# Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History/Chapter 6

Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History by Henry John Elwes was first published in London in 1930, and edited by Edward G. Hawke
CHAPTER VI
TOUR IN INDIA, 1879–1880
In 1879 I returned to India in company with my brother-in-law, Mr. F.D. Godman, who had never been there. Arriving early in November, we spent two or three days near Bombay before going on to Indore, where the late General Sir H. Daly was then Resident and had invited us to visit him. In his house I met a remarkable man, Aberigh-Mackay, then Principal of the College which had been established for the education of the sons of rajahs and noblemen. He was the author of a book which in its time had a great popularity, and which, forty years later, I have re-read with as much pleasure as I did the first time. Aberigh-Mackay gave a very interesting account of his work and told us how easy it was to manage and to teach young Hindus in comparison with English boys of the same age. They seemed to acquire learning and manners with great readiness, and in some cases became so fond of the college that they did not want to go home. But he found that when they were again subject to the bad influences of native courts of the old school, and of the harem, they often relapsed into their former habits as quickly as they had forgotten them.
From Indore we went on to Simla, where we hoped to find Mr. A.O. Hume, but as he was away, we made a short trip up the great Tibet road to Narkandah. We were caught in a heavy snowstorm, which obliged us to return to Simla, so that I did not have as much opportunity of comparing the fauna and flora of the North-West Himalayas with those of Sikkim as I had hoped. My general impression was that, though the climate is for most of the year more pleasant to Europeans, and the attractions for sportsmen are much greater, yet neither the birds, insects, nor plants were at all comparable in variety, interest and beauty with those of Sikkim. On leaving Simla we visited Agra and Delhi, and arrived at Darjeeling at the end of November. The weather at this season was usually fine and clear and the nights quite cold. On December 15th the ground was frozen and there was ice half an inch thick, but there was no snow below 10,000 feet and that did not lie long.
I found everything very prosperous at my tea plantation, which had been paying a good dividend for three years past. My friend Mandelli was now part owner of an adjoining plantation which we tried to amalgamate; but difficulties of finance intervened, and the affair was not carried through.
There had been some considerable loss of planted land, owing to landslips, which on slopes lying at an angle of from 35 to 45 degrees are frequent all over the district since so much of the forest has been cleared. The difficulty of getting wood for making tea boxes was increasing, largely owing to the restrictions of the Government Forest Department, which had now established a working plan for the whole of the forest not alienated to planters or in the possession of natives. It seemed to ​me that this working plan had been drawn up on lines which, however applicable to other conditions, were in some respects wasteful, and unfair to the all-important local planting industry. For instance, there was a considerable tract of forest on the north slope of the Goonipahar ridge within three or four miles of our plantation, which was full of old toon and other trees suitable for tea boxes. The toon, Cedrela toona, is, on account of its light but strong wood, preferred to all others when it can be got at a reasonable price, but these trees, though in many cases more or less decayed, could not be cut without leave from the Forest Department, until this block of forest came in its turn to be worked over. In consequence we had to buy our wood in Native Sikkim and the boards had to be carried by coolies three or four days' journey to the plantation.
After some correspondence the officer in charge of the Darjeeling forests got leave to mark and sell certain trees standing, but the transaction was surrounded by so many formalities, and the native forest guards made so many difficulties in order to get bribes from our contractor, that in the end we had to give it up altogether, and the Government lost what might have been a considerable revenue from these dead trees. To give an idea of their size, I may say that, on the banks of a river just below my plantation, there was one whose roots had been undermined by a flood, and which fell across the river, forming a capital bridge nearly 100 feet long and three to four feet in diameter. I have never seen any accurate measurements of the size of various kinds of timber in Sikkim, except those which are given in Gamble's Timbers of British India and a few examples in my own work on trees, but I do not think that they often, if ever, attain a height of 200 feet or are as large as some of the trees in Burmah, Tenasserim and Malaya.
We paid a visit to Mongpo, where the extension of the cinchona plantations was going on rapidly, and the manufacture of quinine had now been commenced.
My friend Mr. Gammie was now resident superintendent and a keen collector of birds and eggs, in which he was materially aided by the large number of coolies on the plantation. Some of the boys were clever at snaring birds on their nests, and thus enabled him to identify the eggs of a great many species whose nesting habits were previously unknown. But the variety of birds in Sikkim is so great, and some of them are so rare, or more probably so very local, that even now there are some of which we know little or nothing. On one occasion, when I was staying at Mongpo, I was riding with Gammie along the edge of a narrow gully crossed by a small bridge when he heard, in the thick scrub close below us, the note of a bird which he did not know. We sat down with our guns one on each side of the gully. It was a long time before I got a glimpse of a small brown bird with a long curved bill creeping near the ground, so close to me that I could not help spoiling it with the shot, I found it was a bird described long ago by Hodgson as Rimator malacoptilus, which we only knew from his description; and of which only two specimens, I think, had ever been got before. There were still others in the same place, and after a long time I succeeded in shooting two more, one of ​which we could not find while the other was a good specimen. Gammie has since told me that these were the only ones he ever saw or heard during his many years' residence at Mongpo.
The same remarks apply to many kinds of butterflies and moths, as I shall show later, but I may here mention one remarkable case which happened in May, 1886. I was riding through the virgin forest at about 6,000 feet on the road from Darjeeling to Mongpo, and as the day was misty and drizzling, I had seen few butterflies. As I passed over a bridge on the road I noticed a small blue butterfly and I dismounted to catch it. I found that it was a species unknown to me, but before the gleam of sunshine which had brought it out passed by I got two more. I described it as Chilades pontis, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society for May 3rd, 1887. But though I sent a native collector to stay some days at the same spot, where he got a good many males, I never got a female for years afterwards; and the only place where a similar butterfly has since been found is in China, where Leech discovered a nearly allied species at Ningpo. I have since obtained a third in Central Formosa, so that the only three known forms of this peculiar genus are separated from each other by intervals of over a thousand miles. These are the facts which add so much to the interest of collecting, when the collector is well acquainted with the distribution of the objects he seeks and is able to recognise the scientific interest of even such insignificant little objects as these.
Before coming up to Darjeeling, Godman made a trip to Buxa, a hill station in the lower hills of Bhutan, a hundred miles east of Darjeeling, in the hopes of finding a butterfly of extraordinary beauty and rarity, which had been discovered some years previously by Dr. Lidderdale when quartered there with a native infantry regiment, and which had been described and figured by Hewitson as Bhutanitis Lidderdalii. This beautiful butterfly is black with white stripes and three long tails on each hind wing. Godman was unsuccessful in his search, as he was unable to reach the spot where it was supposed to be found. My friend Mandelli was also very anxious to obtain this butterfly, and on three separate occasions sent two of his best Lepcha collectors to Buxa during the rainy season provided with guns, money and a letter to the police to give them what help they could. On the first occasion they both got fever and returned sick; on the second expedition one was killed by a tiger and the other would not remain alone; on the third the Bhutanese robbed them and frightened them away. And so our collections remained without a single specimen, until my friend Doherty discovered the butterfly in the Naga hills at Mao near the Manipur frontier and gave an account of its habits.
Another of the beautiful butterflies which was for a long time only known at Darjeeling is Teinopalpus imperialis. It is a very strong flying species which comes out during the rainy season near Darjeeling and flies rapidly round and round small open spaces on the tops of hills like Sinchul at 7,000 to 8,000 feet whenever the sun shines, though this is often not for days together. The native collectors used to lay down baits of some dead animal or stinking garbage at these well-known flying places, and watch them for hours together, so that the male was not very rare in ​collections. But the female, as is often the case among butterflies, does not fly with the male and settles usually on high trees in the forest, and in consequence was so extremely rare that, though for years I had a standing offer of ten rupees for a perfect specimen, which represents about two months' wages to a native, I never got one till I bought Mr. Wilson's collection. My friend Knyvett, also a very keen collector, told me that the only female he ever saw until the food plant, which I believe to be Daphne cannabina, was discovered, was one which settled on the ground where he was playing lawn tennis, and which he did not see till he had put his foot upon it. But this butterfly has now been found not only in the Khasia hills and in Burma, but also in Western China, and remains practically without variation in all these places, the only representative of its genus in the world.
When Godman rejoined me at Darjeeling we started on December 15th for the interior with a party of twelve coolies, a bird collector who was with me on my last trip in 1876, and a man named Nimtien, formerly employed as a plant collector, whom I now promoted to be sirdar. We also had two servants, a pony and a syce. Lieutenant Harman of the Royal Engineers, who had been employed in surveying the Tibetan frontier, lent us a tent, and we had some Lepcha plant collectors from the Botanic Gardens to collect seeds and plants.
My principal object was to compare the distribution of the birds at this season with that which I had previously observed during the rainy season, and to find out to what extent the birds which breed at elevations above 10,000 feet descend to the lower valleys in winter. Our route lay across the Rangit valley and over the shoulder of the Tendong mountain via Namchi to Temi in the Tista valley. On the way we met parties of Lepchas carrying heavy loads of sweet oranges from their villages in the Tista valley to Darjeeling. These oranges are, like those of the Khasia hills, largely exported to Calcutta, and are loose-skinned oranges of the Mandarin type. On the road we bought them very cheaply, twelve or sixteen for an anna, We also met parties of Nepalese carrying lime in baskets containing two maunds (160 pounds) each from Namchi to Darjeeling. It seems an immense load, but in this country a maund (80 pounds) is not thought too much for a woman or a boy. During one season, when there was cholera among the coolies and labour was scarce, the Nepalese women on my plantation volunteered to carry tea boxes, weighing from 100 to 115 pounds, on their backs up to Darjeeling, an ascent of over 4,000 feet by a steep slippery path. They begin as children to carry water in long bamboos with the joints broken out, from the stream to their houses, often a long way up the hillside. Though their muscles do not appear to develop as those of the men do, yet it seems that the actual physical strength of the female sex, among uncivilized races, is, like that of female horses, cattle and dogs, not much if at all inferior, in proportion to weight, to that of the male sex.
FIG. 3.—NEPALESE HILL-WOMEN IN SIKKIM.
We met parties of Lamas travelling to and from the various monasteries in the Little Rangit valley, and always found them civil and well disposed; they offered us a grateful drink of Marwa beer, with which they were always well provided. On the 20th December we crossed the Tista by a long cane bridge, and sent the pony back, as the paths were becoming too rough and steep to ride much.
On the east of the Tista we passed through many small Lepcha clearings, and, crossing the Ryott river low down near its junction with the Tista, had a steep climb up the opposite side. We found a good many orchids in this part of the country, as they have not been carried off to decorate the gardens as in many places near Darjeeling. Dendrobium, Cœlogyne and Vanda Cathcarti, with some beautiful leaved Anæctochilus, were the most ornamental; and there were also some fine Aroids in flower and fiuit in the forest.
On December 22nd we camped at a place called Maling, which commanded a magnificent view up the Bah valley towards Kanchenjunga, whose snowy peaks here seen from a comparatively short distance, look far higher than they do from Darjeeling. The Bah valley, which joins the Tista from the north-west opposite Singtam, is one of the least-known valleys in Sikkim. It had then never been visited by any European, as there seemed to be some strong objection among the Lepchas to allow anyone to visit the Talung Goompa, which is some way up, and where the treasures of the Sikkim Rajah were kept in safety. Lieutenant Harman tried to go there, but the path passes along very steep cliffs and he was stopped by stones being rolled down from above.
In this valley Hooker heard of the existence of wild men, Himalayan Journals, chap. 5, and I was very desirous of penetrating the valley so as to enquire further about them, but every sort of difficulty was placed in our way on this as on my previous visit. At Singtam we heard that there was too much snow in the Lachen and Lachung valleys to get there without much difficulty, but I believe that we might have done it if time had allowed. So far we had seen hardly any birds except Accentor rubeculoides and Emberiza pusilla, which I had found on their breeding grounds in those valleys ten years before. I suppose they do not migrate very far towards the plains.
Round Singtam the soil is very fertile and the clearings in the forest extend up to 6,000 feet, producing large crops of millet, followed by wheat, which I had not noticed in the other valleys. The sky had been clear for some days; the clouds which come up from the south apparently do not extend farther up the Tista valley, which here makes a sharp bend.
​In the more open parts of the forest we found large scattered flocks of small birds, belonging to many different genera and species, which associate at this season and feed their way in straggling bands, which keep together but move steadily in the same direction. At five successive shots out of such a company I killed Siva cyanoptera, Minla ignotincta, a Phylloscopus, an Abrornis, and an Ixulus.
This assemblage of birds, belonging to many different genera but all having the same habits, is peculiar so far as I have noticed to this subregion. I have observed the same thing among birds of the same genera in the forest of Formosa at the same season and elevation. It is also very remarkable how the bills of certain birds, which feed and live in the dense bamboo scrub at higher elevations, have been modified in opposite directions, though as far as we know, their food is similar. Take for instance the Xiphirhynchus superciliaris, which is the only species of a genus peculiar to the Eastern Himalaya and always found in bamboo jungle. Its bill is very long and curved like that of a honey-sucker, whilst Heteromorpha unicolor has its bill reduced to the shortest possible dimensions, like that of Suthora and Propasser . Another curious instance is that of Chloropsis paradoxa, a bird as yet only found by Abbé David in Western China, which is so like Heteromorpha that if its feet were cut off it would be hard to distinguish; but this bird has the outer toe on each foot completely aborted—an unique case so far as I know among all its allies.
We spent Christmas Day at Tumlong, the old capital of Sikkim, in the same monastery where I had previously lodged, and found it much more chilly there, with the snow lying in patches in the forest at 8,200 feet. Notwithstanding this, two very beautiful shrubs were in full flower, Edgworthia Gardneri and Luculia gratissima, which I have generally had in flower at Christmas in my greenhouse at home, where its fragrance seems greater than in its native country. Some years afterwards when Mr. White was resident at this place as representative of the Indian Government he had a most lovely garden which is illustrated in his book on Sikkim and Bhutan, a work that forms an admirable supplement to Hooker's Himalayan Journals.
We visited the Rajah the next day and found him to be a young man of apparently feeble intellect, with a hare-lip, who had little or nothing to say. The Padang Lama, who at that time was acting as "vakeel" to the Indian Government, was very civil and received us hospitably.
After leaving Tumlong we descended again to the Tista valley and crossed it by a cane bridge at Samdong. Thence we ascended 3,000 feet through a forest of very fine trees to Mongong Gompa, where we stayed for two nights as the weather became wet and I had a considerable number of bird skins to dry and pack. In the twenty days during which our trip lasted we got no less than ninety-four species, including many of great beauty and some rarity. Among them was a woodcock, which I myself never saw in Sikkim, but which is not uncommon in some seasons; a very rare wren, Troglodytes pnnctatus, peculiar to Sikkim; and a small grebe which I saw only in the small stagnant lake near the monastery at Mongong.
​Of butterflies very few were flying at this season, except at the lowest elevations and those mostly Lycœnidæ and Hesperidæ, but a fine specimen of a large silk-producing moth, Saturnia Tibeta, was picked up, with some beautiful day-flying moths, one of which turned out to be new. On the next day, December 30th, we stopped in a good Bhutia house at Lingdam and went up to the monastery where a curious annual festival, which I have never seen elsewhere, was going on. After a service with the usual accompaniments of gongs, horns and cymbals, a procession marched out to some little altars, which were set on fire after arrows had been shot over them, and we were requested to contribute to the effect of the performance by firing a salute from our guns. With the exception of the four Lamas who conducted the ceremony, all the spectators—as I have often noticed during Buddhist ceremonies both in Sikkim and in China—seemed to regard it as an amusing sight. I have never been able to detect any real religious feeling among the common people, though they pay the greatest deference to the priests and are apparently as much under their influence and domination as in Tibet.
On our way back to Darjeeling we made a long march along the same ridge which I had crossed on my way to Pemiongchi four years before. There I found a new species of Curculigo, and what I believe to be Lilium oxypetalum, hitherto only known from the North-West Himalaya, though as it was not in flower I cannot be certain of the species. Among the birds procured were Arboricola rufigularis, a forest-haunting partridge, a lovely little flower-sucker and Myzornis pyrrhura, peculiar to Sikkim. I also shot one of the large yellow-throated martins, Hirundo fuligula, which are not uncommon at 7,000 to 9,000 feet. All this forest is very dense and damp, without any break until it descends to 6,000 feet above Namchi.
On January 3rd we sent our coolies with baggage direct to Darjeeling and made a detour down the Rangit valley to the Tista bridge, which was then being built as a permanent structure with iron cables, passable for ponies. We stayed that night with Mr. Munro at his plantation at Pashok, and he gave me bulbs of a fine lily which I believe to be L. Wallichianum, and of a Pancratium which is abundant in the Sal forest at about 2,500 feet. From here we rode up to Darjeeling, where we found it cold and misty.
After spending a few days at my plantation we concluded our visit to Sikkim by a short trip to Tonglu, where there was now a nice stone-built bungalow for travellers' use. We found some snow on the road above 8,500 feet on the slopes facing noith. Tonglu is surrounded by a lovely grove of old rhododendrons, among which we measured one of R. ferrugineum, fifteen feet nine inches in girth at two feet from the ground. Birds were fairly numerous, among them a fine wood-pigeon, Alsocomus Hodgsoni, and the long-tailed blue magpie, Urocissa occipitalis, which I had not seen before, and which has a peculiar metallic cry like that of the crow tribe with which it is classified. A sharp frost set in before sunset, but in the sun next day the snow was thawing, whilst it froze in the shade.
After a march of fourteen miles along the ridge we found the ascent of 3,000 feet to the top of Sandakphu very trying. The rarity of the ​atmosphere above 10,000 feet was much more evident than it is in damper and warmer weather; and Godman's heart was considerably affected by it, so that he had some difficulty in getting up the last part of the ascent. There was a rough house on the top in which we made a large fire, and with plenty of warm clothes we got through the night pretty well, though it was so cold that tea, left in a cup, froze in the room. At sunrise next morning we had the most glorious view of Kanchenjunga as well as of the top of Mount Everest in the far distance, and of Chomolhari to the north-east. I have never seen so striking a view as this in any part of the world, though it is quite impossible to describe or, I should think, to paint. Though the thermometer was below 20°, we found some Bhutia or Limboo shepherds camping out with bare feet just below the bungalow, apparently quite unaffected by the temperature.
On the way back to Darjeeling I shot Trochalopteron affinis, which breeds above 12,000 feet, Tarsiger chrysæus and T. superciliaris. Many nut-crackers, Nucifraga humispila, and jays were seen; and in the dense bamboo thicket at 9,500 feet Xiphirhynchus superciliaris and Conostoma æmodium, which, though not so tame, resembles the Siberian jay in appearance and habits more than any other Himalayan bird. The silver firs, Abies Webbiana, which cover the ridge in many places from 11,000 to about 12,000 feet, seem to be for the most part in a dying condition, and have been much injured by fires near the road. Their appearance is very peculiar, as shown in a photo taken by Mr. C.B. Clarke and produced in plate No. 215, of Trees of Great Britain. On the bare parts of the hill where much aconite grows we found a number of little bamboo muzzles, thrown down by the roadside, which are used by the Nepalese shepherds to prevent their sheep from being poisoned by eating aconite when passing over these places.
At Darjeeling I met a very remarkable man, Lieutenant Harman, R.E., who died soon after from the effects of the severe hardships he underwent in surveying the frontiers of Sikkim. He was so keen to carry on and complete this work that, when he was no longer able to walk on account of frost-bitten feet, he continued his survey in a chair carried on the back of a powerful Bhutia. On the walls of his room I noticed a dilapidated skin of a large slaty-blue-eared pheasant, which I thought must be a new species, and this he was good enough to give me. On my return home I found my surmise correct, and described it under the name of Crossoptilon Harmani in the Ibis, 1881, p. 399, Plate 13. This skin was said by the native surveyor who. brought it in to have come from a point about 150 miles east of Lhasa in the valley of the Sanpo river, and remains unique to this day. Though Hodgson long ago procured from a Nepalese envoy to Pekin a specimen of the white-mantled Crossoptilon Tibetanum, which is found near Ta-tsien-lo, my new species is much more nearly allied to Crossoptilon auritum of Pallas, which is found farther north in Kansu and Koko Nor, but differs in having no white on the outer tail feathers. A fourth species, Crossoptilon mantchuricum, is found in North China, but is very rare and local owing to the destruction of forests and the pursuit of man.
From Darjeeling I returned by Calcutta to Ceylon, where I spent a ​fortnight with my brother, who was then managing a cinchona plantation at Rambodde. He had a good bungalow surrounded by a large but rather wild and neglected garden, which seemed to be a particularly favourable spot for birds. The elevation of about 4,000 feet made the climate very pleasant, though the sun was hot in the day, and I collected about half of the thirty-seven species of birds peculiar to Ceylon, in the short time that I spent there.
Cinchona at that period was in a very flourishing condition as regards its growth, and owing to the scarcity of quinine, the bark was realising a very high price, which reached as much as 16s. per ounce for Howard's sulphate. Some of the planters cut their trees as fast as possible, and others sold their plantations at fancy prices, but those who held on had a very heavy loss to bear later, when disease became prevalent, and when the price of quinine fell to a point at which it became unprofitable to grow any but the varieties producing bark very rich in the sulphate.
To give an idea of the enterprise for which Ceylon planters have always been distinguished, I may mention the case of a Mr. Campbell. This gentleman, hearing that in the Dutch Government plantations in Java there was a variety named Ledgeriana, whose bark produced from 8 to 10 per cent, of sulphate as against 3 to 4 per cent, produced by the species C. succirubra, of which it is a variety, went to Java and purchased at a very high price all the seed he could get. He sowed the seed in frames in Ceylon and raised thousands of plants which, if I remember right, when he showed them to me, were selling at one rupee each. Thirty years later in Java I saw perhaps the very same trees which produced this seed, and by the courtesy of the Dutch manager I was able to take some of the seed, with which the Japanese Government started a plantation in Formosa.
I made a short trip to Newara Elia and ascended a peak of over 8,000 feet, but I was very much disappointed with the variety and abundance of the birds, plants and insects to be found at high elevations in Ceylon, as compared with those of a similar altitude in the Himalaya. I rejoined Godman, who had gone to see the Nilgiri Hills, and we returned together to England, having had a most enjoyable and successful tour.
* ↑ Twenty-one Days in India, by G. Abengh-Mackay (Allen, London, 1880).
* ↑ Since then it has been visited by Mr. Claude White; see his Sikkim and Bhutan.
* ↑ Elwes, H.J. (1881). "On a new Crossoptilon". Ibis. 4 5: 399–401. (description of the Tibetan eared pheasant (Crossoptilon harmani), also called Elwes' eared pheasant; Wikisource-ed.)
* ↑ Plate XIII (Wikisource-ed.)