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Allan Quatermain, the archetypal Great White Hunter
The heroic counterpart to the Egomaniac Hunter and the Evil Poacher, the Great White Hunter is a heroic big game hunter. He is most likely a Gentleman Adventurer, but he could also be an earthier type who leads safaris for a living. Either way, he will be an expert tracker, a crack shot, and skilled at wilderness survival.
Deliberate Values Dissonance might come up if the story is trying to impart An Aesop about respecting the lives of wild animals. Often, however, this character does admire animals even as he kills them, considering them a Worthy Opponent of sorts.
The Great White Hunter is something of a Dead Horse Trope. When he still appears, it will either be in a period piece or he will be leading expeditions to capture animals alive. May wear an Adventurer Outfit.
Despite his title, not always white...and not always all that great, either.
Examples
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Comic Books
- Congo Bill in The DCU (who later gained the ability to swap his mind with that of a giant golden gorilla because Everything's Better with Monkeys).
- Congo Bill was also featured in a 15 chapter movie serial in 1948.
- In Jon Sable Freelance, Jon showed aspects of this trope, working as a safari guide and game warden before his Roaring Rampage of Revenge turned him into a mercenary.
- There's also a DC hero called B'wana Beast (a white guy granted mystical powers by a magic helmet and a special potion). His successor, Freedom Beast, might count...except he's black...
- Ulysses Bloodstone and (to a lesser extent) his daughter Elsa, in the Marvel Universe, although they usually restricted their hunting to monsters.
- In The DCU, Paul Kirk was one of these before he adopted the superheroic identity of the Manhunter.
- Tintin in Tintin in the Congo killed a rhinoceros by blowing it up with dynamite after bullets didn't work. This and his earlier senseless killing of a monkey are especially jarring in light of his later kindness to animals in The Black Island and Tintin in Tibet. A Swedish translator made Herge redraw his work to spare the rhinoceros.
- Allan Quatermain (see Literature below) is one of the central characters in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
- Johnny Orchid, a Great White Hunter character created by J.T. Edson, whose adventures appeared in the British comic The Victor.
- Secret Six reveals that Catman's father was one of these. He was also an abusive asshole who believed that A Real Man Is a Killer to the point that he forced his son to kill his mother.
- Bob Reynolds, boyfriend of Sheena Queen Of The Jungle was supposed to be this, but he spent most of his time as a Distressed Dude.
Film
Literature
- Lord John Roxton from The Lost World.
- H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain
- Captain C.G. Biggar from the P. G. Wodehouse novel Ring for Jeeves.
- Sanger Rainsford, the hunter who becomes General Zaroff's prey in The Most Dangerous Game.
- Geoffrey Household's 1939 novel Rogue Male featured a white hunter going after Adolf Hitler. It was later filmed as Man Hunt in 1941 and Rogue Male in 1976.
- Wilson from Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
- John Hunt and his sons Hal and Roger from the Adventure series of children's novels by Willard Price.
- Richard 'Dick' Kennedy from Jules Verne's Five Weeks In A Balloon.
- A comic version of this character is Colonel the Hon. George Hysteron-Proteron CB DL JP (1870 - 1942), the invention of the author J. K. Stanford.
- Commander Trafford Bradshaw in the Thursday Next series.
- The version of Gatsby's Multiple-Choice Past that he personally tells Nick includes this, inducing a Narm attack:
“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe — Paris, Venice, Rome — collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.” With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.
- However, a minute later, Gatsby produces some evidence that other parts of his story are true, giving Nick what he later calls "one of those renewals of complete faith in him."
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
- Denys Finch-Hatton in Out of Africa.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Ned Land, the King of Harpooners.
- In the Bunduki series by J.T. Edson, James Allenvale 'Bunduki' Gunn was a Game Warden in Kenya before being transported to another planet.
- David Talbot in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles is an old Brit who keeps fondly recalling his youth, much of which was spent in the jungles of India and South America as this trope. He would also often find local lovers (usually young men).
- Tarzan goes under cover as an American big game hunter in The Return of Tarzan.
- Prepoc, the feline alien whose grave is the titular Urn Burial of Robert Westall's sci-fi novel, is described as glorying in the hunt and taking a savage joy in pursuing his quarry in battle; facing them honourably but not stupidly, and trying to take as many as possible down with a single shot. It's a holdover from the days before he was Fefethil war-leader and hunted game for food.
- Subverted in Search for the Nile with sir Mortimer P. Quimby III. He is content merely to track down the animal and aim his rifle without actually shooting, solely for the satisfaction of outwitting the beast.
- The Man with the Yellow Hat's role in the first Curious George book, where he captured George for an American zoo.
Live-Action TV
Music
- Deconstructed into absurdity in "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill", by The Beatles.
- Many sources claim that the song was actually a harsh metaphor for The Vietnam War, though it did definitely use the hallmarks of this trope.
The children asked him if to kill was not a sin,
"Not when he looked so fierce" his mummy butted in,
If looks could kill, it would have been us instead of him.
- The singer/narrator of "Hunting Tigers Out in 'INDIAH'", a music hall song covered by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, is trying to be this, although the Bonzo Dog Band's version implies he's not quite as brave as he'd like to be.
- Mentioned by name in Nightwish's "10th Man Down": "I alone, the great white hunter, I'll march till the dawn brings me rest"
Newspaper Comics
- Jungle Jim, who also appeared in radio, film, and television.
Radio
Tabletop Games
- The Explorer's Society in Deadlands even lets player characters become Great White Hunters. Of course, our herioc PCs can do this in good conscience because the "great whites" in question almost always have a taste for human flesh ("but what doesn't these days?").
- A player character archetype in Hollow Earth Expedition.
- Even though they're another society in a whole culture of hunters, the Bear Lodge of Hunter The Vigil is probably the Compact most closely matching this trope. Why? Because they tend to hunt werewolves.
Videogames
- Played straight in World of Warcraft with Hemet Nesingwary, an anagram of Ernest Hemingway, who repeatedly asks you to hunt countless animals.
- Nesingwary, incidentally, is widely hated by players for his tedious quests (which are less "hunting" than "ecological disaster") and the whole thing is hilariously subverted in the fact that he's opposed personally by a faction of druids in Wrath of the Lich King. His questline in said expansion is also arguably a lot more tolerable than his other efforts.
- Franklin Payne, one of the possible party members in Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura.
- Bonus Henchmen Col. Blackheart from Evil Genius. Complete with bear trap.
- In Champion Of The Raj, an obscure game set in early 1800s India, one way the player can win an alliance with local lords is by going tiger hunting with them. Two of the possible players are the British and French East India Company representatives.
- Captain Ash from Time Splitters.
- The Sniper from Team Fortress 2 is meant to be a version of this, except that he hunts people instead of animals.
- According to his character background, he actually used to be this trope in the Australian outback.
- The player character of the 1980 Sega game Tranquilizer Gun (which was also released for the SG-1000 as Safari Hunting).
- Sir Hammerlock in Borderlands 2, a Gentleman Adventurer who is equal parts hunter, scholar, and gentleman. He doesn't go out in the field much anymore, mostly because he literally lost an arm and a leg to some of Pandora's native fauna. His ex-boyfriend Taggart also tried to be this, but mainly just punched stalkers in the face until he got killed. He's even involved in his own DLC (titled Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt), where he invites the player to Pandora's equivalent of Darkest Africa for a safari trip.
Western Animation
- Wildly subverted by Commander McBragg from Tennessee Tuxedo And His Tales. As his name suggests, he was very sure of his skills and conquests, but they didn't always play out as nicely as he described them.
- The Beatles go on a three-week African safari holiday with great white hunter Alan Watermain in the episode "I'll Get You."
- Colonel Pot Shot from Chilly Willy. He has a vast collection of stuffed animals, each a trophy from a previous hunting expedition.
Real Life
- Jim Corbett was a hunter, conservationist, and naturalist who hunted and killed tigers and leopards that had turned man-killers. Between 1907 and 1938, Corbett tracked and killed at least a dozen man-eaters. It is estimated that the combined total of men, women, and children these twelve animals had killed was in excess of 1,500. His very first success, the Champawat Tiger in Champawat, alone was responsible for 436 documented deaths. He also shot the Panar Leopard, which allegedly killed 400 after being injured by a poacher and thus being rendered unable to hunt its normal prey. Other notable man-eaters he killed were the Talla-Des man-eater, the Mohan man-eater, the Thak man-eater, and the Chowgarh tigress. However, one of the most famous was the man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, which terrorised the pilgrims to the holy Hindu shrines Kedarnath and Badrinath for more than ten years. Later in his life, Corbett became a coservationist and had an important role of establishing India's first national park (now named after him) which is a protected area for the endangered Bengal tiger. A TV movie starring Jason Flemyng was made in 2005.
- Crocodile Hunter: Ecological awareness need not be a hindrance to the trope. The late Steve Irwin ran around in khaki shorts, and when he captured crocodiles to relocate them, he got to jump and wrestle them, which was far more exciting than to have him just shoot them.
- Subverted Truth in Television: Robert Sapolsky's autobiographical "A Primate's Memoir".
- Theodore Roosevelt. President, adventurist, Conservationist, big-game hunter, all-American hero.
- Frank Mundus was a particularly literal example of the great white hunter. What did he hunt? Great white sharks.
- Martti Kitunen (1747-1833). He shot 193 bears with a muzzle-loading musket. That means he got exactly one shot before the bear would be on his skin. He succeeded always.
- J.A. Hunter
 who, amongst other exploits, is responsible for tracking down and killing the rogue elephant of Aberdare Forest.
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