3-011-922 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mode of capturing wild elephants in Ceylon: an elephant kraal, with the "grand stand" for the English visitors, 1864. Engraving of a photograph '...of the great elephant-catching expedition to a place called Ebbewellepittia...so as to afford the utmost sport and entertainment to the European visitors...The kraal...is a square inclosure, sixty or seventy yards in length and breadth, with openings on three of its sides, through which the elephants are to enter, and which may be strongly barricaded when a sufficient number of them have been driven in. The interior of the kraal is left full of thick natural jungle, with a small pool of water in the midst of it. The inclosure...is formed by a strong palisade, ten or twelve feet high, consisting of trunks of small trees firmly fixed in the ground, and connected together by three rows of horizontal beams, tied by tough and lissom creepers cut from the jungle; the whole being further supported by buttresses or slanting pieces of timber, forked at the end where the horizontal beams rest upon them, and sunk deep in the ground at the other end. At one comer of the kraal...stood the "Grand Stand," an open building of two stories, erected for the accommodation of the lady spectators'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.