Bøger af John Henry Patterson

President Theodore Roosevelt once wrote, "I think that the incident of the Uganda man-eating lions, is the most remarkable account of which we have any record. It is a great pity that it should not be preserved in permanent form." Now this timeless original account by Col. John Henry Patterson has been which was preserved over time is republished in this paperback edition. This is an excellent historical account of the African journey of Col. Patterson and his first-person account of interactions with man-eating lions, natives and other interesting stories.

From my boyhood I have either been a soldier or taken the keenest interest in soldiering, not only in England but in all parts of the world. My military experiences extend through home, India and South Africa, and have been by no means of a sketchy character. I spent the best part of three years in South Africa, where I commanded a Yeomanry regiment, and at times Regular troops of all arms, during the Boer War. Those were glorious days-days when one could thoroughly enjoy warfare-a wild gallop over the veldt, a good fight in the open, and the day won by the best men. In these days war is robbed of all its glory and romance.

This collection chronicles the fiction and non fiction classics by the greatest writers the world has ever known. The inclusion of both popular as well as overlooked pieces is pivotal to providing a broad and representative collection of classic works.

In 1898 John H. Patterson arrived in East Africa with a mission to build a railway bridge over the Tsavo River. Over the course of several weeks Patterson and his mostly Indian workforce were systematically hunted by two man-eating lions . In all, 100 workers were killed, and the entire bridge-building project was delayed. As well as being stalked by lions, Patterson had to guard his back against his own increasingly hostile and mutinous workers as he set out to track and kill the man-eaters. Patterson''s account of the lions'' reign of terror and his own attempts to kill them is the stuff of great adventure. Consider this description of the aftermath of an attack by the lions: "...we at once set out to follow the brutes, Mr. Dalgairns feeling confident that he had wounded one of them, as there was a trail on the sand like that of the toes of a broken limb.... we saw in the gloom what we at first took to be a lion cub; closer inspection, however, showed it to be the remains of the unfortunate coolie, which the man-eaters had evidently abandoned at our approach. The legs, one arm and half the body had been eaten, and it was the stiff fingers of the other arm trailing along the sand which had left the marks we had taken to be the trail of a wounded lion...." This classic tale of death, courage, and terror in the African bush is still a page-turner, even after all these years.