Between Man and Beast Page 4

  Thus, on October 16, 1855, Cassin stood before the members of the academy and announced that Paul was about to return to western Africa, undertaking an expedition that would provide them with specimens. During that meeting, the group appointed a committee to solicit contributions to help finance a trip of undetermined length.

  It instantly became clear to Paul that his stay in America would not be the wholly transformative experience he at first hoped it might be, but rather a meaningful parenthesis between two chapters in Gabon. In October, he boarded a three-masted schooner in New York and sailed for Africa.

  Neither Cassin nor anyone else seemed to know that Paul had his sights set on something far greater than mere birds. He told himself that he wasn’t coming back until he had bagged the beast that until that moment had existed more in myth than in reality, a demon-like creature whose killing could earn anyone, even the lowliest slave, the sort of esteem powerful enough to break the chains of any circumstance. Paul wanted a gorilla.

  CHAPTER 6

  To Slide into Brutish Immorality

  London

  Richard Owen grabbed six different artifacts from the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Three were human skulls: an aboriginal from Van Diemen’s Land, a Mongolian from central Asia, and a Caucasian from Europe. The other three were the skulls of apes: an orangutan, a chimpanzee, and a gorilla. Throughout the winter of 1854 and 1855, he pored over every detail of each skull, determined to chart their similarities and differences.

  Chimpanzees had been known to European scientists since 1699, when an English anatomist dissected a specimen collected in West Africa, and orangutans had first been described by an English traveler to Borneo in 1712. A few decades later, when Carl Linnaeus developed the biological classification system that is still used today, he labeled humans as primates, along with the apes. He believed humans to be essentially unique, and he knew grouping men with apes would trouble people. “It is not pleasing to me that I must place humans among the primates,” he wrote to a friend in 1747, “but man is intimately familiar with himself. Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name is applied. But I desperately seek from you and the whole world a general difference between men and simians from the principles of Natural History. I certainly know of none. If only someone might tell me one!”

  Within thirty years, scientists came up with something. They separated the primates into two genera—one for four-handed species (apes and monkeys), and another for two-handed ones (humans). By the early nineteenth century, Georges Cuvier had separated them even further, creating a distinct order for humans.

  Many scientists today believe that apes shared a common ancestor with humans several million years ago before splitting off on separate evolutionary paths. Modern genetic evidence suggests that the chimpanzee is man’s closest living relative, and gorillas are a close second. But when Owen compared features of the skulls—the shape of the orbits, the projection of the nasal bone, the grinding surface of the teeth—he concluded that the gorilla was the most anthropoid, or humanlike, of all animals. When he presented these findings at a meeting of the Royal Institution in London in February 1855, the gorilla instantly became the standard benchmark for anyone wanting to compare humans with other animals.

  At that same meeting, Owen seemed to feel a threat to the fixed taxonomical lines that had been drawn between humans and apes. His contemporaries had created those distinctions on paper, but the increasing chatter about transmutation suggested that many modern scientists harbored doubts about the stability of species. Owen, addressing the crowd behind a lectern at the Royal Institution, attacked the notion by lauding the wisdom of the seventeenth-century Platonist philosophers like Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, who sought to prove that reason and religion were perfectly compatible.

  “The present age may be more knowing, but can it truly flatter itself as being wiser, more logical, and less credulous than that of Cudworth and More?” Owen asked his audience.

  He told them that More had anticipated that a future generation might want to blur the lines between man and animal, and as far as Owen was concerned, the thoughts of the wise old sage on the matter still rang true. Owen recited a passage from More: “And of a truth, vile epicurism and sensuality will make the soul of man so degenerate and blind, that he will not only be content to slide into brutish immorality, but please himself in this very opinion that he is a real brute already, an ape, satyre or baboon.”

  In other words, the resemblance between a man and a gorilla was cause for concern only among those uncivilized enough to doubt mankind’s essential separation from mere animals.

  Owen seemed untroubled by one obvious fact that he failed to mention during his lecture: no one that he would consider “civilized” had ever actually seen a gorilla.

  CHAPTER 7

  An Awkward Homecoming

  Gabon

  The captain’s charts showed a mazy obstacle course of shallows and shoals, and an occasional westerly sea breeze crisscrossed the water’s currents to whip up peril. Newcomers often tensed when they reached this broad estuary of the Gabon River, but Paul knew that the surf was even worse farther down the coast. Given all he and the rest of the men had endured for weeks aboard that cramped schooner, a mild bout of pitching and rolling was a more-than-equal trade for the promise of dry land.

  Paul had spent those weeks with a seven-man crew. The four sailors and the cook had bedded down in the stuffy forecastle, but Paul’s status as the schooner’s only paying passenger earned him preferential treatment: a bunk in the aft cabin alongside the captain and the mate. By the schooner’s standards, this qualified as a luxury.

  This cruise was supposed to be the relaxing part of his expedition, but little about it was comfortable. Even for someone as small as Paul, it was impossible to stand upright in that cabin, unless he happened to be directly under the tiny skylight. The only real furnishings consisted of the bunks, a small table in the center of the floor, and a wall-mounted cupboard that held the rattling plates and cutlery. When they ate, the three men sat on the same chests that stored their personal belongings.

  Paul had spent most days up on the deck, where the wind whistled through the rigging. If he looked hard enough, something could usually be found to break the monotony of the waves. It might have been a swordfish knifing through the water, or a teeming school of porpoises, or a desperate bullfinch that appeared as if it might drop dead from exhaustion at any moment, so far from the shore. It had been easy to sympathize with the bird: all transatlantic voyages that relied on only currents and wind were endurance tests. The Doldrums, a dead zone of low atmospheric pressure near the equator, stalled their progress for a full week.

  “For five days,” Paul wrote, “two empty flour barrels that had been thrown overboard remained alongside of our ship.”

  Eventually, an afternoon squall pushed them into the southeast trade winds. More storms converged on the small ship. Water lashed the bulwarks and threatened to bury the prow, tossing the boat so fiercely that the sailors had to tie themselves to the masts.

  In that storm, Paul had thought about the cargo he’d loaded into the hold back in New York, which reminded him of the reason he’d endured the journey in the first place: to explore and to hunt. Every crash of thunder seemed to pose a troubling question: What if one of the glowing branches of lightning somehow connected with the expedition supplies that Paul had stowed in the hold?

  “I had enough powder on board to blow the ship to pieces,” he later wrote.

  SHORTLY BEFORE Paul arrived on the coast of Gabon in late 1855, the Wilsons returned to America, a permanent move prompted by a worsening liver ailment John had developed after more than twenty years in West Africa. One of the Mpongwe natives told Paul how they all had gathered around the boat to watch the couple leave the continent. As the man recalled that parting scene, tears welled in his eyes. The locals had grown fond of Wilson, and they missed him.

  But the old m
an’s presence thoroughly pervaded Baraka, where Paul planned to stay with Wilson’s successors for five months, until the dry season commenced and the swamped interior might be traversable. The saplings Wilson had planted on the bluff had grown into a shady orchard, rich with the scent of tropical fruits. The cadence of life was reassuringly predictable: the stirrings of the fowl house in the early morning; the breakfast pots clanging in the kitchen hut; the chime of the morning school bell summoning the children from the village below; young voices reciting prayers in the Mpongwe language. Paul could amass supplies and plan his route here, comfortable within an atmosphere that provided a constant reminder of his old friend and mentor.

  Wilson’s departure wasn’t the only significant event that immediately preceded Paul’s arrival. Around the same time, his father died. Charles-Alexis Du Chaillu was interred near the estuary in a burial ground cluttered with trees and crooked crosses. Whatever feelings the news stirred within his son were lost to history, because Paul never committed a single word to paper on the subject and none of his acquaintances ever publicly recalled him speaking of it.

  The only mentions of his father in Paul’s writings that survive from this time are connected with a desire to move beyond the memory and influence of his father. Many of the locals assumed that he’d returned to take his father’s place as a merchant, and they greeted him warmly, eager to see what he’d brought to trade.

  “Their disappointment was great, therefore, when I was obliged to inform them that I had come with no goods to sell,” he wrote, “but with the purpose to explore the country back, of which I had heard so many wonderful stories from them, and to hunt wild birds and beasts. At first they believed I was joking.”

  Some suspected that his exploratory hunting trip was a pretense, a cleverly disguised attempt to circumvent Mpongwe control of the coastal trade. Over centuries of regular visits from Portuguese and Dutch ships, members of the tribe had established a rigid commercial system designed for their benefit. The Mpongwe on the coast, led by King Glass, would procure many of their goods—ebony, ivory, barwood, and even slaves—from other tribes that lived farther inland. If, for example, King Glass traded a tusk of ivory to a Portuguese sailor in exchange for fabrics, it’s likely that the tusk had already passed through the hands of several other tribal rulers, and each would have pocketed a commission. King Glass’s cut, invariably, would have been higher than any other along that chain of supply. Despite the markups, the trading system remained a bargain for the Europeans, who never had to venture beyond the coast to fill their cargo holds. This system helped explain why, after so many years of sporadic trade, no white man was known to have traveled more than a short distance inland. To do so simply wasn’t necessary, and it would have been considered a foolish risk. It would also have invited the kind of suspicion that Paul now faced among the Mpongwe: Was he simply trying to cut out the middleman by acquiring goods directly, and more cheaply, from the inland tribes?

  Most of the Mpongwe didn’t trust his plan, which made his preparations more difficult than he had expected. Only his closest native friends from his years with Wilson would agree to help him acquire provisions. Even some of those who assisted him tried to talk him out of a plan they believed was unwise, if not suicidal. The jungle was no place for a foreigner, they said. The Mpongwe themselves didn’t dare head inland unless it was an absolute necessity. Even then, they didn’t go far.

  But in his limited encounters with tribes of the near interior, Paul had learned that most of them had been eager to meet and speak with him simply because he was the son of a white trader. Among most of the inland tribes, a non-native visitor was an unheard-of novelty, and he could use that to his advantage. His status as an outsider alone was enough to grant him an audience before the king of any of the inland tribes. And if the kings were on his side, he’d never have a shortage of helpers during his journey.

  The idea that so much might depend on his links to a non-African origin was a fact of life that Paul wasn’t above exploiting, even though he recognized how thin and superficial such differences often seemed. Sometimes the Gabonese he met marveled at his light complexion, but Paul didn’t see such a clear line of separation. “It is really tanned a very dark brown by now,” he wrote of his skin after spending several weeks under the equatorial sun.

  Such fine points of shading didn’t matter much in the black-and-white world of western Africa in the early days of its colonization. Even if Paul seemed eager to obliterate his past for reasons he chose to keep to himself, everyone knew he was the son of a white man. That fact, both on the coast and in the interior, was much more than skin-deep.

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY explorations into Africa’s unmapped regions were never taken lightly. Most everything associated with them, in fact, was incredibly heavy.

  Thousands of yards of cloth bundled into seventy-pound bales, bags of glass beads that weighed more than fifty pounds each, lengths of wire rolled into sixty-pound coils—and those were just the “gifts” that served as traveler’s insurance, used to buy favor from whatever tribes an explorer might encounter. The standard cargo was even bulkier: an armory of guns, shields, and swords, plus hundreds of pounds of gunpowder; a full line of surveying equipment; tents, tables, and bedding; multiple kitchenware sets; crates of tea and medicine; and even a small carpentry shop for inevitable repairs. When Captain Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke journeyed into Africa from the east coast in search of the source of the Nile at the same time Paul was in Gabon, their list of provisions was staggering: 380 pounds of lead bullets; twenty thousand copper caps; two thousand fishhooks; a small library of native grammar manuals and almanacs; five dozen bottles of brandy; and a trove of other items that ranged from cork beds to rain gauges. A few years later, when Henry Morton Stanley commenced his legendary expedition to find David Livingstone, he estimated that his traveling kit weighed about eleven thousand pounds. Wheeled transport was impractical when traversing such rugged terrain, and draft animals were generally useless because of the ravenous tsetse flies. As a result, a small army of native porters—between 100 and 160 men, in Stanley’s case—traveled right alongside every established Victorian explorer.

  Paul, alas, wasn’t an established Victorian explorer.

  The academy in Philadelphia hadn’t provided funding up front, so his was destined to be a poor man’s operation. Even so, what he lacked in provisions and equipment he made up for in ambition. His plan was to enter Gabon’s interior via the Muni River, ascending it to its headwaters. Then he’d cross the Crystal Mountains on foot. In addition to encountering gorillas, he hoped to verify the course of the Congo River, which was rumored to flow northward behind the mountains. The territory was an empty white spot on the map. He hoped to color it in by himself.

  Just before embarking on the trip, Paul traveled to the small island of Corisco, which sits in the bay about eighteen miles from the mouth of the Muni River. There, he would finish outfitting his expedition by hiring a few native traders to accompany him on the first leg of his journey. One of those traders was a man named Mbango, who reputedly had traveled upriver before and had bartered with a great king who ruled several tribes of the Muni. If Mbango could just introduce him to that king, Paul believed he might be able to avoid one of the most serious dangers he faced: hostilities with isolated forest tribes.

  Mbango and a dozen of his friends agreed to accompany him for a couple of weeks and to lend him a canoe. The vessel was large, having been carved out of a broad tree trunk, and it was even rigged with a primitive sail. The canoe measured thirty-five feet long, three feet wide, and about three and a half feet deep.

  Paul packed the canoe with everything he thought he’d need for this part of his expedition: chests containing a hundred fathoms of cloth, nineteen pounds of beads, a few looking glasses, some flints, a little tobacco, eighty pounds of shot and bullets, twenty-five pounds of powder, some basic medicines, half a dozen crackers in case of stomach upset, ten pounds of arsen
ic for preserving animal specimens, and his rifles.

  Everything he brought with him into the jungle, including Mbango and the other men, fit into the single dugout canoe.

  PAUL AND his makeshift crew, each carrying a gun, sailed across the Bay of Corisco toward the headwaters of the Muni River, which today forms part of the border between Gabon and its neighbor to the north, Equatorial Guinea. The men intended to accompany him only as far as the village of the river king, about forty-five miles inland. If Paul wanted a permanent crew to travel with him farther, he’d need to hire them in that village. These men in his canoe were traders, not explorers. The fact became painfully apparent to Paul even before they reached the mouth of the Muni.

  In the middle of the bay, something caught Mbango’s eye. Across the water, another boat was approaching theirs. But when the men in that boat spotted Mbango’s canoe, they changed course and veered away in the opposite direction. But they hadn’t acted quickly enough. Mbango recognized the boat, which belonged to a man who owed him money. Seizing the opportunity to collect, Mbango yelled to his men to pursue the fleeing men.

  “But the more he called ‘stop,’ the harder they paddled off,” Paul wrote. “Now our side became excited. Mbango called that he would fire upon them. This only frightened them more.”

  Mbango’s canoe soon overtook the other boat. Paul’s pleas for peace were drowned out in a wash of angry shouting and splashing water. Hand-to-hand combat broke out as the canoe ranged alongside the boat.

  The canoe rocked violently, threatening to dump the men and all of Paul’s supplies. But Mbango and his men seemed to be getting the best of their enemies. A couple of the men in the other boat jumped overboard, forcing the rest to surrender. Mbango seized three members of the other boat’s crew, ushering them into his crowded canoe as captives. He told Paul that now they would make an unplanned detour: the prisoners could be detained on a nearby island, which would help guarantee Mbango the speedy repayment of the debt.