Between Man and Beast Read online

  The book hadn’t been out for a week, and every customer who poured into Mudie’s seemed to have the same request: “Du Chaillu’s gorilla book.” It shot to the very top of Mudie’s advertised list.

  It wasn’t just the library’s most popular book of the season. It was fast becoming one of the most popular in Mudie’s history.

  AMONG THE first publications to review the book was John Thadeus Delane’s Times of London. The article, embroidered with superlatives and running more than three thousand words, brought the mysterious Delane’s view of Paul’s adventures into clear focus.

  “We must go back to the voyages of Le Perouse and Captain Cook, and almost to the days of wonder which followed the track of Columbus, for novelties of equal significance to the age of their discovery,” the Times stated. “M. du Chaillu has struck into the very spine of Africa, and has lifted the veil of the torrid zone from its western rivers, swamps, and forests.”

  The review summarized his travels and quoted liberally from the text. It marveled at Paul’s encounters with cannibals and especially with the “interesting monster” that currently had the public in its terrifying grip. The man who had journeyed so far to tell such incredible tales, the article suggested, had shown a rare sort of courage that deserved special celebration.

  “Such exploits on the part of a slight, wiry American gentleman of French extraction, whose modesty and evident trustworthiness have commended him to almost everyone who has met him in English society,” the newspaper concluded, “are a sufficient explanation of the eagerness to read his narrative, and more than an excuse for our own prompt attention to its varied contents.”

  Competing periodicals heaped similar praise upon the book. The Saturday Review concluded that “M. du Chaillu’s narrative will not disappoint the expectations which it has excited,” and the Spectator reported that the book was “all that could possibly be wished.” Many of the reviews stretched on for thousands of words, excerpting Paul’s passages and then lamenting the fact that they couldn’t print more. The book reviewer for the Critic expressed his dilemma this way: “To quote everything that is interesting in this volume would be tantamount to a reprint of the entire volume.”

  EXPLORATIONS AND Adventures in Equatorial Africa as originally published in England ran to 479 pages, including seventy-three sketches and a map that roughly charted Paul’s expedition routes. The frontispiece was an 8.5-by-11-inch foldout drawing of a gorilla standing upright with its right foot propped on a rock. The posture was deliberately human. The artist who’d drawn the portrait made sure that a conveniently placed tree branch performed the work of Adam’s proverbial fig leaf, artfully obscuring the gorilla’s groin.

  The book was presented as a strictly chronological reconstruction of Paul’s experiences in Africa between 1855 and 1859. Aside from the members of a handful of African tribes, Paul was the first person to ever encounter a gorilla in the wild, and he clearly understood that his book’s success rested on his descriptions of that animal. He rarely wasted an opportunity to titillate. His gorilla was a “hellish dream creature” that rules the jungle through sheer intimidation.

  As the title suggests, the book had competing aims: at times it read like an analytic document of exploration, and at others it switched narrative gears into a boyish adventure that tantalized with the thrill of the exotic. The book’s schizophrenic desire to have it both ways threatened at times to tear the narrative apart, but that tension also lent it a propulsive energy that made it so popular.

  Was Paul condemning the ferocious, terrifying natural world that he encountered as a place that needed to be civilized, or was he celebrating it? Did he believe the gorilla bore a striking resemblance to man, or did it represent the very opposite of humanity? He left the questions open, and the resulting uncertainty shook the ground under the feet of Victorian readers, providing them with the irresistible jolt of a thrill ride. The world had entered an era of uncertainty, and Paul’s own conflicted vision supplied it with a fascinating, if disorienting, fun-house mirror.

  He portrayed himself as a young man who was eager for a challenge and fortunate to survive the experience. In the preface, he offered this summary of his journey:

  I travelled—always on foot, and unaccompanied by other white men—about 8000 miles. I shot, stuffed, and brought home over 2000 birds, of which more than 60 are new species, and I killed upwards of 1000 quadrupeds, of which 200 were stuffed and brought home, with more than 80 skeletons. Not less than 20 of these quadrupeds are species hitherto unknown to science. I suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, taking, to cure myself, more than fourteen ounces of quinine. Of famine, long-continued exposures to the heavy tropical rains, and attacks of ferocious ants and venomous flies, it is not worth while to speak.

  The book dripped with sensational descriptions of gorillas, a beast whose chest beating could be heard a mile away and whose hideous roar made the trees tremble. Tellingly, the story of the gorilla bending the native hunter’s gun barrel in his mouth was highlighted in all its monstrous glory, even though Paul made it clear he didn’t witness the event himself. A pencil sketch of the imagined scene wrung every drop of melodrama out of the anecdote.

  But near the end of the book, the lurid tone that defined most of the narrative abruptly gave way to a healthy dose of analytic sobriety. Despite the brute’s reputation as a man hunter, Paul described the gorilla as shy and a “strict vegetarian.” He noted, “I examined the stomachs of all which I was lucky enough to kill, and never found traces there of aught but berries, pineapple leaves, and other vegetable matter.” He continued:

  I am sorry to be the dispeller of such agreeable delusions; but the gorilla does not lurk in trees by the roadside, and drag up unsuspicious passers-by in its claws, and choke them to death in its vice-like paws; it does not attack the elephant and beat him to death with sticks; it does not carry off women from the native villages; it does not even build itself a house of leaves and twigs in the forest-trees and sit on the roof, as has been confidently reported of it. It is not gregarious even; and the numerous stories of its attacking in great numbers have not a grain of truth in them.

  Such abrupt shifts between sensationalistic hyperbole and dispassionate debunking epitomized the book’s split personality. The schisms were most obvious when Paul struggled with a core question: Did the gorillas bear a strong relation to men, or did they not?

  As might be expected of someone who owed his education to missionaries, he felt a strong pull toward religious tradition. He’d been taught to view humans and the animal kingdom as definitively separate, and he repeatedly professed a firm belief in that idea. In a passage that was added to the book just before its publication, he contrasted the cranial capacity of the skulls of men with those of apes. Paul asserted that the differences evident between the skulls provided “incontestable proof of the great ascendancy of the intellectual life of the human species, even in the lower orders of the human family.… The difference of size of brain or cranial capacity between the highest ape and the lowest man is much greater than between the highest ape and the lowest ape.” The addition had Richard Owen’s fingerprints all over it. It sounded as if it could have come straight from one of the anatomist’s lectures.

  Despite the book’s respectful nods to convention, it was difficult to determine from the text whether Paul truly believed it. To him, the gorilla represented “a being of that hideous order, half-man, half-beast, which we find pictured by old artists in some representations of the infernal regions.” He wrote:

  I protest I felt almost like a murderer when I saw the gorillas this first time. As they ran—on their hind legs—they looked fearfully like hairy men; their heads down, their bodies inclined forward, their whole appearance like men running for their lives. Take with this their awful cry, which, fierce and animal as it is, has yet something human in its discordance, and you will cease to wonder that the natives have the wildest superstitions about these “wild men of the woods.”
/>
  Explorations and Adventures isn’t just the story of Paul’s quest “to find the very home of the beast I so much wished to shoot.” It’s also the chronicle of a conflicted man’s attempt to suppress a terrifying suspicion: the beast he’s pursuing seems, in a most unsettling way, to resemble himself.

  SEVERAL WEEKS after his lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, Paul delivered a speech at the Royal Institution, where he again confronted a lecture hall that was “crowded to excess.”

  Owen sat next to his wife, Caroline, in the audience. She described the event in her diary: “M. Du Chaillu gave a very quaint, clear, and interesting account of his travels in Africa, and his meeting with the gorillas, a row of which hideous creatures was overhead: some skulls were before the lecturer, who traced his progress on a large map as the lecture proceeded.”

  As he continued to lecture throughout London, Paul would survey the crowd, gauge what sort of story they wanted to hear, and then he’d give it to them. Anyone who regularly attended such meetings had heard enough academic lectures to last a lifetime. But stories that thrilled, delivered by someone who had the authority of a man of science, were a relative novelty. His audience wanted to be entertained.

  “Shooting a lion,” he told the Royal Society audience with nonchalance, “is merely shooting a great beast. But there is something more dreadful in killing one of these apes. Their death is terrible, and, when in the conflict, you can but feel that if you make any mistake with the monster, he will not make any mistake with you.”

  He wasn’t just walking the thin line between credibility and bravado; he was dancing on it. Whether or not he realized it, he was turning himself into a caricature—a fearless explorer who had faced nature’s darkest secrets and lived to tell about it. The image was destined to outgrow the man himself. In more ways than one, Paul was creating a monster.

  CHAPTER 23

  Into the Whirlwind

  May in London marked the beginning of a period known simply as the Season. The gray skies rolled back to welcome the sun, and the city swelled with an influx of aristocracy who each spring moved out of their countryside estates and into their town houses in Mayfair and Green Park.

  Ladies with parasols shopped at the arcades in the mornings, and they “paid calls”—short home visits of fifteen to thirty minutes—to friends between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. The House of Lords was in session, and its members spent almost as much time engineering private business deals as they did crafting legislation. Private balls and soirees consumed the evenings. The theater season kicked in to full gear.

  To take advantage of the influx of social traffic, the Royal Geographical Society opened the doors of its headquarters at 15 Whitehall Place, inviting the public to visit an exhibition of one of Paul’s gorillas. From 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., visitors could stand in front of the brute, whose arms were spread in a posture of fearsome attack. The animal’s lips were pulled back to better reveal the teeth, which, according to one reporter, “from their size might fairly be denominated tusks.” The label on the specimen read, simply: “KING.”

  Instead of returning to the United States, Paul opted to remain in the house at Mayfair belonging to Sandbach, the RGS fellow. Paul occasionally visited the exhibit himself, amazed at the adulation that was showered upon him by some of the wealthiest people in the world. He dined with lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses. His name seemed to be on everyone’s lips.

  If Paul himself wasn’t the most popular attraction of the season, the title had to go to the animal he had brought to the world’s attention. The distinction made little difference. The man and the beast had become inextricably linked in the popular imagination.

  More than any animal before or since, the gorilla had become an instant cultural phenomenon, dominating every level of public discourse from the highest of the highbrow to the lowest of the lowbrow.

  BEFORE THE 1840s, the word “cartoon” wasn’t associated with humor or caricature. A cartoon was simply what artists called the preliminary sketches they used as guides for paintings, frescoes, or tapestries.

  But in 1843, London’s Punch magazine poked fun at Parliament by sketching a “cartoon” of a possible painting that could be hung in the Palace of Westminster for an upcoming state-sponsored art contest. After this, the word “cartoon” stuck as a label attached to humorous sketches, like the ones Punch began to publish each week.

  In the spring of 1861, one of the magazine’s cartoons pictured a gorilla standing upright, holding a walking stick, and wearing a placard around its neck that read, “Am I a Man and a Brother?” Everyone who read Punch would have understood the joke instantly. Before England had abolished slavery in 1833, the symbol of the Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade was a portrait of a slave, chained and kneeling in a posture of supplication, bearing the inscription “Am I not a man and a brother?”

  Punch titled the cartoon “Monkeyana” and featured a long poem as its caption. Signed by an author called only “Gorilla,” the poem occupied three-fourths of a page:

  Am I satyr or man?

  Pray tell me who can,

  And settle my place in the scale.

  A man in ape’s shape,

  An anthropoid ape,

  Or monkey deprived of his tail?

  The Vestiges taught,

  That all came from naught

  By “development,” so called, “progressive”;

  That insects and worms

  Assume higher forms

  By modification excessive.

  Then Darwin set forth,

  In a book of much worth,

  The importance of “Nature’s selection”;

  How the struggle for life

  Is a laudable strife,

  And results in “specific distinction.”

  Let pigeons and doves

  Select their own loves,

  And grant them a million of ages,

  Then doubtless you’ll find

  They’ve altered their kind,

  And changed into prophets and sages.

  The poem continued for several stanzas before noting that apes “can’t stand upright, / Unless to show fight, / With ‘Du Chaillu,’ that chivalrous knight!”

  Years later it was revealed that “Monkeyana” was penned by Sir Philip Egerton, a geologist by training. It has become a regularly cited reference illustrating the early Darwinian debate. It was prompted not by the publication of On the Origin of Species but by the popular sensation stirred by Paul and his gorillas.

  THE PRESS loved him—a “man of insignificant personal strength,” according to the Times, who’d successfully slain a beast no one before had ever dared confront. Now he was being feted by elite Britain, an outsider who’d somehow wedged his foot in the door. Reporters delighted in the fish-out-of-water ambience that positively dripped from him.

  According to one story, Samuel Wilberforce—still running victory laps after what he perceived as a triumph in his debate with Huxley—invited Paul to breakfast to meet about ten of the country’s top men of science (or at least ten who’d earned the bishop’s approval). When the appointed hour arrived, all the invitees gathered around the breakfast table—except Paul.

  The next day, Wilberforce tracked down Paul on the street, curious to know why he’d been a no-show at the event hosted in his honor. A baffled Paul explained that he hadn’t received the invitation from Wilberforce, a man so famous that he was known simply as “the Bishop” throughout London.

  “But I left the note myself at your door,” Wilberforce insisted.

  “Must have miscarried,” Paul replied. “I have seen no breakfast invitation except one from one ‘Mr. Bishop,’ and I make it a point to decline all invitations from people I don’t know.”

  PARLOR MUSIC and dancing had become one of London’s most popular pastimes. Someone would sit at the piano, while four couples would stand in a square formation, with each couple occupying a separate corner of the imaginary quadrangle. The pianist would play,
and the dance—called a quadrille—would commence. The couples would take turns dancing in the center of the square, sometimes exchanging partners.

  Publishing companies capitalized on the craze by selling sheet music that could accommodate this kind of dancing. The songs themselves became pop standards. In 1861, the stalls that sold sheet music stocked a new song, written by C. H. R. Marriott, titled “The Gorilla Quadrille.”

  The cover showed a drawing of a gorilla—dressed in tails and a bow tie—conducting an orchestra, while couples danced in the background. The music itself pulsed with primitive rhythms.

  The lyrics were breezy and crude:

  My name it is gorilla, and by that you plainly see

  By birth I am a Darkie, but you can’t get hold of me.

  I laugh—Ah, Ah!

  I sing—Doo Dah, Ah, Ah!

  Doo Dah! Ah, Ah!

  I’m th’ wonderful gor-il-la who you’ve heard of but not seen.

  ONE WEEK after Punch published “Monkeyana,” the magazine hit the newsstands with another cartoon featuring London’s favorite exotic species. This one was titled “The Lion of the Season.” The drawing featured an alarmed liveried butler—eyes wide, hair standing on end—at a seasonal party announcing the arrival of a guest: a gorilla, dressed in a tuxedo and white gloves. The caption transcribed the startled servant’s introduction: “MR. G-G-G-O-O-O-RILLA!”

  WITH LONDON transfixed by Paul’s gorillas, a man named Theodore Lent decided to visit the city on the Thames.

  Lent’s wife, Julia Pastrana, had died just over a year before, in March 1860. She had spent her later years as a performer, and Lent had been her manager. Together, they toured Germany, Austria, Poland, England, and Russia. Pastrana had been born in Mexico with a rare condition that today is called hypertrichosis terminalis, which means that her face and body were covered with excessive amounts of straight black hair. While traveling in Mexico, Lent had actually purchased Pastrana from a woman believed to be her mother. He dressed her as a Spanish dancer and put her onstage as “the Bearded and Hairy Lady.”