Vivienne de Watteville
Vivienne de Watteville first went out to East Africa at the age of twenty-two with her father, Bernard de Watteville , the well-known naturalist, to collect groups of the whole fauna of that country for the Berne Museum. All went well with the expedition, planned to last for two years and a half and to cover Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, and Sudan, until in the Congo it was overtaken by disaster. Bernard de Watteville was fatally mauled by a lion.
The party was many days' march from human aid, and Vivienne de Watteville, who was herself dangerously ill with spirillum fever, found herself alone in the wilds with sixty black porters to control, and no provisions, for they had relied for food on the meat that her father shot for them.
She herself had never shot a head of game in her life, but in this crisis she suddenly discovered that she could shoot, and from this discovery sprang the decision to remain in the wilds till she could complete her father's work. This meant collecting and preparing the whole skins of many specimens including buffalo and the now rare white rhino. The story of the expedition is told in her book ' Out of the Blue '.
The elephants she is to talk about today are those she studied when three years later, drawn back by the magic of the veldt, she returned alone to East Africa to photograph wild animals. The full account of this trip is given in her book, ' Speak
I to the Earth '.