Rooke Biographical Record
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Biographical Record
Dr. Percival Rooke
Born: 1 Mar 1858 · Died 29 Feb 1908
Occupation: Naturalist, Cartographer and Explorer
Cause of Death: Impaled through the chest by the second tusk he brought home from his final expedition.
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Percival Rooke joined the Society in 1886 after being politely encouraged to leave the Royal Geographical Society following what contemporary correspondence describes only as the Zanzibar Incident.
A cartographer by training and an explorer by temperament, Rooke specialized in investigating reports of animals considered extinct, misidentified, or, in his words, "dismissed by men who have never been farther from London than Brighton."
His most notorious expedition began in 1900, when Rooke led six men into the interior of Portuguese East Africa in pursuit of an animal described by local accounts as an enormous nocturnal boar with downward-curving tusks.
Four months later, Rooke emerged alone.
His right eye was damaged and he carried two enormous tusks lashed to his pack. He refused to explain what had happened to the other members of the expedition, stating only that they had "mistaken evidence of feeding for evidence of habitation."
Rooke subsequently had one tusk fashioned into a ceremonial gorget and wore a smoked-glass monocle over his ruined eye. He died the following year.
His body was discovered inside a locked room at the Society's London offices. Examination revealed extensive trauma to the right side of the skull consistent with the injuries sustained during his final expedition. More troubling was the fresh puncture wound through the sternum.
The second tusk was missing.