The Shimoga man-eaters

The events described in this post are nothing historical. No lines on maps were redrawn because of it, no wars fought, no great men created and only a few notable ones [who?] destroyed. If I had never thought of it, if it had never been written, Andalusada would look no different. In no way does this significantly change the overall flow of history.

This post is parerga. And yet it is legendary parerga. This post is a symptom of imperial France in its decline, a post of a story that's become etched in the French consciousness as surely as Jaws is in ours.

Background to the Shimoga man-eaters

Since it hasn't been mentioned in awhile, southern India is a French colony. L'affaire de Chimogue was entirely a colonial affair, taking place in French Malenadu - specifically in the vicinity of Shimoga, home to a fairly large and young coffee latifonde.

• The War of the French Succession left the Empire perilously close to fiscal collapse; the next generation had been spent trying to rebuild it. Fortunately for them, the Iberian coffee monopoly had cracked with the collapse of Umayyad Seville thirty years earlier; since the price of New World coffee stayed high (between limited Mexican production and Cabralia's war-shaken economy), the French colonies were able to make it a lucrative cash crop, leading to the Oriental Company's latifundism.
• From the 1880s, the spread of coffee rust blight from Africa started seriously impacting the global coffee market. French India, which had thus far managed to avoid the coffee blight, was thus even more profitable than it had ever been before.
• About a generation later [when?], tiger-hunting become the sport of choice for a certain type of cosmopolitan noble twit. Guns in hand (many totally inadequate for the task; many Frenchmen gave their lives before the black-powder cat-gun was sorted out), they managed to devastate the Malabar tiger population, which led to some interesting side effects, such as...
• ...the collapse of tiger-hunting, and with it preparation for dealing with tigers.
• ...the collapse of a lot of former tiger habitats, as growing populations along the Malabar Coast began expanding outward, pushing back the tree coverage that the tigers needed to move and progressively driving them north.
• ...a period of about a decade in which so few tiger hunts were successful that the tables began to turn: every year during this period [when?], Malabar tigers killed more humans than humans could find tigers to kill. (This was chalked up to the tigers being more aggressive rather than any environmental changes.)

French colonial policy had thoughtlessly prepared a perfect storm. Early in the 20th century [when?], that storm hit.

The initial attacks

Man-eating tigers were nothing particularly new. Man-eating tigers attacking was new, especially so boldly - Shimoga was an established city, not a hamlet in the jungles.

• The first attacks came nightly for for the second week of September, about ten days before the harvest season was supposed to begin. All of these attacks reported only a single tiger; after a few intrepid nights using bonfires, fireworks and compounds, the attacks stopped, and the harvest started more or less on schedule.
• Three weeks after the last tiger attack was reported, the harvest was disrupted when two tiger attacks were reported simultaneously, on the north and west ends of the Shimoga plantation. The harvest was called off for a day while local authorities unsuccessfully swept the area, guns in hand. Finding nothing, they ordered the harvesters to go back to work the next day.
• Two days later, the tigers struck again, in the single bloodiest attack to date. Inside of a single workday, four latifonde workers had been devoured, two had been killed but left uneaten, and another three were injured to various degrees.

After a week of attacks and sightings, the latifonde owner, facing more than a week of lost profits and lost labor, caved to the demands of his employees and called in a chasseur, Jean-François Mescombre, to deal with the tigers once and for all. Rather than flushing them, he attempted to bait them - and succeeded, catching one tiger (a male) in the open.

• Unfortunately for Mescombre, the tiger who took the bait was only wounded, not killed.
• Worse than that, Mescombre's gun jammed, and while he was unjamming it discovered that he'd somehow been flanked and ambushed by two tigers. His final moments were spent staring down the most coordinated tiger attack seen to date, and loudly reminding them that tigers do not hunt in packs. That it simply does not happen. 

When Jean-François Mescombre first came to the Shimoga latifonde, morale was at an all-time low. What had begun as a single man-eating tiger, and been revealed to be a pair, had now climbed to an unprecedented three tigers, frighteningly able to coordinate their activities apparently without communicating or actually meeting (no confirmed report ever sighted the three man-eaters together.)

On his death, morale collapsed altogether. A number of harvest workers, most of whom had neither work nor pay for more than a week, simply abandoned the latifonde for anything else to do. A number of others organized a strike, the first of its kind in Shimoga (or indeed in any Carnatic latifonde), presenting a terrified, incoherent set of demands: the right to arm themselves, a danger bonus to their pay for as long as the tigers were active, and/or another hunter to stop the carnage.

The Oriental Company launched a flurry of telegraphs. By the time the flurry subsided, they had arranged an all-expenses-paid visit by the most successful hunter of them all: the great Jean-Marc Lemercier.

Years later, when he wrote his autobiography, Lemercier would dedicate two full chapters to Shimoga. Of all his adventures, it was the only one he counted as a failure.

The arrival of Jean-Marc Lemercier

The great Jean-Marc Lemercier arrived with a Cauvigne tierseur all his own. Unlike the Modestes (which it was otherwise extremely similar to), it featured a charger guide; those connoisseurs of the tierseur who saw the detail were sobered by it. The charger guide would allow him to reload faster when he shot himself out of bullets - something Lemercier, one of the world's best shots at the time, had never once had to do. It was an unspoken confession of fear.

• The death of the male: After nearly three months of chaos, Lemercier finally claimed the first success of the entire debacle, killing the tiger that Mescombres had wounded before.
• The loss of the last: With the tigress dead, the last of the Shimoga man-eaters proved the most difficult to catch. Eventually she was flushed out into a glade, which was surrounded and then burned.

The body of the last Shimoga man-eater was never found.