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  With the unshakable good cheer that had charmed so many in London, he insisted that he bore no personal grudge against Gray. The truth, he said, would prevail in the end.

  “I am just a boy,” he said, “and the more I come into contact with the great men in this and other countries, the more I am convinced that they will not see me crushed.”

  GRAY WASN’T finished yet, and the reports of the banquet at the Freemasons’ Hall seemed to fuel his determination to unmask Paul as a fraud.

  About eighteen hours after the party at the tavern, Gray strode into a meeting of the Zoological Society. He was ready to take his attack to a new level. Instead of referring to him as a mere traveler, now Gray dismissed Paul as “an uneducated collector of animal skins for sale and an exhibitor of them in Broadway, New York.” That description included a veiled dig at Owen, who had agreed to purchase some of the skins on behalf of the British Museum, where they would be displayed—without Gray’s consent.

  When Paul had lashed out defensively, painting Gray as an armchair naturalist, he ignited the museum keeper’s instinct to go for the jugular. Gray went ballistic—literally.

  He reported that a “friend” of his examined the skins and skeletons on display at Whitehall Place, searching in vain for visible bullet holes. “He says they seem to have been wounded when retreating, and not attacking,” Gray said.

  Gray then visited a taxidermist who had prepared one of the skins that would soon be displayed at the British Museum. It was a large male gorilla, like the one Paul had described as charging close to him before he shot it in the chest. “I then inquired of [the taxidermist] whether he had observed any bullet hole in the chest, and he stated that he had not, but pointed out to me two holes in the nape of the neck (now filled with putty),” Gray explained. “There are also two large holes in the thin portion of the hinder part of the skull belonging to the same skin which pass through the bone, and are quite sufficient to have caused death.”

  Despite the authority with which Gray voiced his contentions, they weren’t conclusive. Sir Philip Egerton, a well-known sportsman (and the anonymous author of the “Monkeyana” poem that appeared in Punch), had examined the same specimen that Gray referenced before it had been stuffed. Egerton insisted the evidence was entirely consistent with a frontal shot. Additional experts concluded that the holes in the back of the gorilla’s skull couldn’t have come from bullets, as Gray had implied. That part of the bone was paper-thin—about two-thirds of a millimeter. Those holes likely appeared after the animal’s death, caused by rough handling.

  Though Owen and Huxley still sparred over the gorilla’s place in the evolution debate, more of the attacks against Paul were personal. At least in this particular instance, Gray’s argument appeared to be based less on verifiable evidence than on a grudge. The controversy was shaping into a long war that would rage far longer—and range far wider—than Paul could have predicted.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Squire’s Gambit

  Charles Waterton wouldn’t have been able to read about Paul without recognizing something familiar about the story. Years before, the Squire’s honesty had been questioned during a remarkably similar public controversy concerning his own jungle adventures.

  At twenty-two Waterton first traveled to British Guiana, at the northern edge of South America, to oversee an uncle’s property. It wasn’t long before he set out into the wilderness, dipping south into a forest that blanketed the northern third of the continent. For nearly a dozen years he continued to explore the South American jungle as far south as Brazil, generally traveling on foot, often without shoes. He took copious notes on the region’s flora and fauna, transforming himself into a competent and observant naturalist. In 1825 he published a book called Wanderings in South America.

  It was an unexpected success. Members of an upcoming generation of roving naturalists—Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace among them—later cited the book as one of several that excited their interest in natural history and exploration. But critics smelled hyperbole.

  In his book Waterton had written that he was always on the lookout for the crocodile-like caiman, hoping to add a flawless specimen to his collection. He’d wade into the swampy haunts of the reptile, which was reputed to be a man-eater, but he’d come out empty-handed. Finally, with a small group of natives, he devised a plan to fish for a specimen. They tied a sharp, meat-laced hook onto the end of a long rope and cast it into a river overnight. The next morning, they found that they’d hooked one.

  Waterton wrote that the frightened Indians wanted to shoot the caiman with arrows, but he begged them to put down their weapons. He wrote that he waded into the water and wrestled it ashore himself, riding the writhing creature onto dry land as one might ride a horse.

  “I immediately seized his forelegs,” Waterton wrote, “and by main force twisted them on his back; thus they served me for a bridle.” The book’s illustration was comically faithful to his description, depicting him calmly astride the scaly beast.

  Those who knew him best recognized that wading into water with a caiman was perfectly in keeping with his slightly unhinged brand of bravery: they couldn’t forget that he had once fashioned a homemade pair of wings, strapped them around his arms, and jumped off his roof, convinced that he’d be able to fly (he could not). But those unfamiliar with his eccentricities, or his tendency to embellish his stories for effect, accused him of inventing the episode out of whole cloth.

  Waterton was changed by the controversy surrounding his book, but instead of being sympathetic to later generations of adventurers, he tended to be reflexively hostile to anyone who challenged his status as the most famous living collector of exotic specimens. Waterton had fashioned himself as the original fair-skinned knight striding fearlessly among the quaking natives, an erudite naturalist who doubled as a man of action. The untraveled scientists in the professional societies—“self-constituted censorious scoundrels,” as Waterton sneeringly called them—didn’t deserve a fraction of his acclaim. In his later years, Waterton seemed hell-bent on protecting his claim as the king of wilderness adventurers.

  Central to his image was Waterton’s Roman Catholic faith (he claimed to be descended from no fewer than eight canonized saints). God had given man dominion over nature, Waterton believed, so anyone who feared nature was spiritually weak. He protected his image as a fearless wrestler of monsters because it placed him not within the natural world that he loved but above it.

  But now, decades after the publication of Waterton’s book, Paul was taking his place as the prototypical beast-slaying adventurer. The gun-toting gorilla hunter, not the unarmed Squire, had become the model inveterate thrill seeker who rarely failed to bag the big-game trophies he’d set out to conquer. This type of stock character would later be branded the Great White Hunter in the popular lexicon. The implied derision that would eventually stick to that label hadn’t yet established itself, and England couldn’t stop talking about Paul.

  WATERTON HADN’T seen Paul’s specimens, he hadn’t read his book, and he hadn’t heard him speak. But that didn’t stop him from anonymously penning the very first article attacking Paul’s credibility. Gray’s articles, which captured far more public attention, actually appeared shortly thereafter. With Paul’s reputation publicly tarnished by Gray, Waterton dropped all pretense of anonymity.

  He published several critical pieces in the Gardeners’ Chronicle and added some new accusations to Gray’s. Believing that all apes were more or less similar, Waterton was convinced that gorillas should be found in trees—like the arboreal monkeys of the New World, with which Waterton was most familiar. Gorillas should not be spotted on the ground, where Paul had encountered them. He also doubted that gorillas could rise up from all fours to stand on two legs. Quoting from news reports of one of Paul’s lectures, in which he described the gorilla as beating his chest, Waterton mocked the idea: “It must have been on its hind legs only; a most trying and unsteady position for an ap
e in the hour of battle!”

  Waterton’s successive articles throughout the summer of 1861 reiterated that he found it impossible to believe that a gorilla—or any ape—would charge a man. He mentioned that he himself had experienced numerous encounters with apes, and none were beyond his capacity to tame. “Our closet naturalists may gulp such foreign food as this, and praise its flavour: but I remove it disdainfully from my lips, as it ill befits them.”

  Waterton then casually referenced a fact intended to destroy Paul’s credibility once and for all: the Squire had once himself owned a live gorilla and for years had kept it as a playful, gentle pet. The implication was clear: not only had Paul misrepresented his journeys and the nature of the animal he so famously encountered, but Paul didn’t even deserve credit for bringing the best specimens to England. Waterton did.

  BEFORE PAUL came along, Waterton had not been interested in gorillas. But by that summer, he was convinced not only that he had seen one years earlier than Paul but that he currently owned a stuffed gorilla and kept it on display in his house.

  Among Waterton’s hobbies was anthropomorphic taxidermy: he stuffed zoological specimens, dressed them, and positioned them as still-life actors in elaborate theatrical dioramas. Those displays customarily mocked all those who dared to challenge his beloved Catholic Church. In one scene shown under glass in Walton Hall in the summer of 1861, he arranged various reptiles in positions of attack around something labeled “The True Church.” A toad was labeled “Martin Luther,” and a snake was “John Calvin.”

  But the oddest diorama was titled “Martin Luther After the Fall.” It centered on a small stuffed ape in a position of humiliating absurdity, complete with a set of donkey ears affixed to the top of the creature’s head. Waterton had believed the animal was a young chimpanzee. But now he’d begun to reconsider the assumption. Abraham Bartlett, the taxidermist who had tried to salvage the rum-soaked gorilla skin that was sent to Owen a few years earlier, visited the mansion in 1861. Bartlett recognized the animal at once: a baby gorilla.

  The young animal, named Jenny, had been captured by natives near the Congo River and brought to Europe in 1855 as part of a road show called Mrs. Wombwell’s Travelling Menagerie. Waterton was fascinated by the tiny creature, and he convinced Mrs. Wombwell to let him play with Jenny on four separate occasions. Their final meeting, according to Waterton, was full of sweet sorrow. “Having mounted the steps which led up to her room, in order that I might take my leave of her, Jenny put her arms round my neck; she ‘looked wistfully at me,’ and then we both exchanged soft kisses, to the evident surprise and amusement of all the lookers-on,” Waterton wrote. “ ‘Farewell, poor little prisoner!’ said I. ‘I fear that this cold and gloomy atmosphere of ours will tend to shorten the days.’ Jenny shook her head, seemingly to say, there is nothing here to suit me. The little room is far too hot, the clothes they force me to wear are insupportable, whilst the food which they give me is not like that upon which I used to feed when healthy and free in my own native woods. With this we parted—probably for ever.”

  His hunch was right. Jenny died within months. “She journeyed on, from place to place, in Mrs. Wombwell’s fine menagerie of wild animals, till they reached the town of Warrington, in Lancashire,” Waterton wrote. “There, without any previous symptoms of decay, Jenny fell sick and breathed her last.” But the Squire had made arrangements with the show’s caretaker, a woman named Miss Blight, to recover the ape’s remains if misfortune struck. “Miss Blight wrapped her up in linen by way of winding-sheet, put her in a little trunk, and kindly forwarded her to Walton Hall, at the close of February, in the year 1856.”

  Putting aside any heartache over her death, Waterton dissected and stuffed Jenny, preparing her for the starring role in his museum of curiosities. Though he’d never been to central Africa himself, he assumed that the primates there were similar to the ones he’d observed in South America. Following this chain of logic, weak as it was, he decided that he was eminently qualified to speak authoritatively on the habits of African apes in the wild.

  He remembered that Jenny liked to knuckle-walk, which Waterton thought was a painful form of locomotion that resulted from captivity. If the animal had been allowed to spend her time in the treetops, as was natural among the monkeys of South America, he assumed that Jenny’s movements would appear more graceful. Gorillas, he concluded, were made to swing in trees, not walk on terra firma. To Waterton, the fact that Paul almost always described finding his gorillas on the ground was an obvious sign of the author’s fraudulence. Another clue was his descriptions of them charging him: Jenny had been a gentle playmate, unlike the intimidating brutes that Paul had described. She never would have charged a soul.

  In the early summer, Waterton traveled to London hoping to prove that Paul had invented his stories of untamable gorillas. No animal, he said, was beyond man’s powers of control.

  Waterton wanted to put on a show to prove his point, and he knew exactly how to do it. A few years earlier, he had visited London’s Zoological Gardens to examine an orangutan. He had entered the animal’s cage without incident, but almost as soon as he left, the ape urinated on the floor. Waterton wrote that he was “scandalized beyond measure, at this manifest want of good breeding,” and he considered it firsthand proof that “all monkeys are infinitely below us—aye, infinitely indeed.” Now Waterton intended to restage his foray into the orangutan’s den. Assuming that gorillas were more or less the same as orangutans, he hoped his public one-on-one encounter with an ape would undermine Paul’s reputation.

  Richard Hobson, a friend of Waterton’s who wrote a flattering, though often defensive, biography of him shortly after his death, painted the Squire as a conquering hero who proved his mastery over the ape with “cool courage”:

  I allude to an occurrence in the Zoological Gardens, in London, in the year 1861, when, after much entreaty on the part of Mr. Waterton, he was permitted by the then curator, Mr. Mitchell, now deceased, to pay his personal respects to a large orang-outang, from Borneo, which was reputed to be very savage. Indeed, the keepers, one and all, declared that “he would worry the Squire, and make short work of it,” if he should enter his den, especially as he was just then in a horrid temper, having been recently teased by some mischievous boys. The late Mr. Mitchell, even at last, yielded to Mr. Waterton’s urgent request, with great reluctance. Nothing daunted by all this badinage of the keepers, the Squire, to the very great horror of numerous spectators, entered the palisaded enclosure with a light heart. The meeting of these two celebrities was clearly a case of “love at first sight,” as the strangers embraced each other most affectionately; nay, they positively hugged each other, and in their apparently uncontrollable joy, they kissed one another many times, to the great amusement of the numerous spectators.

  Waterton was certain that he had exposed Paul’s incompetence as an observer of nature. On July 14, he wrote a letter to a friend predicting that “experts” like Owen and Murchison—the same class of scientists who had criticized Waterton’s book decades before—would regret their support of the young man.

  “What a clever fellow Du Chaillu has been to have enlisted in his favour the powerful approbation of our learned doctors in zoology,” Waterton wrote. “But whoever shall read my letters on his gorilla in the Gardener’s Chronicle will, I trust, conclude that those gentlemen ought to have examined well the dangerous locality before they took the leap.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The Gorilla in the Pulpit

  Charles Spurgeon followed the controversy that surrounded Paul, but according to his reading of Explorations and Adventures the young man was a good Christian who’d been the victim of misplaced outrage.

  “It’s nothing but the pictures,” he told himself, noting how the illustrations seemed to threaten the author’s credibility much more than the actual text did. “The pictures have ruined the book.”

  As he prepared to talk to his congregation about the gorilla, the preache
r sought some visual props that would prove far more arresting than mere illustrations. He wanted one of Paul’s gorillas, and Paul himself, in the flesh.

  AS SOON as the side doors of the Metropolitan Tabernacle opened on Tuesday evening, October 1, the mad scramble for seats began. Charles Spurgeon’s special lecture—“The Gorilla and the Land He Inhabits”—had been oversold by the ticket office. Hundreds of people were turned away at the door, even though some of them had secured reservations days in advance.

  A small army of ushers guided the crowd through the aisles, making sure not a single seat or standing-room space was left empty. Spurgeon, meanwhile, waited in the vestry backstage. He was in a good mood, greeting those around him with pumping handshakes. He stood about five feet six, but his stout frame lent him a weighty presence. His bearded cheeks had grown plump, and his hands swelled with gout. His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed to slits when he smiled.

  On this night, he had good reason to smile as six men carried in a bulky parcel wrapped in coarse linen. At the front of the stage they began to unwrap it. They fastened one of the beast’s hands to the iron railing that encircled the stage and raised its other arm overhead, pointing toward the audience. The congregation howled with laughter, recognizing the gesture: it appeared as if the gorilla were delivering a fiery sermon—just like Spurgeon.

  After a few minutes, Austen Layard, the Parliament member who represented the tabernacle’s South London district, walked to the middle of the stage. Paul sat in one of the velvet-lined chairs alongside Spurgeon at the side of the altar.

  “I’m at a loss to know why I’ve found myself here,” Layard told them—an unconvincing confession, considering that Spurgeon had given him the irresistible opportunity of face time in front of thousands of people, some of whom almost certainly were eligible voters. “It surely isn’t to introduce the reverend lecturer, who must be known to all or the greater part of you personally—if not personally, then there are few throughout the length and breadth of the land, whether rich or poor, high or low, to whom his name is not familiar.”