"Elephant Company," Vicki Constantine Croke - A Review

This non-fiction book was recommended by a cousin, retired to New Hampshire. Later, I found that a sister who lives there as well had also read it. It was published in 2014, was on the New York Times best seller list and a New York Times “Notable Book.” Many of you will have read it. If not, you are in for a treat. 

 

Despite having long been affiliated with the political party that uses an elephant as their symbol, that fact played no role in my reading of the book, nor in my recommendation; and I have no family connection to the hero of the story, James Howard Williams.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Elephant Company, Vicki Constantine Croke 

April 27, 2024

 

“In non-monsoon seasons, the manager explained, timber was hauled by elephants to dormant, 

dry creeks, Then, when the rains arrived in the summer, stirring the tributaries to life, the lumber 

would rise with the flowing water and begin its journey to larger rivers, such as the Irrawaddy.”

                                                                                                                                Elephant Company, 2014

                                                                                                                                Vicki Constantine Croke 

 

James Howard (Billy) Williams – also known as “Elephant Bill” – arrived in Burma (Myanmar, since 1989) in November 1920. He was 23-years-old, hired by the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, Ltd., a company formed in Scotland in 1863, and today an India-based company headquartered in Mumbai. In 1920, the company was a leading producer of Teak, harvested in Burma and Siam (Thailand, since 1939). Williams was headed to the northwestern section of Burma, a remote region along the border with India, to work in one of their lumber camps. A map is provided and the reader develops a sense for the area.

 

Teak trees were cut during the inter-monsoon months (February to mid-May), when dry riverbeds allowed logs to be placed in them. Because there were few roads and virtually no railroads, elephants were used to build bridges across remote rivers and to carry logs to dried-out riverbeds before monsoon floods allowed the logs to be carried downstream to mills. 

 

Ms. Croke quotes from Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 poem “Mandalay,” written in a Cockney dialect:

 

“We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.

Elephants a-pilin’ teak

In the sludgy, squdgy creek,

Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!

On the road to Mandalay…”

 

Williams had served in India and Afghanistan during the First World War. And he had always had a way with animals. But the jungle was new to him, as were elephants. However, his curiosity (providing an autopsy on a recently-died elephant) and his talents (from sketching to managing men and communicating with elephants) allowed him to succeed with the company and rise within its ranks. Along with many others, we are introduced to Bandoola, the best-known elephant and to his keeper Po Toke.

 

But that quiet, isolated world in Burma’s jungles and teak forests changed when the Japanese invaded. Rangoon fell as did Mandalay, and Williams is charged with evacuating his men, along with a couple of hundred refugees and about 55 elephants.

 

The last part of the book tells of their escape from the Japanese, out of the jungles and over the five-and-six-thousand-foot peaks that separate what was then Burma into Assam, a state in northeastern India. They were led by Williams and the indomitable Bandoola, providing an exciting climax to this fascinating story.