Vivienne de Watteville

Vivienne de Watteville (1900-1957) was a Swiss writer and adventurer. Through 1923-24, she and her father, Bernard de Watteville, started a safari trip through Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo, hunting for trophies for the natural history museum in Berne, Switzerland, without the help of a professional hunter. When her father was killed by a lion, Watteville finished the trip alone, hunting the remaining species on their license, including a white rhinoceros. In her first book, Out In the Blue, 1927, she describes her experiences on safari.

The de Wateville's had been troubled by marauding lions throughout their safari. Lions had attacked the mules in the kraal and her father Bernard had shot several of the big cats. One lion, on the verge of starvation, had stormed their camp and raced off with a canvas bathtub, which it had tried to eat. Sometime later they found nails and torn bits of canvas in its droppings.

At the start of the safari, Bernard de Watteville had missed most of what he shot at. By the time he and his daughter reached the Congo, he had bagged an impressive number of trophies with the help of his daughter. Their collection included a giraffe, elephant, lion, cape buffalo, and even a male bongo. They wanted a white rhino and managed to get special permission from the Belgian authorities to shoot the animal. The young and enterprising Vivienne, though only 23 years old, handled all the taxidermy. She worked to preserve whatever her father shot for the museum. Vivienne de Watteville, was in addition to becoming a skilled taxidermist, the camp nurse, relying heavily on Epsom salts and quinine powder, her cure-all remedies.

In 1924, Bernard shot a wounded lioness with cubs. He unwisely followed the lioness on foot into a bed of reeds where she lunged at the hunter and swatted him to the ground. Unharmed, Bernard jumped to his feet and fired at the retreating lioness, causing her to whirl around and in just a few bounds, and attack him once again. The angry cat mauled him until he was able to shoot it while on it was on top of him. The cat's claws were buried in the man's body and had to be pulled out, one by one before he could get to his feet. Two hours later Bernard staggered into camp where he collapsed in his daughter's tent. Vivienne did her best to save her father, but even after treating his infected wounds with raw crystals of permanganate, the bleeding couldn't be stopped. Most daughters would have given up and gone home, however, Vivienne completed her fathers mission and continued on safari alone.

In 1928 she returned to Kenya to photograph and film. Her second journey resulted in the book Speak to the Earth, published in 1937. On 23 July 1930 she married George Gerard Goschen and they moved to Farnham, Surrey. They had two children, Tana, named after the river Tana in Kenya, and David Bernard.

References

• de Watteville, Vivienne. Out in the Blue. London, 1927.
• de Watteville, Vivienne. Speak to the Earth. London, 1937.
• Hartmann, Lukas. Die Tochter des Jägers. Zurich, 2002. ISBN 3-312-00292-3