Between Man and Beast Read online

  Wilson was away from the house when the commander arrived, but Jane spoke up.

  “It is doubtful whether the territory was really ceded,” she told the commander, “and the mission does not desire or need French protection.”

  Her protest, mild but brave, was ignored. The deal had already been done. What’s more, it had been replicated up and down the coast. In addition to obtaining the signature of King Glass, the French merchants had already collected signed treaties from his neighboring rulers. It was official: the French navy had been granted legal permission to construct military or commercial outposts wherever it pleased in Gabon.

  From the start, France’s interest was halfhearted, part of an official “foothold policy” designed to put the brakes on the rapid colonial expansion of England, its longtime rival. Early hopes of turning the coastal plain into a profitable agricultural center quickly fizzled, and construction of a coastal fort was abandoned. The half-completed structure was left to rot in the scouring sea spray as a monument to the country’s apathy toward its latest acquisition.

  By 1848, the most visible sign of French presence in Gabon was a trading station—the Maison Lamoisse of Le Havre. Paul told Wilson that he had recently arrived in the country from Paris, which was in the throes of a violent revolution, to join his father, who’d moved to Gabon a few years earlier to manage the trading post.

  Wilson realized that he in fact had met Paul’s father, who had told him about his son a couple of months earlier. The trader, named Charles-Alexis Du Chaillu, had tried to get his son enrolled in a French Catholic mission school nearby, but the Jesuits had refused him entry. The elder Du Chaillu then asked if the Baraka mission might take the boy on, but Wilson couldn’t give him an immediate answer. So Paul spent his first months on the coast making short trade runs for his father, traveling upriver to collect goods from tribes that lived several miles inland. He’d been fetching a load of ebony and ivory when his canoe had overturned, he said, forcing him to trek back to Wilson’s house.

  After their initial meeting, Wilson agreed to take Paul into the school and teach him English, a skill that Charles-Alexis recognized as valuable for an up-and-coming merchant.

  Paul leaped at the chance, trading a life that centered on his father’s household for one that revolved around the mission. He became a permanent fixture at the Wilsons’ house, moving into one of the boxy rooms that adjoined the “parlor,” which the couple had ennobled with an old Windsor chair and some gilt-framed pictures. It was as if Paul had traded his real father for a new one, nabbing a mother as a bonus in the bargain.

  Jane Wilson liked the boy as much as her husband did, and she welcomed his cheerful, almost elfin, presence in their home. He exuded energy and optimism and was always quick to dish out compliments—which must have delighted Jane, who proudly clung to a southern belle’s sense of style and etiquette. Every day, after she finished tutoring the natives and Paul in their makeshift mission school, she busied herself with the same “delicate little attentions” that she’d observed growing up in Savannah, Georgia: she washed and fixed her hair, putting it up in the style that her husband liked best, and donned a freshly laundered calico dress. For years, she felt as if her husband had been the only person in Gabon to admire her efforts; she never expected the villagers with their square-cut robes to fully appreciate the refinements of a proper Christian lady. But now the unfailingly polite boy was like the doting son she and her husband had never had. Like everyone else, they called him by his first name—a familiarity that Paul would encourage his whole life, among all classes of people, in defiance of the formality of the age.

  It wasn’t long before he made his feelings about the Wilsons crystal clear: he stopped addressing them as the Reverend and Mrs. Wilson, and he started calling them “Father” and “Mother.”

  IN THE boy’s eyes, Wilson was a miracle: a white man who commanded universal respect among the coastal tribes without resorting to force or coercion, a stately presence who not only tolerated his equatorial surroundings but actually regarded them with a kind of devotional reverence. From the start, the boy looked up to Wilson, both literally and figuratively: Paul, standing just over five feet tall, was about a foot shorter than Wilson, whose paternal eminence had earned him a public stature on the Gabon River that rivaled King Glass’s for authority.

  It wasn’t just a reasonable command of conversational English that Paul was picking up from his newly adopted parents. A mix of constant contact and dazzled admiration made him particularly receptive to Wilson’s all-embracing immersion in the natural world around him.

  Thanks to his trading jaunts, which took him farther inland than others dared, Paul in a few months had already acquired a working knowledge of the region’s natural life that far exceeded that of most common traders. But Wilson probably knew more about the flora and fauna of western Africa than anyone alive.

  For years, the missionary had been compiling notes for a book that he hoped would chronicle everything worth knowing about western Africa. He’d been the first person ever to study and develop written systems for several of the tribal languages spoken on the coast. He diligently transcribed the local lore, delved into the people’s superstitions, and untangled their systems of tribal governance. He mapped the region’s rivers and plains, faithfully recorded weather patterns, and attempted to classify nearly every plant and animal he stumbled across, no matter how insignificant it might have appeared. Wilson seemed to affix a literal interpretation to Proverbs 6:6: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” Wilson’s entomological observations bore the stamp of an obsessive. He delved into the ants’ turreted mounds and dug down into their radiating burrows. He charted the times of day when white ants seemed most active (night), and he timed how fast a swarm of driver ants could consume a live horse or cow (forty-eight hours). He marveled at the way they built arched bridges from one plant to another using nothing but their own bodies and how they collectively formed “rafts” that allowed them to cross streams en masse. These weren’t tedious data entries documented with the duty-bound dispassion of a stenographer; they were celebratory appreciations of the diversity of life.

  His enthusiasm proved contagious. Paul—whether the tendency was latent in him or planted there by Wilson—blossomed into a keen-eyed chronicler of the inexhaustible wonders that God had created for man. He was particularly fond of the fantastical stories the missionary could tell about the region’s more exotic fauna, like the boa constrictor that one day a few years earlier had grabbed one of the Mpongwe’s pet dogs. The snake, about halfway through with the process of swallowing the dog whole, had coated the poor mutt’s fur from the head down with slimy saliva before Wilson and a couple of tribesmen wrestled it away from the serpent.

  “The dog experienced no injury,” Wilson said, “but it was several weeks before the varnishing he had got could be removed.”

  Of all the stories Wilson told, however, none fascinated the boy more than the story of the njena. The creature was shrouded in obscurity, spoken of by the locals as if it were a mythical monster, not a real animal. The njena was a mystery just waiting to be solved.

  CHAPTER 2

  A New Obsession

  London, England

  Caroline Owen tried very hard to maintain a presentable household. The high-backed sofa in the spacious dining room was plush, the leather and stained wood of the library shone with polish, and the colorful carpets in the drawing room left no doubt that the family belonged to Britain’s upper crust. But her efforts to preserve decorum often felt doomed. Try as she might, she could not ignore the elephant in the room.

  It smelled awful.

  “The presence of a portion of the defunct elephant on the premises made me keep all the windows open, especially as the weather is very mild,” she confided to her diary. “I got R. to smoke cigars all over the house.”

  “R.” was Richard Owen, the husband responsible for dragging the stinking carcass into thei
r home and one of London’s most celebrated men of science. He was always bringing his work home with him, and that work had a way of permeating every room in the house.

  If it wasn’t an elephant, it was a dead giraffe. Or a hippopotamus. Or a penguin.

  Caroline didn’t complain too loudly, because she had known from the minute she married Richard exactly what lay in store. As the daughter of a museum keeper, she’d grown up accustomed to the heady aromas of bodily rot. The couple had first met when Richard had been the most promising protégé of Caroline’s father. Now, more than a decade later, the couple and their young son lived together in a house on the grounds of the Royal College of Surgeons, where Richard reigned as the most prominent anatomist in England.

  The position brought with it a measure of fame. Science as a profession was relatively novel, and it was electrifying the public imagination. The British Empire was sending explorers and naturalists all over the globe, and their biological discoveries almost always ended up on Owen’s dissection tables. He liked to coin new terms for the curious items he examined (“dinosaur,” for example, was a term he invented), and he wasn’t shy about grabbing glory from field scientists; finding a new species was one thing, but classifying that species and placing it into a broader scientific context was something far greater, in his view. Newspapers covered his lectures, and illustrators caricatured his strong chin and his bulging orbs, which scrutinized the world with a bug-eyed intensity.

  The public notoriety he’d earned opened the doors to London’s highest social circles, and he stormed in with the same unstoppable fervor he’d brought to his science. When a new production of a Weber opera debuted in London and captured his fancy, Richard donned his formal wear to attend the same performance for thirty consecutive nights. He met Charles Dickens backstage in the green room during a performance of As You Like It, and the novelist soon became a regular visitor to the Owen house. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert counted the Owens as friends, and they asked Richard to tutor their children in biology. Lord Tennyson would visit their home to recite poetry in the parlor.

  Caroline understood that their lifestyle depended on Richard’s work, pungent as it was, and she tolerated her husband’s eccentricities with a stiff upper lip. He’d recline on the sofa, smoking one of the cigars he kept in the skull of an Australian aborigine, and she’d take down his dictation. At dinner, he might specially request leg of fowl, just so he could examine the muscular structure of the bird while he dined with her. Before bed, she might tuck in his pet tortoise under a flannel blanket, then pull out her diary and note with wry exasperation that her young son, after watching his dad dissect a chimpanzee in the house, “himself smelt like a specimen preserved in rum.”

  The last week of April in 1847 unfolded like many others in the Owen house. Richard—battling a stomachache that Caroline blamed on ostrich meat that he’d gamely tasted—was spending much of his time looking at the latest zoological treasure: a squirming, eyeless, flesh-colored amphibian that snaked around blindly in a jar. It looked as if it had been pulled from the lightless depths of a cave, which, in fact, it had. Richard called it a proteus (today it’s called an olm), and he persistently tried to feed it worms. Not knowing that such creatures can live up to ten years without food, Owen worried the animal might die of starvation. But his preoccupation with the wriggling creature subsided when a letter was delivered to him that pushed this, and all other preoccupations, out of his mind.

  The address of the sender read: “Protestant Mission-House, Gaboon River, West Africa.”

  THE LETTER was signed by Thomas Savage, an American missionary stationed in Liberia who had recently visited John Leighton Wilson in Gabon.

  “I have found the existence of an animal of an extraordinary character in this locality,” Savage wrote to Owen, “and which I have reason to believe is unknown to the naturalist.”

  Savage explained that he’d been on his way home to America when his ship was forced to stop in Gabon. While staying with Wilson, he saw the strange skull, and he was captivated. With Wilson’s help, Savage begged the native traders for any additional evidence related to the njena that they could find. Eventually, the two men collected more skulls and several other bones. The wife of an English missionary who happened to be visiting Wilson at the same time drew anatomical diagrams of the skulls. The sketches were included in the letter that Owen now read.

  Savage wrote to request that Owen compare the descriptions of the skulls with those of other species stored in the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. He also mentioned to Owen that he hoped to procure the carcass of a njena and preserve it in alcohol, but was careful not to excite Owen with a promise. “Great uncertainty however attends my success, as they are indescribably fierce and dangerous and are found only in the far interior,” Savage added.

  Owen was intimately familiar with all the known species of chimpanzees and orangutans, having dissected each multiple times. But as he eyed the drawings, the differences between this skull and those of the other apes popped out in sharp relief. The facial angle wasn’t the same as in the chimpanzee, and the nasal bones were more prominent than those of the orangutan. The njena appeared to be a different animal altogether.

  A naturalist in Bristol whom Owen knew well contacted the captain of a trading vessel, and he asked him if he might try to collect more skulls during an upcoming visit to Gabon. The captain returned a few months later with three skulls, but the man died almost immediately upon his arrival in Bristol, unable to offer any more information about the animal. It didn’t matter; Owen had gotten his hands on a real skull, and he wasted no time in giving it a thorough examination.

  By February 1848, Owen was ready to deliver a paper to the Zoological Society titled “On a New Species of Chimpanzee.” He cataloged all the details he was able to discern—the skull’s facial angle, its dental structure, and other osteological traits. As a tribute to the man who’d brought the animal to his attention, Owen proposed to name the new species Troglodytes savagei.

  But Savage, who’d since returned to the United States, had delivered his skulls and bones to Dr. Jeffries Wyman, an anatomist at Harvard Medical School. Because it generally took months for scientific news to travel across the Atlantic, Owen wasn’t aware that Savage and Wyman had already jointly published the first-ever description of the species in the Boston Journal of Natural History. The name they gave it was Troglodytes gorilla.

  Owen had come in second place in the race to name the new species. Conceding the victory, he withdrew the name he’d suggested. But he couldn’t stop thinking about this new animal. When something captured Owen’s imagination, whether it was an opera or the discovery of an unknown species, it was very difficult for him to let it go.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hanno’s Wake

  Gabon

  The name “gorilla” was plucked from an ancient Greek text called The Voyage of Hanno, written in the fifth century B.C. The document charts the sea journey of Hanno the Navigator, who was ordered by Carthage to lead a fleet of ships beyond the Pillars of Hercules to explore an area that would later be known as northern Africa.

  Hanno wrote that he sailed past coastal rivers that teemed with crocodiles and encountered an island that burned with fires at night and was filled with the “sound of pipes, cymbals, drums, and confused shouts.” Frightened away from the island, he continued to sail south. He wrote:

  On the third day after our departure thence, having sailed by those streams of fire, we arrived at a bay called the Southern Horn; at the bottom of which lay an island like the former, having a lake, and in this lake another island, full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae. Though we pursued the men, we could not seize any of them; but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices, and defending themselves with stones. Three women were however taken; but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed on to a
ccompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage. We did not sail farther on, our provisions failing us.

  What sorts of beings Hanno actually saw remains anyone’s guess, but it almost certainly wasn’t the same species of creature whose skull Wilson had acquired. But perhaps the njena could have been the same mysterious manlike animal that Andrew Battell—an English sailor imprisoned by the Portuguese in Angola for eighteen years—had described as the “pongo” in the early seventeenth century. Battell, who never saw one himself, described some of the fantastical local legends about the animal:

  They goe many together and kill many negroe that travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon elephants which come to feed where they be, and so beat them with their clubbed fists and pieces of wood that they will runne roaring away from them. The pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong ten men can not hold one of them.

  Another traveler, T. E. Bowditch, wrote a book of his travels along Africa’s coast in 1819 and described a beast the Mpongwe called the ingena. He was told it stood about five feet tall with broad shoulders that spanned four feet. “Its paw was said to be even more disproportioned than its breadth,” Bowditch reported, “and one blow of it to be fatal.” He also said that numerous natives had told him—“without variation”—that this anthropoid ape built primitive imitations of their bamboo houses and slept outside on top of the roofs.

  Savage and Wyman tracked down all these hazy historical references, while Wilson continued to help them collect more anecdotal information in Gabon. As Du Chaillu hovered close by, Wilson labored on his encyclopedic book about western Africa, pressing the Mpongwe natives for whatever they could tell him about an animal that almost no one near the coast, it seemed, had ever seen with his own eyes.