Between the 1840s and the 1920s, a small number of hunters, missionaries, soldiers, and naturalists carried single-shot rifles into lion country and lived to write down exactly what happened when the lion charged first. Man-Eaters gathers nineteen of their firsthand accounts into a single volume: men dragged from their tents in the dark, oxen torn from the yoke mid-march, trackers who vanished into six-foot grass and were never found.
These are not modern retellings. Every account in this collection is drawn from the hunters' own out-of-print journals and expedition narratives, first published between the 1850s and the 1920s by men who were there: Frederick Russell Burnham, the American scout who took up the spoor of the lion that had carried off his mule boy from the corner of his own tent; William Stephen Rainsford, the New York clergyman who followed Theodore Roosevelt's path into Africa; Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, whose South African hunting grounds reach back to the 1840s; and sixteen others, including naturalists, elephant hunters, and colonial officers who each met the same animal from a different angle.
As James Sutherland, one of the hunters collected here, put it: "People living in the perfect safety of their homes in a civilized country have no conception of the insecurity that is felt by natives in their kraals in the interior of Africa. The cause of this feeling of insecurity is chiefly the man-eating lion." This book is an attempt to recover that felt danger - not through modern dramatization, but in the plain, adrenaline-charged words of the people who survived it.
Man-Eaters closes with a full Sources & Verification Notes section, documenting the original publication and public-domain basis of every excerpt, so readers and researchers alike can trace each account back to its source.
The Frontier Book Club compiles rare, public-domain accounts of exploration and survival, restoring firsthand adventure narratives that have been out of print for a century and gathering them into single volumes for a new generation of readers.
