Between Man and Beast Page 7

  Paul measured the carcass at five feet eight inches. He noted the astonishing girth of the forearms and the deep gray of the eyes. While he worked, his men were building a fire and a crude shelter on the spot. As Paul continued to study the animal, the men had already begun to divvy up the parts of the gorilla among themselves. Paul couldn’t stop them; they slaughtered the animal, roasted it, and tore into its deep red flesh. Eventually, they cleaved the head to expose the brain, because the Mbondemo had heard that consuming it offered two benefits: it strengthened a man’s powers as a hunter and as a lover. They took particular care with the valuable, spongy pink tissue and shared it equally.

  “Luckily, one of the fellows shot a deer just as we began to camp,” Paul wrote, “and on its meat I feasted while my men ate gorilla.”

  The men’s eagerness to eat that first gorilla was an indication of how extraordinarily rare it was for them to kill one. The tribesmen were not great hunters, partly because they were forced to hunt with cheap, African-made flintlock muskets that were notoriously unreliable and imperfectly calibrated. The thin barrels were easily bent. Usually, the native hunters poured powder of impure quality into their guns, then stuffed dry grass on top of it as wadding. The bullets were often crude bits of old iron, stuffed snugly into the barrel with more grass. As often as not, the degraded powder exploded without successfully firing the bullet—a failure known as a flash in the pan. They customarily overloaded their guns as a result, and when the rifles did successfully fire, the explosions often were so volatile that the weapons’ components were damaged in the process. This unpredictability led many hunters to hold the rifles in front of them, a short distance from their shoulders—a precaution that sacrificed accuracy for personal safety.

  Paul, on the other hand, was equipped with comparatively sophisticated rifles, powder, and ammunition. He was also a truly skilled marksman and often amazed the native hunters with his accuracy. Even so, his abilities were certainly exaggerated by his companions, given that almost none of them had previous experience with state-of-the-art firearms and powder. They speculated that he had, in fact, eaten gorilla in the past—how else to explain his gifts as a hunter who always seemed to get the better of his prey?

  As the months stretched on, the Mbondemo tribesmen used his guns and powder to become formidable hunters in their own right, securing spots for themselves in the local folklore. As more of the animals began to fall to their rifle fire, the Mbondemo hunters quickly lost the desire to eat their kill. Instead of using his arsenic to preserve bird skins, Paul began using it to preserve the carcasses of gorillas.

  John Cassin back in Philadelphia could have all the birds he wanted. The gorillas were Paul’s.

  IN 2001, scientists split gorillas into two different species, which are very closely related and share many of the same physical and behavioral traits. Western gorillas—including the lowland subspecies that Paul encountered—make up one of the species, and they range across the forests of equatorial Africa in the Congo River basin. Eastern gorillas, first discovered in 1902, are the other species; they’re found on volcanic slopes of the Virunga Mountains and in the eastern forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  Paul’s western lowland gorillas represent the most common subspecies; the vast majority of gorillas born in captivity in zoos and research institutions are of this variety. But they are also the least studied in the wild, mostly because they range over a much wider territory than do mountain gorillas, and that jungle terrain is generally more difficult to penetrate. Adult western lowland males weigh about twice as much as females, commonly topping out at around four hundred pounds. The adult males are called silverbacks because of the silvered hair they develop after about twelve years of age. They generally live in groups of between seven and sixteen members, which are roughly analogous to families. Commonly, these groups consist of a single silverback male, three or four adult females that mate with the male, and their resulting offspring. Life spans vary in the wild, but the oldest gorilla ever verified by researchers died at age fifty-three. Like chimpanzees, gorillas are highly intelligent.

  As Paul examined more and more specimens, he confirmed something that is now a well-established fact: gorillas are, for the most part, herbivores. Every time he sliced open one of their stomachs to examine the contents, he found only vegetable matter—not exactly the stuff of bloodthirsty demons. But it was an irony of nature that those vegetarian proclivities had a direct hand in shaping the gorilla’s frighteningly imposing aspect. Those powerfully massive forearms, as muscular as human thighs, are perfect for tearing rough plants out of the ground and snapping thick stalks. Those formidable teeth and powerful jaws are necessary to bite, break, and grind coarse stems and trunks, and a muscular neck is required to support the temporal muscles used to chew. An oversized torso is essential to house the enormous digestive organs needed to handle such bulky, fibrous fare.

  Paul noted the shiny black skin visible only on the hairless face, hands, and chest. The ears seemed miniatures of the human form. He measured the teeth, the bones, the nasal apertures. He noted that the skin sometimes felt as thick as oxhide but, fortunately for him, wasn’t so thick that a close-range bullet couldn’t penetrate it with ease.

  Paul began to distribute high-grade powder to everyone in his hunting party. His traveling chests started to fill with gorilla skins. Dozens of them. But his fear of the creature didn’t die as easily as the animals did.

  Once, when the rainy season was drying up, the hunters descended into a dark patch of forest where visibility was limited to about ten feet in any direction. It was a known haunt of gorillas, according to one of the tribesmen.

  The men decided to split up, which was customary. One of the men ventured into the woods alone. Paul and a man named Gambo, the son of a local chief, veered in another direction. A couple of other hunters split off on still another route.

  According to Paul’s later account of the event, one gunshot rang out in the forest, then another. He and Gambo ran toward the shots. The roar of a gorilla flooded the woods and was soon replaced by silence. After searching, they found a figure lying in blood on the forest floor. Expecting to see a gorilla, Paul was surprised to see a man—the hunter who’d ventured out on his own. He was bleeding from the abdomen, his bowels spilling out of a deep lacerating wound. His gun lay beside him. The stock was broken, and the barrel was bent.

  For two days the man lay in pain in their camp. Paul, when he wasn’t trying to snuff his own fevers by self-medicating with quinine, tried to nurse the wounded man back to health with brandy, the only thing in his medicine chest he could imagine doing any good. The wounded man drifted in and out of consciousness, and a story began to take shape to explain his injury. The hunter’s first shot at the gorilla merely grazed the animal, it was said, and as he was frantically reloading for a second shot, the gorilla attacked him and delivered a powerful blow to the abdomen. The marks on the gun barrel seemed to be from the teeth of the silverback.

  On the third day, the man died and the story entered the realm of legend. The natives decided that the gorilla that killed him had been possessed by a human—“a wicked man turned into a gorilla,” they said, that “could not be killed, even by the bravest hunters.”

  But a day later, Paul’s men returned to camp with the carcass of a male silverback. He assumed it was the same animal that the unlucky hunter had encountered, but like so many things about this jungle, he’d never really know for sure.

  IF THE people back in the States were wowed by the stories he could tell before this trip, when his experience had been limited to the coast, just imagine how they’d react to him now.

  Murderous beasts! Hissing serpents! Naked savages! Stories that had been lurking in these forests for centuries, untold, growing wilder every day. And they were all his for the taking.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Lion in London

  London

  Richard Owen rose from the head table and turned t
o address the 350 people who had packed the Freemasons’ Hall on a February evening in 1858. He lifted a glass of wine to toast the man who sat to his right—“the distinguished traveler we have this day assembled to honor,” Owen said.

  David Livingstone probably was, at that moment, the most famous man in England. The Scottish missionary had spent years exploring Africa, and his memoir about his experiences—including his terrifying encounter with the lion that had mangled his left arm—was the hottest book in the country. Since returning from Africa, he’d spent the past year collecting honorary degrees, getting mobbed by adoring crowds at sold-out lectures, and hosting a constant parade of dignitaries. His public image couldn’t have been better: Livingstone was a brave and humble adventurer who, as Owen told the audience, sought to spread “that higher wisdom which is not of this world.” Just that morning Livingstone had enjoyed a private audience with Queen Victoria, who wished him luck on his latest venture: an expedition to try to open the Zambezi River to travel. The upcoming expedition—one of the most ambitious ever launched—was being sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society, which had also arranged this elegant banquet as a formal send-off.

  Owen recounted to the audience how he’d met Livingstone eighteen years before, when the young missionary came to him seeking advice on collecting natural history specimens before his first trip to Africa. Since then, Livingstone had occasionally provided Owen with specimens that ranged from dinosaur bones to elephant tusks. Owen returned the favor by helping him edit his book to make sure the biological descriptions were sound. Livingstone, whose wife was sitting beside Caroline Owen up in the ladies’ gallery, had become a good friend of “the professor,” as he sometimes called him. Years later Livingstone would joke that his mutilated left arm, which had become an iconic symbol of bravery, should be bequeathed to Owen when he died. “That is the will of David Livingstone,” he said.

  Livingstone might have felt indebted to Owen for conferring scientific legitimacy on the missionary’s work, which in turn had helped the missionary win the respect of learned academies all over the world. But Owen’s support on this night was perhaps less a favor to Livingstone than it was to his good friend Roderick Impey Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society.

  Murchison had personally micromanaged almost every detail of the banquet, from the precise sequence of the toasts to the Scottish airs played by the band. Molding Livingstone’s celebrity was Murchison’s highest priority. Before Livingstone even knew he might want to write a book about his adventures, Murchison had lined up a publisher and secured a deal. When Livingstone was mobbed in the streets of London, it was Murchison’s advance public relations work that had made it happen.

  Like Owen, Murchison genuinely liked and respected Livingstone. But his advocacy wasn’t without an ulterior motive.

  SINCE 1843, Murchison had been elected three different times to serve as president of the Royal Geographical Society. When the institution was granted its royal status, Murchison had been the only person named in its charter as a founder. In the eyes of many, he was the Royal Geographical Society.

  In his younger days, Murchison had lived a life of leisure as a country squire. But at the urging of his wife, he took up geology, a subject of which she was fond, and he began devoting his ample free time to its study. His inherited fortune allowed him to finance trips to Scotland, Russia, and the Alps, and soon he’d risen to the summit of the discipline. His studies of mountain formations and classifications of geological strata ranked among the most important developments in the burgeoning field.

  But by the late 1850s, he was less known as a geologist than as a patron for the explorers of the RGS. Following three centuries of ocean-faring expeditions, the mid-nineteenth century had become the golden age of inland explorations, and no one could claim more responsibility for that than Murchison. To some, he appeared like an imperial chess master, moving his pawns around the world, expanding the British domain one newly explored territory at a time. His influence jumped off the pages of any world atlas: among the twenty-three topographical features on six continents that eventually bore his name were Mount Murchison in Antarctica, Murchison Falls in Uganda, Murchison Island in Canada, the Murchison River in Western Australia, plus its two tributaries, the Roderick and the Impey. Explorers all around the world revered him, at least when it came time to dole out glory, because he was their lifeline: the man with a hand on Queen Victoria’s purse.

  Africa held special charm for him. Livingstone sparked an unprecedented mania among the British public for stories of African adventure, and Murchison helped sate their demand. He called his core group of Dark Continent explorers—Livingstone, Richard Burton, and John Hanning Speke, among others—his “lions,” and he nurtured them with special care.

  The RGS was riding the public mania for exploration for all it was worth. Membership was exploding, and its monthly meetings had become the place to be seen among the city’s upper classes.

  When Livingstone left London in 1858 for his latest expedition, which promised to last several years, Murchison had identified the key to the continued growth and funding of his empire within an empire: heroes with thrilling stories to tell.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Man-Eaters

  Africa

  The only inhabitants of that forest who rivaled gorillas in terms of mythical baggage were the members of the Fang tribe. Today they’re the dominant ethnic group in Gabon, making up about 80 percent of the nation’s population. But in the mid-nineteenth century, the tribe was still confined to the interior of the country. They were steadily migrating westward but hadn’t yet made it far beyond the Crystal Mountains. Even so, the Fang were legendary on the coast. The tribe was said to have a taste for human flesh.

  Few things excited the imaginations of European and American travelers as did rumors of man-eating tribes. Stories of cannibalism went hand in hand with newly explored territories all over the world. It didn’t matter that the cannibalism itself was almost never witnessed directly. History was still full of stories about the ultimate taboo.

  It started with Herodotus, who wrote that the “Andropophagi [‘man-eaters’] have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law.” That term, often spelled “anthropophagi,” had a monopoly on describing the practice of eating human flesh until Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World. In his journal on November 23, 1492, Columbus reported that natives in the West Indies spoke of man-eaters who inhabited a nearby island, and they called them caníbales (a variable spelling was caribes, which provided the name to the region that Columbus explored—the Caribbean).

  After Columbus, cannibalistic natives became a staple of exploration literature, described by everyone from Captain Cook to Herman Melville. The term was over-applied from the start, due to the unhealthy mixture of ethnocentric fear and a lust for conquest. Labeling a race as “cannibalistic” was as good as saying it deserved to be annihilated. Queen Isabella of Spain issued a decree in the sixteenth century stating that the only natives that Spanish colonizers could legally enslave were cannibals. If they ate human flesh, they were beyond hope, and they didn’t deserve to benefit from civilized behavior. Perhaps as a consequence of this decree, rumors—often initiated by rival tribes hoping to save themselves from the onslaught of colonization—were unquestioningly accepted as fact.

  But Columbus himself had pointed out an irony that was easily overlooked: the same natives who had told him about the caníbales had also believed that the European newcomers were man-eaters when they first encountered them.

  IN GABON, the Mpongwe tribe that controlled coastal trade had a natural incentive to exaggerate the Fang’s reputed ferocity: they wanted to discourage travelers from dealing directly with inland tribes. Everyone on the coast had heard stories about roving bands of Fang who offered to buy dead bodies from other tribes, just to satisfy their hunger for human flesh. But the Mbondemo tribe that Paul now
traveled with had a more levelheaded view of the Fang. King Mbene maintained sporadic relations with the residents of three Fang villages, and he could speak their language. He had even taken a couple of Fang women as wives, purchasing them with ivory.

  Paul’s first encounter with the Fang caught him off guard. He had been in the forest, looking up in a tree at a chattering monkey, when he looked down to see a male Fang warrior and two of his wives standing silently before him. The man held two spears and a huge shield of elephant hide, more than three feet high and two feet wide. The two women stood by two large woven baskets, which they’d been carrying on their heads before they had spotted Paul. They were clothed only in the skin of a wild cat, which hung from a woven strand of soft tree fibers around their waists. Their hair, as well as the man’s beard, was braided in long thin plaits, each one ending with either white beads or metal rings. One glance at them was enough to set Paul on edge. But the three Fang appeared to be just as scared as he was.

  Almost immediately, Paul was joined by some Mbondemo men who escorted the Fang to their encampment. Paul offered them beads to prove his friendliness. They accepted them.

  Within two days Paul and King Mbene set off to visit the Fang in their village.

  Paul walked into their community like a man wading into dangerous waters, vigilant for anything suspicious that might be lurking under the surface. The village was fenced for security, and a dog barked upon their approach. A single dirt lane about eight hundred yards long was flanked by thatched-roof huts. Paul spotted the bloody remains of something on the edge of the village: the more he looked at the mess, the more human it began to appear to him. A woman walked by holding what appeared to be a bone—was that a man’s femur?