First edition: The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures by Lieut.-Col. J. H. Patterson, D.S.O. With a foreword by Frederick Courteney Selous. With illustrations. Macmillan and Co., London, 1907. John Henry Patterson (1867-1947) - Anglo-Irish military man, hunter, writer. From the age of seventeen, Patterson served in the British army, participated in the Anglo-Boer and the First World Wars. Patterson experienced his most amazing adventure in 1898, when he came to the territory of what is now Kenya to build a railway bridge across the Tsavo River. Construction was in jeopardy due to constant attacks by two man-eating lions. This documentary book tells about the months-long hunt for cannibals and the life of the author in East Africa. It became the basis for the plot of three films, the most famous of which is “Ghost and Darkness” (1996). An abridged Russian translation of the book was published in the almanac “On Land and Sea” (1962). Here is a newly made, but also abridged translation, which was originally located on the Wikilivres website ( Chapters were left telling about the hunt for cannibals, about the construction of a bridge, about native tribes. The chapters devoted to hunting as a sport have been greatly abridged. The original English text can be found at Project Gutenberg ( and the Internet Archive ( Photographs used as illustrations from the first edition of the book. A special section contains modern photographs taken from the Wikimedia Commons and Flickr sites and distributed by their authors under a free Creative Commons license.