Between Man and Beast Read online

  The ruler of the village met him in the communal palaver house, the brass rings around his ankles jangling with each step. He wore red body paint, and his face, chest, and back were heavily tattooed with blue curving lines. When the man opened his mouth to speak, Paul thought his teeth looked uncommonly sharp, as if they’d been filed to razor-edged points.

  King Mbene, greeting his Fang counterpart, seemed to instantly acquire a few extra cubits of stature, and it had everything to do with the adventurer standing at his side.

  “Mbene is in great glee,” Paul wrote after the encounter, “as wherever he goes he is surrounded with Fang fellows, who praise him for being the friend of white men.”

  The Fang prepared a house for Paul. That night he barred the door with a traveling chest so no one could enter while he slept. When the king’s wives brought cooked bananas to his hut, he could summon no appetite; he imagined that the bananas might have been boiled in the same pots the Fang used to cook human flesh.

  He couldn’t drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn’t wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.

  Throughout his stay in the village, Paul was treated as if he were the guest of honor at a great ceremonial banquet—not the main course. The Fang ruler, a man named Ndiayai, himself took Paul out elephant hunting and proudly taught the curious visitor everything he wanted to know about the tribe’s hunting methods, weaponry, agricultural techniques, and ceremonial rituals. He even introduced him to other Fang populations that were scattered in other parts of the Crystal Mountains region.

  “Today, several hundred Fang from the surrounding village came in to see me,” Paul wrote. “Okolo, a great king among them, gave me his knife, saying it had already killed a man. Tonight there is a great dance in honor of the arrival of a spirit (myself) among them.”

  When he bade farewell to the Fang, the tribe seemed truly sad to see him go, and they presented him with gifts and promises of loyalty and affection. Paul never dropped his certainty that they were cannibals. But just as the caníbales that Columbus had described believed the Spaniards themselves were man-eating savages, it seemed that the Fang harbored their own myths concerning Europeans.

  One of them confessed to Paul that his tribe had heard stories about the fiercely cannibalistic ways of white men. Paul’s first instinct was to laugh him off as a simpleminded fool. But the legend hadn’t been conjured from thin air. When Paul tried to assure him that white men didn’t eat black men, the man confronted him with a direct challenge: explain why they bought and sold Africans as if they were cattle, not human beings.

  “Why do you come from nobody knows where, and carry off our men, and women, and children?” the man asked Paul. “Do you not fatten them in your far country and eat them?”

  CHAPTER 14

  D.O.A.

  On September 10, 1858, a package from Gabon arrived at the Crystal Palace in London. It was a cask of rum.

  Owen and a taxidermist named Abraham Bartlett pried open the cask the day after it was received. A vile stench wafted out, and they reflexively slammed the lid of the barrel shut. They moved the cask outside and opened it again, summoning the requisite willpower to squint past the fumes. Hair and skin floated loosely in the rum, detached from what appeared to be a carcass.

  It was a juvenile gorilla. Natives in the interior of Gabon had carried it all the way to the coast, and someone had put the remains in the alcohol to try to save it. Unlike Paul Du Chaillu with the specimens he had been collecting months prior to this shipment’s arrival, the unknown person who had found the carcass or killed the animal didn’t preserve it with arsenic. It had decomposed severely.

  At Owen’s urging, Bartlett labored heroically for a week—in an open field, hungry for fresh air—trying to reassemble the remains of the undersized specimen. The result was a pitiful approximation of the living animal. It provided little of scientific value.

  IN THE first months of 1859, Owen continued to deliver lectures stressing that the gorilla was man’s nearest approximation in the animal kingdom. But some people were beginning to wonder if they’d ever have a chance to get a good look at one.

  The editors of the London Lancet in 1859 wrote: “Whether we shall ever be treated to a sight of a living animal is a doubtful matter. There is evidently much more difficulty in obtaining a young gorilla for exhibition than a young chimpanzee; and if no full-grown chimpanzee has ever been captured, we can scarcely expect the larger and more powerful adult gorilla to be ever taken alive. It is said that a bold negro, the leader of an elephant-hunting expedition, being offered a hundred dollars if he would bring back a live gorilla, replied, ‘If you gave me the weight of yonder hill in gold coins I could not do it.’ ”

  CHAPTER 15

  Spirit of the Damned

  Africa

  Unable to travel farther inland beyond the Crystal Mountains, Paul retreated to the coast and tried his luck about two hundred miles farther south. He sailed to Cape Lopez, where he planned to follow the course of the river system that stretched inland from the Fernan-Vaz Lagoon. Then he would hike as far as he could on foot.

  As he prepared for this leg of the expedition, he spent fifty dollars to build a five-room house near the banks of the Fernan-Vaz. He stored his gunpowder and ammunition in a shack, and he kept a hundred chickens and a dozen ducks in a fowl house. He hired twenty men from the coastal Nkomi tribe to accompany him on his upcoming journey, and they stayed in the dozen tiny huts that ringed Paul’s house.

  He’d created his own village, essentially. With a warm sense of satisfaction he’d survey the wide prairie that stretched in front of this homestead, watching white eagles soar over sprawling groves. A stream burbled in front of the property.

  “Looking upstream almost any time,” he wrote, “I can see schools of hippopotami tossing and tumbling on the flats.”

  But a sinister traffic also occupied those waterways. The Fernan-Vaz river system was a hotbed of the slave trade, much of it illegal. About a dozen miles from Paul’s new home, he found a pair of holding pens run by Portuguese slavers. These barracoons, or “slave factories,” as they were called, were little more than prisons where men, women, and children were held before being sold and loaded onto ships bound for the Americas. During the 1850s, most of those ships were bound for Brazil or Cuba. Paul asked those in charge for a tour of the premises, which they willingly provided.

  Even before this expedition, he opposed the institution of slavery, sharing John Leighton Wilson’s objections to the shackling and confinement of any potentially divine human soul. His observations of the Cape Lopez barracoons only reinforced his opinion. The slaves milled around in holding pens outside, bound together in groups of six by chains that connected their iron collars. The slaves represented a diverse mix of tribes, some from deep in the interior, and they were bound together without regard for tribal affiliation or language. The result was that a slave more often than not couldn’t speak to the others chained to him. But if he wanted to drink, for example, he had to coordinate the entire group’s movements toward one of the big buckets of water that had been left out for them in the pen. Huge cauldrons sat in the corners where Portuguese overseers would cook the beans and rice fed to the slaves. Some of the captives looked abjectly miserable. Others seemed oddly serene, as if they’d made peace with their fates.

  When he visited the second factory, which was much like the first, he saw a boy of fourteen sold for a twenty-gallon cask of rum, a few fathoms of cloth, and some beads. But that sale was just the first of dozens that day, because a Brazilian slave schooner was anchored near the shore. Paul watched for two hours as six hundred slaves, chained together in groups of six, marched from the factory to the shore. The men and women filed into enormous canoes, which were powered by no fewer than twenty-six paddles, and then were loaded into the schooner’s narrow hold.

&
nbsp; “They seemed terrified out of their senses; even those whom I had seen in the factory to be contented and happy, were now gazing about with such mortal terror in their looks as one neither sees nor feels very often in life,” Paul wrote.

  He soon discovered that the peaceful grove nearest his house hid dark secrets. While hunting for birds, he heard the clanking procession of a dozen chained slaves carrying the corpse of another. A Portuguese overseer marched behind them, holding a whip. Paul followed them to the edge of the grove. They threw the body on the bare ground, then marched off in the direction of the factory.

  He waited until they left to investigate the grounds, which had already attracted the notice of vultures circling above. As he walked toward the body, he noticed that the ground was littered with old bones.

  “The place had been used for many years, and the mortality in the barracoons is sometimes frightful,” he wrote. “Here was the place where, when years ago Cape Lopez was one of the great slave-markets on the west coast, and barracoons were more numerous than now, the poor dead were thrown one upon another, till even the mouldering bones remained in high piles, as monuments of the nefarious traffic.”

  The inescapable reality of the slave traffic pervaded everything, even the relationships among the free men Paul employed for his expedition. He knew that many of his acquaintances back in the United States—who lumped all native Africans in the same degraded social class—would have struggled to comprehend the subtleties of the African social hierarchy. Most of the coastal tribes, for example, considered themselves vastly superior to the tribes of the interior, whom they themselves often kept as slaves. His men in Cape Lopez told him that the stigma of slavery was a tough thing to shake. If a free man and a slave had a child together, for example, the child was considered free, because it was a paternal society. But the child’s freedom was a technicality. His social rank was forever tainted by the mother’s degraded position. “Even in this rude Cape Lopez country to be born of a slave mother is a disgrace, and debars the unfortunate from much of the respect and authority which his daily companions enjoy,” he discovered.

  Paul returned to the village he’d created as if it existed in a sphere separate from all of that. His was a place where the past couldn’t shadow a man, where relationships beyond a person’s control didn’t dictate status, where parentage wasn’t fate, and where all slates were clean. His village was the capital of a new, self-made universe where Paul was able to redefine himself. Here, he could be an American, a brave explorer, a slayer of beasts. In this world of his own creation, he had discovered the freedom to be anything he wanted to be.

  He named his village Washington.

  EXPLORATION, LIKE war, is usually a long succession of unremarkable moments punctuated by brief flashes of action. Those flashes, though not in the least bit representative, tend to define the experience. When Paul and his men eventually pushed into the interior again, they endured months of arduous slogging through the overgrown forests. But the miserable routine was made bearable by a few radiant moments of remarkable incident.

  On May 4, 1857, Paul’s hunters presented him with a gift: they had captured a young gorilla alive.

  It was between two and three years old, and it measured two feet six inches tall. They had found him in the forest, sitting on the ground eating berries. A few feet away sat his mother, also eating the fruit. The hunters shot the adult female, killing her instantly. “The young one, hearing the noise of the guns, ran to his mother and clung to her, hiding his face, and embracing her body,” Paul later explained. When the hunters approached, the young gorilla let go of her body and raced up a tree; when they cut the tree down, they threw a cloth over the animal’s head to capture it. Even so, the gorilla bit two of the men, and they struggled to keep hold of him. “He constantly rushed at them,” Paul wrote. “So they were obliged to get a forked stick, in which his neck was inserted in such a way that he could not escape, and yet could be kept at a safe distance. In this uncomfortable way, he was brought into the village.”

  The sad story of the animal’s capture didn’t faze Paul, who was thrilled to have his hands on a living specimen. He described the moment as one of the happiest of his life. “All the hardships I had endured in Africa were rewarded in that moment,” he wrote.

  Paul named the gorilla Joe. Within two hours he and his men built a bamboo cage to house little Joe. He examined the animal and took detailed notes of everything he saw: the jet-black tone of his face and hands; the reddish-brown tint of the hair on the head; the short, coarse hair that covered the upper lip; the faint eyebrows, three-quarters of an inch long; the whiteness of the hair around his anus; the hair that hung from the wrist to the second joints of the fingers; the way the grayish hair of the legs grew darker nearer the ankles.

  With Joe unhappily caged, Paul was seized by the desire to tame him. He began talking to him in a friendly way, getting close to the slats, but Joe rushed him and grabbed his pant legs, tearing them as Paul tried to move away. “He sat in his corner looking wickedly out of his gray eyes, and I never saw a more morose or ill-tempered face than had this little beast,” he wrote.

  Joe’s attitude only worsened the next day. If Paul tried to come close to the sides of the cage, Joe threatened to attack. On the fourth day of his captivity, Joe pried apart two of the bamboo slats of his cage and escaped. Several men gave chase, while Paul ran toward his house to grab a gun. But when he ran through the open door, he was surprised to see that Joe had run into his house in search of refuge. Paul quickly shut the windows while others guarded the door. Eventually, they captured the frantic young gorilla with a large net and returned him to a newly reinforced cage. Joe was madder than ever.

  Paul’s attempts to train the animal were going nowhere. Joe would eat only fruits and leaves found in his native forest, which were difficult to collect. Paul tried to get him used to “civilized” foods, but the gorilla wouldn’t touch them. For two weeks Joe sullenly resisted Paul’s attempts to make peace. He gnawed another hole in his cage, attempted escape, and was again recaptured. Paul, deciding the cage was a lost cause, tethered him to a chain. He seemed to be doing better under this arrangement, and he began eating more of his preferred wild foods. But after ten days wearing the chain, he suddenly grew ill. Joe died two days later.

  Paul captured another live gorilla—this one even younger—a couple of months later. During a hike, he and his men found a baby male gorilla sucking at his mother’s breast. One of the men fired. The adult gorilla slumped to the dirt. The baby clung to her, mouthing desperate cries as if trying to revive the mother’s attention. Paul walked toward him, and the infant hid its head in his dead mother’s chest.

  Paul lifted the baby into his arms, while the men mounted the mother on a pole to carry back to their camp. When they arrived, they laid the adult on the ground, and Paul set the baby down nearby. “As soon as he saw his mother he crawled to her and threw himself on her breast,” Paul wrote. “He did not find his accustomed nourishment, and I saw that he perceived something was the matter with the old one. He crawled over her body, smelt at it, and gave utterance from time to time, to a plaintive cry, ‘hoo, hoo, hoo,’ which touched my heart.”

  Without milk, the baby died on the third day. Paul preserved the body in a cask of rum.

  THE MORE time Paul spent around gorillas, the more an uncomfortable notion gnawed at him.

  These beasts seemed disconcertingly familiar.

  When the gorillas reared up and ran on their two legs, they reminded him of men sprinting. Every time they roared, he thought he heard a human note somewhere inside that cry. Instead of a hunter, he at times felt like a murderer.

  “Though there are sufficient points of diversity between this animal and man,” he wrote, “I never kill one without having a sickening realization of the horrid human likeness of the beast.” That likeness couldn’t have been more grotesque—“a spirit of the damned,” he thought.

  By the time he departed Africa
to return to America in 1859, Paul had collected more than twenty stuffed and preserved gorilla skins. Each of them possessed that eerie similarity to the human form, which is what gave them their unsettling power in the eyes of everyone who looked at them.

  The disconcerting effect that a man gets when encountering his human reflection in nature had been noted twenty years earlier, when the uncommonly analytic young Darwin wrote about his voyage on the HMS Beagle. In South America, Darwin had been repulsed at the sight of a snake when he looked the creature in the eyes. Darwin wasn’t content to let the discomfort he felt go unexamined. “I imagined this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness,” Darwin wrote in his book The Voyage of the Beagle.

  On such a scale, Paul’s gorillas were off-the-charts abominable.

  “It was as though I had killed some monstrous creation, which yet had something of humanity in it,” Paul wrote. “Well as I knew that was an error, I could not help the feeling.”

  He didn’t know it, but at the exact same time that he was packing up his gorilla skins and preparing to leave Africa to return to New York, Darwin was putting the finishing touches on another book that would question whether Paul’s feeling might not have been entirely wrong.

  CHAPTER 16

  Origins

  London

  Some modern writers have embraced the idea that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species instantly became a publishing phenomenon in late 1859, devoured by average citizens in England and around the world. On the two hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth, in 2009, magazines and newspapers recounted the “massive popular success” of a book that “sold out its first edition on the first day of its release.” Although it’s difficult to exaggerate the eventual impact of the book on the broad course of science and culture, it is easy to overstate the book’s immediate, direct impact on the Victorian public.