by Monte Reel
History remembers Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, for uttering one of the most eloquent epitaphs of all time after Lincoln’s assassination: “Now he belongs to the ages.” But four years earlier, when he was still an outspoken critic of the president, Stanton nicknamed Lincoln “the Original Gorilla.” In a potshot he enjoyed repeating, Stanton added, “Du Chaillu was a fool to wander all the way to Africa in search of what he could so easily have found at Springfield, Illinois.”
The nickname stuck, particularly in the newly formed Confederacy. “Since the Southerners have adopted the habit of calling Mr. Lincoln the ‘Gorilla,’ we observe that some of the papers are giving detailed sketches of that animal,” read an editorial in the White Cloud Kansas Chief in August 1861. “So traitor blackguardism is doing some good—it is making the people acquainted with the history of a remarkable species of the animal kingdom.”
Paul and the gorilla craze he inspired unintentionally gave the less principled ideological combatants in both the Union and the Confederacy a wealth of material to twist to their own ends. Throughout the United States, the term “gorilla” became the ultimate dehumanizing epithet for blacks. When two separate sexual affairs between black men and white women were reported in Detroit (scandals that merited national coverage in 1861), the Cleveland Plain Dealer referenced Paul’s book to slander all parties involved. “We do believe that if the African Gorilla was plenty in our midst, ‘lying around loose’ like many of these worthless Negroes, they would have no trouble in contracting ‘advantageous family alliances’ among some of our women!” When the issue of official emancipation was first debated in Congress, Representative John Law of Indiana predicted that ending slavery would effectively empower “these human gorillas to murder their masters” and rape their wives and daughters.
The gorilla was quickly enlisted to justify the practice of slavery. T. W. MacMahon, a popular essayist from Virginia, in 1862 wrote a book called Cause and Contrast, which sold more than five thousand copies in its first week on sale. The author’s principal aim was to systematically prove that blacks were saddled with a “hopelessly degraded intellectual organization” and that whites therefore need not apologize for treating them as inferiors. MacMahon called upon a host of “scientific facts” from dubious sources, including the testimony of a Dutch doctor who asserted, “The pelvis of the male negro in the strength and density of its substance, and of the bones which compose it, resembles the pelvis of a wild beast.” MacMahon also marshaled Paul to his cause, noting the “awful likeness” that the adventurer perceived between the gorilla and humans. MacMahon apparently believed the observation was full of significance—provided that the humans in question were black ones, like the Hottentots of South Africa, whom MacMahon considered especially beastly. “The Negro proper is certainly not so low in the scale of physical organism as the gorilla,” MacMahon conceded, “yet it is demonstrable that he (especially the Hottentot), most certainly approximates in the structure of his frame to the monkey kind and the troglodyte.”
From there, it got worse. The Confederate writer Marvin T. Wheat published a 595-page book arguing that blacks should be classified under the biblical category of “living creatures” or “beasts of the earth”—not humans. Genesis stated that God had created man “in His own likeness,” and according to Wheat blacks didn’t qualify for inclusion in that category, because God’s likeness couldn’t be both black and white. In one perfectly representative sentence, Wheat unrolls a rope of fraying logic:
In this there seems to be a palpable contradiction, for it is irreconcilable with natural philosophy, to suppose for a moment, that the two colors, distinct in their natures and organizations, could be created after the Image of One Being, for this being must have had color, as well as other natural characteristics, or he was not nor is a being; and hence we would infer that, speaking technically, philosophically and phrenologically, there could have been but one race of man created after the Image of the Creator, and that all others were created subordinate to him, filling intermediate positions between him and the lower scale of animated nature.
Based on such articles of “organic law,” Wheat declared that slavery was therefore a “Divine Institution” that God commanded white men to follow. The validity of these truths was confirmed by African explorers, Wheat explained, since they exposed blacks as hopelessly primitive. By opening Africa to American and European expansion, Wheat argued, explorers were fulfilling the white man’s duty of absolute dominion.
If P. T. Barnum were ever forced to defend the idea that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” Wheat might have been a convincing Exhibit A. Wheat genuinely believed that Barnum’s “What Is It?”—the black man with microcephaly—was a new and undiscovered species of primate. Wheat wrote that the “What Is It?” was, perhaps, a link that connected gorillas with blacks, who deserved to be grouped with apes.
It wasn’t Paul’s fault that his work influenced such writings, because the tortured reasoning of the writers could have twisted almost anything to serve their ends. But by the second half of 1861 he was clearly uncomfortable with the idea that he’d unintentionally helped blur the lines between the human and the animal worlds. Increasingly, he made a point to tell audiences that he believed gorillas were fundamentally different from humans of all races, echoing Owen’s conclusions. Anyone who exploited the supposed links between gorillas and humans to make arguments related to evolution or to racial politics, Paul suggested, was seriously misguided.
AT THE same time that Paul’s notoriety reached its height in England, a young Welshman named John Rowlands was struggling to create a new life for himself in the United States. Rowlands began telling people he’d been born in Louisiana, even though he’d been an illegitimate child who’d spent much of his youth in a workhouse for poor orphans. Shortly before the Civil War began, he changed his name to Henry Morton Stanley.
Two decades later, Stanley would assume the role in the public imagination that Paul currently held—Africa’s greatest explorer. For both men, the desire to explore and dive headlong into adventure was intricately bound to a desire to transcend the circumstances of birth. Stanley’s biographer Tim Jeal has written that for Stanley adventure was “a Nietzschean confrontation that was the breath of life to him, a breaking away from the daily self he knew and could not endure, into a persona in which he could escape past humiliations, and stretch the boundaries of the human condition in denial of his own mortality.” Stanley, in his own autobiography, supported that theory when he wrote that he’d been able to find “independence of mind” while exploring Africa. Only there, Stanley wrote, could he achieve a transformative state of presence that “is not repressed by fear, nor depressed by ridicule and insults … but now preens itself, and soars free and unrestrained; which liberty, to a vivid mind, imperceptibly changes the whole man.”
Stanley’s motivating secrets, however, weren’t nearly as threatening as Paul’s. Being illegitimate was one thing, but being illegitimate and part black was incalculably more serious in the eyes of the Victorian establishment. The mania for Caucasian “purity” often meant that people of mixed-race ancestry languished even lower on the social scale than blacks. Richard F. Burton tapped into this sentiment when he wrote about mulattoes as being “neither fish nor fowl” and “despised by the progenitors of both races.”
Stanley himself demonstrated the malign potential of Paul’s ancestry. On the island of Zanzibar, which like Réunion had become a melting pot of black and white cultures, Stanley lashed out against the progeny of this commingling.
“For the half-castes I have great contempt,” Stanley wrote. “They are neither black nor white, neither good nor bad, neither to be admired nor hated.… Cringing and hypocritical, cowardly and debased, treacherous and mean, I have always found [the half-caste].… When he swears most, you may be sure he lies most, and yet this is the breed which is multiplied most at Zanzibar.”
Such were the views that Afr
ican exploration routinely excited in England and America and that Paul endured in silence.
Years later, however, with his ancestry still hidden from the public, the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer reported that Paul had directly spoken of the mixing of races during a public appearance. According to the paper, Paul believed that it “degraded the superior race without permanently elevating the inferior race.” The article ended, “M. du Chaillu is, evidently, not much of a believer in Negro equality.”
CHAPTER 32
The Impostors
The press, once so friendly, was ripping Paul’s reputation to shreds. He needed character witnesses, and not just from new acquaintances in London like Burton. His best supporters would be those who knew him in Gabon and who could vouch for his credibility. He wrote to the missionaries requesting they write letters in his defense to the London newspapers. Paul promised Owen and his friends at the Royal Geographical Society, the men who’d backed him from the start, that “the truth would right itself in the end.”
Months passed. But no letters arrived.
Wilson, at the very least, should have responded. Paul had written to the Presbyterian mission office in New York, assuming it could forward his request to Wilson in South Carolina. But with the Civil War under way, regular mail service between the North and the South had been suspended. So while Paul anxiously awaited the support of a man who probably knew as much about Gabon as anyone else alive, Wilson went about his life in the war-torn Confederacy, unaware that Paul had told his friends and members of the press in London that Wilson’s corroboration would prove that his journeys weren’t inventions.
In the early fall, Paul sought refuge at the country estates of high-placed friends. During one of these escapes, he got his hands on a copy of the Athenaeum, where he saw his name mentioned in a column called “Our Weekly Gossip.” The piece reminded readers that Paul had insisted that the missionaries in Gabon would defend his character and confirm his honesty. The newspaper item announced that now rumors were circulating that at long last the first of those responses had trickled into London.
“Letters came to town from the Gaboon on Wednesday last,” the newspaper reported. “A gentleman, who has been conspicuously named as a witness for M. Du Chaillu, has written on the subject to his friend in London:—will M. Du Chaillu produce the letter so sent? We hope he will.”
Finally, he thought. Paul figured that if the letter had arrived from Africa from someone he had “conspicuously named as a witness,” it must have been sent by the Reverend William Walker, who’d taken over as head of the Baraka mission when John Leighton Wilson left the country. Paul had known Walker since 1848, and he’d stayed with him at the mission several times between his inland journeys. Paul had always been friendly with Walker, who would surely stand up for him.
But the Athenaeum item was puzzling. Paul should have been notified if the letter had been addressed to him, but he hadn’t heard a word about it. Was he the “friend in London,” or was the letter headed to someone else?
“Everything will be right,” Paul wrote to his publisher John Murray the day after he saw the item in the paper. “The imposters will be those who have tried to blacken my private character and who hate me without a cause.”
The next day, a package of letters from Murray dashed all hopes of tranquillity. The letter from Gabon hadn’t been addressed to Paul. In fact, it had just been printed in the Morning Advertiser newspaper. Murray informed Paul that the letter had been signed by Walker, but it was full of devastating accusations.
Paul couldn’t believe what he was reading. According to Murray, Walker’s letter ridiculed Paul’s knowledge of native languages, and Walker flatly stated that he had invented his stories. “I, in common with most persons, doubt that M. Du Chaillu ever killed or assisted to kill a Gorilla,” Walker had written, “and also of the extent of his ‘travels.’ ”
Paul was stunned. How could Reverend Walker have accused him of something like that? It contradicted everything he believed he knew about the man. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Unless the letter wasn’t really from Walker.
THE REALIZATION hit him like a shot: he had met another Walker in Gabon who had nothing to do with the missionary.
He was an English-born trader based in the far south, and his name was Robert Bruce Napoleon Walker—better known in Gabon as either R. B. N. Walker or just Brucie. He was about the same age as Paul. He’d moved from Sussex to Gabon in 1851. His older brother was operating a small “trading station” from aboard a ship docked off the coast, about two hundred miles south of Baraka. In 1857, while Paul was exploring the interior, Walker opened a small station on land near the coastal village of Sette Cama, where he served as an agent for a Liverpool trading firm.
When Paul traveled to the Fernan-Vaz region to establish a base for his southern foray into the jungle, he’d met Walker several times. He’d told him about his expeditions, his encounters with gorillas, his travels into unexplored territories, and his interactions with native tribes. When Paul let it slip that he hoped to someday visit England and display some of his natural history specimens there, Walker offered to help. He gave him the names of a few friends and relatives in London who might be able to assist him. Walker was a friendly man—or so Paul had believed.
As soon as he figured out that the Walker referred to in the Athenaeum wasn’t the missionary, Paul dashed off a letter to explain the confusion to Murray. Still it didn’t add up. Why would R. B. N. Walker want to smear his name? His only interactions with the man had been friendly ones.
“My enemies will not let me rest,” he wrote to Murray, asking for a full copy of Walker’s letter. “I’m astonished that Walker has written anything against me.”
A day later, Paul’s copy of the Morning Advertiser arrived. It couldn’t have been worse. Every sentence stabbed at the heart of Paul’s credibility.
“Having known M. Du Chaillu for some years personally, and possessing, moreover, from reliable sources, information the most exact as to his antecedents, besides having a knowledge of many of the places and people which he pretends to describe, I am induced to request a place in your journal for the following remarks.”
Walker didn’t get into specifics concerning Paul’s “antecedents,” thankfully, but he implied that the young adventurer was hiding something scandalous about his true identity. Walker suggested that members of a certain trading firm in Paris could provide verification of highly sensitive personal details if informed that the young man claiming the surname “Du Chaillu” was actually “identical with M.
Paul Belloni.”
The letter spread throughout London like a virus. The Athenaeum reprinted Walker’s letter the next week, although the editors cut the insinuating reference to his maternal name “for the sake of greater courtesy to M. Du Chaillu.” The act suggested that the editors knew very well that Paul’s racial background was a matter of rumor and that merely hinting at such a secret was too devastating a claim to risk without irrefutable proof. The Times, for its part, declined to print even an excerpt of Walker’s letter. John Gray didn’t exercise the same restraint. He reprinted the letter, complete with the doubts about Paul’s “antecedents,” in his monthly journal, the Annals of Natural History.
The letter cast doubt on almost every story Paul had told. Walker wrote that the descriptions of the Fang cannibals were greatly exaggerated, if not wholly invented. He asserted that baby gorillas were not “untamable” and added that he’d kept one alive on the coast for several months. He mocked Paul’s knowledge of native languages as being “of the most infinitesimal kind.” He charged that the so-called gorilla hunter had prepared some of his skins on the coast, not in the jungle, and that Paul had downplayed the presence of other white men in Gabon to make his own limited travels seem more exceptional.
“I think I have sufficiently shown that M. Du Chaillu has been guilty of many incorrect statements; in fact, his work contains nearly as many errors and inac
curacies as there are paragraphs,” Walker concluded.
WHAT HAD happened to the friendly R. B. N. Walker whom Paul had met on the Gabonese coast? Had that man been a mere hallucination?
Details emerged that helped explain the betrayal.
After R. B. N. Walker had met Paul in Gabon, he had written to a brother-in-law in England in 1858 and 1859. In both letters, Walker had praised Paul as an admirable young man.
On November 4, 1858, Walker wrote that Paul hoped to travel to England with the specimens he’d collected in Gabon, and he encouraged his brother-in-law to help him make contacts with the professional societies there. “An enterprising naturalist with whom I am acquainted, Mr. Paul Duchaillu (a Frenchman), will shortly be in England with a collection of rare birds and animals, many discovered by him,” Walker had written. “I will endeavor to get him to call on you. He has traveled where no white man ever penetrated before.” Six months after that initial letter, Walker wrote again, going even further in his praise of the adventurer. He compared Paul to Nimrod, a great-grandson of the biblical Noah and a great hunter who, according to some interpretations of the Old Testament popular in the nineteenth century, was a progenitor of the black race. Walker wrote:
Mr. Paul Duchaillu, the West African Nimrod, will shortly leave the coast for the United States, and thence to London. I shall give him a letter of introduction to you, and have advised him to get you to revise his journal previous to publication. I shall consider it a favour if you will put him in the way of finding the best market for his specimens, as he deserves to be well remunerated for his trouble. I presume he is about the only European who has seen the N’jena, or Gorilla, in its wild state, and killed it himself.… As Mr. D. will therefore be a celebrity in a small way, it will be a feather in your cap to be his cicerone, and to lionize him. I may give him a line or two to one or two other people; but I think you are the most likely to be useful to him. He is a very nice little fellow, and he will amuse you with his descriptions of tribes and people, who never yet have been seen by another white man than himself, and who have seen no other than him. As you will see him in a few months, I will not forestall him by recording any of his adventures here. He is no boaster, and I, for one, place confidence in all he has told me, and I consider that what he related may be relied on.