Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mule Deer - Message for Craig Boddington

Bell never mentioned ammo availability as much of a problem, he would order it by the case from England apparently before he set out.
He did however mention it was hard to get Snider 577 ammo for his 'boys' but he found some 577/450 once and gave them that. Said the bullet fairly rattled down the barrel, bit they still managed some miraculous shots with it.

I suppose part II of my question would be based on the supposition that it would be easier to find several 1000 rounds of say .303 or 7x57 and pack it into the bush that it would be to find the same amount of another larger cartridge.

Was looking at things from a logistics standpoint as a commercial venture.
What cheapest we can get away with, still have room for other stuff and make money.

Just throwing random thoughts out.

Thanks Ingwe!

I read one of his books about two years ago. Wanderings of an ivory hunter? Mebbe? It I can hardly remember much I read from it!

Bob, I don't think finding or ordering the ammo of any size was much of a problem for Bell, I got the impression he brought it all with him as part of his 'kit'.
He shot the small bores because he did a stint ( I think with Fraser of Edinburgh) of shooting and regulating large caliber double rifles, and developed a hearty dislike for them.

Ha! I remember making 577 Snider out of 28 gauge double AA's and 58 Minie balls when I was 16! Hey they worked great. Extraction was simple with case pocket knife!

Bob, I highly recommend a book " Bell of Africa" it is his memoirs, written by him, and sheds a bit more light on the man. He led a remarkable life, and was not a man to be made sport of.
Even the great Alan Black said he did not feel worthy to walk in Bell's shadow, and he meant it literally because he ran into Bell a couple times in person.

I will certainly check it out! I read the other book during one of wifey's surgeries. So I had lots on my mind then.

275 Rigby, 7X57, and 7 Mauser are different names for the same cartridge.

I think that's why that little smiley emoticon is at the end of that post?

Bell said economy played a role in his choices. He liked the 450/400 but 7X57's were cheaper by the box and still got the job done. Plus he said recoil was a consideration because he was shooting so much.

Prezactly.

Most folks can't do what Bell did with a rifle. Remember, JA Hunter started out as a 7X57 guy too but became the biggest .500 NE advocate ever. And Hunter was to Rhino what Bell was to elephant so he was clearly one of the all time greatest.

Great thread.

PS - in the last issue of F&S Petzel has an article on recoil and effective rifle shooting. He calls out the 7x57 and leopard thongs as a great combination for big game.

To further my point, Bell could wingshoot geese with a rifle! Consistently!!

If anyone - anyone! - can find a picture of Bell in a leopard thong holding a .275 Rigby, you gotta post it. Ingwe will wet himself before he swoons.

If I remember that passage correctly, he took to pass shooting geese with a .318 because his ammo supply suffered from a percentage of hang fires which made it unaccepatable for "serious" work.

Hang fire ammo was the same theme in the Aagard story I refered to earlier in the thread!

Didn't matter when rifle went off, you simply followed thru!

IIRC they were a cormorant type bird�.that he used up the lousy ammo on.

In this anecdate about shooting birds out of the sky with a rifle, he was shooting comorants flying low over lake Victoria, range of about 300 feet. He was getting about 6-7 out of 10 of them apparently, two spanish gentlemen came over to ask if they could borrow his shotgun, and were amazed to find it was a rifle.
He was using up .318 Westeley Richards ammunition, which was prone to splitting at the neck, or misfiring. (It probably didn't help either that in his .318 WR double rifle, one of the chambers had serious headspace issues. Have corresponded with modern owner of it.)

Another one I like myself, was that he was seen shooting fish in the air that were jumping from the surface of a lake.

(After a wile Bell starts to sound like a hunting super hero...)

A lot of people have mentioned his coolness under pressure and put his good shooting down to that, but on the contrary he would write that he was often of a nervious disposition when it came to elpehant hunting, with a trememndous desire to shoot - and that he had to calm himself down, he said to count to ten before doing anything.

What is just as interesting is that he shot around 800 buffalo, mostly with a 6.5 or 7mm Mauser also. He never had much trouble shooting buffalo, and he was never charged even once; but he wrote in a letter to a friend that he made it his business to never have a wounded one, and made evry effort to kill them outright. (Also, he was shooting them for meat and hides, so he wasn't singling out big bulls, he was laying waste to groups of them)

It is fascinating to think that this young man started shooting lions for the railways when he was sixteen, was hunting elephants for a living at the age of 22, after already having made a living shooting elk for meat in the Yukon, and fighting in the Boer war.
He did indeed complete the majority of his African hunting by the time he was 35, but then he went and joined the RFC and started shooting at flying Germans.
(It would also pay to remember that he didn't need to make a living doing anything really...google 'Clifton Hall' near Edinborough sometime. It's a school now, but it was his family home. It's a [bleep] castle.)

Another anecdote I like - sometime around 1909-10, he heard about flying machines as being viable (there was a well publicised flying race ie Those Magnificanet Men in Their Flying Machines" etc, and so he immediately sent a telegram to his sisters asking them to purchase one of those flying machiens and sent it to East Africa along with as much fuel as possible.
They cabled back again, having made inquiries, and quietly explained that flying required considerable tuition.
He immedaitly went back to England and got flying lessons, plainly believing that he could use the plane for spotting elephant. But his lessons were a dispointment - the pupils got one hour of flying time a month, the rest of the time they just taxiied around on the ground and he became dissatisfid and went back to Africa. But there are foreshadowings of why he joined the RFC at the start of WW1, he already had in interest in flying.

He comes across in his books as a very moderate, even tempered, likeable man, and quite modern compared to some of his contemporaries. (such as Roosevelt for example) It suprises me sometimes to rememebr that when he published "Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter" in 1923, at the age of 43 and at the start of his retirement from elephant hunting, it was still six years before they would even invent sound movies.

Good post!

From what Ive read of Bell having a nervous disposition around elephant it was more like a kid on Xmas than a quasi frightened hunter
He didn't seem to get rattled by much. While others have written complete books about Man eating leopards ( Not to EVER short Col. Corbett�) I remember a passage by Bell who was once asked to sit up at night for a man eating leopard. He said he could hear it coming through the village by its throaty cough, referred to it as an "impudent bastard" and shot it. No more details


REALLY liked his story of accidentally shooting down the French Spad�.