How it is used by the British Government in India.
    Its elephant fleet is one of the strangest and most deadly departments maintained by the British government in India. It is a large fleet of coasting steamers specially built for the transport of elephants. India’s population is one-fifth that of the entire globe. All these people use elephants. They use them for draft work and for tiger hunting, and in the arenas of the native states they even pit them against one another and against wild beasts. The elephant fleet transfers the animals from Dacca, the trapping and training headquarters, to the various districts whence comes the demand:
    To get an elephant aboard ship is a difficult and dangerous task. The animal must wade through the surf to a stout raft, and this unknown surf, so white and tumultuous, often terrifies and maddens him. If in his fury he slaughters a mahout or two he cannot be greatly blamed. Once on the raft, his legs are tied to pegs, and the slow sail to the ship is uneventful. But now a great band must be arranged under the elephant’s belly, and a crane must hoist him up some twenty or thirty feet to the deck. Here again the elephant cannot be set down as intractable if, losing his head in that unprecedented serial journey, he murders some more mahouts. Very prosperous, albeit stained a little with mahouts’ blood, the elephant fleet for many years has plied up and down the Indian coast, embarking and disembarking its heavy, unmanageable freight.-New York Press.
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