Jim Corbett. Hunter. Badass.

Hats off!

Don’t fuck with moustachioed men. It’s a timeless aphorism by which you could safely live your life.

But among a roll-call of history’s hirsute badasses from Bennett (“Your soldiers are nothing. Matrix and I can kill every single one of them”) to Jack Churchill, one man stands alone: Jim Corbett.

Born in India during the Raj, he spent time dawdling around as a pissant railway fuels inspector… but since the age of 10 – at which age the rest of us haven’t even worked our what our whangs are for – he’d been a dedicated hunter.

But distinct from the stereotypical ‘Great White Hunters’ who walked the Earth around this time, Corbett came to believe in killing only animals that were killing people. As a hunt guide, a party (or shikar) he was leading needlessly and laughingly slaughtered hundreds of wildfowl and from then on he swore to only raise his gun against man eaters.

Rapidly, his skill as a tracker and hunter made him a one-man hit squad who was called in whenever an animal had turned man-eater. Unlike his contemporaries, who would hunt from the back of an elephant or horse and rely on a huge retinue of staff, Corbett preferred to work alone – going into the jungle by himself, sleeping in trees and most likely ingesting snakes through directly through his eyeballs. He killed the man-eaters on their own turf – regardless of whether they were in the open or hidden in bush.

That takes balls of colossal magnitude.

Perhaps his most famous kill was The Champawat Tigress – a rogue animal that had chowed down on 436 men, women and children during a 2 year reign of terror. Corbett came in and finally tracked the animal down shortly after it had claimed its last victim – a 16 year old girl. Discovering her lower leg in the bushes (a sight he later described as the most pitiful he ever saw) he was momentarily distracted until some earth started to slip down a nearby embankment, disturbed by the tiger.

Corbett fired 8 shots at the animal, which kept advancing on him until the final bullet felled her mere feet away. Now tell me that Roy Keane is a hard man.

The Bachelor of Powalgarh 0 - 1 Jim Corbett

The Leopard of Rudrapayag killed 125 people over the course of a horrifying decade – preying on pilgrims to shrines in a remote area. Naturally, it was Corbett who put paid to the leopard’s reign (resulting in the cheery, hat-waving photo at the top of the page).

Not content with that, he tracked down and killed the equally notorious Tigers of Chowgarh, the Leopard of Panar (itself reputed to have killed in excess of over 400 people) and a string of other cats that between them are estimated to have claimed 1200-1500 people.

Later in life, he dedicated his time to the conservation of India’s forests – hunting only with a film camera and trying to raise awareness of the plight of the big jungle cats.

Because of these acts – and the fact that he slept, ate and spoke with the local population in a way that was extremely singular in an age of casual racism among his contemporaries – he is still revered as a holy figure in these districts of India. His books on his experiences and his conservation work are studied in schools, and today his name lives on in the name of the Jim Corbett National Park – a sanctuary for the very animals he made his name killing.

To learn more about this remarkable historical badass, tiger killer and moustache wearer, the The Jim Corbett Omnibus is highly recommended (or look for a copy of James Clarke’s Man is the Prey, which is also all kinds of awesome).