Jim Corbett(1875-1955)

British hunter who spent most of his adult life in India. He was born in a hill station in India, the second youngest of thirteen children. One of his older stepsisters had survived the siege of Agra during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. His father died when he was 4, while serving at the 'volatile' Afghan border. He was brought up by his mother on their Naini Tal estate and their "Irish cottage" at Kaladhungi, fifteen miles away. He was fascinated with the jungles as a child and collected birds eggs, studied wildlife and learnt to hunt. From the age of 18 he worked for over twenty years for a railroad company in India. During World War I he was captain of the 500 man 70th Kumaon Labor Corps to France. After the war he was promoted to Major and sent to the North West Frontier as Commandant of the 114th Labor Battalion in the Third Afghan War. From 1920 to 1936 he spent half of each year in Tanganyika, Africa, where he hunted and tracked big game. He supervised growing of coffee and maize on his plantation on slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. In 1930 he gave up hunting big game when he discovered the wonders of a 16 mm movie camera. Instead he began to 'shoot' animals with his camera. He continued, however, to hunt man-eaters who were disrupting human communities. Corbett shot the "Bachelor of Powalgarh," the most prized big-game trophy of the decade. His other famous kills included the "Champawat man-eater" and the "Man-eaters of Kumaon", the latter whom he killed in 1907 after they had killed nearly 436 victims. His last man-eater hunt was the Thak man-eater in 1938. His most famous book about his exploits in tracking and killing man-eating tigers, lions and leopards in India - Man-Eaters of Kumaon was published in 1944.