Ivory’s Ghosts – The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants
By John Frederick Walker
With so many colleagues and acquaintances in common, it took only a moment to break the ice with author, conservationist and artist John Frederick Walker in the oak-panelled lobby bar of New York’s Algonquin Hotel.
I’d taken Walker’s ‘elephant book’ with me on safari in Mozambique; actually, I’d taken it as an e-book on my Kindle, and this is the first review I’ve written without turning pencil-marked pages. Walker’s other book, A Certain Curve of Horn on Angola’s giant sable (soon to be reissued with the latest fabulous discoveries), weighed 1.5 pounds and could not be downloaded.
Ivory’s Ghosts turned out to be the perfect safari companion – extensively researched, clearly written, and covering a compelling subject for hunters: mankind’s long love affair with the carvable ivory teeth or tusks carried by only elephant, hippo, walrus, pigs, some whales, narwhal, and the extinct mammoth.
Walker starts his skeleton-littered tale of men and elephant with the 2007 discovery in south-west Germany of dozens of 35,000-year-old figurines of bison, cave lion, woolly rhino, and wild horse carved out of mammoth tusks by our stone-age cousins. Although the earliest elephant ivory carvings appeared 10,000 years later, Ancient Egypt’s lust for ivory already caused elephants to disappear from the eastern Sahara around 2750 BCE and from the central Sahara around 2000 BCE.
By the time Pericles ordered the building of the 40-foot-tall statue of Athena in Athen’s Parthenon in 447 BCE, both the Mediterranean and the Middle East’s last elephant herds, in Syria, were gone; the gold-attired virgin warrior’s face, neck, shoulders and arms consisted entirely of ivory. Looted and taken to Constantinople, the statue was later destroyed there, probably during the Fourth Crusade (1202-04).
Walker traces the story of ivory’s manufacture, how in Egyptian furniture-making the tusks were peeled and the thinly split large sheets of ivory softened, then molded into required shapes; and how, in the 19 th century, the elephants of Tanganyika were transformed into entire industries in the US and Europe, supporting thousands of workers.
Especially interesting is Walker’s elegant descriptions of the use of Asian elephants by Alexander the Great and of presumably African forest elephants by his son, Ptolemy II, as tools of war. Still, the military deployment of elephants will forever be associated with the Punic Wars, when Hannibal invaded Italy in 218 BCE, travelling with 37 elephants through Spain and France, and then crossing the Alps into the Po Valley.
He discusses the symbolism of elephants in Hinduism, where elephants are the pillars of the world, carrying the earth on their heads, and the creation of Buddha when a white lotus held in the trunk of a divine white elephant touched virgin Queen Maya’s side.
Since time immemorial each civilization yearns for ‘white gold,’ from Caligula’s ivory beds, toiletries and dice to the Inuit’s walrus-ivory sled runners, pipes, knives and amulets. Walker discusses everything, from the sale of narwhal tusks as unicorn horns to George Washington’s hippo-ivory false teeth – all in intriguing detail, placing each market’s demands on the resource within its historical context, from technology to animal rights.
Walker provides an excellent story of elephants and circuses, from the first two pachyderms that toured the States in 1802, to P.T. Barnum’s 1881 purchase of the London Zoo’s elephant, Jumbo, for the unheard of sum of $10,000. For those who don’t know the famous tale, Jumbo was killed by a train and his ‘widow,’ Alice, for years marched in the circus parade behind a stuffed Jumbo, draped in black and wiping her eye with a handkerchief.
He discusses how ivory disappeared from European workshops for centuries to be reintroduced after the Crusades for making religious objects. Use slowly became more secular, and ivory appeared in furniture inlays, sword hilts, buttons, weapons, musical instruments, and scientific instruments that required precise scoring, like sundials.
Already by the 15 th century elephants were disappearing from Africa’s Indian Ocean coastlands. Over a quarter-million tusks, some 2,500 tons of ivory left West Africa for Dutch and English markets between 1699 and 1725. Walker describes this early trade during which the Portuguese sent their ivory to be carved with religious images to India and Sri Lanka to be sold in Portugal and Brazil; the Spanish sent theirs to the Philippines.
Interestingly, it’s a hand-powered machine for which the US patent was issued in 1799 that turned the ivory comb into the most popular ivory object in history. The production of billiard balls and veneers for piano keys contributed to tusks being ‘fed like logs into indefatigable machines’ in manufacturing towns like Ivoryton and Deep River, Connecticut.
Walker describes the hypocrisy of these Puritan, abolitionist businessmen whose raw material was enmeshed in the Zanzibar and Mombassa slave trade, numbering up to 30,000 bodies a year, going on under their agents’ noses. By 1885, ivory expeditions required up to 2,000 porters; the explorer Richard Burton saw one caravan transporting 28,000 pounds of ivory. Some say that every elephant tusk cost an African life, yet the Arab Zanzibar trader and warlord, Tippu Tip, was a hero in the streets and consuls of Zanzibar. ‘There were no ethics in the ivory business,’ wrote one agent in his memoirs.
Walker describes Zanzibar’s heyday in detail, how the windowless stone and stucco buildings maintained the steady cold and damp environment ideal for storing ivory while it was graded, marked, and soaked in peroxide along its journey to becoming poker chips, doorknobs, teapot handles, cigarette holders, tongue depressors, and hip replacements.
Some 12,000 pounds of ivory left Zanzibar for American ports every month, including the 215 and 220-lb ‘Kilimanjaro Tusks,’ purchased for 1000 pounds sterling or $5,000, the highest price ever paid for a pair of tusks.
Pianos, too, played their role in the ‘white gold’ story, and by 1910 the United States was the world’s biggest producer with 350,000 pianos per year – more than twice its closest competitor, Germany. By 1913, the USA was using 200 tons of ivory annually to produce the 4-inch long, 1/16 th-inch thick veneers glued onto wooden keys. Each keyboard required 1.5 pounds of ivory; a 60-lb tusk could yield 36 keyboards.
By the turn of the 20 th century, the US became the dominant consumer of the world’s ivory. Britain’s domestic consumption increased when it became the fashion to serve meals à la russe, one course at a time, which required a huge array of ivory-handled cutlery from bonbon tongs to marrow spoons, keeping Sheffield’s workers busy.
Starting in 1700, billiards in all its forms – 16-ball American pool and 22-ball UK pool, snooker, etc. – would impact on elephant when ivory replaced wooden balls. Tournament-quality sets of perfectly matched balls required the straighter, high quality, small tusks (under 15 lbs.) called scrivelloes ‘harvested’ from female elephants; pound for pound, this ivory was the most costly.
Ultimately, the numbers tell the story: Some 30,000 to 44,000 elephant were killed every year from 1905 to 1914; average ivory weights fell from 80–90 lbs in the 1880s to 55 lbs by the late 1920s. Uganda’s agonies have cost 90% of its elephants, and between 1973 and 1977, Kenya’s population dropped from 167,000 to 59,000. Walker records all the horrible numbers, and reminds us how Burundi, with its elephant population of one, nevertheless exported 1,300 tons of ivory between 1965 and 1986 under licences stating these were domestically culled elephants.
Eventually, in our culture, the psychological distance between ‘animal in the bush’ and ‘item in hand’ was reduced and we’ve become increasingly conscious of animal products and how we obtain them. Walker’s entire in-depth discussion of CITES and its ramifications is excellent reading, and his arguments for sustainable utilization we can only hope will reach the convincible unconvinced. He has no personal ax to grind and his arguments can be memorized by hunters to pull out of their holsters at their urbanized offspring’s cocktail parties.
I wish Walker had discussed today’s vibrant elephant-hunting safari industry, and how it is generating noteworthy incomes for local communities without the ‘footprint’ of the equivalent number of tourists required to generate the same benefits – not counting ‘black gold’: meat. If he were to do a new edition, I hope he will contact organizations like the Tanzania Professional Hunters Association and individuals like Debbie Peake in Botswana to discuss the role of elephant hunting in conservation and improving African lives.
At the end of our two-hour chat in the second most appropriate place on earth (after a safari camp), it was clear that the hunting industry is presently blessed with a clear-sighted individual with excellent communication skills – the kind of person who should be a spokesperson for hunting at safari conventions, and not Sarah Palin.
P.S. Give me a hardcover edition over an e-book anytime.
Ivory’s Ghosts – The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants, b y John Frederick Walker is publishedbyAtlantic Monthly Press, New York 2009.