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  But Speke arrived home weeks before Burton, and he declared to the group that he had solved the mystery of the Nile. In later years, Speke’s reputation would be destroyed by this display of naked ambition and presumption, but, temporarily at least, his power play worked. By the time Burton returned to England, Speke had already secured funding from the RGS for a second expedition to the region to confirm the discovery. He had also bad-mouthed Burton to anyone who would listen, recycling the old suspicions about Burton’s moral depravity and suggesting his loyalty to the Crown was dubious. Burton, the son of an English military officer, had spent much of his youth in France and Italy, and Speke believed this diluted his Englishness. When Burton eventually arrived in England and voiced his inevitable displeasure with Speke, the ambitious young subordinate became defensive. Referring to Burton’s continental upbringing, Speke told one editor that he would “die a hundred deaths” before he let “a foreigner take from Britain the honour of discovery.”

  With his reputation freshly assailed, the newly married Burton faced an uncertain future. His best friend in the beginning of 1861 was Monckton Milnes, who introduced him to Swinburne at a party in March (Burton in turn introduced Swinburne to alcohol, according to Milnes, sparking a ruinous love affair with the bottle). By midsummer Burton and the half-dozen core members of the Cannibal Club had become a clique. Weeks later, Burton pulled Paul—who’d already mingled socially with Milnes—into their circle.

  PAUL’S BACKGROUND among missionaries certainly wouldn’t have impressed Burton, who believed that “Christianizing” native populations generally led to their cultural demise. But Burton had other reasons to be drawn to him. In March the Foreign Office, thanks to his wife’s pleading, had finally offered Burton a job: British consul for Fernando Po, a flyblown Spanish island used by the British navy to monitor the slave trade off the coast of West Africa. It was the lowliest consulship in the service, and the unattractive offer reflected the depths to which his reputation had sunk. Burton told Milnes that he accepted “the governmental crumb” only so that one day he might be able to nab a “governmental loaf.” Burton’s experience in Africa exceeded that of almost anyone in England, but his wanderings had been limited to its eastern and central regions. He had little more than four months—April to August—to learn as much as he could about West Africa before he departed, a period that corresponded exactly with Paul’s explosive entry onto the London social scene.

  The fact that the young adventurer was an outsider among the learned societies of London would have appealed to Burton, whose recent experiences with the RGS had soured him on “armchair geographers”—those who stayed in England and attended meetings while the real men of action risked their lives. Some of the officers of the RGS barely concealed their contempt for field scientists, viewing them as little more than mindless robots sent out to collect data that could be analyzed by experts back home. Burton hated the idea that explorers were expected “to see and not to think,” as he phrased it in the preface to his book about the Nile.

  Burton’s distaste for this notion was never more intense than in 1861, thanks to his recent arguments with a prominent RGS fellow named W. D. Cooley. Cooley authored a book in 1852 that he triumphantly titled Inner Africa Laid Open. He claimed the Dark Continent as his area of expertise, even though he’d never set foot there. After his expeditions, Burton had exposed several damning errors in Cooley’s work, and in his usual sardonic style he dismissed one of Cooley’s articles as “a most able paper which wanted nothing but the solid basis of accurate data.” Cooley responded by publishing a pamphlet stating that Burton’s conclusions during the Nile expedition could not be trusted because of an ignorance of the local languages. The pamphlet asserted that Burton had obviously lied about speaking Swahili during his expedition because, according to Cooley, Swahili was unknown in Africa beyond the coast. His charges were supremely confident and entirely wrong.

  The attacks against Paul by arrogant skeptics who had rarely ventured out of London seemed similarly unjust to Burton, who unlike Waterton sought to defend Paul from the barbs. In a world of “gentlemen and players,” Paul seemed, like Burton, a player.

  In May, Paul was invited to speak at a meeting of the Ethnological Society of London by Burton and James Hunt, the group’s president. After listening to Paul describe the tribes he’d encountered both on the coast and inland, Burton declared that the descriptions rang true, based on his experiences in eastern and central Africa.

  Two months later, Burton prepared a lecture that he titled “Ethnological Notes on M. Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa.” He invited Paul to hear its presentation at the Ethnological Society.

  Burton praised Paul’s work, and his only direct criticism of the book was its lack of exactitude in transcribing the native languages—“a sin of omission,” Burton said.

  “This paper will, I trust, satisfy the most querulous that Monsieur Du Chaillu has well and voraciously studied the new and curious races of whom he has treated,” Burton concluded. “For myself, I must be allowed to offer him my best thanks; every page produces upon my mind the effect of the bugle upon the cast charger after a year or two in the cab-shafts of civilization. And I venture to express a hope that at some future day I may be permitted to appear before the Ethnological Society as an eye-witness of, not merely an analogical testimony to, the truthfulness of the picturesque and varied pages which have caused such a sensation on both shores of the Atlantic.”

  Applause greeted Paul when he stood to say a few words of thanks. But as soon as he began to speak, it was clear that one querulous critic had not been convinced by Burton’s show of support. The man began hectoring Paul.

  Paul had endured months of ridicule and public abuse. His character had been assailed in some of the most widely read publications in the world. Now, in the middle of a dignified gathering, Paul’s composure cracked for the first time. His inner barbarian burst out charging.

  THE MAN’S voice kept interrupting Paul with catcalls and taunts.

  The voice belonged to Thomas Malone, a thirty-eight-year-old chemist who worked in the laboratory at the London Institution but was better known as an expert in the nascent field of photography. He and a partner had opened one of London’s first photographic studios, and he had helped establish the school of photography at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Malone was also a regular at the meetings of scientific societies, promoting photography as a tool that could be used by almost any man of science, from geographers to ethnologists.

  Malone wasn’t much interested in Paul’s descriptions of gorillas or of the native tribes. He had not read Explorations and Adventures, but he had seen an article about it in the London Review and knew that Paul had described a stringed musical instrument used by the Fang called the ombi. Comparing the instrument to a guitar or a harp, Paul had written that the strings were made of long fibers extracted from the roots of a tree. Malone didn’t believe such strings could produce musical sounds and made his doubts clear to everyone in the crowd. When Paul begged to differ, explaining that he had seen and heard the instrument himself, Malone’s pestering intensified. He began shouting questions into the air:

  Did you see everything you describe in the book with your own eyes?

  Did you actually write the book yourself?

  Has the public been misled?

  “Of course all my remarks were unpalatable to M. Du Chaillu and his friends, and I was begged to keep myself to the discussion of Mr. Burton’s paper,” Malone reported after the event. “I did, however, tell M. Du Chaillu that the days of authority with regard to things capable of human proof were gone, and that any scientific man, however eminent, who came to us with novel statements must expect to be questioned.”

  What Malone described as honest inquiry was rendered as obnoxious browbeating by other witnesses, including Burton and James Hunt. “He then rose,” Burton said of Malone, “and, after a preamble touching the fierceness of his d
isposition, adopted a tone and style of address which would have caused the coolest temper to boil over.”

  Paul stepped away from the podium, humiliated and enraged. As the audience began to disperse, he searched the crowd for Malone, stepping over chairs and benches to reach him. Hunt reported: “Soon after the chairman had left the meeting, I observed M. du Chaillu making his way in an excited manner to that part of the room in which Mr. Malone had been sitting. I followed him, but did not reach the spot until Mr. Malone called out, ‘Is there no one here to protect me?’ ”

  Several witnesses heard Paul shout at Malone, “Coward! Coward!”

  After the Globe newspaper reported one version of events, Malone attempted to clarify the exact sequence: “I was preparing to go, when, to my astonishment, I saw standing before me, on a form, a little figure with dark threatening eyes and hands. It was M. Du Chaillu. I did not hear or heed what he said, for I instantly received—the outrage described in the Globe extract.”

  Paul’s actions had been so unspeakable that Malone couldn’t even bring himself to spell them out. But in the words of the Globe, that outrage consisted of “the wild justice of expectoration.” In other words, Paul spit in Malone’s face. It was a startling vulgarity that stunned some of the gentlemen present.

  Burton didn’t count himself among the offended. More propriety was the last thing he believed the Ethnological Society needed. Feeling stifled by the “respectability” of the organization, he and Hunt would soon quit and start a new group, the Anthropological Society of London. The new society, which would become the quasi-official haven for all the members of the Cannibal Club, was intended as a place where Mrs. Grundy would be banished to eternal hellfire.

  When the new group was officially inaugurated two years later, Paul was appointed an honorary secretary. The incident with Malone had scandalized the public, but it had won Burton’s lifelong friendship.

  “My wonder is that M. Du Chaillu had restrained himself for so long,” Burton quipped.

  But others wondered aloud just who, exactly, Paul was and where he’d learned his manners.

  “We fear M. Du Chaillu has been too long among the gorillas,” reported one newspaper. “We regret that so distinguished a traveler and author should so disgracefully forget himself, and suggest to an English public whether the gasconading spirit of his Gallic blood has not been intensified and degraded by his naturalization in the land of the bowie-knife and his sojourn in the country of the gorilla.… We don’t relish these foreign manners; and, if M. Du Chaillu does not wish to appear in the police courts, he had better abandon them, whether they be French, African, or American.”

  Where, exactly, had Paul come from? He never spoke about his youth, and his silence had, unbeknownst to him, fueled speculation about his background that had already begun to circulate on both sides of the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER 29

  “Evidence of a Spurious Origin”

  Charles Waterton had jealously squared off against rival naturalists before, but no battle shed more light on his ire toward Paul than did his previous effort to discredit John James Audubon.

  Waterton had always prided himself as a gifted observer of birds. If he had an ornithological hero, it was Alexander Wilson, a Scotsman whose American Ornithology was something of a sacred text for Waterton. That book inspired Waterton to visit North America shortly after Wanderings in South America was published, and there he befriended George Ord, a zoologist in Philadelphia who had written a biography of Wilson. Ord and Waterton forged an instant friendship that centered on their reverence for Wilson and their animosity toward Audubon, who was threatening to knock him off his perch as America’s foremost bird specialist.

  Waterton met Audubon once, in New York in 1826. Compared with the pedigreed English squire, the young French-American bird hunter was a rowdy upstart, a long-haired maverick in a buckskin coat. Audubon delighted in speaking of the untamable nature of the untrammeled American landscape and prized his skill as a rifleman. Sometimes, in his speech and the textual descriptions that accompanied his paintings, Audubon seemed to anthropomorphize his animals, lending them the most indelicate of human traits. When he described the bald eagle, for example, he suggested that the raptor delighted in inflicting suffering on its prey:

  It is then that you may see the cruel spirit of this dreaded enemy of the feathered race.… He presses down his powerful feet and drives his sharp claws deeper than ever into the heart of the swan. He shrieks with delight as he feels the last convulsions of his prey, which has now sunk under his increasing effort to render death as painfully felt as it can possibly be.

  Waterton thought him a charlatan and believed Audubon was falsely elevating animals by ascribing human characteristics to them—a sin he’d live to see repeated by Paul. Together with Ord, Waterton had conducted a transatlantic smear campaign designed to rob Audubon of all scientific credibility. Some of their potshots found their target. They once correctly called Audubon out for claiming to have discovered a new species he called the “Washington sea eagle,” when in fact it was nothing more than an immature bald eagle. But they often let their venom cloud their judgment, taking their criticisms too far.

  In the 1830s, Audubon painted a mockingbird, placing a rattlesnake with it in a tree. Waterton and Ord insisted the image included at least two mistakes: rattlesnakes cannot climb trees, and their fangs are invariably curved inward, like scythes, and never feature even slight recurvature, as Audubon’s did. On both points, Waterton and Ord were wrong. Rattlesnakes can ascend trees, and sometimes their fangs do curve in the manner Audubon described.

  By attacking Audubon’s description of a snake, Waterton seemed to be playing with fire. In Wanderings, the Squire described fighting off a snake attack by putting his fist into his hat and then stuffing it down the snake’s throat, overpowering the ten-foot serpent with raw courage. To some, Waterton had a lot of nerve accusing someone else of taking liberties with the description of a snake in the wild. “Audubon has been rudely assailed about a ‘snake story,’ ” said the Reverend John Bachman, who collaborated with the artist on a book about America’s quadrupeds, “but Waterton has given us several stories that fairly fill us with wonder and dismay.”

  The distaste for Audubon by Waterton and Ord probably had as much to do with class snobbery as scientific disagreement. Audubon was a shadowy figure during his life, and his illegitimate birth in what is now Haiti was a secret he guarded closely. He went so far as to surrender his claims of inheritance from his father to ensure the facts of his birth didn’t become public. He had a fake passport that said he was born in New Orleans, and he falsely claimed that he had studied art under the tutelage of Jacques-Louis David, an influential French painter. Audubon was, in some ways, impersonating an educated man of noble birth to gain acceptance in a scientific community that valued such qualities. Ord and Waterton, both highborn sons of wealthy patriarchs, sniffed out inconsistencies and were determined to expose him as one who’d trespassed into spheres that were beyond his station.

  Audubon was feted when he visited England in 1826, celebrated by some of the country’s leading men of science. Waterton was incensed. “Without leaving behind him in America any public reputation as a naturalist, Mr. Audubon comes to England, and he is immediately pointed out to us an ornithological luminary of the first magnitude,” Waterton huffed. “Strange it is, that he, who had been under such a dense cloud of obscurity in his own western latitude, should have broken out so suddenly into such dazzling radiance, the moment he approached our eastern island.”

  He and Ord redoubled their attack. In a letter, Ord predicted that “many of those who have afforded their patronage to the contemptible imposter, will blush to think that they ever made his acquaintance.” For years, they waged a two-man war on Audubon’s reputation, which did nothing to prevent him from becoming the most celebrated ornithologist of all time.

  In 1861, Waterton must have experienced an unsettling pang of déjà vu. He wa
sted no time in writing to Ord to tell him that he’d found another trespassing pretender who seemed to be begging for a corrective reproach.

  He wrote: “Audubon is immaculate when compared to Du Chaillu.”

  PAUL WAS everything Audubon had been, only more so: a man who exaggerated the untamable state of nature and who had splashed onto the scene minus the proper pedigree, wooing some of Britain’s most celebrated arbiters of culture. Waterton knew that Ord would be very interested in his struggle to expose the so-called American as counterfeit goods.

  “I have warmed his hide in the last five or six numbers of the Gardener’s Chronicle,” Waterton informed Ord. “I am quite convinced, in my own mind, that Du Chaillu’s adventures in the land of the gorilla are nothing but impudent fables. He always meets the gorilla on the ground. It ought to have been in trees. I suspect strongly that the traveler has been nothing but a trader on the western coast of Africa; possibly in kidnapping negroes, and that he has bought his skins of negro-merchants from the interior.”

  Gossiping about an unfounded connection between Paul and the illegal slave trade must have seemed a juicy tidbit thrown in for Ord’s pleasure. But as Ord began asking his friends within the Philadelphia academy about Paul, he stumbled across an explosive notion: What if this Great White Hunter wasn’t really white?

  The rumor had spread around Philadelphia that Paul might be half-black. Ord suggested that this secret might explain his soured relations with his onetime sponsors in Philadelphia. Some of the members of the academy, Ord told Waterton, had taken note of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and had detected “evidence of a spurious origin.”

  “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed race are termed in the West Indies,” Ord wrote to Waterton, “then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected by habits of romance.”