Between Man and Beast Page 5

  “A good day’s work,” Mbango told Paul.

  The trader smiled at his good fortune, but Paul couldn’t muster anything resembling joy. This wasn’t the way expeditions into the Dark Continent were supposed to begin. Other African explorers lorded over their porters like commanding generals. Paul was comparatively powerless.

  As he sailed along in the canoe, soaking wet and crammed alongside the newly procured prisoners, the young adventurer felt as if he were the captive.

  THE CANOE slipped deeper into the Muni River, and swampy woodlands pressed closer upon both sides. The breeze was too feeble to fill the sail, so with oars the men muscled the boat up the choked tributaries that led to the king’s village. Stiff mangrove roots raked the sides of the canoe. Morning passed to afternoon. They were one degree north of the equator, and at that latitude twilight arrived without fanfare: there was light, there was darkness, and very little in between. Sounds of the onrushing evening filled the boat: the whine of mosquitoes, the slap of palms on exposed skin. Threading their way upriver by moonlight, they continued to paddle only because there was nowhere to stop and make camp. The riverbanks were muddy quagmires.

  It was ten o’clock at night when they finally arrived at the village. From the canoe, they saw men, women, and children darting in and out of dancing firelight. All Paul wanted to do was meet the king, get his blessing, and collapse into sleep. But the king, whose name was Dayoko, announced that he would speak with him first thing in the morning. Paul was served a hot meal of plantains and shown to a bed. Shortly after midnight, he covered himself with mosquito netting and tried to sleep.

  Dayoko was nearly seventy years old—an unusually ripe age for an African living in a village of mud and bamboo. But little else seemed to distinguish him from the others in his tribe. His meager hut lacked even the slightest trace of regal distinction. However, Dayoko had amassed an enormous collection of wives over the years. In every village for miles, he had fathers-in-law who could be counted on as allies and trading partners. Those relationships, more than anything else, gradually allowed him to accumulate more power and influence than anyone else in his tribe. If Paul could get Dayoko’s blessing, he would snag a golden ticket into an invaluable tribal network that extended deep into the forest in all directions.

  Shortly after sunrise, Dayoko was ready for their meeting. Paul pulled out the coat that he’d worn in New York the previous winter and presented it to the king, knowing that the exotic garment would be kindly received. But Paul didn’t stop there. He offered twenty yards of cloth, a little gunpowder, some gunflints, and a few looking glasses for Dayoko’s wives.

  The king was duly impressed with the young man’s etiquette but wasn’t sold on his travel plan. Paul hoped to venture about 150 miles inland—a place that very few natives of this region had ever explored. Dayoko’s sphere of influence didn’t stretch that far. It was said that ferocious cannibal warriors ruled that territory. Dayoko couldn’t guarantee his safety.

  “Dayoko thought my project impossible,” Paul wrote after the meeting. “I would die on the way, and he should have my death on his soul—a consideration which seemed to affect him greatly. I should be murdered by the cannibals and eaten. There was war on the river, and the tribes would not let me pass. The country was sick. And so on.”

  These were not the hysterical exhortations of a fainthearted man. Exploring the African interior in the nineteenth century was dangerous business, and Dayoko knew that his blessing would do little to reverse that fact. African explorers of Paul’s day not only flirted with death; they practically invited it upon themselves. Britain sent four major expeditions to the Congo, Zambezi, and Niger Rivers between 1816 and 1841, and of the hundreds of men who started out on those journeys, a full 60 percent of them didn’t make it out alive. Bare statistics, however, couldn’t fully convey the endlessly creative ways that Africa tormented adventurers. Mungo Park, the first European to explore the Congo, drowned trying to swim to safety as hostile tribesmen strafed the water around him with arrows. Around the same time as Paul began this journey, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were preparing to venture into Somalia. In Zanzibar, they were told that the last European to attempt the feat had been a French naval officer whose luck couldn’t match his curiosity: he stumbled across a group of tribesmen who tied him to a tree and systematically lopped off his limbs, one by one, ending with his head.

  But even the minority who survived African expeditions, as Burton and Speke would, often emerged as shells of their former selves. At intervals during their journeys between 1855 and 1859, Burton took a spear through his cheek, suffered fever-induced delirium, was unable to speak because of a swollen tongue, and suffered briefly from full-body paralysis. Speke fared even worse. He went temporarily, and mysteriously, blind. As he struggled to regain his vision in a hostile environment, his tent was swarmed by tiny black beetles, one of which tunneled deep into his ear canal. Speke reported that when the insect began to “dig violently away at my tympanum,” all self-control abandoned him. He desperately thrust a penknife into his ear, killing the insect but slashing apart the delicate membranes inside. The resulting infection, which eventually hardened into an abscess, inflated his face with swelling. Chewing food became impossible. “For many months the tumour made me almost deaf, and ate a hole between the ear and the nose, so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.” To make matters much worse, Speke’s crew of porters—the very men to whom he’d entrusted his life—actively despised him.

  But Paul remained determined, and he wasn’t about to turn back after coming this far. After two days of pleading, he finally won the king’s support. With Dayoko’s endorsement, several members of a neighboring tribe called the Mbondemo agreed to serve as Paul’s assistants. Additionally, the king promised to send two of his own sons to accompany him.

  With the arrangements made, Mbango and the rest of his men returned to Corisco, taking the canoe with them. Paul remained, alone with Dayoko’s tribe. His fate was in their hands.

  THE MBONDEMO had to finish their seasonal planting before they could accompany him, so he was forced to wait for a full month in Dayoko’s village.

  Paul had been primed to be wary of the inland tribes, thanks to years of exposure to the coastal Gabonese. Although he would make friends with members of nearly every tribe he encountered during his journeys, Paul’s view of the native populations often reverted to the familiar stereotype that was a by-product of fear: the tribes of the interior were godless savages who lived by a code that was amoral and, as a result, inscrutable.

  In Dayoko’s village, he temporarily slipped into this mind-set. A few weeks after he’d arrived, the village buzzed with rumors of an impending execution. An old man had been accused of wizardry, of casting fatal spells upon one of the village chiefs. To Paul the man seemed harmless; bent and wrinkled, with white hair, he had been bound in crude stocks outside a hut. Paul figured he was probably the victim of tribal indifference: he was simply so old that the village didn’t want to take care of him any longer. Whatever the case, the villagers had conclusively voted to kill the old man, reasoning that he’d already murdered one person with his wicked spells and was therefore a threat to everyone.

  “No one would tell me how he was to be killed,” Paul later wrote, “and they proposed to defer the execution till my departure, which I was, to tell the truth, rather glad of.”

  But before he left, he heard shrill cries rise from the river. He saw men walking through the village with blood on their hands and arms. He was told that the old man had been tied to a log and hacked into pieces.

  It’s impossible to know for sure if this actually occurred, but Paul gave every indication in his writings that he believed it had. On the same night as the alleged execution, the men of the village were pleasant and jocular—“mild as lambs,” he wrote, as if nothing had happened. Had they been part of the slaughter? The possibility, in light of their absence of remorse, ra
ttled Paul. Whether it was his imagination or not, the entire village felt sinister and unclean.

  The following Sunday—a day before he was to depart with the Mbondemo for the interior—he opened his Bible, hoping to find solace. When two villagers asked him what he was doing, he tried to explain that he was reading a book that was given to the world by God—the single divine Creator who ruled all.

  “Oh yes,” one of the men replied, “that is true for you. But white man’s God is not our God.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Unfriends”

  London

  John Edward Gray couldn’t stand Richard Owen. He couldn’t have put a finger on just one thing that rubbed him the wrong way; he simply hated everything that Owen represented.

  In 1856, at age fifty-six, Gray was the keeper of the zoological collection at the British Museum and the vice president of the Zoological Society of London. But he had never intended to be a zoologist. As a young man, he had wanted to be a botanist, like his father before him. The story behind his failure to achieve that dream explained much about the ingrained bitterness that seemed to define his personality and his hostility toward the cultural elite.

  Like any up-and-coming botanist, Gray had tried to join the Linnean Society when he was just twenty-two years old. But his membership was denied. The reason, so it was said, was that Gray had disrespected the founder and president of the group, James Edward Smith, by failing to credit him as the author of a work he had cited in a scholarly paper. Such a faux pas might have been forgiven in a layman, but not in someone vying for a place in Smith’s own fiefdom. What undoubtedly made the matter worse was the undisguised contempt that Gray showed for Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist who conceived of the system used to classify plants and animals. Gray and his father co-wrote a paper that described the Linnaean system, which defined plant species according to their sexual parts, among other things, as the product of its creator’s “prurient mind.” That conclusion could not have pleased the members of the society that proudly bore the Swede’s name.

  After being rejected for membership by the Linnean Society, Gray shifted his focus from plants to animals. He systematically clawed his way to the top of the field, becoming the head of the British Museum’s zoological department in 1840. His rise to prominence occurred despite the Victorian scientific establishment. And he never forgot the slight he’d received as a young man. His obituary in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a publication Gray had edited for years, tried to dissect his cantankerous streak: “One can easily understand that the circumstance of being thus ignominiously rejected must have been a bitter disappointment to a young and enthusiastic naturalist such as Gray then was; and we cannot wonder that he placed himself in decided antagonism to those whom he thought his enemies in the matter, and thus acquired that combative habit of mind which undoubtedly in after life procured him many ‘unfriends.’ ”

  His relationship with Darwin illustrates Gray’s talent for stirring professional rancor. In 1848, Darwin was immersed in researching barnacles, noticing all sorts of interesting homologies between those invertebrates and other crustaceans. Gray had encouraged Darwin with his research, and he even allowed him free access to the British Museum’s barnacle collections. But then, while busy putting all his research together for publication, Darwin was told that Gray “intended to anticipate” his work by publishing descriptions of the most interesting specimens himself. It was a stunning betrayal, and Darwin confronted Gray in person. “I felt anxious to know what you intended doing,” Darwin later reiterated in a letter to Gray, “and I think you will admit that it was natural that I should wish that what little of novelty there yet remained in the subject, should be the reward of my work, which I assure you has been to my utmost every day.” Gray backed down and continued to support Darwin, who politely promised to hold no grudges and apologized for his protestations. But the incident was awkward for both of them.

  Gray’s relations with Owen involved none of that politesse: they openly hated each other and made no apologies about it.

  In the early 1850s, Owen and his family moved out of their house at the Royal College of Surgeons and into an estate called Sheen Lodge, which sat in the middle of London’s Richmond Park. Surrounded by lush gardens, carp-filled ponds, and roaming deer, the house was a gift from none other than Queen Victoria herself. This act of royal charity caused many eyes to roll among the scientists who were forced to compete with Owen for attention and prestige, and no one was more disgusted than Gray. But in 1856, Owen was given another gift that infuriated Gray far more: he was named the superintendent of all the natural history collections at the British Museum. Owen was now Gray’s boss.

  Until then, Gray had ruled the department as his own personal kingdom. He had acquired a world-class collection of specimens for the museum. He lobbied hard for a new facility devoted solely to natural history, believing he should be the person to preside over it.

  Owen, coincidentally, had floated the same idea around the same time. But unlike Gray, his access to the highest levels of the British government eventually enabled Owen to successfully land a new, five-acre museum facility dedicated to zoology. Naturally, Owen thought he, and not Gray, would be the best choice to oversee its establishment.

  From the moment Owen took over at the British Museum, Gray’s role in museum affairs was seriously threatened. Given the zoologist’s infamous irritability, scientific London braced itself for a thunderous clash of wills. One observer who knew them both—a young professor of physiology named Thomas Henry Huxley—predicted that the two men would rip each other apart. Huxley wrote to a friend: “In a year or two, the total result will be a caudal vertebra of each remaining after the manner of the Kilkenny cats.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Fever Dreams

  Gabon

  One of Paul’s most precious possessions was his medicine kit, a small but potent collection of remedies that he believed would save him from one of the deadliest evils in the jungle: a malign specter known simply as the fever.

  The land is sick: he’d been fed this warning since he left the coast, and he believed it. The river near Dayoko’s village was shallow, and when Paul waded through the muck, it reeked of plague. One could imagine the sickness seeping up from the ground in a wavy haze of vapors, oozing into the nostrils, settling in the rhinal cavities, doing who knew what sort of damage to a man’s constitution. More than deadly beasts and warring tribesmen, this was what killed explorers.

  The African fever of Paul’s day was the same malaria that’s still killing millions of people, and it was transmitted by the same kinds of mosquitoes then as now. But no one knew that. The mosquito-malaria link wasn’t discovered until the 1880s. Instead, almost everyone subscribed to a “miasma theory”—the same hunch that led most Victorian scientists to believe that cholera was caused by tainted vapors and not water infected with human waste. An English traveler, venturing into Gabon several years after Paul, wrote confidently that he’d consulted “all the authorities on this subject” and collected an “immense mass of evidence” to demystify malaria’s origins. He concluded that “bains, dews, winds blowing from malarious localities, marsh exhalations, and possibly the human breath, may therefore be considered as the proximate causes of fever. Those of nervous temperament, of light hair, and of fair complexion, of strumous habits, or a plethoric disposition, are the most liable to suffer from fever.”

  Even if the underlying cause was buried in murky conjecture, one partially effective treatment for malaria had already been identified: quinine. Dr. David Livingstone, the celebrated medical missionary-cum-explorer, attributed his relative immunity to malaria to the alkaloid, which is found in the bark of the cinchona tree. Aware of this, Du Chaillu loaded his medicine chest with all the quinine he could get his hands on. He used it not only as a remedy for fever but also as a prophylactic to prevent its onset. In the mid-nineteenth century, 2 grains of quinine per day was considered an adequ
ate prophylactic dose. But Paul at times took 150 grains per day. He regularly supplemented the quinine with a small amount of brandy, and sometimes he took laudanum—an opiate that was a favorite of Victorian doctors, prescribed for everything from diarrhea to cholera.

  Sometimes, when nothing else worked, he improvised. “And when the system becomes accustomed to quinine, and this medicine ceases to operate, sometimes a small dose of Fowler’s solution of arsenic will be found very successful in stopping the chills,” Paul wrote.

  He occasionally blamed the quinine for rattling his nerves, but the poisons filtering through his system were probably altering his perceptions in ways he couldn’t appreciate. In recent years, medical researchers have determined that quinine in very high doses can significantly lower a person’s serotonin levels. Shortages of this brain chemical have been linked to depression, obsessive behavior, and even intense spiritual experiences. The anthropologist and historian Johannes Fabian, in a recent study of nineteenth-century Belgian and German explorers in central Africa, concluded that the volatile interaction of drugs such as quinine, laudanum, and alcohol undermined the rationality of the explorers, producing in them distorted states of perception that he labeled “ecstasis.” Their descriptions of Africa and African natives were sensational, Fabian argues, due in part to the fact that fatigued explorers were under the influence of medications that doctors didn’t fully understand.

  PAUL HAD already begun regularly taking quinine before he set out on August 18, 1856, to meet the new escorts Dayoko had lined up for him. They slogged across miles of rooty thickets, through dangling vines and aloe. By the time Paul reached the Mbondemo tribe, his blue button-down shirt was torn to ribbons in places, and the skin underneath raked red.