Roosevelt was surrounded then by his famous “Tennis Cabinet.” This was an elastic term, for the cabinet included not only such old Western friends as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther Kelly--who was formerly an army scout against the Sioux--and Abernathy, the wolf hunter, but also men like Leonard Wood, James Garfield, Secretary of the Interior, and Robert Bacon, afterward Secretary of State.
One of the chief of the many athletic diversions of the “Tennis Cabinet” was swimming in the Potomac. Roosevelt in his autobiography tells how one day, when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, was along, the members of the party, including the Ambassador, took off their clothes preliminary to swimming in the river.
Just as they were entering the water someone cried:
“Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves!”
“I think I will leave them on, we might meet ladies!”
Often big game hunters from abroad were entertained by Roosevelt and the “Tennis Cabinet,” and when the Colonel mentioned to this group his ambition to bring his hunting experiences to a grand climax in the wilds of Africa he received the enthusiastic encouragement that one would expect to come from these hunters and sportsmen.
On March 23, 1909, with his son Kermit, he sailed from New York to Naples, thence, by way of Suez, to British East Africa, for a hunting trip in its jungles.
The Smithsonian Institute had commissioned him to collect specimens, and the faunal and floral trophies he brought back from this almost unknown country show that he fulfilled this part of his mission with brilliant success.
Roosevelt was on his way to one of the wildest parts of the earth, yet he did not entirely cut himself off from the influences of culture. Always there were books to ease his mind when the strenuous hunt was over or when the journey into the jungle grew monotonous. With him he took his famous “Pigskin library,” bound in pigskin that they might be handled by powder-stained or oil-stained hands. This strangely assorted list, which showed the wide range of Roosevelt’s reading, included the following-named authors and works:
“The Federalist,” Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”, the “Song of Roland,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer, Dante, Spenser and Milton, Shelley, Emerson, Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, Poe, Bret Harte, Bacon, Lowell, Euripides, Froissart, Macaulay, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dickens, Thackeray, Cooper and Scott. “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” were included for humor, and later were added such books as “Alice in Wonderland,” “Tartarin,” “Don Quixote” and works of Darwin, Goethe and Huxley.