Between Man and Beast Page 6

  The Mbondemo lived in an olako, a tribal word meaning something close to “temporary settlement.” It aspired to be a village, but it wasn’t one yet. The people slept under rectangular shelters of thatched leaves supported by four crooked sticks at each corner. After dark, when Paul arrived, the place dripped with a romantic jungle atmosphere that he loved: the orange glow of the fires lit the faces of the families and made the shadows in the forest dance. The tribe gave him, as an honored guest, one of the best shelters, with the tightest weave of leaves overhead. But the roof was overmatched by the rain, which was just beginning to regularly soak the region at night. Every morning he woke covered in mosquito bites and soaking wet.

  Protection, not comfort, was what he really needed from the tribesmen. He still didn’t fully trust his new companions, but as he got to know them better, his biases began to soften. Their king, named Mbene, seemed noble. Instead of invariably seeing them as godless savages, Paul began to see fellow men worthy of respect. He confided to his journal:

  Today {August 20} I sent back Dayoko’s men, and am now in Mbene’s power and at his mercy. He is a very good fellow, and I feel myself quite safe among his rough but kindly people. I have found it the best way to trust the people I travel among. They seem to take it as a compliment, and they are proud to have a white man among them. Even if a chief were inclined to murder, it would not be profitable in such a case, for the exhibition of his white visitor among the neighboring tribes does more to give him respect and prestige than his murder would.

  Dayoko’s men had promised to return to look for Paul in three months. That would give Paul enough time to explore the two ridges of the Crystal Mountains that were visible from the encampment. Those hills, looming and shrouded, had been his targets since he’d arrived in Gabon. They appeared fuzzed with light green baize, but what lurked within that verdure was the stuff of legend. Cannibals who roasted their enemies over open fires. Gorillas that made the cannibals seem harmless. He was sure to see things no one else in the outside world had ever laid eyes upon. The promise of such wonders set his fevered imagination ablaze.

  CLIMBING WAS hard and slippery work. These were days of sore legs and empty stomachs, of boot soles skidding across wet stones. His barefoot companions navigated the dangers with fewer spills, but it wasn’t easy for them, either. In addition to the native hunters and guides, six Mbondemo women had been assigned by male tribal leaders to serve as Paul’s carriers—a lowly task that none of the men agreed to do.

  All of them were rewarded with sights of otherworldly splendor. From a cliff on the side of a mile-high mountain, the valleys looked as pristine as they were mysterious. But images of Edenic solitude were broken by unwelcome visions reminding them that nature would never leave them alone.

  During that first foray into the Crystal Mountains, Paul sat under a tree and spotted an enormous snake stretching across the branches overhead. He shot it, and it fell to the ground, shook reflexively a few times, and died. It measured just over thirteen feet long. To Paul, it was a repulsive creature, and it made his skin crawl. To his companions, it was lunch. They flayed it, roasted the meat over a fire, and ate it. Paul couldn’t stomach the sight of it. But it wasn’t as bad as the mangabey monkey the hunters cooked days later. That image rattled Paul to the bone. He thought it looked like a roasted baby.

  The more time he spent with his guides, the more his perceptions grew into fantastic shapes, colored by fear, flowering into surreally vivid, almost psychedelic, phantasmagoria. His hatred of snakes soon populated the jungle with terrifying serpents that were eager to unhinge their jaws and engulf him. Once, when he was stepping into a cave with his companions, his mind immediately conjured a squirming mass of snakes—a fantasy, but one that reality nearly trumped. “Peering into the darkness, I thought I saw two bright sparks or coals of eyes gleaming savagely at us,” he wrote. “Without thinking of the consequences, I leveled my gun at the shining objects and fired. The report for a moment deafened us. Then came a redoubled rush of the great hideous bats; it seemed to me millions on millions of these animals suddenly launched out on us from all parts of the surrounding gloom; our torches were extinguished in an instant, and panic-struck, we all made for the cavern’s mouth—I with visions of enraged snakes springing after and trying to catch up with me.”

  At the very forefront of his imagination, however, Paul reserved a special place for the King of the Forest—the gorilla, for whom he always remained vigilant, wherever he went.

  WHEN PAUL saw the strange footprints near a cluster of sugarcane where a native village had once stood, the native hunters who had accompanied him all day on the long, slippery uphill slog said one word: nguyla. Paul recognized it as the Mbondemo version of njena, or “gorilla.”

  As they followed the tracks to large granite boulders, they saw that the tracks included knuckle marks, suggesting the animals had been walking on all fours, stopping occasionally, it seemed, to sit and chew stalks of cane that they had taken from the patch. Examining the scene closely, the men counted at least five distinct sets of prints. They seemed fresh.

  When Paul and the men got their first fleeting glimpse of the gorillas, the tree cover was too dense to get off a clear shot. But the momentary flash of their bodies—Paul thought he might have seen four different gorillas run for cover—was vividly impressed in his mind.

  Considering that they had been climbing the mountainside since morning, they should have been exhausted when they returned to the camp that night. But they didn’t sleep. Instead, they replayed the scenes from that day, soaking their impressions of the sightings in the volatile fuel of folktale and legend.

  Paul had been hearing the natives’ stories about gorillas for years—about how they were more powerful than lions, about how they could kill men with brutal efficiency. But around the fire, his guides took those stories to another level. They lit up the night with descriptions of a beast that bore only a passing resemblance to the skittish phantoms they’d barely glimpsed hours before.

  One of the men told Paul a story—a true story, he assured him—about two of the women from the Mbondemo tribe who had encountered an enormous gorilla deep in the forest. The beast seized one of the women and disappeared with her into the gloom. The other woman ran back to the village in hysterics. But the tribe could do nothing to help, and they mourned the victim’s certain death. A few days later, they were shocked when the abducted woman returned. The gorilla, she reported, had raped her, leaving her traumatized but otherwise unharmed.

  “Yes,” one of the Mbondemo men told Paul, “that was a gorilla inhabited by a spirit.”

  Stories of gorillas that were possessed by humans, Paul learned, constituted an entire chapter of the native lore. Possessed gorillas could be distinguished, they said, by their unusual enormity and the fact that they could never be killed. These men-beasts were the perfect union of brute strength and human intelligence, they said. The men rattled off names of members of their own tribe, now dead, who were believed to roam the forests in the bodies of gorillas.

  Paul didn’t take these stories as literal truth, but where could he draw a line separating reality and tall tales when it came to less supernatural matters? He’d heard more than one tribe say that gorillas were known to lurk in trees, waiting to ambush people who walked underneath, pulling their victims up with their feet before quietly choking them with their massive hands. Some said that the brute exercised a bloody dominion over all the animals in the forest. Most of the native tribes agreed that gorillas sometimes beat elephants to death with sticks.

  These men, reliable or not, had more knowledge concerning gorilla behavior than anyone else alive. No one else, anywhere in the world, had as much experience with the animal as they had—even if they’d be the first to admit that they always tried to avoid accumulating such experience if at all possible.

  But now, after the brief encounter of that day, Paul was an expert. He’d gotten one little glimpse of gorillas in their natural h
abitat, and that was enough to make him the world’s foremost authority on the behavior of the most fantastic beast in the annals of natural history. No one else, aside from a handful of native tribesmen, had ever seen this much. He was desperate for more.

  CHAPTER 10

  Between Men and Apes

  London

  When T. H. Huxley predicted that John Gray and Richard Owen would rip each other apart if forced to work together, it had seemed like a real possibility—but only if Huxley himself didn’t get to Owen first.

  Like most up-and-coming scientists in Victorian London, Huxley had never really liked Owen. As early as 1851, when he was just twenty-six, Huxley observed in a letter to a British entomologist: “It is astonishing with what an intense feeling of hatred Owen is regarded by the majority of his contemporaries.” Although Owen hadn’t wronged him personally, Huxley thought the older scientist arrogant and egotistical—“a man with whom I feel it necessary to be always on my guard.”

  Now, in 1857, Huxley found his opportunity to try to knock Owen off his lofty perch.

  Early in the year, Owen delivered a lecture to the Linnean Society arguing that the brain of man differed from that of the gorilla in a fundamental structural way and that the differences could never be bridged by transmutation. Specifically, Owen cited three structures present in the architecture of man’s brain that he said didn’t exist in apes: the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor (a spur on the horn of the brain’s lateral ventricle that today is known as the calcar avis). Owen argued that the structures allowed the development of larger and more powerful brains, and as a result humans deserved a taxonomical upgrade. Not only did men deserve to be classified in a separate order from apes, Owen argued, but they should be classified in a completely different subclass.

  Owen framed the discussion as pertaining not just to physical science but also to metaphysics. The particular biological characteristics that distinguished man from all other animals were precisely the same ones that allowed man to fulfill “his destiny as the supreme master of this earth, and of the lower Creation.”

  The London Lancet, the journal of Britain’s medical establishment, strongly endorsed Owen’s writings on gorillas and the human brain. By methodically emphasizing the differences between man and ape, Owen would become, in the words of the journal, nothing less than a vindicator of “the dignity of the human race.”

  Huxley, then a thirty-two-year-old professor at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, wasn’t convinced. He began dissecting Owen’s Linnean Society lecture, searching for flaws.

  “As these statements did not agree with the opinions I had formed,” Huxley later wrote, “I set to work to reinvestigate the subject, and soon satisfied myself that the structures in question were not peculiar to Man, but were shared by him with all the higher and many of the lower apes.”

  What, then, was the defining difference between a man and an ape? The question had never seemed so urgent.

  CHAPTER 11

  Maps and Legends

  Africa

  Ignoring everything green, Paul shot the color out of the forest. The gray and red of the African parrots. The scarlet of rosy bee-eaters. Yellow weavers, purple herons, indigo swallows. The black-and-white palm nut vultures.

  “The dry season is delightful in Africa,” Paul noted in his journals. “It is the season of flowers, of humming-birds—who flit through bushes at all hours, and charm one with their meteor-like flight—of everything pleasant.”

  Life had settled into something like a routine by the middle of 1856. He’d wake in the morning at about five o’clock and down a cup of strong coffee. Then he’d grab a rifle and hunt birds until ten. After that, he’d return to his encampment for a starchy breakfast of plantains and manioc. He filled out the remainder of the morning stuffing his fresh bird specimens with cotton and carefully curing the skins in a solution of arsenic to protect them from insect-driven decay. He’d rest until mid-afternoon, when he’d hunt for about three more hours. Dinner was served around six. The rest of the evening was reserved for more small-scale taxidermy and chats with the tribesmen.

  Following this schedule, Paul earned a reputation among all the tribes he encountered as more of a hunter than an explorer. Shooting was the one part of his life where his pride showed through strongest. To him, hunting wasn’t mere sport. It provided a foot in the door of a scientific community to which he didn’t yet belong.

  Today science has uncoupled itself from hunting, but the two realms were indivisible for most of the nineteenth century. A naturalist, more often than not, had to kill in order to thrive. This was viewed not as crude or barbaric but as a prerequisite of developing a heightened sense of appreciation for the natural world. Before someone like John James Audubon could hone his gift for revivifying birds on an artist’s canvas, he had to develop his skills as a marksman. In those days before field photography and telephoto lenses, stuffing and wiring animals into lifelike poses was considered the best way to enable the sustained reflection required to deepen one’s respect for nature. Audubon himself shot most of the birds he drew—a necessary compromise that inspired generations to refine their own appreciations of nature and, in some cases, to work to protect such species from endangerment. In the twentieth century, that compromise became unnecessary. Hunting lost whatever scientific, academic, and artistic authority it once claimed. But in the mid-nineteenth century, naturalists felt little moral pressure pushing them away from hunting. If anything, they were pushed toward it by scientists and academic institutions with a wolfish demand for specimens.

  No one exhibited a stronger desire for bird specimens than John Cassin, Paul’s contact at the Philadelphia academy. Cassin sponsored a small army of guns for hire who spanned the globe, shooting, stuffing, and shipping birds across the seas to his museum in Philadelphia. He had catalogued and named nearly two hundred different species of previously unidentified American birds. By the mid-nineteenth century, from his perch in Pennsylvania, he was working his way around the world, building new taxonomies for birds native to Asia, Africa, and South America. Cassin had reached the pinnacle of his field and had earned respect on both sides of the Atlantic.

  A young naturalist eager to make a name for himself would have had a hard time finding a better model than Cassin, and Paul diligently supplied him with stuffed specimens. When he was close to the coast, he’d ship them aboard vessels bound for America, the birds laid out stiffly on their backs, plump with cotton stuffing. Within months, Cassin was standing in front of the other members of the Philadelphia academy, telling them that the young adventurer who’d so recently begun his journeys had already shipped him more than one thousand specimens.

  One of the previously unclassified birds that Paul had packed in a box and shipped to Philadelphia was a small, acrobatic insectivore with a short bill, a muted brown breast, and dark wing tips. After Cassin examined it, it ended up in the hands of Ferdinand Heine, a German ornithologist who had the privilege of bestowing an honorific on the bird. Paul’s bird was christened Muscicapa cassini, a name that it still carries today: Cassin’s flycatcher.

  It was clear that Paul, as an outsider to the scientific establishment, wouldn’t make a name for himself even if he sent a million birds to the States.

  AFTER HE got his first glimpse of a gorilla in the shadows of the Crystal Mountains, Paul jumped at any chance he could get to shake up his daily routine to try to find another one. But lowland gorillas generally are encountered more easily by accident than by hunting for them. Because they range widely in small groups and are very difficult to track, they’re the kind of animal you stumble upon during long treks in the most remote parts of the forest, and not the kind likely to reward a hunter’s pursuit. Paul and his Mbondemo helpers often spent full days simply hiking eastward, moving their portable camp farther inland. Some days he estimated they walked as far as twenty miles through the forest. They rarely traveled in a straight line.

  In t
he middle of one of these day treks, when time was counted by the steady rhythm of footfalls, one of the men with him stopped walking and clucked his tongue—a signal to everyone to be quiet and still. They froze and peered eagerly at the forest around them. The rustle of tree branches. The rip of uprooted stalks and stems.

  Paul’s first thought was of gorillas. The grave expressions on the faces of the other men betrayed the same hunch. They checked their guns, making sure that they had powder in the pans of their rifles. Slowly, they tried to proceed toward the noise, stepping as lightly as they could across the undergrowth. They walked within a silence so profound that even the sound of breathing, Paul thought, seemed loud. Through a dense screen of branches and leaves they finally saw movement—something near a fruit bush ahead. Without warning, the silence was ripped apart by a husky roar.

  He had never heard a sound so unsettling: a terrifying bark that seemed to start somewhere deep in the pit of the animal’s massive chest and explode outward in a thunderous crescendo.

  For the first time in his life, Paul got a clear view of a gorilla—an adult male with a tuft of silver hair on its back. It rose onto two legs when it saw the hunters and appeared to stand almost six feet tall. The forearms bulged with the promise of strength, its neck a massive pillar of solid muscle. The animal must have weighed nearly four hundred pounds. With the hunters drawing their guns, the gorilla charged but didn’t directly attack; it stopped about six yards shy of them. Du Chaillu heard the blast of a gun and watched the gorilla fall forward onto its face, with a groan. The men watched the animal convulse for a moment, arms struggling against the dirt. Then all was still.

  After years of picturing the gorilla in his imagination, Paul finally got the chance to examine one up close, but the other men in the group had different plans.