Introduction the THE COMPANY OF ADVENTURERS
by Mike Resnick

Let me tell you about John Boyes, because in all of African history there is no one quite like him.

There have been better hunters. Certainly there were greater explorers. Although he's very readable, there have been finer writers.

But when it comes to the category of Opportunist, one name stands out from all the others: hunter, explorer, farmer, trader, ivory poacher, gambler, reprobate, soldier, sailor, and, yes, even king, there was only one John Boyes.

John had a humble enough beginning -- and a pretty humble ending, too. He was born in Yorkshire in 1873, the son of shoemaker, and he died in Nairobi in 1951, spending his final days driving a milkwagon. But John Boyes put more living, more scheming, more out-and-out _adventure_ into his 78 years than any other man you can name.

John had no intention of following in his father's footsteps, so at the age of 14 he hopped a ship bound for distant ports, prepared for a life at sea. It almost turned out to be a very brief life _in_ sea, as the young cabin boy was washed overboard during a storm and barely made it back aboard. He got to see quite a bit of the world during the next decade, and not always in the happiest of circumstances: he was marooned off Rotterdam, hospitalized with yellow fever on the Amazon, and stricken with malaria on the rivers of West Africa.

All of his experiences to this point -- including having his ship rammed in the middle of the night -- simply whetted his appetite for more exotic adventure. While his ship was docked in Durban, South Africa, he heard of the Second Matabele War, which was taking place in Southern Rhodesia, and he jumped ship and set off, _on foot_, for Bulawayo, which was close to a thousand miles away.

Once there, he joined the Matabeleland Mounted Police, couldn't find enough action to suit him, and soon transferred to the Afrikander Corps, which boasted such officers as F. C. Selous, perhaps the greatest Africam hunter of all (though I myself lean toward Karamojo Bell), and Lord Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scouts. A severe spell of dysentary didn't stop John from enjoying the war -- if he ever willingly avoided a battle during his life, it has gone unrecorded -- and when it was over he founded the Colonial Fruit and Produce Stores of Bulawayo, a business that eventually made over one hundred thousand pounds (but not until long after the restless Boyes had sold out to his partner.)

A brief stint as a Shakespearean actor in Durban was followed by a trip up the east coast of the continent. John wound up in Mombasa in 1898 and began creating his legend in earnest. It was at this time that the Mombasa-Uganda Railway -- known as the "Lunatic Line", for, as was argued in the British Parliament, only a lunatic would spend a thousand pounds a mile to build "a railroad to nowhere" -- was under construction. When the railway reached Tsavo, the two most famous man-eating lions in history brought work to a halt by dining almost nightly on the imported coolie laborers until Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson finally dispatched them. But in truth, the railway had more serious, if not more newsworthy, problems facing it. There was disease, there was drought, there were hostile tribes, there were mass defections, and there was the enormous task of supplying food for 25,000 coolies.

Now, John didn't know anything about railroads or coolies -- but he _did_ know that the Sudanese Mutiny had broken out in Uganda, and the army was offering top dollar to anyone who could transport food from the Coast to Lake Victoria. John figured it was easy money, bought a caravan of donkeys, loaded them down with boxes of food, hired some donkey drivers, and headed west. In less than a month the last donkey had died from the bite of the tsetse fly, so John loaded the boxes onto the backs of his donkey drivers. A couple of days later he came down with another attack of malaria, and when the fever broke and he came to his senses, he found himself surrounded by hundreds of boxes, a bunch of dead donkeys, and no drivers. They had all deserted.

John was nothing if not self-confident. He figured that if this could happen to such a competent man as himself, it had probably happened to everyone who had gone ahead of him as well, so he simply made camp and waited -- and sure enough, a number of porters who had deserted other caravans soon came down the trail on their way back to Mombasa. John, gun in hand, simply explained the facts of life to them and enlisted them, somewhat less than voluntarily, into his service.

He finally delivered the food and was paid two hundred pounds for his efforts -- enough for a man to live like a king for a decade in East Africa. But John, never satisfied and always looking for an angle, decided that if he could make money supplying the soldiers in Uganda, he could make even easier money supplying people who were not quite so far away.

Which was when he discovered the railroad, and its crying need for food.

Now, John knew that _he_ couldn't single-handedly supply food to 25,000 coolies no matter how many impala and zebra he shot. But all that potential profit got him to thinking, which was always what he did best, and he cast about for some means by which he could supply railroad with all food it required. So he looked at a map, and found that there was a huge area to the north known as Kikuyuland, which was closed to whites. He did a little research and discovered that Kikuyuland housed the most fertile farmland in all of Kenya. (In fact, this land later became the "White Highlands", one of the major causes of conflict in the Mau Mau Emergency.)

John walked north to the border of Kikuyuland, hired some locals who knew the Kikuyu dialect, and prepared to enter the forbidden country, when the British refused to let him pass. Undeterred, John led his crew around the perimeter to a less developed district, a journey of well over a month, and crossed over the border from there.

Although a number of huge caravans, hoping to set up trade with the Kikuyu, had been slaughtered, it never occurred to John that he might be biting off more than he could chew. After three days he came to a Kikuyu village, ruled by a chief named Karuri, and faced down a war party of 500, demanding an audience with their leader.

Karuri had never seen a white man before, and was so fascinated by John's appearance that he put off killing him long enough for John to lie about all the firepower that would be brought to bear on the village if anything untoward should befall him. Karuri pointed out that John had only one gun, but John replied that it was a magical rifle that could shoot through six men at once -- and to prove it, he loaded a solid cartridge into it and fired it at a nearby baobab tree (which is known for its soft, pulpy wood). He told Karuri to examine the tree, and he would see that the bullet came out the other side -- and furthermore, added John, far from stopping, it had gone through still more trees off in the distance. The ruse worked, he and Karuri exchanged gifts, and Karuri even built him a hut in the village.

The very next morning, John was awakened by savage war cries: the village was being attacked by a rival Kikuyu band. He raced out of his hut, rifle in hand, opened fire on the attackers, and killed a number of them while the rest fled in terror. He then explained to Karuri that the men were bound to come back in greater force, and the only things standing between the village
and its certain destruction were John and his weapon. Karuri was enough of a realist to agree, and insisted that John remain there.

The best of John's miracles was yet to come. After the battle was over, he went among the injured men, most of whom could be expected to lose an arm or leg to gangrene as infection set in, and treated them with iodoform, the first disinfectant the Kikuyu had ever seen. When the warriors began recovering from their wounds, Karuri finally found something worth trading for, and John, exchanging an amount of iodoform equal to that of a man's thumbnail for every twenty pounds of flour, was soon in business.

He sold the flour to the railroad for four hundred pounds, then gathered up more porters and returned to Kikuyuland. While back at Karuri's village, John heard of another village that had attacked and slaughtered an Arab caravan which was said to have possessed more than one hundred rifles. He quickly organized an army and conquered the village, and while he found
only thirty rifles to be in working order -- the Kikuyu hadn't known what they were, and had simply thrown them in a huge heap -- he now had a blooded army plus the only 31 firearms in Kikuyuland.

One by one the other tribes asked to join with him. There was opposition as well, but after one final battle, in which he came as close as he ever had to losing his life, John emerged triumphant and became the acknowledged King of the Kikuyu. The entire ascent from intruder to monarch took just over a year.

John learned to speak Kikuyu, but when dealing with new tribes, he fell back upon an old native trick of pretending he could not understand the language, which often gave him an advantage. He created a network of wandering minstrels who gathered news from his entire kingdom and brought it straight back to his waiting ears. At one point he bought Kirinyaga -- now known
as Mount Kenya -- for the sum of four goats, extending his dominion appreciably. His greatest regret was not shooting a native who showed signs of smallpox; instead he had the man confined to a cabin until he could import some medication, but the guard released him a few days later, the man wandered to another village, and soon an epidemic ensued.

By this time, John was so preoccupied with his duties as king that his business of supplying food had dwindled away to nothing, so when some British soldiers showed up and announced that the Crown was taking control of Kikuyuland, he was overjoyed.

His happiness was short-lived. Very soon afterward a squad of ten native soldiers entered his village and, under British orders, placed him under arrest for the crime of _dacoity_, which was loosely described as "banditry" (though his greatest sin seems to have been flying the Union Jack without official permission), and told him that he would have to stand trial in Nairobi. As they marched him through Kikuyuland, thousands of his loyal subjects, wearing war paint and brandishing their spears, joined the caravan to accompany their king. Eventually the soldiers washed their hands of the matter and made John march a few miles ahead of them and tell his people not to molest them.

Once he left Kikuyuland, he was accompanied the rest of the way to Nairobi by 200 of his personal bodyguards, while the ten native troops followed very discreetly in his wake.

The trial was eventually held in Mombasa, and was promptly thrown out of court, the judge ruling that Boyes had done the best he could for Britain under trying circumstances.

John took some time off to buy a farm, explore the White Nile, and write his first set of memoirs, _John Boyes, King of the Wa-Kikuyu_. Then he began looking for money and adventure again.

Opportunity soon beckoned to him from the Lado Enclave.

The Enclave was a piece of land that had formerly been part of the Belgian Congo bordering on Uganda, but due to intricate diplomatic maneuverings it had literally become a no man's land upon the death of King Leopold of Belgium in 1909. It also happened to hold the greatest concentration of elephants left in Africa. All the great elephant hunters of the day made a bee-line to the Enclave upon news of Leopold's death. John was one of the first to arrive.

Now, John wasn't much of a hunter, and he wasn't much of a tracker, but he was one hell of a thinker, and while Karamojo Bell and Deaf Banks and Bill Buckley and the other legendary hunters used their bushcraft to find the fabled herds, John chose an especially Boyesian method: he entered Belgian territory, represented himself as a trader, and made friends with the Belgian district commissioner. After an appropriate number of drinks, he let it slip that he was terrified of elephants, and was going to be trading in the Lado Enclave -- and the commissioner, as a gesture of friendship, gave John a map with all the herds marked on it so he would know which areas to avoid! Within a month John had collected thirteen thousand dollars' worth of ivory.

J. A. Hunter, the aptly-named white hunter who authored four books, recalls the time that John was crossing the savage Abyssinian desert with a string of donkeys and horses he had agreed to purchase and bring back for the British troops stationed in Nairobi. Along the way, a local district commissioner asked him to load some ivory he had confiscated from poachers onto the mules and deliver it to the Governor. It would be a long, arduous journey, fraught with danger, and John demanded a very high price, which the commissioner agreed to -- but when he arrived in Nairobi the Governor refused to honor the agreement and paid him a lesser amount.

Some men would have raised hell and got themselves thrown in jail. Some would have shrugged and accepted their losses. Not John. He wandered over to the bar of the Norfolk Hotel, trying to figure out how to get his money, and found himself in the middle of a meeting of sisal growers who were enraged by some new government regulation. John promptly took control of the meeting, and within a few minutes was leading a march on the Governor's home. Once there, he told the furious farmers to wait outside, that he would speak to the Governor _mano a mano_.

Upon gaining entrance to the Governor's house, he took that poor official by the arm, led him to the window, and explained that these outraged citizens standing out there in the street were ready to lynch him for short-changing poor John Boyes. The Governor gave John the rest of the money due him, and John went outside and told the farmers that the Governor was looking into their problem and would have a solution within a very few days.

The next morning, his bank account once again healthy, John was off in search of more adventure.

He turns up in the oddest places in the history of East Africa. Though an uneducated Yorkshireman, he was a friend of Karen Blixen and even played host to Theodore Roosevelt while he was poaching ivory in the Lado Enclave. In fact, at one point during Roosevelt's visit, John offered to put a force of ivory poachers at the American's disposal if Roosevelt would remain in Africa and devote himself to opening up the Congo for commercial exploitation.

John also appears in the diary of Fred Roy, a trader: "_August 28, 1907_: John Boyes, who was up in Golbo to relieve Zaphiro, had a very narrow escape. While riding his mule he was seized round the waist by an elephant and thrown to the ground. Not being stunned, he proceeded to get up. The elephant grabbed him again, this time throwing him in the air, and with presence of mind Boyes caught hold of a tree. The elephant, not seeing him, looked round and, finding a boulder which he mistook for a man, sat down and rubbed away until scared off."

A young John Alfred Jordan, himself a notorious ivory poacher, was impressed enough by the sight of Boyes riding through Nairobi on his Abyssinian mule that he remembered it half a century later when writing his own memoirs, _Elephants and Ivory_.

At various times during his life John also ran the Norfolk stores, worked as a white hunter, was a gambler, and though no longer a young man, rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of the Legion of Frontiersmen after fighting the Germans in East Africa during World War I.

I personally find him the most fascinating and multi-faceted of all Kenyan pioneers, and I have made fictional use of him as "Catamount Greene" in my novel _Paradise_ (Tor, 1989) and as himself as Theodore Roosevelt's companion in my award-nominated novella, _Bully_ (Axolotl Press, 1990; Tor Double, 1991). I also appropriated a number of his schemes and scams in my African parody, _Adventures_ (New American Library, 1985).

He was a little man, small and wiry, but he left a big footprint across the pages of East African history. He is perhaps best captured by Lord Cranworth, who described him thus in his classic Kenya memoir, _A Colony in the Making_: "Although of amazingly strong and resilient constitution, there was nothing outstandingly impressive in his appearance or physique. The country wherein he operated was the wildest and least explored, and the tribes he encountered were the most savage and barbarous. I would judge that he had less support, near and distant, moral or actual, than any of his kindred rovers."

Fortunately, support was one thing John Boyes never needed.

-- Mike Resnick