Of William Finaughty, the greatest of the English elephant-hunters, neither Selous nor any contemporary writer gives any particulars, so I am indebted to Mr. G. L. Harrison, an American gentleman, for his "Recollections of William Finaughty," which was privately printed in 1916. He met Finaughty, who was then a very slight old man, with a wonderful memory and much weakened by attacks of fever, in 1913. Finaughty was one of the first white men to hunt elephants in Matabeleland, and his activities extended from 1864 to 1875, when he gave up serious hunting because he could no longer pursue them on horseback. Finaughty describes himself as a harum-scarum youth who left Grahamstown at the age of twenty-one early in 1864. He passed north through the Free State, then swarming with tens of thousands of black wildebeest, blesbok, springbok, quagga, blue wildebeest, and ostrich, and made his way to Matabeleland, then ruled by Mzilikatse, a brother of the Zulu king Chaka. After sport with lion and buffalo on the road, for all game, including elephants, were abundant at this time, he reached Tati. Old Mzilikatse was then a physical wreck but treated the Englishman well, although at times he had violent outbursts of passion. Finaughty was witness of a great dance in which 2500 warriors took part, and on which occasion 540 oxen were slaughtered. Horse-sickness was then rife in the country and the party lost fourteen horses out of seventeen within thirty hours. In this, his first trip, Finaughty only killed three elephants, which he attributed to lack of experience. On his second trip in 1865 he did better, whilst a third in 1866 was made purely for trading, yet he shot eight elephants and then decided to become a hunter only. On the fourth trip he shot nineteen elephants, but in 1868, on the Umbila, he states that he had "the two finest months of my life. In all I shot 95 elephants, the ivory weighing 5000 lbs." One day he had a narrow escape in the sandy bed of the Sweswe river. He had wounded an old bull when he fired at it again as it was on the point of charging. His boy had put in two charges and the hunter was nearly knocked out of the saddle by the recoil. The elephant then charged and got right on the top of him, but, at the moment when death seemed imminent, the elephant's shoulder-bone broke and he was helpless--thus Finaughty escaped. In those days the elephants did not know the meaning of gunfire. Finaughty one day bagged six bulls in a river bed, as they did not run on the shots being fired.