by Monte Reel
At first Paul suspected that jealousy might have been behind Walker’s stark reversal.
“I cannot express to you the sorrow I felt when I read the letter of one whom I considered as one of my friends formerly, one who gave me letters of introduction to his family, one who begged his friend to present me to English society, one who wrote in one of his letters a most flattering account of me,” Paul wrote to Murray as soon as he saw Walker’s letter in the Morning Advertiser. “Probably he is vexed that I did not mention his name in my book.”
Soon, another explanation came to light: Walker himself hoped to cash in on England’s gorilla fever.
Within months, R. B. N. Walker would board a steamer for Liverpool with the partially preserved specimens of several gorillas. He had arranged to exhibit the specimens in a museum, and he had organized his own lecture tour.
For the rest of his life, Walker presented himself not simply as a trader but as an African explorer. He supplied museums in England with zoological specimens throughout the 1860s and 1870s, became a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, attempted ill-fated exploratory expeditions of the Ogowé River, and spoke often of his dreams of writing a book about West Africa. He seemed to want nothing more than to transform himself into another Paul Du Chaillu.
Walker never entirely dropped his attempt to undermine the reputation of the man whose path he sought to follow.
“I am going to pen a few lines for the Athenaeum in contradiction of the alleged parentage of Du Chaillu,” Walker wrote in a letter to the curator of the Liverpool Museum after he had established himself in London. But if he wrote such an exposé, it was never published. It has been speculated, though never proved, that Walker’s biographical sketch was the work that Mary Kingsley later claimed would have “blown the roof off any publisher’s house in London” had it been published.
Incredibly, Walker enthusiastically entertained the notion of collaborating with Paul on a joint Ogowé River expedition, and he tried to get the RGS to sponsor such a venture. That collaboration, not surprisingly, never happened.
CHAPTER 33
Shortcuts to Glory
The public fallout from Walker’s letter was disastrous. Newspapers all over the world publicly accused Paul of inventing everything in his book—the route of his travels, his encounters with gorillas, and even his own identity.
“Belloni, it appears, is the traveler’s proper name, not Chaillu, and it would be satisfactory to know the reason of his assuming the alias, which in itself is suspicious,” reported the Glasgow Examiner. “Until M. Du Chaillu refutes the evidence he himself has invoked, it will be difficult for his best friends to clear him from the imputation of having attempted to pass off his fictitious adventures as a true account of travels that had never been accomplished.”
Paul’s first public appearance after Walker’s letter appeared was in Glasgow. He marched onto the lecture stage inside the city’s municipal building. With two stuffed gorillas flanking the podium, he insisted that he had visited every location he had described. Anyone who had the nerve to suggest he had not faced down the frightening beast that stood beside him onstage, he said, should have the courage of his convictions.
“I simply told what I saw,” he told the crowd, “and if any one does not believe me, they had better go and see for themselves.”
The audience laughed, unaware that one enterprising author in London was preparing to do just that.
WINWOOD READE had published three books before he turned twenty-three—an impressive accomplishment if all three hadn’t unified the nation’s literary critics in a chorus of unrestrained contempt. His first novel, Charlotte and Myra, was dismissed by the Athenaeum as “foolish.” His second, a university novel called Liberty Hall, Oxon, was skewered by the British Quarterly Review as “one of the most untruthful narratives, while affecting to be truthful, we have ever read.” The Spectator called that book “nauseous” and deemed it “full of all sorts of things he would have done well to erase the moment they were written.” In early 1861, Reade published The Veil of Isis, a book “deformed by not a little bad taste,” according to the Spectator.
Now Reade was facing a crisis of professional desperation. He was young, free from obligations, awash in family money—but bereft of literary inspiration. As the controversy surrounding Paul unfolded, however, he sniffed an opportunity. As Reade himself later phrased it, he believed he had “discovered a short cut to glory” in l’affaire du Chaillu.
The controversy, Reade saw, needed a referee. Someone had to sort out truth from fiction. Reade appointed himself to the job.
In the autumn of 1861 he began planning a trip to Gabon. There, he would retrace Paul’s steps, hunt gorillas, and deliver the definitive verdict on both the adventurer and his descriptions of his infamous beasts.
“In my humble character as a mere collector of evidence,” Reade explained, “having no special views to promote, I wish only to arrive at the truth.”
ON CHRISTMAS EVE, Reade boarded a steamer in Liverpool. Fifty-one days later, he stepped onto Gabonese soil.
With the five men he had hired during a brief stop in Liberia (“all of whom were tolerably accomplished thieves”), he spent his first night in Gabon in a trading station near Baraka. When he awoke the next morning, someone named Walker was waiting to meet him. This wasn’t the R. B. N. Walker whom he’d read about in London but the elusive Reverend William Walker himself, the man who’d known Paul for more than a decade and who had provided him with a home base during his expeditions.
Walker took one look at Reade—sleeping next to his piles of supplies, covetously safeguarding them, fearful of being robbed—and decided he had to offer him a place to stay. It wasn’t so much an act of generosity as one of convenience: Walker was certain that the inexperienced Reade would run into problems, most likely conflicts with natives, and as a fellow white man Walker would be the one responsible for bailing him out of trouble. Keeping Reade close at hand would make intervention easier.
Walker didn’t tell that to Reade. “As you have not been in a hot country before, you will be sure to have a bad fever,” Walker said, “and it will be more convenient for me to attend you in my house than here.”
Reade instantly took a liking to Walker, who in turn viewed Reade’s naïveté and irrepressible urbanity as sources of mild amusement. “He is very social, & likes our simple way of living, though he has an annual income of seventy thousand dollars,” Walker wrote to a friend days later, unimpressed by the information that Reade had revealed. “But income will not keep off fever, nor cook a fowl. So he is just on a level with us all; only when he chooses, he can go home.”
Walker was an understated man, and he had a melancholic streak that he was never able to shake after his wife died in the early 1840s. It wasn’t his style to get mixed up in a controversy like the one that had enveloped Paul. His silence in the London press was more a reflection of a determination to mind his own business than an indictment of Paul. To Reade, Walker spoke kindly of the young man he’d met back in 1848. But he told him that he couldn’t verify all he’d written in his book, because he hadn’t accompanied him. That said, Walker told Reade he sincerely believed that Paul had done exactly what his critics were alleging he hadn’t: he’d hunted gorillas, observed them in the wild, and shot them himself.
Other missionaries in Corisco and Baraka told Reade the same thing. They also told him that Paul was a crack marksman, a knowledgeable naturalist, and uncommonly courageous and had silently endured more privations and challenges during his travels than he had mentioned in his book.
Reade spent several weeks traveling up the Muni River and then headed south to the Fernan-Vaz region, where most of Paul’s encounters with gorillas had allegedly taken place. Exasperatingly, none of the natives seemed immediately willing to take Reade gorilla hunting. Reade had hoped to verify or disprove Paul’s claims by repeating his feats.
The days dragged on, and not only had Reade failed to
shoot his own gorilla, but he hadn’t even seen one. On April 20, he wrote to Reverend Walker, suggesting that he felt tremendous pressure to send an initial progress report to London and that he feared his trip was proving a failure.
“I must shoot a gorilla, and have something to say about these cannibals,” he wrote.
In the Fernan-Vaz region, Reade lucked upon a young interpreter named Mongilomba who informed him that he’d traveled with Paul during part of his journey. When Reade questioned him about the gorilla hunts, Mongilomba recognized Reade’s eagerness: R. B. N. Walker had quizzed him about the very same subject months before. Mongilomba told Reade that he’d told Walker that he’d been with Paul when he shot two of the gorillas. But now the young interpreter told Reade he had lied to Walker. He never witnessed those slayings himself, he admitted.
This put Reade on high alert. Days later he met the leader of a local tribe named King Quengueza, whom Paul had praised in Explorations and Adventures as intelligent, sensible, and brave. Through an interpreter, Reade asked him if he believed that Paul had really hunted gorillas. The old king didn’t hesitate.
“His answer was precise,” Reade later wrote. “He and Paulo (as he called M. Du Chaillu) had been in the habit of shooting gorillas together in the bush.”
But the next day, Reade met the wife of another chieftain. Unlike Quengueza, she spoke English. Although she hadn’t met Paul, she’d heard rumors suggesting that he hadn’t shot any gorillas himself.
“He had only shot little birds,” she told him.
Reade was intrigued. To him, this woman seemed to have “an intelligent face.” She seemed more trustworthy than Quengueza’s people, whose black skin he described as “the color of disease” and who constituted a degraded race that “imitates the white man as the ape imitates the negro.” When Reade told her that Quengueza claimed to have shot gorillas with Paul, she quickly brushed it aside.
“Ah, you must not believe all these people tell you,” she said. “They do not speak the truth.”
Quengueza happened to be standing nearby. He and the woman began to converse in their native language.
“What’s he saying?” Reade asked his interpreter, unsure of what was going on.
“He says that Paulo and he went a long way into the bush.”
Reade decided to try to clarify the confusion by appealing directly to Quengueza, eliminating the filter of the interpreter. Reade held his arms out, trying to pantomime the act of holding a rifle, and he uttered the word the natives used for gorilla: “njena?”
The king shook his head from side to side, as if to say no.
Reade interpreted this as a confession. The old man, Reade decided, had never hunted with Paul.
Later, when Reade asked other villagers to confirm that gorillas beat their chests with their hands, as Paul had described in his lectures and his book, the men laughed. That was just a ridiculous story that Quengueza had fed to Paul, they said.
On September 7, Reade sent a letter to the Athenaeum declaring that he had finished his journey. The letter unfolded like a juicy exposé of untruths. He revealed that his assistant, Mongilomba, was merely a young boy and “not a gorilla hunter at all” when he’d been with Paul. Reade’s verdict was definitive.
“Having spent five active months in the Gorilla Country,” Reade wrote, “I am in a position to state that M. Du Chaillu has shot neither leopards, buffaloes, nor gorillas; that the gorilla does not beat his breast like a drum; … that the young gorilla in captivity is not savage; and that while M. Du Chaillu affects to have been ‘a poor fever-stricken wretch’ at Camma (June 1st, 1859), he was really residing in robust health.”
Near the end of his letter, Reade conceded that many of the locals held Paul in high regard and that some of the book’s descriptions—including those of the Fang cannibals—were “very good,” though occasionally exaggerated. But that was faint praise. Reade had already dismissed most of the book as a journey into the land of make-believe.
In refuting Paul’s descriptions of gorillas, Reade had zeroed in on the accounts of the animal’s supposed tendency to beat its chest when threatened. Reade reported that Quengueza was the source of this misinformation. Paul had never witnessed it himself.
“Thus in an obscure African village an old savage could tell a lie, which has blazed through Europe,” Reade concluded.
CHAPTER 34
The Wager
Paul was incensed when he read Reade’s report—understandably, because it was unfair.
How could someone who spent only a few months in Gabon, and who had never once even caught a fleeting glimpse of a gorilla, confidently claim more knowledge of the animal than he could?
He grabbed a pen and dashed off an angry letter to the editor.
“What are five months to traverse and explore the immense tracts of country I visited, to ascend rivers, scale mountains, become intimate with numerous tribes, learn to understand their various dialects, occupy many days in palaver with each in succession, make the stay with each which is necessary to acquire their confidence, and pass on to others; and how can any one with such a limited experience only venture to contradict such experiences as mine?”
Reade believed that his own failure to hunt a gorilla proved the difficulty of the enterprise, and therefore cast additional doubt on Paul’s claims. But Reade’s failure, in Paul’s eyes, was easily explained: he hadn’t won the hard-earned trust of the natives. Reade never spent more than a few weeks with any one tribe. He didn’t speak their languages. In fact, he openly despised them as treacherous fools.
“The old African hunters will not take you to the gorilla’s haunts unless they have confidence in your nerve and skill,” Paul wrote, “and Mr. Reade did not allow them sufficient time to acquire this confidence, if his nerve and skill fully entitled him to it.”
The supposed revelation from Mongilomba—the young interpreter whom Reade triumphantly exposed as “not a native hunter at all”—was a perfect example of Reade’s distorted sense of truth telling. Paul had temporarily employed Mongilomba, then just fourteen years old, as a camp helper, which he had mentioned in his book. He had never implied that the boy was a hunter or that he had ever accompanied him into the forest to hunt.
Yet Reade’s bold declaration that Paul had never shot a gorilla, or any other large animal, was based on exactly this sort of evidence.
At wit’s end, Paul issued a challenge to those who believed he’d invented the stories in his book: he bet them that he could repeat the feat. They were welcome to accompany him on a return journey to Gabon, and there they could observe him directly interacting with the tribes, hunting gorillas, and preserving the specimens. All they had to do was to help pay for the trip if he was proved right. He wrote to the Times:
I will prove how I got my specimens, by the simple expedient of hunting and shooting others as I hunted and shot these, under certain conditions, which involve a fair offer. If Dr. Gray and his friends will raise among them and deposit in a bank 2,000 pounds, I will deposit 1,000 pounds on my side. I will start for the gorilla country, and if I do not kill five or six gorillas in the course of two years (I allow so long for fevers and other contingencies), and bring their skins and skeletons home preserved with a preparation which these gentlemen shall give me (provided it is ascertained to be suitable for the purpose), I will forfeit to them my 1,000 pounds. On the other hand I shall claim their 2,000 pounds to repay my expenses if I succeed, and I shall be very happy of the company of the bravest of them in making the venture.
None of them took him up on the wager, but their refusals did nothing to restore Paul’s credibility with the public. By declining his offer, they stripped Paul of his only means of definitively proving his case.
Desperate, he sold his only possessions of real value: the gorillas and other stuffed specimens that had made him famous. Owen, who continued to support Paul in the face of the criticism, arranged for the British Museum to pay £500 for some of them. The remainder o
f Paul’s collection was taken to an auction house in Covent Garden. The skins and skeletons were put up for public bids, one at a time. The most sought-after gorilla skin, an adult male, sold for £110—“a sum much below that at which it was valued by the owner,” according to the Times. The other skins and skeletons sold for between £4 and £20 each. “The prices realized by the sale of the birds were too insignificant to notice,” the newspaper reported.
It had been eight years since Paul had first risked his life to pursue a beast that had never been faced—a risky gambit to a future where he could be judged on his own merits, not tethered to his ancestry. He had guarded secrets, spread white lies, struggled to attract the broadest audience possible—all to protect the possibility of that future. But now the public judged him a fraud. His determination was dismissed as mere tinsel and sham.
Paul’s celebrity, quickly souring to infamy, had spun out of his control. It was true that some of his descriptions had been colored by imagination. Mistakes had arisen from his lack of expertise, and he’d grasped at fame too eagerly. Like Reade, Paul had thought he’d found a shortcut to glory—but he swore to his friends that the path itself hadn’t been a fanciful dream. He truly had traveled to the places he said he’d gone, and he swore by his descriptions of the gorillas in the wild. But if he couldn’t prove it, every gamble he’d ever risked would be lost.
Near the middle of 1863, he counted the money he had earned from the sale of his specimens. It wasn’t as much as he’d hoped—the equivalent today of about eighty thousand dollars.