In 1911, the South African Government, in a daring mission to the deep desert, tried to corner the world market on one of its most valuable exports—ostrich feathers.
In the decades around the turn of the 20th century, one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world was “millinery”—the art of decorating women’s hats with colorful bird feathers. From New York to London to Paris, every fashionable young lady had to have a collection of hats that were lavishly and brightly decorated with bird plumes, bird wings, or sometimes with entire stuffed birds. Some of the most popular feathers for millinery were the ornate lacy breeding plumes of the herons and egrets that lived in the southeastern United States. But these were only available during the birds’ breeding season. For the rest of the year, the plumage of choice was that of the ostrich, and most of these feathers came from farm-raised birds in South Africa. By 1910, the ostrich trade was one of the country’s most lucrative exports, ranking next to gold and diamonds.
Because the huge birds had taken up a terrestrial existence and had forsaken flight, their long feathers had become adapted for use as a mating display. Instead of the tightly-woven asymmetrical flight feathers sported by most birds, the ostrich feather was long, loose and fluffy, and lacked the tiny hooked barbs that held other feather vanes together. It was perfectly suited for decorating the hats of wealthy society ladies in Europe and America.
But the South Africans knew that there was something out there that was even better. Every once in a while, shipments would arrive containing bundles of feathers from the “Barbary Ostrich”—and these plumes outdid all others in their extravagance. The Barbary Ostrich is the largest of all the subspecies, and therefore is the largest living bird. The plumes were correspondingly larger, and were also “double-flossed”, with delicate filmy down that was twice as dense as ordinary ostrich feathers, creating a wonderfully luxurious display that would produce the finest-quality hats that anyone had ever seen. The South Africans knew an opportunity when they saw one—the Americans were already cutting into the world ostrich-plume market by farm-raising their own flocks in the deserts of Arizona, but the government in Pretoria saw at once that if they could obtain some breeding pairs of the Barbary subspecies and interbreed them with their own well-established Cape Ostriches, South Africa’s millineries would be able to produce a luxury commodity that would dominate the entire world market.
Only one obstacle presented itself: although the South Africans had been receiving the double-floss Barbary Ostrich plumes for some time now, they had passed through so many intermediaries that nobody knew where they had originally come from. The best guess anyone could make was that the mystery birds lived somewhere in the western Sahel region, at the lower edge of the great Sahara Desert within caravan range of the trading center at Tripoli. And so in 1911, the South African Government organized a “Trans-Saharan Ostrich Expedition”, which had the sole purpose of finding the home territory of the Barbary Ostrich and bringing as many of them as possible back to South Africa.
The expedition was led by Russel William Thornton, a hero from the Boer War who had taken up the ostrich-farming business. After making some hasty preparations, the expedition, consisting of Thornton, a couple of ostrich experts, and around 100 porters, trappers, cooks, translators, and others, sailed from Cape Town in August 1911. Their rushed departure was provoked by rumors of a rival: Thornton’s own brother Ernest, himself an expert ostrich-rancher, had suddenly quit his job with the Transvaal government and left for the United States, where, rumor had it, he had sold his services to guide an American expedition into Africa to try to find the fabled birds first. It wasn’t until the Trans-Sahara Expedition had already left that Russel learned the truth: his brother Ernest had been acting as a double-agent, secretly spying on the Americans and evaluating the extent of their ostrich industry.
More international intrigue would follow. After several months of trekking, Thornton’s expedition was camped near the town of Kano in British Nigeria. Among this local trading center’s products was Barbary Ostrich feathers, and the South Africans sent out scouting parties in every direction and also inspected the cargo carried in by desert caravans in an attempt to find their source. Finally, they learned that the plumes were being obtained from the area around Zinder, which was apparently the only place on earth where wild Barbary Ostriches could still be found.
And this presented a huge problem: Zinder was a week’s travel away, inside the French colony of Soudan (now part of the nation of Niger). Although South Africa was self-governing, it was technically still part of the British Empire—and the French and British Empires were centuries-long rivals. Although it might produce some sticky diplomatic entanglements and pull London into involvement with South African internal affairs, the Pretoria Government finally agreed to allow Thornton to take his expedition into French Africa and try to negotiate a trade deal. The French colonial officials, it turned out, weren’t quite sure what the South Africans wanted to do with their ostriches, but in the end they decided that if the English-allied Africans wanted them, they were probably worth protecting. The French issued strict orders that Thornton not be allowed to hunt, capture or purchase any ostriches in French territory.
The Expedition returned to British Nigeria—without any ostriches. But Thornton wasn’t ready to give up yet. As a feather importer, he already had trade relations with several of the local desert tribal leaders, and now he turned to them for help. Through some rather shady deals, these emirs were able to gradually buy, through intermediaries, a flock of 150 Barbary Ostriches, which were in turn passed on to Thornton. In April 1912, with his precious birds held in reed cages in the ship’s hold, he set sail back to Cape Town. His mission appeared to be a stunning success.
But fate was not on Thornton’s side.
In the United States, a group of bird enthusiasts calling itself the Audubon Society was formed. One of the first environmental conservation organizations in the world, it immediately targeted the millinery industry, and within a few years had successfully lobbied for laws to protect the birds from the feather hunters. By 1914 the demand for millinery had plummeted in the United States.
Then in 1914 the First World War broke out. With an entire generation of young British men off fighting in the trenches of France, young women swarmed into the work force, where they required an attire that was less ostentatious and more practical than the showy plumed hats which they had been wearing for decades. Almost overnight, the entire millinery industry died out, and the plumed lady’s hat was a thing of the past.
In South Africa, the effect was devastating. Thousands of ostrich farms went suddenly bankrupt. Thornton’s priceless Barbary Ostriches, which had been snuck into the country at enormous expense and political risk, were now worthless: the entire flock was dead by 1930. With no monetary value, the subspecies itself went extinct in its native Niger as human colonists expanded into its habitat and converted it to agriculture. Today the Barbary Ostrich has been virtually eliminated from most of the southern Sahara and survives only in scattered parts of Chad, Cameroon and Senegal. It is listed as “critically endangered”, and efforts are being made to reintroduce it to areas in its former range.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)