Bell recorded all of his kills and shots fired. It was a business to him, not pleasure, and he needed to record expenditures�

� He shot exactly 1,011 elephants with a series of 6 Rigby-made 7x57mm (.275 Rigby) rifles with 173 grain military ammo.
� He shot 300 elephants with a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5x54mm carbine using the long 159 grain FMJ bullets.
� He shot 200 pachyderms with the .303 and the 215 grain army bullet.
� He went to a .318 Westley Richards for a while, which is a cartridge firing a 250 grain bullet at about 2400 fps, but found the ammunition unreliable and returned to the 7mm.
� He also recorded that one of the reasons why he favored the 7x57 was that the ammunition was more reliable and he could not recall ever having a fault with it. Whereas British sporting ammunition, apart from the .303 military ammo, gave him endless trouble with splitting cases.( He used the .303 in the hope of running into a Herd of Bulls so he could make use of the 10shots ! He was famed for using a Martini in .303 & holding the spare rounds between his fingers & could fire the rifle as fast as a bolt action !)
� The balance of his elephants were shot with this .318 and his .450/400 Jeffrey double rifle.
� He wrote about being able to drop an elephant with a light caliber rifle if he shot it in the same place that he would have shot it with a heavy rifle.
� It was unmentioned, but understood, that 7x57 ammunition cost a tenth the price of large caliber .450/400 Jeffrey cartridges and money is always a factor in business.
Just out of interest, it is must to be mention that to judge ammunition expenditure and his own shooting, he calculated an average. He discovered that with the .275 (7x57mm) he fired an average of 1.5 shots per kill. This means that half the time he only needed one shot. That is a fair performance for such a large number of elephants killed and considering that it is common today to fire an insurance shot, anyway. Seemingly a business man of a Hunter with a profit & loss acumen.

As for an infamous gun, I'd take the 6.5 Carcano Oswald used to kill Kennedy.


Last edited by hotsoup; 03/06/11.