Of the 3 Bell books I've read....Wanderings Of An Elephant Hunter, Bell of Africa, and Karamojo Safari, I liked the latter book the best. Any thoughts from anyone else?
Yes, I agree, I think Bell would as well.
He didnt seem to think that Wanderings of an Elephant hunter really caught the essence of what his hunting was about. He write of it later a little dismissively as 'just a collection of essays.' So then in 1949 he chose to write about one specific safari, and describe how it went, and that was Karamojo Safari.
This really is the book that you want about WDM Bell, and it comes closest to simply being the book by him thats purely about his elephant hunting.
The last one (so far)- Bell of Africa, contains what seems to be an essay divided into a three or four chapters which are purely autobiographical details(Townsend Whelen says it was written for his wife) fascinating nevertheless, about his youth market hunting in Canada, as a pilot in the RFC etc, but then the African chapters of the book are simply reprints of much of Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter.
The newly published material might be accounts or chapters that Bell wrote for Bell of Africa, and then didnt include when he sent the manuscript to Whelen. We cant know why. Maybe he thought the ms was too long. Maybe he thought Whelen would tell him what he thought of what he had so far and then he would send these others later. Maybe he considered them unfinished, or not much good. But maybe he planned it exactly as it has happened, that this material might be another book again.
Of course he died straight after sending off the ms of Bell of Africa to America, so we cant know. His wife might have had an idea, but she died in the eighties. But then she might not, my wife has no interest in my writing at all. (Perhaps she is right to.)
But still, it will be well worth it for anything new and I would like to read what he wrote about the car trip with the Forbes.
I still think Karamojo Safari is his best one, and the one closest to what Bell wanted in a book himself.
What I would love to do, would be to edit and collate all of it together into one volume.
Introduction would be the description by the chap who went to visit with them them in Scotland around 1950.The Bell of Africa autobiographical stuff, followed by his expositions on hunting in Africa, from Wanderings and Karomojo) other incidents and tales - (Wanderings and the new materiel, ac couple of chapter son rifles and shooting collated from books and his other articles, and finishing with one safari entire as an example, from Karamojo Safari.
Call it - "Safari!" (With an exclamation mark!) Or more prosaically, maybe just, "Karamojo Bell".
