Between Man and Beast Read online

  Mounted fish. Birds wired with wings outspread. A chimpanzee skin that he labeled the “koola-kamba.” A leopard. Spears and clubs he’d collected from the natives. The hollowed-out hippopotamus that he’d used as his “strong box” to carry dozens of his specimens home. And, of course, a stuffed gorilla—the most significant natural history specimen that had been unveiled in the country in decades.

  “Hideous monsters with unearthly names beginning with four or five consonants, and dominions of outlandish places, such as the O-go-bai river, attract the attention,” wrote a New York Post reporter after a visit to the newly opened showroom. “Uncouth forms of sluggish life repel the beholder.… But the guardian genius of the place is the gorilla, or man-monkey—one of the troglodyte tribe.”

  Paul’s showroom seemed to have it all: an authentically newsworthy specimen of almost unimaginable novelty, a perfect location in the middle of the liveliest street in America, and a proprietor who wasn’t afraid to take the floor and thrill anyone who’d listen with firsthand accounts of the beast’s life in an impossibly romantic land.

  All he needed now was an audience. But in a city torn apart by distractions, this would prove far from easy.

  ONE PERSON who undoubtedly took notice of Paul’s displays was P. T. Barnum. The world’s premier showman had made a fortune introducing America to curiosities, both real and imaginary, and Barnum’s American Museum on Broadway was a cathedral built to thrill. His ads during the first weeks of 1860 tempted the public with rare exhibits of natural history that included a marbled seal and two kangaroos. But now a newcomer had ventured onto Broadway with something that the press was calling a “man-monkey.” Paul’s gorilla threatened to steal Barnum’s thunder, not to mention some of the quarters the public had to pay to get into either door.

  Barnum was in a fix. He didn’t have a prayer of acquiring anything that could equal the gorilla in terms of sheer novelty—that is, if he observed the rules of truth in advertising. But when it came to competing for the public’s attention, Barnum rarely followed anyone’s rules but his own.

  Since John Brown’s raid, Barnum had tried to capitalize on the racial tension that was making New York sizzle. In January he had begun displaying a wax statue of John Brown, an autographed letter from the abolitionist, and two spears that Barnum claimed had been used at Harpers Ferry. At the same time in his lecture room, Barnum staged performances of a play called The Octoroon, a tragic romance set in the rural South involving a woman whose father is a white plantation owner and whose mother is a mixed-race slave woman.

  In the drama, written by an Irish-American Southerner named Dion Boucicault, the nephew of the plantation owner falls in love with the girl, whose name is Zoe. But her “dark, fatal mark” dooms them to heartbreak. In act 1, Zoe explains: “Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood.… The one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing—forbidden by the laws—I’m an Octoroon!”

  The play struck nerves among audiences on both sides of the slavery debate. Abolitionists viewed it as a racist screed, while defenders of the South suspected that the play was thinly disguised abolitionist propaganda. “If such a being as Zoe ever existed in person, her mind and the taint of her blood would create a gulf between her and the whites that would be wider than the poles asunder,” wrote New York’s Spirit of the Times newspaper, which defended the South in the slavery debate. The play “is founded upon the false idea that there is an equality in the races, an idea that is preposterous, unnatural, and profane.” Boucicault claimed impartiality: he was a Southern Democrat who felt “warmly towards the sunny South,” he wrote in a letter printed in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but hadn’t intended his play to be mixed up in politics. But it was inevitable. Arguments defending and attacking the play ricocheted through the popular press, and Barnum reveled in the controversy.

  But when Paul opened his exhibit down the street, Barnum knew he needed more incendiary firepower to attract crowds and blow his competition out of the water. In February, he took out an advertisement in the Tribune that ran down the entire length of the broadsheet page—an unusually large bit of self-promotion, even by Barnum’s standards. At more than two thousand words, it was fifty times larger than Paul’s ad in the same paper. What’s more, many of Barnum’s words were capitalized and attached to exclamation marks, drawing the eye to his side of the page:

  THAT EXTRAORDINARY LIVING CREATURE, JUST ARRIVED FROM THE WILDS OF AFRICA …

  WHAT IS IT?

  Is it a lower order of Man? Or

  Is it a higher development of the Monkey? Or

  Is it both in combination?

  NOTHING OF THE KIND

  HAS EVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!

  During the past six days not less than

  25,000 PERSONS

  have seen it, all of whom agree in pronouncing it the

  MOST MARVELOUS CREATURE LIVING.

  WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT?

  WHAT IS IT? WHAT IS IT?

  Barnum claimed that the mysterious creature, which could be viewed at the American Museum both day and night, had been “captured in the interior of Africa, on the borders of the River Gambia, by a party who were in search of the famous Gorilla.”

  The press in New York flocked to the exhibit, and Barnum manipulated the newspapers with masterly effect. Days after the exhibit’s debut, Barnum was able to reprint the kind of press coverage most promoters could only dream about. All of New York’s major papers published raves about the strange exhibit. The Sunday Times declared, “The new curiosity just added to the Museum stock seems to supply the real link between man and monkey.” The New York Times added, “It seems to be playful as a kitten and imitative as a monkey. Singular facts about him—for he is obviously of the male species—are, that he can laugh with thorough heartiness, and occasionally mutter a few words of unintelligible gibberish.… It would be hard to find a place where more can be seen for a quarter of a dollar.”

  The truth, which the papers helpfully hid, was that the “nondescript” was a black man who suffered from microcephaly, a developmental disorder that results in an unusually small skull that tapers back at the forehead. Many microcephalics are severely mentally disabled, and their motor skills are often impaired, causing some to walk with difficulty. In a letter he wrote in April 1860, Barnum confessed that he purchased the man in Philadelphia from “a certain museum proprietor in St. Louis.” Pictures taken of the man in early 1860 show that Barnum clothed his arms and legs in black fur (half of a monkey suit, essentially) and shaved his head, except for a small tuft on top, which heightened the sloping effect of his skull. When Barnum’s manager described to the audience how the “creature” could walk upright with difficulty, the man would walk across the stage in what the New-York Commercial Advertiser described as an “exceedingly awkward” stride; when he’d stoop and rest his hands on his thighs, the announcer would tell the crowd that the gesture represented “the return of its desire to use all fours.”

  Barnum began to incorporate the “What Is It?” into performances of The Octoroon, trotting the man out onto the stage between the play’s acts. Together, they formed Broadway’s most popular attraction.

  Paul and his very real gorilla, meanwhile, languished in comparative obscurity just a few blocks away, thoroughly upstaged by a living, breathing hoax.

  CHAPTER 18

  Fighting Words

  Oxford, England

  The famously gray skies of England opened up, and the leaders of Oxford University were thrilled that the sun was shining on the campus’s latest addition: the Oxford Museum. The newly completed neo-Gothic structure was a cathedral to the natural sciences, a majestic assemblage of pillars, soaring arches, and spacious halls. The June 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave the university its first chance to show it off.

  Lord John Wrottesley, the organization’s president, wel
comed attendees with a long-winded speech that threw obligatory nods to patrons and university dons and labored through a drowsy chronology of the most important British scientific advances during his own lifetime—an overview that wholly ignored Darwin’s book. The omission might not have seemed especially blatant, because On the Origin of Species, though much on the minds of the scientific community, wasn’t the book that was expected to stir up the most controversy among those in attendance. That distinction went to Essays and Reviews, an anthology of seven articles about the relationship between contemporary Christianity and science that had been published just three months before.

  Essays and Reviews was written by liberal ministers within the Church of England, and it challenged the church to give science more freedom to delve into subjects that traditionalists considered sacrosanct. The essays urged a general retreat from literal interpretations of the Bible. Beliefs that did not square with the laws of nature—such as miracles—should be considered myths. In the twenty months after its publication, Essays and Reviews would sell more copies than On the Origin of Species would sell in its first twenty years. Two of its authors would lose their jobs in the church and be indicted for heresy.

  Wrottesley, undoubtedly influenced by the interest that the essays had excited among clergy and scientists alike, assured the attendees of the conference that their work could never tarnish the glory of God.

  “Let us ever apply ourselves seriously to the task,” Wrottesley said, “feeling assured that the more we thus exercise, and by exercising improve our intellectual faculties, the more worthy shall we be, the better shall we be fitted to come nearer to our God.”

  Looking to the crowd, Wrottesley would likely have noticed Samuel Wilberforce, perhaps the most conspicuous attendee at the meeting. Wilberforce was the archbishop of Oxford, and he also indulged a personal interest in natural science. In the months before the conference he’d been meeting regularly with Richard Owen. With the anatomist’s help, Wilberforce had even written an anonymous review of Darwin’s book in the Quarterly Review. Owen, the man of science, was helping the man of the cloth develop arguments that each hoped would quash the notion that science could erode religion’s authority. The meeting of the British association, which began in earnest the next morning, would put them both to the test.

  THE MEETING’S first session that touched upon Darwin’s theories ended with a debate about the gorilla. The subject was nowhere on the program.

  It started innocently enough. The botanist Charles Daubeny presented a paper titled “On the Final Causes of the Sexuality in Plants, with Particular Reference to Mr. Darwin’s Work.” Darwin himself wasn’t in attendance; he’d been suffering from what he termed “anxiety & consequent ill health” and had retreated from the public eye during those early weeks of summer. But Huxley and Owen sat in the audience, listening. As soon as Daubeny was finished reading, the man chairing the discussion asked Huxley, already established as Darwin’s most energetic supporter, if he wanted to add more detail to defend the general crux of the theory. Huxley declined the offer. It wasn’t the right forum for a debate, he explained, and Daubeny’s paper hadn’t really raised any ideas that needed defending.

  Others jumped in to fill Huxley’s silence. The discussion digressed into a jumble of loosely related subjects, from plant reproduction to primate behavior. Someone mentioned the gorilla. Owen, with his proprietary interest in the subject, rose to speak.

  “Professor Owen wished to approach this subject in the spirit of the philosopher, and expressed his conviction that there were facts by which the public could come to some conclusion with regard to the probabilities of the truth of Mr. Darwin’s theory,” wrote a witness to the meeting in the next week’s edition of the Athenaeum. “Whilst giving all praise to Mr. Darwin for the courage with which he had put forth his theory, he felt it must be tested by facts.”

  Owen wanted to evaluate the theory by extending it to the question of man’s origin. The test he had in mind was fairly simple: an anatomical comparison of humans and the recently discovered ape he believed represented man’s closest relative. Owen identified the hippocampus minor, the spur today known as the calcar avis, as a defining difference—humans had it, he said, and gorillas didn’t. The curvature of the hippocampus minor in the human brain, he said, was a key marker pointing to a vast difference in human and ape brain development. The sizes of brains were too dissimilar. The slow workings of natural selection, he suggested, could never turn a gorilla’s brain into a human’s.

  Huxley couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. He’d heard this argument from Owen before, and he remained unconvinced. He’d read papers by multiple anatomists that suggested that ape brains, particularly those of orangutans, did have a hippocampus minor, if only a rudiment of one. Huxley “denied altogether that the difference between the brain of the gorilla and man was so great as represented by Prof. Owen,” reported the Athenaeum. Huxley “maintained that the difference between man and the highest monkey was not so great as between the highest and the lowest monkey.”

  The meeting broke up without incident shortly thereafter. But the polite disagreement would resume two days later when Wilberforce met Huxley.

  FOR MOST of the twentieth century, history cast the verbal clash between Wilberforce and Huxley as a pivotal event—if not the pivotal event—of the early Darwinian debate. But as several modern historians have since pointed out, the most reliable evidence from the period, including all the eyewitness accounts and the letters written at the time by the participants, tells a different story.

  The Saturday morning session began with another forgettable presentation, this one about the intellectual climate of Europe. Darwin was referenced. After the presentation, the chairman of the session called on Wilberforce to share his thoughts. The Athenaeum ran the most detailed account of his remarks, which argued that all the concrete facts available to science—from mummies found in Egypt to the sterility that afflicts hybrid species like the mule—speak to “the irresistible tendency of organized beings to assume an unalterable character.” Darwin’s book had presented a mere hypothesis, Wilberforce said, not a theory.

  When the bishop was finished, Huxley rose to defend Darwin’s ideas. He conceded that not every element of the theory had yet been confirmed, but he insisted that it was still the best theory concerning the origin of species that had ever been presented. Darwin’s book was full of new facts and observations, all of which bore out the theory.

  Although the Athenaeum and the other periodicals covering the conference didn’t deem it important enough to mention, Wilberforce referenced Huxley’s comments from two days before, when he had said that he believed men are more closely related to apes than apes are to lower monkeys. Wilberforce facetiously asked Huxley whether he believed he was descended from apes on his mother’s side of the family or his father’s. “This gave Huxley the opportunity of saying that he would sooner claim kindred with an Ape than with a man like the [bishop] who made so ill a use of his wonderful speaking powers to try and burke, by a display of authority, a free discussion on what was, or was not, a matter of truth,” reported Alfred Newton, a zoologist who witnessed the exchange, in a letter written a month after the meeting.

  In the mythology, Huxley’s retort is a blunt smackdown, a blow that silenced the bishop with the force of incontrovertible truth. But descriptions of a decisive victory began appearing in recollections of the event written decades after the fact. The contemporary accounts presented the debate as anything but one-sided.

  Huxley believed he had won the debate, but few others did. In a letter written just a week after the event, the director of the Kew Observatory said that Wilberforce emerged as the victor: “I think the Bishop had the best of it.” Even Joseph Dalton Hooker, a good friend of Darwin and Huxley and a fellow defender of natural selection theory, believed Huxley’s rebuttal, though justified in the wake of the bishop’s “uglyness & emptyness & unfairness,” was less than decisive. “Huxley answ
ered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly nor command the audience.” Wilberforce, in a letter written a week later, judged his debate with Huxley this way: “I think I thoroughly beat him.”

  From the distance of a century and a half, we can see that neither side registered a definitive, lasting victory during this debate. It would take decades before advances in the fossil record and new evidence from genetic theory helped another generation of scientists develop neo-Darwinism, the version of evolution that most scientists now accept.

  Far from being the decisive word on the subject, the meeting only intensified the Darwinian debate. Both Huxley and Richard Owen worked harder than ever in the months following the Oxford meeting to prove their cases.

  Owen would dedicate himself with unprecedented energy to what was called the gorilla question. In his mind, what he really needed to prove his argument was more specimens.

  Within a couple of months of the meeting, he’d receive a letter that began, “My dear Sir, let me present you with a gorilla skin.” The letter ended with the words “Sincerely, Paul du Chaillu.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The Boulevard of Broken Dreams

  New York

  While The Octoroon and the “What Is It?” exhibitions were at the height of their popularity, Abraham Lincoln checked in to the Astor House hotel, just across the street from Barnum’s showplace. It was unseasonably warm for late February, and Lincoln, dressed in a new black suit, decided to go for a stroll with some young Republicans who were eager to show him the city.

  Lincoln wasn’t a recognizable face to New Yorkers in early 1860, and if he attracted any attention at all, it was much more likely to be a result of his unusual height rather than his celebrity. Lincoln and his small retinue of friends, three or four of them at most, on a Monday afternoon headed north for more than a mile. They passed Paul’s museum, but it’s not known if they stopped to peek inside. Lincoln’s destination was just three doors up, at the corner of Broadway and Bleecker.