The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  Other trips were even worse. Bringing wild foals to Hamburg from Mongolia took eleven months, and cost the lives of twenty-four of the fifty-two animals that embarked. Of more than sixty wild sheep making the same journey, not a single one survived. Despite all this, Hagenbeck’s perception of other species as ‘beings akin to ourselves’ does have a strange consistency. By simple logic, if animals are akin to us, then we must be akin to them, and in the diversity of our own species we should find as much to amaze us as in all the oddities of the jungle. Thus did Hagenbeck hit on ‘a brilliant idea’. Alongside the animals he would exhibit in his zoo and travelling shows, he would display exotic people. He began with a family of Lapps, whom he shipped to Hamburg with their reindeer in 1874.

  The first glance sufficed to convince me that the experiment would prove a success . . . On deck three little men dressed in skins were walking about among the deer, and down below we found to our great delight a mother with a tiny infant in her arms and a dainty little maiden about four years old, standing shyly by her side. Our guests, it is true, would not have shone in a beauty show, but they were so wholly unsophisticated and so totally unspoiled by civilisation that they seemed like beings from another world. I felt sure that the little strangers would arouse great interest in Germany.

  He was right. ‘All Hamburg comes to see this genuine “Lapland in miniature”’, set up in the grounds behind Hagenbeck’s house in Neuer Pferdemarkt. He attributed its success to the exhibits themselves having ‘no conception of the commercial side of the venture’, so it did not occur to them ‘to alter their own primitive habits of life. The result was that they behaved just as though they were in their own native land, and the interest and value of the exhibition was greatly enhanced.’

  The great virtue of Hagenbeck’s account is what seems now like almost reckless honesty. If he expected to be judged, it was by people who shared his passion for enterprise. Just as it raised no objection to the exploitation of beasts from Africa, so contemporary thought presented no obstacle to the human parallel. Efficacy was the test, not ethics. ‘My experience with the Laplanders taught me that ethnographic exhibitions would prove lucrative; and no sooner had my little friends departed than I followed up their visit by that of other wild men.’

  These included first Nubians and then Greenland Eskimos, who were displayed in Paris, Berlin and Dresden as well as Hamburg. Then came ‘Somalis, Indians, Kalmucks, Cingalese, Patagonians, Hottentots and so forth’. They were soon worth more to him than elephants. ‘Towards the end of the seventies, especially in 1879, the animal trade itself was in an exceedingly bad way, so that the anthropological side of my business became more and more important.’ The high point came with his great Cingalese exhibition of 1884, when a travelling caravan of sixty-seven men, women and children with twenty-five elephants and many different breeds of cattle caused ‘a great sensation’ in Europe. ‘I travelled about with this show all over Germany and Austria, and made a very good thing out of it.’

  There was innocence as well as calculation in Hagenbeck’s thinking, and it may be wrong to convict him of anything worse than naivety, or of being a man of his time. As usual, ironies are not far to seek. Eighty-three years later, the zoologist Desmond Morris, a former curator of mammals at London Zoo, would famously write The Naked Ape, a uniquely unemotional review of humankind as an evolving natural species. It sold by the thousand, and made Morris a household name. As popularisers tend to do, he raised hackles in the scientific community, but his evolutionary approach to human behaviour caused no great offence to liberal opinion. Indeed, with its absence of value judgements it rather chimed with it. By contrast, we look back upon the scientific anthropology of Hagenbeck’s time with something close to revulsion.

  Human exhibits – a Greenland Eskimo and his family, displayed by Hagenbeck at his zoo

  The nineteenth century was the great age of discovery and classification, when specimens poured into zoos and museums. In London, the British Museum began its system of registering new specimens in 1837, and within a decade it was receiving more than a thousand mammals a year. To a greater or lesser extent, the same thing was going on all over the world. Everywhere, clarity struggled with confusion. Identical species might be given different names by different scientists, or similar names with different spellings, and multiple groups of similar species might be recorded under a single name. It was the age of the enthusiast, when amateur was still a term of approbation applied to men of intellectual curiosity. Despite Darwin (himself a Christian), scientific thought was still channelled through faith in God. The superintendent of the Natural History Museum, Richard Owen, rejected Darwin’s theories and fought with Darwin’s friend Thomas Huxley over what the museum should actually represent. Huxley believed it should be what it has since become, a specialist institution devoted to scientific study within which only a fraction of the collection could be exposed to public view. Owen believed it should be annexed to the Old Testament, setting out with all due wonder and humility the miraculous entirety of God’s divine Creation. Even then, the antique quaintness of Owen’s view opened him to ridicule in press and parliament, but until his retirement in 1883 the museum would kneel more readily to God than it did to Darwin.

  In a way it was of no consequence. Whether the inspiration came from God or from the genius of those created in his likeness, there was a hunger for natural science that gripped the imaginations of educated men and women. Throughout the civilised world and beyond, they came forth in multitudes. In England, bewhiskered physicians, learned doctors and reverend gentlemen toured the countryside measuring, classifying and, in later years, photographing everything they saw. Nothing lived that was not labelled, and the inquiry did not confine itself to beetles, orchids and finches. Like Hagenbeck, the inquiring gentlemen soon found themselves as fascinated by their own species as they were by any other. With callipers, rulers and weights they categorised examples of Homo sapiens with a zeal that stopped only just short of the specimen jar. They called their science ‘anthropometry’, and began to speak of ‘breeds’.

  In 1900, William Z. Ripley’s anthropological field guide, The Races of Europe, identified among others the Old Black Breed, the Sussex, the Anglian, the Bronze Age Cumberland, the Neolithic Devon, the Teutonic-Black Breed Cross, the Inishmaan and the Brunet Welsh. Like breeds of dog, sheep or cattle, they all had their defining characteristics. Some were dark; others pale. Some had woolly hair; others fair and fine. Some tended to plumpness; others were thin and wiry. All were shown like prize livestock, staring into the distance with empty eyes. To a modern viewer they look more like criminal mugshots – an observation with which I suspect Ripley, then an assistant professor of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would not have been displeased.

  He noted with evident approval that members of the aristocracy tended to be blond and tall, whereas the old British types, with their big ugly noses, wide mouths, heavy cheekbones and ‘overhanging pent-house brows’, were coarse and rugged. Noses in particular could speak more eloquently than their owners. According to Bishop Whately in his Notes on Noses, the typical British type was ‘anti-cogitative’, as if the size of the nose were in inverse proportion to the size of the brain. Ripley believed that in the proportion, moulding and texture of flesh, bone and hair he could read every nuance of a human breed’s pedigree and character.

  Few if any pent-house brows were raised at this, for his views fitted snugly within the Victorian mainstream. The august British Association for the Advancement of Science had its own Anthropometric Committee, whose paper of 1883, ‘defining the facial characteristics of the races and principal crosses in the British Isles’, had been of great use to William Z. Ripley. The benchmark was Crania Britannica, a vast survey of ancient British skulls by two professional craniologists, Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam. This had been published in 1856 and, by her own ‘very liberal permission and favour’, was dedicated to ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty, Victoria�
��. In the manner of the time, Davis and Thurnam combined meticulous record-keeping with wild assertion. For the people-watchers of the Victorian empire, racial classification was not just a matter of physical differentiation – height, weight, pigmentation, shape and size of skull – but of psychological, intellectual and moral values too. Hence the belief that lunatics and criminals, like foreigners, could be identified by application of a tape measure to the frontal, parietal and occipital regions of the skull. ‘It would appear,’ reported one celebrated Victorian anthropologist, ‘that dark eyes and black or very dark hair are more common among lunatics than among the general population.’

  All too clearly now we can see where this was heading. In less than fifty years, the hobby-science of Victorian country vicars brought us to Hitler’s master race and the greatest catastrophe of modern history. Among the incidental casualties of war was the use of anthropometrics as a study of living populations. No longer could we talk innocently of ‘race’ and ‘blood’. Racial history was not just politically incorrect; it was politically unthinkable. It was also, for the most part, just plain wrong. Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves. For all the suffering he caused, and for all the contradictions of his own example, Hagenbeck’s thinking has a resilient kernel of usefulness. Whether or not we assign moral equivalence to other species, there is virtue in caring. The commodification of animal life, the casual dispensation of unfelt cruelty, kicks open the door to barbarism. If we value the measurable above the infinite, then we lose sight of what it is that makes us human. The wildlife and slave trades of the nineteenth century left scars that have yet to heal. In a sense, Hagenbeck was ahead of his time. Writing of circus animals, he observed, ‘it is impossible to achieve by ill-treatment one-hundredth part of what can be done by humane and intelligent methods’. It could as easily have been a stricture on the treatment of children in the London of Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, or on the Europe of Hitler and Stalin. In searching for the golden mole, I feel, I am connecting with a thread of what ought to be common humanity.

  On that front, there are two new points of interest. First, my philosophical friend Oliver Riviere has sent me a picture of a ‘golden mole’ that he has trapped in his English garden. It is undoubtedly golden, it is undoubtedly a mole, and it is a puzzle. The European mole, Talpa europaea, is typically dark slate in colour, but this one is like fine-cut orange marmalade. How to explain? I assume it’s an albino.

  More to the point, passing through London I go to look at the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum. Faded in their cabinets, they are kept now more as historical curiosities than the unique specimens they were when Selous and his contemporaries first took aim at them. A short-beaked echidna shares its case with a duck-billed platypus. There are anteaters and armadillos, a vampire bat, a flying lemur, a pangolin and a hyena. The big cats – cheetah, lion, tiger, jaguar, snow leopard – have faded over time into gaunt, sepia-tinted memories of themselves. Apologetic notices explain that the museum no longer collects skins for taxidermy. But never mind. Here among all the giants and curiosities of the jungle, unregarded and unphotographed by anyone but me, is an unprepossessing scrap of sand-coloured fur. The giant golden mole, Chrysospalax trevelyani, looks nothing like itself. It is tail-less, coarsely furred rather than conventionally moleskinned, with no ears, eyes or visible feet. The process of taxidermy has left it with an improbably shiny, joke-shop nose. Overall it looks more like a novelty slipper than anything that might once have had breath in its lungs. The word ‘giant’ is not misplaced. C. trevelyani is roughly twice the size of other species, including the Somali. The museum label explains that golden moles eat worms and other soil-dwelling animals. They are active in the rainy season but may become dormant during the dry or cold season. Looking it up afterwards, I find that the giant golden mole was first described by the museum’s newly appointed keeper of zoology, Albert Günther, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1875: ‘Mr Herbert Trevelyan has presented to the Trustees of the British Museum the skin of a new species of Chrysochloris which he distinguished by its gigantic size . . . He obtained it from a Kaffir who accompanied a shooting-party in the Pirie Forest near King William’s town (British Caffraria), and believes that it must be very scarce or local, as none of his companions had ever seen another specimen. Unfortunately the skull has not been preserved; otherwise the skin is in a most perfect condition. I name this species after its discoverer . . .’

  He reported that Calcochloris trevelyani (since renamed Chrysospalax trevelyani) was nine and a half inches long. ‘The colour and quality of the fur reminds one of an Otter; it is moderately long, rather stiff, and of a deep chocolate brown colour, with a dense whitish under-fur. Margin of the lips white. On the abdomen the fur is less dense and shorter; and patches of the whitish under-fur are visible in the posterior parts of the abdomen. Muffle flat, projecting as in the other species, but comparatively narrower. Claws whitish; the inner and outer of the fore foot very conspicuous. The third twice as strong as the second. No trace of an opening for the eye or ears, or of the tail can be discovered.’ Only the first sentence and the last can be verified from the time-worn specimen whose picture now adorns my mobile phone.

  I enjoy the diversion, but we are not quite done with Hagenbeck yet. An incident in the 1880s, after a rogue elephant nearly killed a keeper at his zoo, laid bare all the moral duplicities of the soi-disant naturalist. There was no place for sentiment. ‘At any moment a fatal accident might occur; there was no help for it, the monster must be executed,’ he writes. Beings akin to ourselves? Well, not as akin as all that. It is difficult to imagine a modern zookeeper coming to such an unhappy conclusion; and even harder to imagine one colluding in what happened next. If unsentimentality was one side of the pragmatist’s coin, then opportunism was the other. Some people might see an elephant’s death as tragedy. Not many would join Hagenbeck in seeing it as just another opportunity to turn blood into money. The chance came during a trip to England, when he mentioned the condemned elephant to the taxidermist Rowland Ward, who then came up with ‘a most original proposition’.

  ‘If the elephant were to be had cheap, he said he would willingly buy him from me, for he believed he could easily find a “sportsman” to whom it would be worth fifty pounds to be able to say that he had once shot an elephant!’ Sure enough, hot-foot to Germany came ‘a certain Mr W . . . for the purpose of shooting big game in my Zoological Garden’. The elephant was driven into the yard and tethered to the wall for the hunter to bag his trophy.

  All was in readiness, but the hero of the story did not appear. What could have happened? We waited for an hour, and then, as the sportsman still did not arrive, I hastened into the town to remind him of his engagement. I found him and brought him back to the hunting-ground, and at twelve o’clock we gathered around to see the hunter slay his game. The gentleman had brought along his arsenal, but now that he was in sight of the victim the sporting ardour seemed to have unaccountably left him. He fingered his murderous weapons, but did not fire the fatal shot. Presently one of my travellers, who happened to be present, offered to fire the shot, but this the owner of the elephant refused to allow.

  The story ends with a cynicism so extreme it becomes bleakly comical. The elephant is ushered back into its stable, a noose is placed around its neck, and six men haul on a rope to hang it from a beam. As an epitaph to an era in which knowledge played hide-and-seek with understanding, it is unimprovable.

  But there is something else about Hagenbeck that connects more appealingly to the present. Even now, as more and more species are being hustled to the brink, zoologists still cling to the optimism of their boyhoods. Somewhere, species not seen for decades, even centuries, must be living out their secret lives. Somewhere – in the depths of a Highland loch, in the high passes of the Himalayas, at the sodden heart of a Madagascan jungle – creatures yet unimagined may wait to be discovered. For all his hard-headedness, Hagenbeck never lost sight of
the dream.

  Independent reports from reliable witnesses, supported by cave paintings, convinced him that the swamps of Rhodesia contained ‘an immense and wholly unknown animal . . . half elephant, half dragon. . . . From what I have heard of the animal, it seems to me that it can only be some kind of dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus. As the stories come from so many different sources, and all tend to substantiate each other, I am almost convinced that some such reptile must still be in existence.’ An expedition sent to find it was inconvenienced by fever, vast areas of swampland and ‘bloodthirsty savages’. It returned empty-handed, but the boy in Hagenbeck would not be quiet.

  Notwithstanding this failure, I have not relinquished the hope of being able to present science with indisputable evidence of the existence of the monster. And perhaps if I succeed in this enterprise naturalists all the world over will be roused to hunt vigorously for other unknown animals; for if this prodigious dinosaur, which is supposed to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, be still in existence, what other wonders may not be brought to light?

  Though the ‘wonders’ of his imagination were coloured by a showman’s lust for size and ferocity, and though the Rhodesian swamp-monster would never be found, serious-minded zoologists ever after have been fired by the same unquenchable optimism, and surprisingly often have been rewarded by the reappearance of ‘living fossils’ or by entirely new species. In my own small way, I am in the grip of it myself. It is not a monster that I seek, but only a tiny scrap of evidence that will prove the existence of the world’s most elusive mole. People still ask me why, and my answer echoes the oldest enticement known to man. Because it is there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Werewolf Seized in Southend

  A hundred years after Hagenbeck’s death (he died, aged sixty-eight, on 14 April 1913) we stand atop a mountain of accumulated historical data. From this high vantage point we have clear sight of how animals are feeling our influence. The evidence is consistent and unignorable; the conclusions almost too painful to articulate. ‘It makes me ashamed to be of the same branch of biology,’ said the late Ian Nairn in a film he made for the BBC in 1973. What had inflamed him – brought him almost to the point of tears – was the demolition of a Victorian church. How much more shaming, then, is the destruction of a work of nature? It seems, or should seem, almost inconceivable that, like historic churches, libraries and market halls, species cannot be saved without a fight. This very day, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has placed an advertisement inviting people to ‘adopt’ a snow leopard. This elegant native of central Asia has had a hard time of it. Rapaciously hunted for its fur in the old Russian republics, persecuted by farmers, it has declined by 20 per cent in just two generations. Beyond question, it needs help. But so do thousands of others. The giant panda, Marley’s golden mole, the black rhino (recently declared extinct in West Africa), the brownstriped grunt . . . Their names alone would fill many pages of this book. The IUCN Red List contains 5,488 species of mammal. Seventy-six of these are extinct with two more gone from the wild; 505 are vulnerable, 448 endangered and 188 critically endangered. Others are ‘near threatened’ or ‘data deficient’. Only 3,110, for the moment, are of ‘least concern’.