Vivienne Florence Beatrice de Watteville (17 August 1900 – 27 June 1957) was a British travel writer and adventurer, author of two books based on her experiences in East Africa in the 1920s, Out in the Blue (1927) and Speak to the Earth (1935). She is best remembered for taking charge of and continuing an expedition in the Congo and Uganda at the age of 24, when her father was killed by a lion.
Vivienne de Watteville was the only child of the Swiss-French naturalist and artist Bernard Perceval de Watteville (Bernhard Perceval von Wattenwyl, 1877–1924) and his English wife Florence Emily Beddoes (1876–1909). Her father had been a pupil of the painter Hubert von Herkomer before turning naturalist. Her mother died of cancer when she was nine, and she spent her childhood holidays from her English boarding-school (St. George's School, Ascot) tomboyishly alone with her father, whom she called 'Brovie' ['brother'], in remote parts of Norway and in the Alps. (He called her 'Murray, my son'.) She had wanted to go to Oxford University and earn her own living, but her father, possessive to a fault, had brushed aside both ideas.
In 1923 Vivienne and her father, with a large team of African helpers, set off on an eighteen-month safari through Kenya, Uganda and the Belgian Congo. It was primarily a hunt for big game, collecting fauna for the Natural History Museum of Bern, Switzerland, without the help of a professional hunter. In her first book, Out in the Blue (i.e. in the far country), published in 1927, she describes her experiences on safari. The de Wattevilles were troubled by marauding lions through much of their trip. Lions attacked the mules in the boma (camp enclosure) and Bernard shot several of the big cats. One, on the verge of starvation, stormed their camp and raced off with a canvas bathtub, which it tried to eat. Sometime later they found nails and torn bits of canvas in its droppings. (They found the remains of their missing Airedale Terrier inside a leopard.) At the start of the safari, Bernard de Watteville missed most of what he shot at; by the time he and his daughter reached the Congo, he had bagged more than a hundred trophies.
Their collection included the Big Five (elephant, lion, leopard, cape buffalo, and rhino). They also shot giraffe, over thirty types of antelope, and even a male mountain bongo, which took seven weeks of stalking in the Aberdare Range. With the help of Echuya Batwa (Pygmy) trackers, they approached gorillas in the Virunga Mountains but were unable to shoot one. They also wanted a northern white rhinoceros and had obtained special permission from the Ugandan authorities to shoot the animal.
The young and enterprising Vivienne, though only 23 years old, handled all the taxidermy, working to preserve whatever her father shot for the museum. She was, in addition, the camp nurse, relying heavily on Epsom salts and quinine powder, her cure-all remedies.
"My father went down with jaundice and I was crippled by veld sores (Africa's worst kind of boil). How I dreaded the wet branches that sprang back like a whip-lash against my festering shins. We all of us had septic throats, and the porters and cook went down with fever."
On 30 September 1924, on the Congolese shore of Lake Edward, shortly after being refused permission by the Belgian authorities to hunt the rare okapi, Bernard shot and wounded a lion, his nineteenth. Adhering to the hunting standard that no wounded animal should be abandoned (he had previously pursued wounded buffalo in thick cover), he followed the lion into a bed of reeds where it lunged at him and swatted him to the ground. He jumped to his feet and fired at the retreating animal, causing it to whirl around, attack and maul him, until he was able to shoot it while it was on top of him. Its claws, buried deeply in his body, had to be torn out one by one before he could push the body off him. Two hours later, bleeding profusely, Bernard staggered into camp where he collapsed in his daughter's tent. Vivienne did her best to save her father, treating his infected wounds with raw crystals of permanganate, but the bleeding could not be stopped. Bernard died later that night and was buried the day after. Though suffering from spirillum fever and shock, and though before her father's death she had killed nothing bigger than dik-dik and guinea fowl, Vivienne took charge of the safari and completed the mission, shooting both for the pot (she had a team of sixty native trackers, skinners and porters to feed) and for the collection. One of the remaining species on their license that she successfully hunted was a northern white rhinoceros.
Vivienne returned to Europe in 1925 to write her book. Among admirers of Out in the Blue was Wilfred Thesiger, who was greatly impressed and moved by it. Despite the killing, the book is notable for its sensitive description of animals and landscape and for its note of regret. "To have been granted even one [bongo] cow was a great concession, for they are strictly preserved; to have slain two seemed to us nothing less than calamity." The de Watteville specimens, mounted, were exhibited from 1936 in the dioramas of the new Musée d'histoire naturelle at Bern.
A German translation of Out in the Blue by Rolf Bally was published in 1949 as In blaue Fernen: Afrikanische Jagdabenteuer (:'In blue distances: African hunting adventures'). A Spanish translation by Raquel Bahamonde Barreiro, Bajo el cielo azul (:'Under the blue sky'), was published in 2023, on the centenary of the expedition.
Natural History Museum of Bern: some de Watteville dioramas
In 1928–29 Vivienne returned to Kenya for seven months, officially to photograph and film elephants, but on a personal level to seek solitude Thoreau-style and fulfil a personal dream of going into the wilds unarmed and "in some unforeseen way to win the friendship of the beasts." "Now I was going back in my own way," she noted pointedly. After overcoming official resistance – she was by then a minor celebrity in the Colony and an aristocratic beauty in demand socially – she spent five months camping in the Maasai Game Reserve on the border with Tanganyika, alone but for five porters from the 1923-4 expedition, her Irish Terrier Siki, her books, gramophone and collection of classical records, and an armed askari (the colonial officials were taking no chances). "Around me the plains ran out to the far mountains melting into the night, and above all, like an invisible presence, Kilimanjaro drew a faint gleam of snow under the first stars." Despite bouts of malaria she mostly achieved her aims: she was tolerated by the elephants, and her chosen camp-site near Namanga turned out to be rhino grazing-ground, with the rhinos returning to graze around the tents. She narrowly escaped death in a close encounter with a lion (thinking the visitor one night was a hyaena, she left her tent to chase it off, realising her mistake too late to retreat: she was so close to the lion she could have touched it), and twice with charging rhinos that missed her by inches; she climbed two mountains (Ol Doinyo Orok and Longido); and she killed no animals except, at the request of the local Maasai, a man-eating lioness, shot by her askari.
She then spent an idyllic two months (January–February 1929) based in Urumandi Hut on Mount Kenya (see Mountaineering on Mount Kenya), in the giant heather and parkland zone, some of the time with two porters and some alone, exploring the mountain and valleys, bathing naked in the rock-pools below the Nithi Falls, befriending the birds and small animals, collecting flowers and seeds, sketching the flora, and meditating "first principles". While up at the peaks she witnessed the third ascent of Mount Kenya, by Eric Shipton, Percy Wyn-Harris and Gustav Sommerfelt (January 1929), who next day took her on a scramble around the south-face glaciers. She thanked them on their return to Urumandi Hut with perfectly mixed cocktails. In her last weeks on the mountain she and the porters saved the alpine hut from a wildfire after a day-long struggle. Suffering toothache a few days later, rather than cut short her stay and return to Nairobi, Vivienne pulled out the tooth herself in an operation that took three hours and forty minutes, using first fishing-wire and gravity, then pliers from her tool kit.