Between Man and Beast Read online

  The publisher John Murray originally printed about twelve hundred copies of Origin. But by the time the book’s release date arrived, Murray had received wholesale orders from book dealers totaling about fifteen hundred copies. Today when people say that Darwin’s book “sold out” on its first day of release, they’re correct only in technical terms: it sold out to booksellers, not to readers. It took longer for those copies to get into the hands of the general public.

  Most of the early readers belonged to a cloistered elite of academics and gentleman scientists. Although this period marked the heyday of Charles Dickens and the rise of the popular novel, the era of general literacy hadn’t fully matured by 1859. The average citizen of England wouldn’t have read a book like Darwin’s, and many would have struggled mightily to read any book at all. Almost half of British adults of marrying age couldn’t even write their own names in the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin certainly fired up a small and hyper-educated pocket of the reading public in the months following his book’s publication, but it took much longer for the blaze to spread among those who steered the course of conversation in pubs, on street corners, and in church pews.

  IN THE book, Darwin didn’t even address the notion of men evolving from apes, but it was implied. In Origin, he concluded that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.” Humans, in Darwin’s view, were not exempt. According to his theory, man was not only related to apes but also related to nearly everything, from dogs to freshwater sponges.

  Before he published the book, Darwin sent a copy to Richard Owen and shortly thereafter wrote him a letter. “I [should] be a dolt not to value your scientific opinion very highly,” Darwin wrote. “If my views are in the main correct, whatever value they may possess in pushing on science will now depend very little on me, but on the verdict pronounced by men eminent in science. Believe me, yours very truly—C. Darwin.”

  Owen didn’t like what he read. Although he accepted the idea of evolution up to a point, he was clearly uncomfortable with the broader implications of Darwin’s theory. In an anonymous review of the book in the influential Edinburgh Review, Owen attacked Darwin’s straight-line theory of evolution. Owen asked how, if all life-forms known to man sprang from the same matter at the same time, could simple organisms like protozoa continue to be found? Wouldn’t they have “evolved” themselves out of existence? Owen also pointed out the absence of clear examples of transitional species, or “missing links,” in the fossil record, a gap in the theory that Darwin himself had acknowledged.

  Owen believed that instead of a single flash of creation out of which all life sprang, there had been numerous flashes. Those separate acts of creation might produce “archetypes” that followed their own processes of evolution to ultimately become what a divine Creator had ordained, Owen suggested. The single-celled organism that a modern scientist might view under a microscope represented a relatively recent “flash,” Owen speculated, whereas the protozoan that eventually evolved into a man had begun its evolutionary journey much earlier, in the distant past. Owen also believed that sudden mutations—not Darwin’s concept of very slow, gradual changes—might steer the development of a species. Unlike Darwin’s theory, Owen’s version of evolution was interpreted by many members of the clergy as preserving the biblically significant notion that humans were unique creations that developed independently of the other animals.

  In the review, Owen anonymously stated that the book’s valuable observations were “few indeed and far apart,” and he said “most of Mr. Darwin’s statements elude, by their vagueness or incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.” More than once in the review, he favorably referenced another naturalist who, unlike Darwin, wasn’t so susceptible to wild conjecture—“Professor Owen.”

  ANOTHER ANONYMOUS review of Origin published in the London Times differed dramatically from Owen’s.

  “Mr. Darwin abhors mere speculation as nature abhors a vacuum,” the review stated. “He is as greedy of cases and precedents as any constitutional lawyer, and all the principles he lays down are capable of being brought to the test of observation and experiment. The path he bids us follow professes to be, not a mere airy track, fabricated of ideal cobwebs, but a solid and broad bridge of facts.”

  The writer of this review was T. H. Huxley.

  Like Owen, he’d been given a copy of the book by Darwin before it was published. On November 23, 1859—the day before Darwin’s book went on sale—Huxley wrote Darwin a letter pledging to defend his theory, come what may. “I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite,” Huxley said.

  Predicting that Darwin would be attacked by critics, Huxley vowed to swoop down on them with raptor-like ferocity. “I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness,” he wrote to Darwin.

  When word spread among London’s scientific community that Owen was the anonymous author of the Edinburgh Review article, Huxley targeted his prey.

  CHAPTER 17

  In the City of Wonders

  New York

  The New York that Paul had returned to after he completed his African expeditions in late 1859 was a city pulled in two different directions. But at seven o’clock on the evening of December 19, thousands crowded the seats of the grandest opera house in Manhattan to try to nudge the city toward the one direction they favored: the South.

  The rally at the Academy of Music, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, had been organized a week earlier by Democratic politicians with the backing of some of the city’s most powerful business leaders. It was billed as a direct response to “outrages as those at Harpers Ferry” in Virginia, where the abolitionist John Brown had tried to start an armed slave revolt. Brown had been hanged days earlier, which put him on the fast track to martyrdom among those in the North who opposed slavery. But he was no hero to the twenty thousand people who had signed a petition backing this rally. The names on that list included about one-third of the city’s eligible voters, and they represented a who’s who of Gotham’s mercantile elite.

  Their support for the South was tied to money. In America’s largest city, the seaport drove the local economy, and the cotton trade helped drive the seaport. The Southern states ferried their cotton harvest to New York, where it was shipped around the world. If the North and the South split, as more people were predicting in the wake of Harpers Ferry, New York might lose a key part of its business to rival ports, like Charleston and New Orleans. New York was vulnerable. Many who’d tied their fortunes to the cotton trade supported slavery under the assumption that the industry might collapse if slavery were abolished. If the industry collapsed, or if they were cut off from its harvests, they believed their profits might disappear.

  When the opera house threw open its doors that night, about six thousand people jockeyed for seats inside the auditorium. Newspapers covering the event estimated that as many as fourteen thousand more huddled outside around bonfires, lighting fireworks and singing patriotic anthems.

  “Hundreds and thousands are among us decrying the South and endangering our peace, but let us bless God that the bond of commerce binds us together,” the former New York congressman James Brooks, one of the event’s organizers, told the throngs. “Let us show the South that there are thousands, and hundreds of thousands, ready to stand by the Constitution and the laws.”

  One by one, a succession of orators took the stage and pandered to their fist-pumping audience, indulging its combative energy. Many earned easy applause by invoking the sanctity of the Constitution, which guaranteed protections for slaveholding Southerners. Several summoned religion to their cause, declaring that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and even Jesus Christ himself lived in slaveholding empires—and the Bible never once explicitly condemned the practice. Charles O’Conor, a former U.S. attorney in New York, went so far as to suggest that slavery in temperate Southern states was a favor to blacks, and it showed consideration fo
r “the condition the Negro is assigned by nature.”

  “Experience has shown that his class cannot prosper save in warm climates,” O’Conor said of blacks, attracting roars of assent. “In a cold or even a moderately cold climate he soon perishes.”

  But in the streets of New York that evening, in the frigid December air, thousands of freed slaves were proving O’Conor wrong.

  IN THE neighborhood of Five Points, about a mile and a half from the rally, fires from iron kettles made the streets shine and dance. Built on the swampy bed of a drained pond, it was America’s most notorious slum, populated mostly by the poorest of recently arrived immigrants from Europe. Those unaccustomed to the stench that rose from its rotten foundations soaked handkerchiefs in camphor and pressed them to their faces before taking to the streets. Pickpockets ducked in and out of its saloons, dance halls, and gambling dens. Its narrow warrens earned nicknames that only thickened the atmosphere of sinister misery: “The Den of Thieves,” “Murderers’ Alley,” “The Gates of Hell.”

  “Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old,” wrote Charles Dickens, when he visited the neighborhood (accompanied by a two-man police escort) in 1843. “See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays … hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”

  A survey of the city’s Sixth Ward, which was anchored by Five Points, showed that the neighborhood consisted of 3,435 Irish households, 416 Italian, 167 American-born, and 73 English. Many others were black, part of a population of freed slaves that numbered about twenty thousand in New York City. Few police roamed this district, so gangs—mostly Irish—with names like the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits dispensed a homegrown version of rough justice. Abject poverty was an automatic assumption in Five Points.

  When social critics of the day talked about amalgamation—the mixing of races—Five Points was often the place they turned to when arguing its downsides. In places like Almack’s Dance Hall, the Irish jig and the African shuffle fused to create a new form: tap dance. Such unexpected combinations made Five Points one of the most vibrant, dynamic places in America in the early 1860s—the hottest recess in a boiling melting pot of cultures. But such hybrids were considered by many whites as little more than vulgar debasements.

  William Bobo, a journalist from South Carolina, headed to Five Points to report on the dangers of mixing white and black cultures—then he decided his readers wouldn’t be able to stomach his dispatch. “To give you a correct and critical description of the Five Points would only disgust, not benefit you,” he wrote.

  As early as the 1840s, Five Points became a magnet for white reformers. Protestant missions opened their doors here. Church leaders wanted to mop up vice, to cleanse the area of its sins. The most idealistic of them saw their work as a mission for the future of a city that was struggling mightily to determine what it was going to become.

  One of these institutions, the Presbyterian Mission House, set up shop at 23 Centre Street, a nine-room house on the edge of the neighborhood. It was in those offices that John Leighton Wilson eventually came to work when he retired from his mission post in Gabon with a liver ailment. And when Paul Du Chaillu returned to America after his African adventure in late 1859, Wilson—who had recently moved back to his South Carolina home to attend to sick relatives—arranged for Paul to use the Mission House as his home base.

  Here, in the middle of the most relentlessly bubbling melting pot in the world, at a time when everyone in America seemed to be debating the course of the future, Paul settled to forge his own.

  Years later, an acquaintance recalled that people who saw him on the streets of lower Manhattan in late 1859 and 1860 were likely to mistake him “for a shoe clerk out of a job and on the verge of ejection from his boarding house.” As an immigrant himself, in some ways Paul wasn’t unlike many of the others he saw in Five Points. But unlike them, his mission contacts allowed him to step outside those dejected circles, to view the city from a privileged perspective. New York provided him with beguiling opportunities, and also vexing questions.

  When introducing himself to people, should he emphasize his connections to America, where he sometimes told people he’d been born? Or should he claim affinity with France, or with Africa? With a storage box full of exotic animals that no one here had ever seen, should he cast himself as a scientist, or was it better to attract attention as a showman? In which direction did his future lie? How could he reconcile all the different elements that mixed together inside him?

  For the next year, Paul searched for his own answers in the ragged heart of a city whose future seemed just as uncertain as his own.

  AT FIRST, he’d tried to play it straight. He hitched his future to science, to the learned societies that conferred respect on anyone associated with them. He’d gone to Africa with the support of John Cassin and Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, which was about as prestigious a body as could be found. But when he returned to the States, an uncomfortable realization began to dawn upon him: for some reason, certain members of the academy were acting as if they’d never heard of him.

  They knew him well, of course. They’d been talking about his expedition during their meetings since 1855, and his name was scattered through the official transcripts of those gatherings. Cassin, who was Paul’s point of contact, had first described him to the members of the academy as a young man who “possesses peculiar advantages as an explorer. He has lived long in the country, is entirely acclimated, speaks well two of the languages, and understands thoroughly the negro character. He proposes to proceed merely with convoys of natives from each tribe successively to the next.” In other words, Paul’s expedition had promised to be cheap, and the academy agreed to back him—a promise that Cassin conveyed to him in multiple letters. So Paul regularly stuffed and shipped animals from Gabon to Philadelphia. But the promised repayment never came. Suddenly the academy began ignoring his letters of inquiry.

  In late December 1859, Paul wrote once again to remind the academy members that he’d returned to the States. He referenced additional letters he’d received from Cassin in 1857 that authorized him to continue with his explorations and indicated that part of his reimbursement would be sent immediately to John Leighton Wilson on Paul’s behalf. But the money had never come.

  Paul’s letter was ignored. A few weeks later, he mailed another one. Then another. In January 1860, he sent them a detailed expense report along with excerpts of all the letters he’d received from the academy promising payment:

  Under the circumstances of the case I shall be satisfied to receive the following sums:

  –Balance admitted to be due for birds taken by the Academy:

  $261.50

  –On account of expense of Camma expedition: $500

  –For birds lost 30 in number: $90

  –For boxes of land shells, 30 in number, 11 species: $15

  $866.50

  Mr. Cassin has informed me that since my return to this country he has sent 47 birds to Brenner (of which he gave me a catalogue) without consultation with me.

  I do not know exactly the terms upon which these birds were sent from the hall of the Academy and wish to know how the value of these birds may be secured to me.

  At the request of members of the Academy I have left a number of quadrupeds at the hall in respect to which the Academy will be pleased to let me know their determination.

  Very respectfully yours,

  P. B. Du Chaillu

  Around the same time that he was struggling to receive acknowledgment from Philadelphia, he was in contact with other prestigious academies. On January 5, 1860, he spoke to the American Geological and Statistical Society in New York. He was introduced to the group as a “French traveler who had advanced quite as far into the interior of the African continent as Dr. Livingstone.” Paul displayed some pro
ps, including the skull of a gorilla, as he traced the route of his explorations on a large map. He explained that his strategy as a hunter was to wait until the chest-beating apes came close to him, then he opened fire.

  “They died very easily,” he said, earning a round of applause for what seemed like a display of admirable bravery.

  He also traveled to Boston, to meet with Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard anatomist who’d named the gorilla and with whom Wilson had been acquainted. Paul gave him several gorilla skins and skeletons and the corpse of a juvenile gorilla soaked in alcohol, fit for dissection. Wyman in turn invited Paul to speak to members of the Boston Society of Natural History, where Wyman was president. Though his lecture charmed the members of the society—enough so that they later elected him an honorary member of the group—the event was sparsely attended.

  As his efforts to penetrate the lofty realms of science and the academies stalled, Paul tried a new approach. Just two blocks west of the Mission House ran a colorful thoroughfare that had already become the prime destination for anyone hoping to earn a starring role in the American story.

  He took his gorillas to Broadway.

  AT THE beginning of 1860, the following advertisement ran in the pages of the New-York Daily Tribune:

  DU CHAILLU’S AFRICAN COLLECTION, No. 635

  Broadway, four doors below Bleecker St. Among which is the gigantic GORILLA and a great many other specimens of Natural History and Native Curiosities. Open day and evening. Admission 25 cents.

  The building at 635 Broadway had been constructed just five years before. It was marble fronted, with Italianate columns facing the street. Inside a long and narrow room, Paul unloaded all the cases he’d brought back from Africa.