''The Overloaded Ark'', first published in 1953, is the debut book by British naturalist

Gerald Durrell Gerald Malcolm Durrell Order of the British Empire, OBE (7 January 1925 – 30 January 1995) was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservation movement, conservationist, and television presenter. He was born in Jamshedpur in British Ind ...

. It is the chronicle of a six-month collecting trip, from December 1947 to August 1948, to the West African colony of

British Cameroon British Cameroons or British Cameroon was a British mandate territory in British West Africa, formed of the Northern Cameroons and Southern Cameroons. Today, the Northern Cameroons forms parts of the Borno, Adamawa and Taraba states of Niger ...

now

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

and

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

that Durrell made with aviculturist and ornithologist John Yealland. Their reasons for going on the trip, he wrote in the book, were twofold: "to collect and bring back alive some of the fascinating animals, birds, and reptiles that inhabit the region", and secondly, for both men to realise a long cherished dream to see Africa. Its combination of comic exaggeration and environmental accuracy, portrayed in Durrell's light, clever prose, made it a great success. It launched Durrell's career as a writer of both non-fiction and fiction, which in turn financed his work as a zookeeper and conservationist. '' The Bafut Beagles'' and '' A Zoo in My Luggage'' are sequels of sorts, telling of his later returns to the region.

History

Durrell had married Jacqueline Sonia Wolfenden (

Jacquie Durrell Jacqueline Sonia Durrell (née Wolfenden; born 17 November 1929 in Manchester, United Kingdom) is a British author. Born Jacquie Wolfenden, she married naturalist Gerald Durrell and worked alongside him for many years. She assisted him on severa ...

), 21, a music student, on 26 February 1951. She knew that he could keep a company spellbound with his talk, and wondered why he could not present stories of his animal collecting to a wider audience. Durrell, having criticized a BBC radio talk about life in West Africa, sent in a fifteen-minute radio script about his trials attempting to catch a hairy frog in the Cameroons. It was his first piece of professional writing. The BBC accepted the script, which he read, live, on the

BBC Home Service The BBC Home Service was a national and regional radio station that broadcast from 1939 until 1967, when it was replaced by BBC Radio 4. History 1922–1939: Interwar period Between the early 1920s and the outbreak of World War II, the BBC ...

the morning of Sunday 9 December 1951. ''The Overloaded Ark'' appeared in 1953.'Gerald Durrell: a biography' Douglas Botting chapter eleven 'writing man' 1951–1953

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Overloaded Ark Books by Gerald Durrell 1953 non-fiction books Faber & Faber books Debut books Books about Cameroon 1947 in British Cameroon 1948 in British Cameroon