Between the 1850s and the 1920s, hunters, physicians, and colonial officers across India, Burma, French Indochina, and China went after the tigers that had turned to killing people - and wrote down exactly what happened when they caught up with them. Tiger Attacks gathers fourteen of these firsthand accounts into a single volume: villagers dragged from riverbanks and rice fields, a temple priest killed within sight of his own shrine, a tiger run to ground beneath the limestone caves of Amoy, and man-eaters that, by their own hunters' reckoning, had killed dozens - in one case, by estimate, over a hundred people - before the final shot.
These are not modern retellings. Every account here is drawn from the hunters' own out-of-print books and magazine narratives, first published between the 1850s and 1927 by men who were there: Sir Samuel White Baker, the Nile explorer, recounting his early tiger-hunting years in India; George P. Sanderson, who ran the government's elephant kheddah operations while pursuing the Iyenpoor man-eater; James Forsyth, whose service in Central India put him on the trail of a tiger that had shut down entire roads; W. Hogarth Todd, mauled by a man-eater in 1904 and still hunting tigers years later with a permanently disabled gun-hand; an American physician tracking a man-eater through French Indochina; and nine others, including a colonial governor, an elephant-kheddah official, and a landholder in the Central Provinces, each meeting the same danger from a different angle.
As James Forsyth wrote of the man-eater that had closed the roads out of Betul: "He occupied regularly a large triangle of country... striking terror into a breadth of not less than thirty to forty miles." This book is an attempt to recover that felt danger - not through modern dramatization, but in the plain, unadorned words of the people who lived it.
Tiger Attacks closes with a full Sources & Verification Notes section, documenting the original publication and public-domain basis of every excerpt, so readers and researchers alike can trace each account back to its source.
The Frontier Book Club compiles rare, public-domain accounts of exploration and survival, restoring firsthand adventure narratives that have been out of print for a century and gathering them into single volumes for a new generation of readers.
