Between Man and Beast Read online

  Word quickly spread deep into the interior that the men at the mission house had a keen interest in anything related to the njena, and more skulls and bones began arriving at the house on the bluff. Eventually, Wilson collected two complete gorilla skeletons, shipping one to Wyman in the United States, the other to Owen in London. Wilson even got a glimpse of a recently slain gorilla, although the corpse had already deteriorated to an unsalvageable condition. Between his own observation and the descriptions of the beast provided by a handful of hunters who’d claimed to have seen one alive, Wilson could roughly sketch the outline of a terrifying monster.

  “It is almost impossible to give a correct idea, either of the hideousness of its looks, or the amazing muscular power which it possesses,” Wilson wrote.

  The natives told him that if the animal met a single person in the forest, it would invariably attack. Wilson said that he’d seen a man who chanced upon one of the brutes and barely lived to tell about it. The man’s lower leg was mangled, Wilson said, and it likely would have been torn clean off if his hunting companions hadn’t come to his rescue, just in time. “It is said they will wrest a musket from the hands of a man and crush the barrel between their jaws,” Wilson wrote, “and there is nothing, judging from the muscles of the jaws, or the size of their teeth, that renders such a thing impossible.”

  Using information that Wilson helped them collect, Savage and Wyman wrote that local tribes considered the slaying of a gorilla to be the ultimate act of courage and skill. The Mpongwe, who sometimes enslaved the members of other tribes that lived deeper in the interior, had recounted to Wilson the story of one lowly servant who had shot and killed two gorillas with a rifle. “This act, unheard of before, was considered almost superhuman,” Savage and Wyman wrote. “The man’s freedom was immediately granted to him, and his name proclaimed abroad as the prince of hunters.”

  For reasons he kept to himself, Paul was also looking for liberation, a way to permanently break free from a past that he never discussed. But as the stories he was hearing from the natives proved, even the lowliest, most unassuming of men could become legends, worthy of respect. All that was needed was courage and the opportunity to prove it.

  Did Paul have to accept the perfunctory fate of becoming a coastal merchant like his father before him? Was he doomed to see the world through the limiting lens of simple commerce, or could he view it in all of its kaleidoscopic splendor? What was stopping him from engaging life on a grand scale?

  Wilson fed Paul’s dreams of self-transformation. As an African missionary, he was well versed in the story of Moses in the land of the Pharaoh: a baby rescued among the bulrushes of the river Nile, spared the fate of a cursed birth, destined to grow into the prototype of the epic hero. Paul acted as if his own life began when he was rescued from the river and met Wilson. Whatever came before didn’t matter. He’d been given the chance to write his own future, and he was eager to start immediately.

  Wilson backed him fully, because that was what he believed mission work was all about: giving people the opportunity to follow paths that hadn’t been open to their forebears, in the hopes that there they would find their true purpose.

  Early in 1852, Wilson discovered that a seminary in Carmel, New York, was looking for someone who could teach French. The wide-open promise of America seemed perfect for a young man determined to erase all antecedents. Wilson sent some letters, pulled some strings. Paul soon met a captain who offered him free passage across the Atlantic. He was off, embarking on what he hoped would be the first chapter of an epic fable of his own making.

  CHAPTER 4

  Drawing Lines

  London

  It was impossible to know what morning would bring to the Owen house, but it was safe to guess it might come early. A few of Richard’s scientific friends possessed a passion for discovery that equaled his own, blinding them to all manner of social norms, such as observing the clock.

  “Mr. Darwin was here very early,” Caroline noted in her diary one day in 1847, “before breakfast.”

  The thirty-eight-year-old Charles Darwin was a regular visitor to Owen’s house in 1847 and 1848. The two men had known each other for years; Darwin had sent Owen the mammalian fossils he’d collected during his South American voyage on the HMS Beagle between 1831 and 1836. Now Darwin was picking the brain of the senior scientist, trying to wrap his head around an idea that Owen was developing concerning a “unity of organization” common to all vertebrates, including human beings.

  Owen believed different species shared a common, fundamental blueprint—an “archetype,” as he called it—that had been preprogrammed to develop in a distinct way. In every species, he wrote, “ends are obtained and the interest of the animal promoted, in a way that indicates superior design, intelligence and foresight; but a design, intelligence and foresight in which the judgement and reflection of the animal never were concerned; and which, therefore, with Virgil, and with other studious observers of nature, we must ascribe to the Sovereign of the universe, in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

  Owen’s writings on the subject were both erudite and opaque, which is why Darwin kept popping by his house, trying to more clearly understand his work. As Owen was preparing a journal article outlining the concept in 1848, Darwin pleaded with him to include illustrations so that the ideas might be more intelligible to “ignoramuses such as myself.”

  Darwin’s eager interest and humility flattered Owen. He didn’t know that the younger scientist was working on his own theory of biological development that was far more coherent and fastidiously tested than his own. That idea—and Owen’s resistance to it—would eventually tear their friendship to shreds.

  AS A member of the Anglican Church, Owen would have kept in his library a Bible that included a time line printed in the margins. The day of creation, it stated, occurred on October 22 in 4004 B.C.

  The chronology had been devised by a seventeenth-century Anglican archbishop named James Ussher, and it was based on readings of the Bible, Talmud, and other sacred documents in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Owen dismissed the time line, which for nearly two hundred years was included in the Authorized Version of the King James Bible used by the Anglican Church. To him and nearly every other scientist of his day, the Bible wasn’t a book to be read literally but rather an allegorical or metaphorical text.

  The scientific evidence for questioning the Bible’s time line became unavoidably apparent to scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, thanks mainly to discoveries in geology and paleontology. The earth appeared to be far older than the biblical accounts suggested, and it had endured multiple geological epochs. The French naturalist Georges Cuvier and the British geologist William Smith had analyzed fossil remains and geological strata to show that each of those epochs featured distinct species of plants and animals, many of which seemed to no longer exist anywhere in the world. Evidence of human life, as Cuvier noted, appeared only within the most recent geological deposits. The idea of a single moment of creation, during which all species roamed the earth concurrently, began to lose credibility among naturalists. By the first two decades of the nineteenth century, most scientists agreed that new species both appeared and disappeared over time.

  Varying explanations sprang up among those who wanted to restore authority to the biblical version of creation. In fact, many of the scientists behind the discoveries that challenged the Scriptures were the same ones who worked hardest to reconcile the findings with biblical accounts. Some proposed a “gap theory,” which said an undocumented amount of time existed between “the beginning” of Genesis and the creation of all species; others suggested that each of the six days of creation, as described in the Bible, was much longer than the twenty-four-hour days of our present age. These scientists weren’t ready to undermine a religion that they themselves followed faithfully.

  For a nineteenth-century man of science like Cuvier, who couldn’t ignore the obvious discrepancies, kee
ping the faith required a reconsideration of what was truly sacred and what wasn’t. The biblical time line was open to interpretation. But despite increasing fossil evidence supporting “transmutation,” as evolution was most commonly termed in those days, Cuvier rejected the notion. Evolution was one line that couldn’t be crossed. “All species reproduce according to their kind,” Genesis stated. For Cuvier, this was an untouchable truth. To suggest otherwise seemed both illogical and immoral.

  The idea that the defining characteristics of a species, particularly the human species, might change radically over time is what really riled literal-minded Christians, then and now. Unlike many other religious traditions, the Judeo-Christian texts insist upon a single moment of creation. More important, they draw a clear, bold line separating humans from other animals. Man was a special creation, fully formed from the start, wholly separate from and superior to all the other creatures on earth. Humans are absolutely unique, according to the Bible, and always have been.

  Most early theories of transmutation tried to preserve the notion of man as the ultimate creation of a divine watchmaker. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a book authored by Robert Chambers but published anonymously in 1844, outlined the idea that animals develop from lesser to “more perfect” beings, with humans being the most perfect of all. By following this progressive law of development, Chambers wrote, transmutation was part of a master plan laid out by the “Almighty Author.”

  The book, regardless of its attempt to appease religious leaders, was condemned as heresy by the conservative members of England’s theological and political elite. In need of someone to poke holes in the book’s science, members of the Victorian establishment turned to a man they knew they could trust to support the status quo: Richard Owen.

  Roderick Impey Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society and a man who would be knighted by Queen Victoria within a year, was one of Owen’s closest friends. He wrote to Owen in 1845 suggesting that he attack Vestiges because “a real man in armour is required, and if you would undertake the concern you would do infinite service to true science and sincerely oblige your friends.”

  But Owen declined. He saw much to admire in the book, and he had slowly come around to accepting the idea of transmutation of species—with limits. His ideas about archetypes were, in a sense, built on the same principles that Chambers outlined. Owen resisted the idea that evolution could result from outside forces, such as Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Like Chambers, Owen believed the changes were internally triggered, from within the living beings themselves.

  Owen’s refusal to attack the Vestiges didn’t mean that he was turning his back on the establishment. Instead, he seemed to be trying to nudge it toward a position of compromise that accepted new discoveries without wholly abandoning Scripture. Over the next decade, Owen worked to draw a precise line defining just how far he believed the concept of transmutation could be taken: nature, no matter how slow the processes, could never gradually turn an ape into a man.

  CHAPTER 5

  American Dreams

  Carmel, New York

  Carmel, nestled between rolling hills, sat a few miles shy of the halfway mark along the telegraph line that connected New York City to Albany. A large pond, called Shaw’s Lake, served as a glassy sort of village green for the hamlet’s twenty-three hundred souls, and near one of its banks a narrow bridge stretched over the recently laid tracks of the New York & Harlem Railroad. By following the bridge road, a visitor ran straight into the town’s most imposing edifice: a hulking mass of pale stone and Doric columns called the Carmel School.

  Built just two years before Paul arrived in the United States, the school had floundered as a girl’s seminary, with an enrollment of only a dozen or so students. But a new director was determined to turn the school into a thriving institution worthy of its venerable premises. In 1852 he opened the school to both boys and girls and augmented the staff to accompany the swelling ranks. One of his priorities had been to hire an authentic Frenchman as a foreign-language instructor.

  Paul seemed to fit the bill. Though he’d learned a passable amount of English from the Wilsons, he spoke it with a soupy Parisian accent, and often, when struggling to find le mot juste, he filled the blanks with French. A more self-conscious speaker might have chosen silence over risking the appearance of eccentricity, but Paul just let it fly. He was a verbal caricature, the kind who could be crudely imitated by turning “the” into dzee and “these” into dzees. In small-town America, he couldn’t have drawn more attention to himself if he had tried. That’s why few picked up on this sliver of mildly tragic irony: the new faculty member everyone called “the Little Frenchman” wanted nothing more than to be considered a real American and to blend in with everyone else in red-white-and-blue Carmel.

  He told his students that he despised France. He said that he’d lived through the revolution of 1848—an experience that forever tainted his view of the Second Empire. He told them he was determined to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, and in fact he visited the Putnam County Courthouse in Carmel to apply. But he didn’t wait for the papers to come through to adopt the country as his own. He changed the pronunciation of his last name—which in French sounded kind of like du-sha-yu—and happily incorporated a common stateside mispronunciation, turning it into du-chally-yu. As far as he was concerned, he was American through and through.

  EVEN IF his students believed he was a citizen, it didn’t mean they accepted him as one of their own. The same transparent sense of wonder that Wilson had encouraged in Paul left him wide open to ridicule among students and other faculty members who were predisposed to belittling the quirky.

  One of his favorite students, Helen Evertson Smith, later described Paul’s days at Carmel School as those of an unwitting innocent who cheerfully reached out for friends by sticking his hand into a viper’s nest: “Mr. Du Chaillu’s diminutive size, his often exceedingly queer English, his very acts of kindness were all openly ridiculed, not only by boys and girls big enough to know better, but also by the other teachers.”

  He had falsely added five years to his age, claiming to be in his mid-twenties when he arrived at Carmel, but that didn’t seem to fool the students, who afforded him none of the respect of an elder. Once, a group of particularly tyrannical male students devised a detailed plan to kidnap Paul while he slept in the dormitory. They decided to sneak into his room and tie him up in a blanket. Then they would toss him hand to hand, like construction workers moving sandbags, down four flights of stairs, across a snowy lawn, down a steep hillside to Seminary Hill Road, across the bridge, and into the frigid waters of Shaw’s Lake. The boys marked a date on the calendar: a suitably chilly one in February. But the day prior to Paul’s planned kidnapping, the French teacher arrived at the door of the school with a wagon brimming with treats—cakes, candies, pies, fruits, even turkeys. That day—for no apparent occasion—Paul’s classroom on the top floor of the school became the site of an impromptu celebratory feast. Stricken with guilt, the boys abandoned their plan, which was later revealed by one of the youngest of the conspirators. Some suspected that Paul had been warned of the plot and cunningly staged the feast to curry favor and humble the guilty. Others believed he hadn’t known a thing, and they argued that the party was completely in character with his generous, exuberant personality. No one ever really knew for sure.

  What was certain, however, is that if Paul won the respect of some of his students, his stories of his time in Africa helped him do so. Though he might have desired to be considered a normal American, he learned to use his aura of the exotic to his advantage. The more he told students about his time in Gabon, the more he witnessed the enthusiasm it inspired in some of them. He’d speak of elephants, of hippopotamuses, of boa constrictors—the wilder the beast, it seemed, the greater the interest. A small group of girls, which included Evertson Smith, used to linger in his room after class to spend part of their lunch hour listening to his adven
tures. He turned it into a sort of exercise, one that the girls grew to cherish: if they asked him questions about Africa in French, he’d respond in English. The exchanges on occasion veered into the personal, as the girls tried to get a clearer picture of the young teacher’s backstory. The details he gave them were spare but satisfied their curiosity: he told them he’d been born in Africa and that his mother had died when he was too young to remember her. He was sent to France to attend school, he said, and when he was old enough to work for his father, he rejoined him in Africa.

  While at Carmel, Paul capitalized on the interest he noticed that some people harbored for Africa, and he offered to write a series of articles about the region for the New-York Tribune. The editors agreed to publish several pieces, which described the coast’s animal life.

  One of the Tribune’s readers, John Cassin, took note of the articles and tracked down their author. Cassin was head of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences and one of America’s most accomplished ornithologists—later he’d be considered by many to be the country’s first true taxonomist—and he’d been compiling lists of species of birds found all over the world, from the American West to Japan to Chile. Cassin’s interest exhilarated Paul, who was thrilled to have attracted the attention of a learned body as august as the academy. The idea of a return trip to Africa—but this time with the added status that American connections gave him—seized the young man. His mind reeled at the potential zoological treasures a true expedition into Gabon might yield. The number of bird species he’d be able to shoot, stuff, and ship back to Philadelphia would dramatically expand Cassin’s inventory of African birds. When he aired the idea to Cassin, the ornithologist heartily encouraged him. If Paul launched such an expedition, Cassin said, the academy would sponsor him.