Submitted by piewacket1861 on Sun, 02/17/2008 - 18:04.
A booklet written by a German Ivory Company for the much publicized 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia notes that most of the ivory harvested from Africa was just lying on the ground. In truth, early in that century great caches of available ivory had been assembled through trade with individual villages. Although Africa may have been the only place ivory tusks served purely utilitarian purposes, tusks were used for animal stockades and for doorposts and pestles. Tusks were used for doorposts and roof beams, and were carved into the tools of daily life, such as mortars and pestles. Henry Stanley saw tusks erected palisade-style around the graves of chieftains. Not only was the elephant a source of food, and for some tribal people it had a spiritual dimension and was represented in their art. In his journal in 1858 Livingstone described the hunting and death of a female elephant in which the African hunters sang and play instruments to the elephant before killing her: "Oh Chief, O chief! We have come to kill you."
By 1876 the notion of piles of elephanty meat and used ivory tusks to support their door frames looked like ignorance to the West. The natives clearly didn't understand the value of the tusks. But it was NOT the Africans who decimated the elephant. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History contains a horrifying collection of correspondence from McLean, Morris & Company, the London broker from which Comstock and Cheney bought huge quantities of tusks during the 1870s. The handwritten letters, each still hearing its small circle of red sealing wax, detail with brutal detail the amounts and varieties of ivory coming to market: "Zanzibar Prime" was the very best--as well as news of sales trends and anticipated shipments. The broker's cheerful communiques to Ivoryton, sometimes several a week, and the printed circulars show annual sales of hundreds of tons of ivory. The German firm of Heinrich Adolf Meyer, a competitor of the Connecticut ivory companies, estimated that 2 million pounds of ivory were consumed each year world-wide.
At mid-century, English explorers had seen great herds of elephants. Livingstone once counted a group of 800. But by the 1870s,the devastating effect of all those pianos was apparent. Bibliography: Livingstone: Last Journal, p. 245 ("Six men were singing").The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press,1955. Slavery and Population Growth in Colonial New England. Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, edited by Peter Temin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
A booklet written by a
A booklet written by a German Ivory Company for the much publicized 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia notes that most of the ivory harvested from Africa was just lying on the ground. In truth, early in that century great caches of available ivory had been assembled through trade with individual villages. Although Africa may have been the only place ivory tusks served purely utilitarian purposes, tusks were used for animal stockades and for doorposts and pestles. Tusks were used for doorposts and roof beams, and were carved into the tools of daily life, such as mortars and pestles. Henry Stanley saw tusks erected palisade-style around the graves of chieftains. Not only was the elephant a source of food, and for some tribal people it had a spiritual dimension and was represented in their art. In his journal in 1858 Livingstone described the hunting and death of a female elephant in which the African hunters sang and play instruments to the elephant before killing her: "Oh Chief, O chief! We have come to kill you."
By 1876 the notion of piles of elephanty meat and used ivory tusks to support their door frames looked like ignorance to the West. The natives clearly didn't understand the value of the tusks. But it was NOT the Africans who decimated the elephant. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History contains a horrifying collection of correspondence from McLean, Morris & Company, the London broker from which Comstock and Cheney bought huge quantities of tusks during the 1870s. The handwritten letters, each still hearing its small circle of red sealing wax, detail with brutal detail the amounts and varieties of ivory coming to market: "Zanzibar Prime" was the very best--as well as news of sales trends and anticipated shipments. The broker's cheerful communiques to Ivoryton, sometimes several a week, and the printed circulars show annual sales of hundreds of tons of ivory. The German firm of Heinrich Adolf Meyer, a competitor of the Connecticut ivory companies, estimated that 2 million pounds of ivory were consumed each year world-wide.
At mid-century, English explorers had seen great herds of elephants. Livingstone once counted a group of 800. But by the 1870s,the devastating effect of all those pianos was apparent. Bibliography: Livingstone: Last Journal, p. 245 ("Six men were singing").The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press,1955. Slavery and Population Growth in Colonial New England. Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, edited by Peter Temin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
PIE