J.E, Hughes operated hunting safaris in the S.E. Bangweulu in Northern Rhodesia from 1911-1919. He then gave it all up, moving to Port Elizabeth for good. The rhino was shot near the Luambatwa River at its source, not far from the Luangwa Escarpment. The last rhino were killed there in 1973 (and extinct in Zambia c. 1993) - one of my patrols caught the poacher. The Chinese building the nearby Tanzam railway supplied the market. Hughes's book Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu (1933) is one of the finest hunting books in existence.
'Hughes landed at Chinde, at the mouth of the Zambezi, on 18 August 1901, with £9 and two good rifles. After three years in the service of the BSA Company in North-East Rhodesia as a Native Commissioner, he moved into the swamps and floodplains of Bangweulu as a White Hunter and trader in otter skins until the outbreak of WWI. Then he took on the massively important task of setting up a 400-mile dugout canoe transport network through the Bangweulu, which allowed Allied war supplies to be transported to the front in East Africa. His book Eighteen Years on Lake Bangweulu, published in 1933, is a natural history classic.'
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