Between Man and Beast

by Monte Reel

  It was a twist Paul probably saw coming, but he was powerless to stop it. In the forests of Africa, he had taken control of his destiny, slain a beast no one had ever seen, and effectively recast his life as a heroic myth. But his past reared up to consume the identity he had risked his life to create. It proved a much harder beast to kill than a gorilla.

  CHAPTER 30

  Shadows of the Past

  Paul’s early history was an involute knot that he had deliberately tied himself. Throughout his life, he spoke little of his French father, Charles-Alexis Du Chaillu, the trader on the coast of Gabon, and never publicly spoke of his mother. Sometimes he’d hint that there were Huguenots (persecuted French Protestants who’d been forced to leave France) among his forebears. Other times he’d vaguely refer to a “Creole” ancestry. That word conjured images of steamy bayous in the Mississippi delta, and when people assumed that Paul was from New Orleans, he didn’t correct them. After his father died in the mid-1850s, he began using the name Paul Belloni Du Chaillu. People naturally assumed that “Belloni,” with its Italian bounce, came from his mother’s side of the family. It made sense. A southern Mediterranean origin might explain the dark eyes and olive skin.

  If a person had asked Paul’s friends in both America and England where they believed he had been born, the variety of answers would have exposed Paul’s falsifications. Many would have said his birthplace was Paris. Those answering America would have disagreed about the state: some would have sworn he’d been raised in Louisiana, some would have picked New York, others would have said South Carolina.

  But of all the conflicting origin stories, one stood out. As far as can be determined through the historical record, he told it to only one person.

  In London, Paul befriended a man named Edward Clodd, an eminent banker who occasionally wrote articles for the scientific and literary press. Clodd welcomed Paul into his social circle, which included some of the most prominent literary men in England. Paul also visited the Clodd home regularly, dining with the wife and entertaining the children with his stories of his adventures.

  At some point, Paul confessed to Clodd that he was neither French nor American. He said that he had actually been born on a French-controlled island off the coast of Africa. Paul’s father, it was true, had been born in France. But his mother was a native.

  Clodd recognized that the information could have ruined Paul’s reputation. He guarded the secret.

  THE ISLAND of Réunion (until 1793 known as Bourbon) sits in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Africa, east of Madagascar. The French colonized the previously uninhabited territory in the late seventeenth century. They brought with them slaves from Madagascar and the African mainland. Throughout the eighteenth century, the population of the island was roughly half white, half black. But in the late eighteenth century, the slave trade boomed, and blacks became the overwhelming majority. By the century’s end, 61,300 people lived on the island, and about 85 percent were black. Most were slaves, but about 1,200 were known as “free domestics” or “free coloreds” who worked for the white landowners without being considered their property. The two cultures—French and African—increasingly blended throughout the nineteenth century, and the island became known as a racial melting pot. A pronounced Creole culture—not white, not black, but unique unto itself—took root.

  Unlike in the United States, children born of a white man and a black woman in Réunion generally became part of the man’s family. This allowed many of the island’s mixed-race children to escape the bonds of slavery, though they often occupied a lowly status in the father’s home.

  Existing archival records offer patchy glimpses into Paul’s likely childhood. The evidence points to a strained relationship between a mercurial father and an overlooked son for whom “home” would always be a shifting concept.

  IN 1831, the year of Paul’s birth, Charles-Alexis Du Chaillu was earning a reputation as a dangerous man. Ever since he’d moved to Réunion from eastern France, the thirty-year-old trader had struggled to climb the island’s social ladder. Even though he was among the island’s white minority, he could only rise so far because he was not one of the plantation owners known locally as the sugar aristocracy. They made the rules on the island, making sure everyone else was kept in his proper place.

  Around 1830, Charles-Alexis and a group of like-minded white middle-class businessmen supported a proposal to create an elected assembly of representatives. The plantation owners hated the idea. They had always been able to exert their influence on the island’s appointed governor, and they feared any changes to the status quo. They thought the upstarts clamoring for an assembly were troublemakers who seemed to be growing braver with each passing day.

  In the summer of 1830, King Charles X of France was overthrown in a coup called the July Revolution. The governor of Réunion, who protected the interests of the elite sugar growers, was a loyal appointee of the king. Charles-Alexis saw the death of King Charles X as an opportunity that might allow him to topple the local government.

  The governor knew he was vulnerable, and he tried to preserve the validity of his rule. He confiscated newspapers and incoming mail deliveries, keeping all of the island’s inhabitants in the dark about events in Europe. But, inevitably, one passenger arriving by ship snuck by the dockside inspectors with a copy of the Journal du Havre in his luggage, and Charles-Alexis began spreading the news. A short time later, a French ship docked in the port of Saint-Denis bearing a new flag with red, white, and blue stripes. The familiar fleur-de-lis banner of King Charles X was gone, replaced with the tricolor symbol of the new king, Louis Philippe. For Charles-Alexis it symbolized a new beginning.

  He ran to the port to see it, along with hundreds of others. Someone suggested hoisting the new flag on top of a local naval ship—a dramatic gesture, full of explosive symbolism. Police at the dock tried to squash the plan. But Charles-Alexis and three other men couldn’t be stopped.

  Holding the flag, they jumped aboard the naval ship, and Charles-Alexis began to climb the tall mast of the ship, where he ripped down the fleur-de-lis and affixed the banner of King Louis Philippe. Shouts of “Vive la France!” and “Long live freedom!” rang over the water. High above the port, looking down upon the cheering crowd, Charles-Alexis might have believed that he had finally scraped his way to the top of Réunion’s social scale. But it was a brief apogee. High on the mast, he was a sitting duck—an easily identifiable enemy of a political establishment that wasn’t ready to give up.

  For the next several months, tensions ran high between the island’s conservative elite and the supporters of King Louis Philippe. On May 1, 1831—exactly three months before Paul’s birth—a group aligned with the sugar barons clashed with the reformers. Around the same time, a ship registered to Charles-Alexis was detained by authorities. Unregistered blacks—perhaps slaves—were found on board. The governor, who still hadn’t been replaced by the new king, saw an opportunity to rid himself of the most persistent provocateur on the island. He exiled Charles-Alexis from Saint-Denis for one year and subjected him to police surveillance. Charles-Alexis chose to be deported to France.

  Government records reveal that he sailed to Nantes, in western France, in the summer of 1831. This indicates that he left the island before his son was born on July 31. For several years after this, Charles-Alexis was absent from the island’s archives. But he reappeared in the decadal census of 1840.

  Between his exile and his return, Charles-Alexis married a woman named Marie-Julie Bréon, who was born in Saint-Denis but was not Paul’s mother. By 1843, their household was thriving. Two children—both daughters—were registered with the census authorities, along with seven slaves. Paul wasn’t recognized as an official member of the family.

  Although island tradition would put Paul in his father’s custody, the exile of Charles-Alexis would have prevented that arrangement during the first years of Paul’s life. However, it’s possible that he joined Charles-Alexis and Bréon after
his father’s return, even though his name doesn’t appear on the official registry. Henry Bucher, a historian who in the 1970s uncovered many of the records pertaining to the family, reported that it was not uncommon for illegitimate children to remain unregistered, even though they lived in the household.

  The woman who gave birth to Paul remains shrouded in mystery, but some clues exist. A Gabonese historian, Annie Merlet, in 2007 consulted the Cultural Services Department in Saint-Denis and confirmed that “Belloni” was among the names used by the “free coloreds” in Réunion. She also discovered that Charles-Alexis had been accused of “immorality” resulting from dalliances with women of black or mixed-race ancestry. Merlet speculated that Paul might have been raised by his mother until her death in the 1840s, at which time the boy sought out his father, who had since moved on to Gabon to manage the Maison Lamoisse of Le Havre trading company.

  Paul first arrived in Gabon in 1848, but he might have spent some time in Paris between his years in Réunion and those in Gabon. A student of his in Carmel, New York, recalled that Paul spoke of the 1848 French Revolution, which deposed King Louis Philippe, as if he’d been there himself. The student remembered that Paul clearly held Louis Philippe in high esteem and was horrified by his violent overthrow. “He hated the country in which such things could be,” she said, believing that it was a principal reason he had so enthusiastically adopted America as a homeland. It’s impossible to know whether or not Paul was in France in 1848, but there’s no reason to believe he wasn’t. His loyalty to the deposed king would make perfect sense for a boy raised on Réunion, where Louis Philippe had been revered by his father’s generation of reformers.

  When Paul arrived in Gabon as a teenager, Charles-Alexis was in charge of all material provisions for the French colony and its naval installations in Gabon. In 1850, Gabon’s administrative authority listed Paul as “a very young” assistant in the local trading storehouse, which suggests he might have been officially employed for a time by his father. But Paul’s eager embrace of the Wilsons as a surrogate family implies that the father-son relationship was untraditional and distant and likely strained.

  After he traveled to the United States in 1852, Paul was able to maintain the fiction that he’d been born an American among many of his acquaintances because passports weren’t necessary for international travel. According to Putnam County, New York, records, he did, in fact, apply to become a naturalized American citizen in 1855. But his request wasn’t honored. No reasons for the apparent rejection are known, but proof of parentage—both paternal and maternal—was required of all applicants.

  WHILE THE controversy about Paul’s credentials as a naturalist and explorer raged, the rumors of his mixed-race ancestry circulated behind closed doors. The gossip likely eroded his standing in Philadelphia and might have fueled some of Charles Waterton’s diatribes, but the general public that followed the controversy in the press remained unaware of those covert machinations.

  It simply wouldn’t have occurred to most people who had met him that Paul was anything other than European. In the pictures that survive of him, his prematurely thinning hair, though usually trimmed short, appears more straight than curly. Paul himself made references to his “very dark brown” or “almost black” skin tone in Explorations and Adventures, but he always attributed it to excessive exposure to the sun, not to heredity. Journalists occasionally referred to him as “dark” or “swarthy” in print, but they never directly questioned his lineage. “M. du Chaillu is a bald, bronzed, diminutive shrunken specimen of humanity who looks as if Equatorial Africa had absorbed his life-blood,” one newspaper wrote of him. Another journalist, the London correspondent for the New York Times, in the summer of 1861 tacked the following to the end of an article about Paul as a provocative afterthought: “By the way, it seems to be another disputed point as to what his politics are. He is an American citizen, and the suspicion of Negro sympathies hangs round him in many ways.”

  The threat of exposure was never far away, and sometimes hovered closer than Paul could have realized. Years later, Mary Kingsley, who in the 1890s became a pioneering female explorer of western Africa, revealed in an unpublished letter to Clodd that she once possessed the manuscript of Paul’s biography “written by an old enemy of his and sent to me for publication which would have blown the roof off any publisher’s house in London—not that I have shown it to any one.” Kingsley died in 1900. The biography never surfaced.

  If it had been revealed that his mother was half-black, Paul would have been called a quadroon. The label would have precluded his acceptance into the highest professional circles in Victorian London, and the connections that fueled his meteoric rise to fame—Owen, Murchison, Murray, and others—would have evaporated. Those who supported him were members of an elite that was infamously intolerant of non-whites. Even some of the most liberal thinkers who adamantly opposed slavery—a list that included Huxley—believed Africans and aboriginal Australians represented the lower stages of human development. Racial minorities didn’t belong to the Royal Geographical Society. Their exclusion wasn’t debated. It was taken for granted.

  The title character in The Octoroon—the play that was staged on Broadway while Paul had been in New York—despairs that a single drop of African blood makes her “an unclean thing.” Paul would have been similarly stigmatized among many in a population obsessed with whiteness. Some ladies in Victorian England actually ate pure clay, believing that it would lighten their complexions, and others rubbed highly toxic arsenic “complexion wafers” over their skin for the same effect. After visiting England twice, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1856 noted a marked tendency to overvalue racial status among the British of that era. “Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race,” he wrote in a book he titled English Traits. “Every body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune; but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.”

  Paul, unintentionally, was helping to make that trait even more pronounced with his descriptions of the native Africans who shared the same forest with the gorilla. Even as his secret remained successfully hidden from most people, Paul found himself walking through a new world where a person’s ancestry seemed to matter more than it ever had.

  CHAPTER 31

  Black and White

  Compared with most other explorers of his era, Paul was considerably kinder in his portrayal of native Africans in Explorations and Adventures. Still, at times he adopted the paternalistic tone that was de rigueur among Victorian exploration narratives—the white conqueror strolling among hapless savages—but at other times he’d slide into the lowly role of the subject. On one page he defined the African character as essentially deceitful, but then a few pages later he launched into praise for the “kind-hearted negroes” he traveled among.

  He wrote: “I met every where in my travels men and women honest, well-meaning, and in every way entitled to respect and trust; and the very fact that a white man could travel alone, single-handed and without powerful backers, through this rude country without being molested or robbed, is sufficient evidence that the negro race is not unkindly natured.” When among the Mbondemo tribe, he reported that in becoming known as “Mbene’s white man,” he surrendered to the authority of the chief. “The title has comfort and safety in it,” Paul wrote. He had assumed the role of the king’s subject, not his overlord. It’s difficult to imagine other celebrated African explorers of the period, such as Burton, Stanley, and Speke, making such a concession. Paul’s depictions were certainly not free from condescension, but they were significantly less offensive than others of the period.

  His complex perspective is apparent in his portrayal of the Fang tribe. Every lurid detail he included—from the Fang’s razor-sharp teeth, to their garish war paint, to his fears that they might “be seized of a passionate desire to taste of me”—supported the idea that the deeper
one ventured into the dark heart of Africa, the more savage the natives. But Paul flatly contradicted the commonly held assumption that a tribe’s degree of savagery corresponded to its degree of “blackness.” He wrote that the Fang were not only the most terrifying cannibals imaginable but also whiter than any of the other tribes he encountered.

  Those who supported the dawning theory of evolution often assumed that blacks were “less evolved” than whites. Advances in biology and genetics have since obliterated that notion, but in the 1860s some of the most celebrated scientists of the era worked under that assumption. This belief implied that blacks were more closely related to apes than whites were. At times in the narrative, Paul seemed eager to undermine the idea. When he wrote of killing a chimpanzee, he reported that the native hunters took note of the animal’s light facial skin. “They roar with laughter,” he writes in describing the natives’ reaction to inspecting the chimp’s seemingly Caucasian appearance. “Look! He got straight hair, all same as you. See white face of your cousin from the bush! He is nearer to you than a gorilla is to us!”

  Paul’s unique perspective on racial subjects and his relatively sympathetic portraits of Africans did nothing to silence the bigotry seething inside many of his readers. The animal he had shown the world was already becoming a charged symbol of the very hatred from which he hid.

  ONE WEEK after Paul first addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated president of the United States. By late summer, the Civil War was in full swing. Harper’s Weekly, a popular magazine owned by the same company that published the American edition of Paul’s book, began inserting articles about the English gorilla craze in between its war reports. Paul’s book became an instant hit in the thirty-four states.