The Man-eaters of Tsavo

infobox Book |
name = The Man-eaters of Tsavo
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author = John Henry Patterson
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country = United Kingdom
language = English
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genre = Non-fiction
publisher = Macmillan and Co., Limited
release_date = 1907
english_release_date =
media_type = Print
pages =
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"The Man-eaters of Tsavo and other East African Adventures" is a book written by John Henry Patterson in 1907 about a pair of lions that he killed in Kenya, known as the Tsavo maneaters.

The book has been adapted to film three times: a monochrome, British film of the 1950s, a 1952 3-D film titled "Bwana Devil", and a 1996 color version called "The Ghost and the Darkness", where Val Kilmer played the daring engineer who hunts down the lions of Tsavo.

The book describes attacks by man-eating lions on the builders of the Uganda Railway in Tsavo, Kenya in 1898 and how the lions were eventually killed by Patterson. It was remarkable as nearly 140 people were killed by the maneaters in less than a year before Patterson managed to kill them (although this number is contestedcite journal | author = Gnoske, Thomas and Julian Kerbis Peterhans | year = 2003 | title = Field Museum uncovers evidence behind man-eating; revises legend of its infamous man-eating lions | journal = Journal of East African Natural History | volume = | url = http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-01/fm-fmu011303.php] ).

Col. Patterson's 1907 book itself states that "between them (the lions) no less than twenty-eight Indian coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate African natives of whom no official record was kept" were killed. This lesser number was confirmed in Dr. Bruce Patterson's definitive book The lions of Tsavo: exploring the legacy of Africa’s notorious man-eaters (McGraw-Hill, 2004), written at the Field Museum in Chicago, where the lions are on display. He showed that the greater toll attributed to the lions resulted from a pamphlet written by Col. Patterson in 1925, stating "these two ferocious brutes killed and devoured, under the most appalling circumstances, one hundred and thirty-five Indian and African artisans and laborers employed in the construction of the Uganda Railway." (The man-eating lions of Tsavo. Zoology: Leaflet 7, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago).

References

External links

* [http://www.rtpnet.org/robroy/tsavo/tsavo.html The Man Eaters of Tsavo (Text)]
*gutenberg|no=3810|name=The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, and Other East African Adventures