Unicorns were supposed to be tropical animals, but Carpophorus discovered that these horns were imported from the Baltic. This, he decided, explained why the Roman animal catchers in Asia and Africa had never gotten any unicorns. He managed to scrape up acquaintance with the crew of a Viking ship that had come to Ostia to trade and do a little piracy on the side during the voyage home. The Vikings had some broken pieces of unicorn horns with them and Carpophorus was able to get one member of the crew drunk at Chilo's tavern. The sailor told him that the horn came from a great fish which fishermen occasionally caught in their nets. The Vikings called it a narwhal. The fish might be called a sea unicorn for it had one long horn growing from the tip of its nose.
Carpophorus didn't swallow this yarn. The horn was ivory and fish didn't grow ivory. Still, he thought that unicorns might sometimes swim rivers and be caught in nets so that was how the legend started. He travelled to the Baltic with a 'negotiator ursorum,' a bear-catcher, but was unable to get any unicorns. But he got something almost as valuable— three great white bears unlike any he had ever seen before. These bears came in on icebergs near Ultima Thule, the last outpost of land to the north. Today we call it Iceland.
Carpophorus had the crazy idea that these bears must come from some great land lying to the west, for surely they could not spend all their lives on the floating icebergs. On his way back with the bears, he advanced this theory to a young centurion who was in charge of one of the frontier forts in Scotland built to keep the Picts and Scots from raiding down into Roman Britain.
'There is no land to the west,' the centurion told him confidently.
'How do you know?' the bestiarius demanded.
'Because if there were, this damn government would have us legionnaires over there policing the place,' said the centurion downing a cup of strong wine.
The bears made a great hit in the arena. The Roman writer Calpurnius describes how the arena was flooded and the bears dove into the water and fought seals. (Polar bears were exhibited in the arena, but at what period is uncertain.) But when the time came for the next act, the bears couldn't be moved. They were still eating the seals, and polar bears are mean animals to handle at the best of times.
The emperor motioned to the archers to kill the beasts for the shows ran on a strict time schedule. Carpophorus refused to see his precious bears killed. He plunged into the knee-deep water, and tried to drive out the bears with his flail. Hampered by the water, he could not avoid the animals' angry rushes. So he died, as did most of his profession, under the teeth and claws of his savage wards. The Romans never realized that they held in their hands the clue to the discovery of a great new world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
You may wonder where the Romans got all the animals they used in the games. You'll wonder more after reading a few statistics. Trajan gave one set of games that lasted 122 days during which eleven thousand people and ten thousand animals were killed. Titus had five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals killed during the one hundred-day show to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. In 249 a.d., Philip celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome by giving games in which the following were killed: one thousand pairs of gladiators, thirty-two elephants, ten tigers, sixty lions, thirty leopards, ten hyenas, ten giraffes, twenty wild asses, forty wild horses, ten zebras, six hippos and one rhino
Statistics in themselves don't mean too much so let's take some specific examples. The Emperor Commodus killed five hippopotami himself one day in the arena, shooting arrows from the royal box. Hippos were fairly common in the arena as this and other accounts show. After the Roman Empire fell, the next hippo to reach Europe was in 1850. A whole army division had to be used to capture the animal. Getting the hippo from the White Nile to Cairo took five months. The hippo spent the winter in Cairo and then went on to England in a tank containing four hundred gallons of water to keep it cool. Yet the Romans imported hippos wholesale for their games; in fact they actually exterminated the hippos in the Egyptian Nile. The Romans imported both the African and the Indian rhinoceros, and even the most ignorant members of the crowd could distinguish between the two beasts readily. Mosaics showing the capture of an Indian rhino have recently been uncovered in Sicily. The next Indian rhino to reach Europe was in 1515. Today, there are only six of them in captivity.
Whole territories were denuded of wild animals to supply the arena. The early Christian fathers could only find one good thing to say about the bloody spectacles—the demand for animals cleared entire districts of dangerous predators and opened them to farming. Several species were either exterminated or so reduced in numbers that they later became extinct: the European lion, the aurochs, the Libyian elephant and possibly the African bear. There are no bears in Africa
today and most scientists believe that there never were any, but the Romans did get a 'bear' from East Africa and Nubia. What was it?
We don't know, but curiously in Kenya today there is a persistent legend of a 'Nandi bear,'' supposedly a very large and ferocious bear which lives in the Aberdare Mountains. It occasionally attacks natives and has been seen by a few white people although no specimen had ever been brought in. Recently, the site of a Roman 'trapping station' has been found in this locality. Perhaps the Romans' 'African bear' still exists.
Collecting and shipping these thousands of animals was an enormous industry. Wild animals were the most valuable gift a barbarian monarch could make to his Roman overlords, and even Roman governors had to collect animals. There is an interesting and amusing series of letters between Cicero, a newly appointed governor of a province in Asia Minor, and Cselius Rufus, who was running for the office of aedile in Rome. Rufus wanted leopards for the games he was giving. Cicero was busy trying to administer his province and wasn't interested in catching leopards. Even before poor Cicero got to his province, he got a letter from Rufus: 'Dear Cicero: please try to get me some good leopards . . . ten will do for a start. Tell your natives to hurry.' When no leopards arrived, Rufus wrote: 'My dear friend Cicero: In nearly all my letters I've mentioned the subject of leopards to you. It would be a terrible disgrace if, after Patiscus (a local Roman businessman in the same area) has sent me ten, you can't send me any more. I have those ten and ten more from Africa. If I don't hear from you, I'll have to make arrangements elsewhere.' Later: 'If I hadn't got some African animals from Curio, I wouldn't be able to put on a show at all. If you don't send me some leopards, don't expect any patronage from me.'
Cicero wrote to a friend: 'Another letter from Rufus . . . all he talks about is leopards.' Then Rufus gave his games and got elected to the aedileship. Right away Cicero wrote him: 'Dear, dear Rufus: I can't tell you how sorry I am about the leopards. I've put all the professional hunters to work, but there seems to be the most remarkable scarcity of wild beasts at this time of the year. But don't worry, I have everyone working on it and anything we get will be for you and no one else '
Rufus had a right to be annoyed. Sulla, who became dictator, freely admitted that the people had originally voted him into office only because he had a tie-in with Bocchus, an African monarch, and could get plenty of animals for the games. In search of animals, the Roman trappers went to Norway, where they brought back moose and elk; to Burma, for rhino, cobra and elephants; and to Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa. As today, Africa was the great trapping ground for wild animals. The Romans even exhibited African porcupines in the arena; naked boys had to catch them with their bare hands. Plautus, a Roman humorist, wrote: 'By the gods, next they'll be giving exhibitions of trained African mice.'
From various sources, let's create the character Fulcinius, a professional animal trapper whose territory was Africa. We can suppose that Fulcinius was a half-caste, the son of a Roman legionnaire stationed in Algeria, by a Negro mother. As today, half-castes were not popular with either race, and Fulcinius grew up a lonely boy, considering himself superior to his mother's people but knowing that he would never be accepted by Romans. Roman writers describe such a man as a 'savage among savages, a shy, sullen man who hated society and was only happy in the jungle.'
Fom his mother's people, Fulcinius learned the tricks of animal catching, which have remained unchanged to the present day. He learned how to dig a pit, surround it with a high wooden fence, and tether a young calf in the pit. When a lion heard the kid bleating, he would jump over the fence, fall into the pit and be caught. He learned how to direct natives to drive heards of antelope into rivers where they could be lassoed by men in boats, or herded down ravines covered with slippery rawhides so the animals would lose their footing and could
