吉姆·科比特

Edward James Corbett (25 July 1875 – 19 April 1955) was an Anglo-Indian hunter and author. He gained fame through hunting and killing several man-eating tigers and leopards in Northern India, as detailed in his bestselling 1944 memoir Man-Eaters of Kumaon. In his later years, he became an outspoken advocate of the nascent conservation movement.

Born in Nainital, Corbett explored and hunted in the jungles of India in childhood. He shot his first man-eater in 1907 and continued to hunt and kill such animals over the next four decades. Animals such as the Champawat Tiger, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, and the Panar Leopard had taken hundreds of victims in the divisions of Kumaon and Garhwal, before their deaths at Corbett's hands. Man-Eaters of Kumaon, which detailed several such hunts, became an international bestseller; it was followed by several other books and was adapted into a 1948 Hollywood film. Corbett increasingly disdained what he saw as the rapacious extermination of India's forests and wildlife, and fervently promoted wildlife photography as an alternative to trophy hunting. He played a major role in the creation of India's first wildlife reserve in 1934; it was renamed Jim Corbett National Park after his death. The Indochinese tiger subspecies received the scientific name Panthera tigris corbetti in his honour.

For many years, Corbett earned a living working for the railway companies, and for twenty-two years supervised the transport of goods across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat. During the First World War, he recruited a labour corps and commanded them on the Western Front; he also supervised the logistics of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. Returning to his home town during the interwar period, he became a prominent local landowner and businessman who also organised hunts for the elite of British India, including the then-Governor-General Lord Linlithgow, who became a close friend. Corbett served as an instructor in jungle survival for troops of the Burma campaign during the Second World War. Dismayed by the febrile atmosphere surrounding the Indian independence movement, he emigrated to Kenya in 1947, and died in Nyeri eight years later.

Ancestry and early life

The Corbetts descended from several families who had emigrated from the British Isles to the Indian subcontinent over the course of the 19th century. His paternal grandparents Joseph and Harriet Corbett, having eloped together from a monastery and a nunnery in Belfast, had arrived in India on 7 February 1815. They had nine children; the sixth, Christopher William, was born at Meerut in 1822, and followed his father into the Bengal Army, where he served as a medical officer. He married Mary Anne Morrow in December 1845, and they had three children before her early death. Surviving the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he retired from military service and married Mary Jane Doyle née Prussia, a 22-year-old widow of Anglo-Irish descent, in 1859. She had four children from her previous marriage to Charles James Doyle of Agra, who was killed in the mutiny.

In 1862, Christopher William was appointed the postmaster of Naini Tal, a thriving hill station in northern India which had been untouched by the Mutiny. There, he and Mary Jane had nine children, and additionally raised four children of a deceased sister. As Christopher William's salary was not large enough to support so many people, they supplemented their income through shrewd property investments, which Mary Jane was especially skilled at—she in effect became the first estate agent in Naini Tal, a valuable position in the rapidly-expanding town. Through his social connections and friendship with Henry Ramsay, the commissioner of the Kumaon division, Christopher William was additionally able to acquire a plot of land in the southern plains of Kumaon near Kaladhungi, on which he built a winter residence he named Arundel.

Edward James Corbett, the eighth and penultimate child of Christopher William and Mary Jane, was born on 25 July 1875 in Naini Tal. His early childhood years were privileged, and he was cared for by his mother, his elder sisters, and local servants; from the latter, he picked up the local languages, the basics of Hindu practices and philosophy, and some of their superstitions. However, the family soon suffered two misfortunes: first, a large landslide on 18 September 1880 which killed 151 people additionally ruined several of the Corbett's property investments; and second, Christopher William, who had retired from postmastership in 1878, died on 21 April 1881 after suffering heart problems. Mary Jane built a home on the opposite side of Naini Tal lake to the landslide; named Gurney House, it would be Jim Corbett's home for most of his life.

Corbett spent much of his childhood exploring the jungles around Gurney House; from these explorations, and from willing adults such as his eldest brother Tom and Kunwar Singh, the headman of the nearby village Chandni Chauk, he gained intimate knowledge of the habits of the local wildlife. He also began hunting, first with projectile weapons such as a catapult and a pellet bow, until being gifted an old muzzle-loading shotgun at the age of eight. With these weapons, he grew more skilled at hunting and tracking animals. After surviving a near-fatal bout of pneumonia at the age of six, he began his formal education in Naini Tal at Oak Openings School; there, training with the local cadet company, the ten-year-old Corbett's shooting impressed a group of dignitaries including the future Field Marshal Earl Roberts enough that he was granted a loan of a military-specification Martini-Henry rifle. Not long afterwards, he shot his first big cat—a leopard—with this rifle.