CHAPTER I
PREPARATIONS
Have the hens been fed?
BISMARCK, on his deathbed
It was the 11th December 1957, a dull morning, and I was sitting in our
single-motored aeroplane flying up the Rhine towards Switzerland. The yellow tips of the
propeller painted a faint, transparent circle over the grey-green
landscape in front of the curved wind-screen. The famous mountain road below us glided
past at 120 m.p.h. It looked empty, cold and miserable.
My son Michael and I each had a joy-stick between our knees. A slight pressure on the
knob dipped the right wing downwards, the earth curved towards us and we slipped a little
closer to the Rhine. As long as we followed the river we could not lose our way, so that
we had time to think about other things.
I felt a trifle anxious, for this was the beginning of a 6,000 mile journey across the
Mediterranean, the desert, Egypt, Central Africa and right across the equator.
I was forty-eight years old, had never been particularly venturesome and had no
interest in any sport but riding. It seemed incredible to me that I should be co-pilot in
a little aeroplane on its way to Lake Victoria.
I married when I was only twenty-one, and now my sons bad grown up. Michael, sitting
next to me wearing a sheepskin jacket, was twenty-three. He was not only my son, but my
only real friend.
Even when he was a little boy be helped me with my experiments on wolves and dogs.
Later on he soon surpassed me in animal photography and graduated to a cine camera. At
seventeen his documentary film got an "honourable mention" and after that he was
determined to make a colour film of my book, No Room for Wild Animals.*
Books, even best-sellers, are only read by a few thousand, and at best by a hundred
thousand people. We wanted to impress millions in Europe and America with the fact that
lions, elephants, rhinoceroses and giraffes are steadily dying out, and that their refuge
- the National Parks - are constantly growing smaller. The only way to get in touch with
millions of people is by films, television or the illustrated weekly papers.
A government agency guaranteed half the expenses of the film. On our return from Africa
we learned to our horror that Walt Disney, a great artist and a very rich man, had made a
film about Africa, The African Lion, which was to be shown at the same time. The
first distributing agency we went to refused to handle our film. Finally Michael had to
write cheques for about £50,000 to have it edited, copied in colour and provided with a
sound track.
The film experts complained that our wild animals were too peaceful. Previous African
films had accustomed them to constant shots of predators killing their prey, giant snakes
squashing men and charging elephants being shot in the nick of time. As scientists we
could only show how these animals lived in reality, not how they are supposed to behave in
order to titillate the public palate. With sinking hearts we sent our film to the Berlin
Festival.
No Room for Wild Animals was shown on the last day of the festival. We had
invited the press to a breakfast in the Berlin Zoo, but at exactly ten o'clock there was a
cloud burst and nobody ventured as far as the restaurant. We were left sitting beside a
pile of sandwiches.
During the premiere of the film we felt like schoolboys on speech-day, waiting for the
prize-giving. When three giraffes moved as silhouettes across the red evening sky there
was spontaneous applause in the middle of the film. Michael gripped my knee. Finally he
stood in the spotlight in his best suit; he hardly knew how to bow to the
* London 1956, New York 1957.
audience or even what to do with the bouquets of lilacs pressed into his arms.
In a haze we walked into the hall where the prizes were to be distributed. The
auditorium was already half empty. The journalists were angry because they had been kept
waiting. The film won one "gold bear" for getting the most public votes, another
"gold bear " from the jury of international experts, and a prize from the
government.
Everything to do with it went extremely well. In one cinema in Munich the film ran for
twelve weeks. It was shown in sixty-three countries, including Eastern Europe, China and
Japan. The South African censor wanted to cut it, but the press protested and the Minister
of the Interior decided it should not be shortened by a single foot.
We felt that all the millions of people who were paying for their tickets wanted to
help the wild animals with their price of admission. Our film protests against the British
Government in Tanganyika's* proposed decision to cut by one-third the area of the
Serengeti National Park, one of the last places thickly populated with wild animals.
Michael offered that part of the revenues of the film which was given to us as producers,
to the British Administration in order to buy land and incorporate it in the game
preserve. Colonel Peter Molloy, director of the Tanganyika National Parks, came to
Frankfurt and suggested that we should use the money for a much more important purpose.
The plains of Serengeti are said to harbour more than a million large animals, and
these are constantly roaming in large herds. Sometimes there is one wildebeest (gnu)
beside the other as far as the eye can see; at others the same area is completely devoid
of animals for months on end. There are many hypotheses about this migration, and the
proposed new borders of the park are based on some of these theories. Up to now nobody has
found how to follow the wandering animals. During the rainy season one often cannot drive
even a station wagon over the few existing "roads", let alone across swamped
plains, mountains and ravines. The government has no funds to spare
* Tanganyika is now joined with Zanzibar as 'Tanzania'.
for such research - but what government on earth ever had money to spare for lions,
giraffes, zebras and wildebeest?
As we talked over this problem, we were lying on the balcony of our house, with our
legs up on the railing, when Michael exclaimed suddenly, "We'll have to learn to
fly." I was thunderstruck, but had to admit that he was right; over ten years earlier
he had forced me to learn to drive in just the same way. We had to fight with our wives
for weeks, but finally, one fine Sunday morning, I stood on the civil aerodrome at
Engelsbach, outside Frankfurt. The runway consisted of a green meadow, not particularly
level and without even a fence round it. The tiny pub at the periphery had dozens of ties
dangling from the ceiling in the bar, for every pupil's tie is cut off after his first
solo.
I had expected to be taught in an indoor trainer, but before I could blink my eyes I
was sitting in a small Piper Cub in front of the instructor, while we rose gently into the
air. A Piper Cub looks as if it came from Woolworth's, all thin struts and canvas. On the
other hand it has delightfully few levers, dials and instruments, so it is harder to make
mistakes.
Flying itself is childishly easy, one hardly has to learn it, but taking off is
difficult and landing even more so. It took me nearly twice as many hours as Michael to
satisfy the official examiner that I could fly the prescribed curves and land the plane at
exactly the indicated spot with the motor cut.
Then there is one's first flight away from the aerodrome, where the hangars, houses and
woods are so familiar. One feels certain that one will lose the way, like a fledgling
first leaving its nest. As all villages and roads looked alike I clung to the autobahn
along which one can feel one's way home. While landing on the high plateau at Koblenz the
wind gripped the machine and I found myself on the run way with the nose pointing the
wrong way. A few days later I had to stay for 30 minutes at exactly 10,000 feet. I had to
look out for commercial air-liners on their way to and from Frankfurt aerodrome. The
sealed instrument behind me kept a constant watch on my altitude.
It is really not difficult to fly a Piper Cub, but the theory is another matter.
I sat in the examination room in Darmstadt from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., ten feet away from
other students to avoid cheating and answered questions. Four weeks ago I had not even
known the minor mountain ranges in Germany, now I could give the height of their main
peaks. I had to fill in the name of all towns, rivers, canals and mountains on a large,
unlabelled map. I had even learned the tributaries of obscure East Prussian rivers because
one of the examiners came from that region. Armed with compasses, ruler and squared paper
I could calculate how long it would take theoretically, to fly from Frankfurt to Hamburg
assuming a 63° North-east diagonal headwind, and how much petrol I would need to get
there. I knew who has to give way to whom should I encounter a balloon, a glider, another
aeroplane or a dirigible. I could explain the terms, local misdirection, drift indicator,
vector triangle, deviation, and inclination, and knew the length of a sea mile and a knot.
I carried the cross-section of the motor and the carburettor in my head. I had learned to
read rate-of-climb indicators as well as turn-and-bank indicators, altimeters and cylinder
temperatures. I knew the names of all types of clouds and aerodrome signals. Weather
charts were no longer mysterious, I could explain what happens when a cool front or a warm
front passes, how a Föhn wind is formed, what a typical cyclone is and the meaning
of the terms all-up weight, under-carriage, flaps and leading-edge slots.
At that time I knew all these things and hundreds of others and passed my exams with
flying colours. Two experienced old pilots, who only wanted to renew their licences,
failed, although they knew more than I did about practical flying. I simply had to work
hard and pass, for otherwise it might have got into the newspapers and I would have been
mercilessly teased.
You finally get a bit of brown-yellow paper to put into your wallet. You are a tested
pilot now, but nobody knows the difference or asks you about it.
Private flying can affect your personal habits in the most roundabout way. I have, for
instance, learned never to drink more than one modest cup of coffee at breakfast. A little
aeroplane has no special arrangements - neither for ladies nor gentlemen. I once almost
made an emergency landing in the open country in a desperate situation of this kind, and
that would not have been a simple matter. Even if you do make a decent landing on a meadow
you must at once run to the nearest village and telephone flight headquarters in
Brunswick. Then you have to await the arrival of the police and official permission to
take off again. It is much easier to forgo your second cup of coffee.
I made a special flight to see my old instructor, because something had been bothering
me for weeks. "Please tell me honestly whether you would let Michael fly to Africa if
he were your own son," I asked. The reason why I had also learned to fly, was partly
that I could not have slept, imagining him by himself in an aeroplane over the desert, and
partly because fathers don't like being outdone by their sons. The journey could not be
postponed for the work in Serengeti had to be done at once, otherwise final
decisions would be made before our job was done. We could not hire or buy a 'plane in
Africa since we needed a machine that could fly very slowly if necessary, and land on a
pocket handkerchief.
"Would it not be better to ship the 'plane out there?" I asked.
"In that case you would do your first serious flying over deserts where there is
no help available" he replied. "Michael is one of my best pupils. Flying is in
his blood. It makes no difference whether you keep on flying over Germany or whether you
get your practice over the Mediterranean countries."
We could no longer avoid the flight. We had, after all, run bigger risks before in a
less important cause. It was well worth taking a sporting chance in order to do research
in the wilderness, and the prospect was both enticing and a little frightening.
