record big-game hunter. He soon found how to put his hunting prowess on a commercial basis. He was moving through country never before entered by a white-man. There were museums and universities all over the world that wanted specimens of tropical fauna. There was, too, an unfailing demand for ivory. East Africa. So you sec him beginning in a small way, but gradually extending operations as 110 found new markets. Ho had a way with , him. He could handle the natives, and win respect and service from them. He had remarkable powers of leadership. He could plan boldly and wisely, whether the matter in hand was a commercial coup or a diplomatic contest with Government officials or recalcitrant natives, or a pitched battle with Arab slave raiders. The nucleus of his party was a serviceable unit of fighting men strongly armed; in addition there were the carriers, a company constantly growing in numbers as the proceeds of his trading or his fighting operations mounted up with each mile of his journeying. A single white man imposing his will on his own men, winning friendship and loyalty from • native chiefs, always just and stern, "creating throughout a wide area the conviction that it paid to be friendly to him, annihilating powerful slave-raiding gangs and liberating at one time and another thousands of "wretched captives—thus ho spent the first years of his manhood. , Now in his age as lie looks back on these experiences of his early twenties one gathers the impression that they were the best years of all. Youth was trying. itself out in an unfamiliar environment, and he _was learning every day the fascinating lesson what he could do and what he could not do. Later a man knows himself, and there are no surprises of Belf-revelation. Specimen Collector. Broomfield established a kind of headquarters in India. He undertook a variety of excursions into Tibet and South America, apparently on commission. lie was known to be a souna and bold adventurer. There is more than a chance that some of the specimens of wild animals in the New Zealand piuseums fell to his rifle. From India a constant stream of trophies flowed to the ends of the earth. An engaging figure appears frequently in the tale—one Da Suva, a Singalese, and an expert taxidermist, a valiant colleague and comrade who was to die tragically of snakebite in New Guinea. T t Later Broomfield turned East. lie chartered a schooner arid tackled tho Dutch East Indies. He hunted and collected in Sumatra, got joyfully into conflict with the Dutch authorities, and as usual came out on top. He had letters of introduction to the Dutch Governor at Batavia, letters of commendation from no less an authority than the Viceioy of India. But ho preferred slipping up a remote river and establishing his own relations without official cognisance or approval. He always has his code, but he hates the slow processes of the law. He is-a freelance, a buccaneer by instinct. He likes to make his own laws. But after he has poached, taken what he wants without leave and run great risks and hardships in the taking, ho will pay tho dues he has dodged as a sort_ of concession to convention and legality and respectability and all that sort of thing. Next Ave find him in Borneo. He has many a brush with head-hunters, elucidates the mystery of the wild man supposed to inhabit that wild countiy, and ends up with a glorious sea fight in which he manages to wipe out the bigger part of a pirate clan. He was clubbed in the fight and woke up considerably later in Hongkong. As fate had brought him to China he set out on a hunting and collecting expedition thero. But he is soon back in Singapore. A Leader. Broomfield had the true loader's ability to attach all sorts and conditions of men to him in unwavering loyalty and service. There was Da Silva, the taxidermist, who served him faithfully and in tho end left him all his property; there was Ali, tho Baluchi, his devoted body servant; thero was a Dyak chief, Foil, whom he picked up in Sumatra; thero was Tulip, tho protegee of a Papuan witch-doctor, a girl of some lighter-coloured Polynesian tribe, who stood by him in many a bitter fight and saved his life more than once; and most remarkable of all there was Bully Hayes, his partner in tho New Guinea expedition, tho notorious pirate and blackbirder, the bad man of the Pacific from the fifties to tho seventies. Broomfield writes with tho directness of the man of action. He has something to say and he. says it without circumlocution. Only rarely does 110 attempt anything in the way of rhetoric. Ho goes straight to his objective. There is none of the picturesqueness of Aloysius Horn. A more unimpassioned, unadorned narrative it would bp impossible to conceive. But his stylo is a perfect instrument for tho stOry ho has to tell. I cannot remember any other accounts of battle that are so simple and so -effective. Once or twice there is a surprising intrusion of a vein of devastating Rabelaisian frankness. But this, too, is the man. " Kachalola," as lie names this record of eight hectic years of his youth, must rank with tho greatest stories of adventure of our time.