Post by Brad Nelson on Nov 14, 2019 9:07:15 GMT -8
Elephant Company
I found this available while browsing through the non-fiction section of the local online library. I found it highly rated at Amazon so decided to give it a go.
I found the organization of the book to be a bit rough here and there. But it was readable. And most of all, it was filled with information and stories I knew little about.
The book centers around James Howard “Billy” Williams, a Brit who went to work in 1920 for a British teak company. Williams was looking for adventure (fighting in WWI not having sated the desire) and went to work in Burma.
It’s quite a selection process that the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation had. It wasn’t as if they were just signing up any warm body. They knew how difficult the work was and that very few could handle it. So they tried hard to weed people out before wasting any money training them.
Elephants were used as you would use a modern tractor or backhoe. They could move heavy logs, help build bridges, move supplies, and were useful in all manner of things.
The book starts out as if Bill Williams is going to be Doctor Doolittle with a magical rapport with the elephants. And there’s a little of that. But I don’t think the book successfully shows this. He is not Mowgli. And although the descriptions of the jungle by the author, Vicki Croke, are sometimes interesting, she is not Kipling.
In 1942 the Japanese invade Burma and then Williams has that to deal with that. The elephants and the native population undergo great hardships. You read this and you’ll think the Japanese got off light with only two atomic bombs. By rights, the Japanese population should have been exterminated and the Japanese main island divided between the Asian countries as a giant theme park or vacation land.
The bits of the overall story here and there are generally interesting. But very often the narrative of the story seemed to shift (forward, past, or sideways) and it lost the sense of telling a coherent story at times.
Because nearly all of this information was new to me, I found the rough spots to be relatively minor. The book was about Williams. And it was about harvesting teak. And it was about the hardships of living and working in the jungle. And it was about WWII. And it was about elephants and what they could do. And it was about the camaraderie and coordination possible between men and elephants. And it was even about how dangerous these elephants could be.
So it’s a hodgepodge mishmash. But because I finished the book, that should tell you that it was a quite readable mishmash for the most part. You can see how easily this could be made into a movie. And apparently Williams spent some of the latter years of his life trying to assist in making that happen. There is one segment made-to-order for Spielberg. Williams (in charge of the elephant forces in Burma) is ordered to pull his elephants back into India. The Japanese are putting on a big offensive, and so are the British forces. The British command is not retreating but they simply want the highly valuable elephants to be out of harm’s way.
But most of the good roads back to India are either controlled by the Japanese or in danger of being soon under their control. So they (along with a group of refugees that they picked up along the way) must make their way through the jungle along a path that is definitely less traveled.
At one point they come to a dead end, trapped by a high mountain range and escarpment. The strange and surprising solution is to build The Elephant Stairway. There are some natural ridges along the side of a ridge. They decide to widen them and extend them, cutting in steps in the soft sandstone where needed. The book supplies one of Williams’ illustrations of it (he is an amateur artist) but (one of the flaws of the book) this entire idea of The Elephant Stairway isn’t pictured well, even in the mind. But suffice it to say, it was a harrowing experience, both for man and for elephants. That’s why I want to see the Spielberg movie.
There is some cursory information about the native population and its religion, but not much more than a once-over. Again, this isn’t Kipling. You’re immersed in the story, for sure, but not to the extent you could be given the material. But the book does do a good job of throwing in some low resolution pictures (in the Kindle version) that gives you a mostly charming glimpse of Williams’ life and times in Burma working with the elephants. Williams was a sort of super-man like Teddy Roosevelt in terms of endurance, interests, and experiences.
Along with The Elephant Stairway sequence, another memorable anecdote was when The Super Elephant (Bandoola…the most prized and capable of all elephants and widely known in Burma) went into musth. It’s an interesting experience for the elephant. This had to have been where Theodore Sturgeon got the idea for the Star Trek episode, Amok Time. The elephants just go completely sexually crazy for weeks or even, in some cases, for months. When in musth, even larger bull elephants stay out of the way of smaller and younger elephants who are in this condition.
For those “all-around” readers, I think they’ll find this book of interest.
I found this available while browsing through the non-fiction section of the local online library. I found it highly rated at Amazon so decided to give it a go.
I found the organization of the book to be a bit rough here and there. But it was readable. And most of all, it was filled with information and stories I knew little about.
The book centers around James Howard “Billy” Williams, a Brit who went to work in 1920 for a British teak company. Williams was looking for adventure (fighting in WWI not having sated the desire) and went to work in Burma.
It’s quite a selection process that the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation had. It wasn’t as if they were just signing up any warm body. They knew how difficult the work was and that very few could handle it. So they tried hard to weed people out before wasting any money training them.
Elephants were used as you would use a modern tractor or backhoe. They could move heavy logs, help build bridges, move supplies, and were useful in all manner of things.
The book starts out as if Bill Williams is going to be Doctor Doolittle with a magical rapport with the elephants. And there’s a little of that. But I don’t think the book successfully shows this. He is not Mowgli. And although the descriptions of the jungle by the author, Vicki Croke, are sometimes interesting, she is not Kipling.
In 1942 the Japanese invade Burma and then Williams has that to deal with that. The elephants and the native population undergo great hardships. You read this and you’ll think the Japanese got off light with only two atomic bombs. By rights, the Japanese population should have been exterminated and the Japanese main island divided between the Asian countries as a giant theme park or vacation land.
The bits of the overall story here and there are generally interesting. But very often the narrative of the story seemed to shift (forward, past, or sideways) and it lost the sense of telling a coherent story at times.
Because nearly all of this information was new to me, I found the rough spots to be relatively minor. The book was about Williams. And it was about harvesting teak. And it was about the hardships of living and working in the jungle. And it was about WWII. And it was about elephants and what they could do. And it was about the camaraderie and coordination possible between men and elephants. And it was even about how dangerous these elephants could be.
So it’s a hodgepodge mishmash. But because I finished the book, that should tell you that it was a quite readable mishmash for the most part. You can see how easily this could be made into a movie. And apparently Williams spent some of the latter years of his life trying to assist in making that happen. There is one segment made-to-order for Spielberg. Williams (in charge of the elephant forces in Burma) is ordered to pull his elephants back into India. The Japanese are putting on a big offensive, and so are the British forces. The British command is not retreating but they simply want the highly valuable elephants to be out of harm’s way.
But most of the good roads back to India are either controlled by the Japanese or in danger of being soon under their control. So they (along with a group of refugees that they picked up along the way) must make their way through the jungle along a path that is definitely less traveled.
At one point they come to a dead end, trapped by a high mountain range and escarpment. The strange and surprising solution is to build The Elephant Stairway. There are some natural ridges along the side of a ridge. They decide to widen them and extend them, cutting in steps in the soft sandstone where needed. The book supplies one of Williams’ illustrations of it (he is an amateur artist) but (one of the flaws of the book) this entire idea of The Elephant Stairway isn’t pictured well, even in the mind. But suffice it to say, it was a harrowing experience, both for man and for elephants. That’s why I want to see the Spielberg movie.
There is some cursory information about the native population and its religion, but not much more than a once-over. Again, this isn’t Kipling. You’re immersed in the story, for sure, but not to the extent you could be given the material. But the book does do a good job of throwing in some low resolution pictures (in the Kindle version) that gives you a mostly charming glimpse of Williams’ life and times in Burma working with the elephants. Williams was a sort of super-man like Teddy Roosevelt in terms of endurance, interests, and experiences.
Along with The Elephant Stairway sequence, another memorable anecdote was when The Super Elephant (Bandoola…the most prized and capable of all elephants and widely known in Burma) went into musth. It’s an interesting experience for the elephant. This had to have been where Theodore Sturgeon got the idea for the Star Trek episode, Amok Time. The elephants just go completely sexually crazy for weeks or even, in some cases, for months. When in musth, even larger bull elephants stay out of the way of smaller and younger elephants who are in this condition.
For those “all-around” readers, I think they’ll find this book of interest.
