by Monte Reel
Paul’s most striking gift to Quengueza was a coat that he’d had specially tailored for him at one of the finest clothiers in London. It was bright blue, with garish yellow trim and red lining. The king was duly impressed, as Paul knew he would be, but there was more. Paul dazzled him with a chestful of silks, cottons, gunpowder, flintlock rifles, and enough beads to bejewel every one of his wives.
It was a payoff, plain and simple, and Paul expected protection in return. Quengueza responded exactly as planned. He promised that when Paul ventured inland, he could count on the services of as many men as he needed. The king personally guaranteed their loyalty.
WHILE HE lingered on the coast, a group of native hunters found Paul in his encampment and told him they’d captured something he might be interested in buying: two live chimpanzees, a male and a female. Chimps weren’t nearly as prized as gorillas, but they were still rare, particularly living specimens. Paul bought them, trained them, and kept them around his camp as pets. He named them Tom and Mrs. Tom.
When Vardon was finally ready to take the Mentor back to England early in 1864, Paul coaxed the two chimpanzees into boxes and loaded them onto the ship, along with a three-month supply of bananas. Mrs. Tom died during the ocean voyage, but the male survived.
The chimp was taken to the Crystal Palace in Sydenham and became one of the most popular zoological attractions in England. He lived there for two more years but died, horribly, in a fire that destroyed the palace’s north wing in 1866. According to newspaper reports, workers fleeing the building reported hearing Tom’s “frantic cries” as the frightened chimpanzee clutched the hot iron bars of his cage, unable to escape.
Paul couldn’t have predicted the animal’s tragic end. As far as he knew at the time, his transfer of a living ape from Gabon to London was an unqualified success. He hoped to repeat the feat with a gorilla.
In addition to the live specimens, Paul was collecting an even odder sort of contraband to be shipped to London: human skulls. He wanted to send them to Owen and to his other friends at the Anthropological Society, to be measured and compared with the skulls of other racial groups. Owen believed such skulls might help demonstrate the differences—not similarities—between men and apes.
Paul told the Nkomi tribesmen that “there was a strong party among the doctors or magic-men in my country who believed that negroes were apes almost the same as the gorilla, and that I wished to send them a number of skulls to show how much they were mistaken.” As incentive, he said he’d pay three dollars for each skull they found.
Soon, he was overwhelmed with skulls scavenged from native burial grounds. When he had collected more than ninety, he was forced to reduce his price.
PAUL ROSE at dawn to travel to a village on the eastern bank of the Fernan-Vaz after reports that a band of gorillas had been seen on a small plantation nearby. When he and a young man named Odanga arrived at a clearing of manioc plants where the gorillas had been spotted, all was quiet. But as Paul walked alongside the plantain trees that fringed the clearing, he heard a leafy rustle of movement.
Paul hid behind a bush, keeping still. The rustling resumed, and soon he caught a glimpse of a female gorilla. He shifted to get a better view, and two more emerged. Then a fourth. None of the gorillas saw him. He remained frozen in place, awed but completely safe, careful not to destroy the best opportunity he had ever had to observe the apes in the wild. If he wanted to confirm the descriptions he had included in his first book, this was the way to do it. He watched in silence, without raising his gun and blowing his cover.
They tore into the shrubby plantain trees, yanking the stalks with their powerful arms. Ripping apart the base of the tree exposed the juicy interior of the stalks, which they devoured greedily. Some of the animals made an odd sort of clucking noise as they ate, which he assumed signaled contentment. Every so often, the gorillas looked up from their meals and scanned the landscape, but they didn’t appear to see him behind the bush.
“Once or twice they seemed on the point of starting off in alarm,” he wrote, “but recovered themselves and continued their work.”
Gradually, as the gorillas worked their way through one plant after another, they slipped out of view and left the plantation.
Paul spent the night in the village. The next morning, as he was crossing a deep hollow planted with sugarcane, he was surprised to see an enormous gorilla on the opposite slope, staring straight at him. Paul was without a shotgun, armed only with a small pistol, which likely wouldn’t have killed the animal. He was scared; it was the first time he’d faced a gorilla without a rifle. Normally, he would have quickly jumped to raise his gun. Now he was forced to adopt a passive attitude of stilled shock.
“The huge beast stared at me for about two minutes,” he later wrote, “and then, without uttering any cry, moved off to the shade of the forest, running nimbly on his hands and feet.”
Without gun in hand, he was able to see the gorillas with clearer eyes than ever before. He took careful note of the way they walked, noticing how the arms were almost completely straight when they touched the ground—not bent or bowed as they had been pictured in some of the illustrations in his own book.
CHAPTER 37
The Boldest Venture
After sending the live chimpanzees to London, Paul spread the news among all the neighboring tribes that he would pay handsomely for a live gorilla. To his shock, a group of tribesmen quickly rose to the challenge and executed the most successful gorilla roundup in history. They brought him three live gorillas: an adult female, a tiny infant, and a very young male, not yet fully grown.
In Explorations and Adventures, Paul had written that capturing an adult gorilla would be impossible. Now he realized he should have added the qualifier “unless wounded.”
The capture had been effective but brutal. The hunters had stumbled upon a group of female gorillas and their young near the Fernan-Vaz Lagoon. The silverback male was not among them, so the men were braver than usual. Armed with guns, axes, and spears, the hunters formed a line and forced the gorillas toward the water. Sensing the danger, the gorillas panicked. Several of them escaped in the ensuing melee, but the hunters managed to seriously wound one adult female with a bullet to the chest, and they beat down a juvenile male with clubs. The infant was defenseless.
Paul examined his new acquisitions with a mixture of awe and pity. Whenever he stepped toward the young male, the animal would rush toward him and then pull up short of Paul and beat a hasty retreat. “If I looked at him he would make a feint of darting at me,” he wrote, “and in giving him water I had to push the bowl towards him with a stick, for fear of his biting me.”
The adult female, however, was in no shape to intimidate anyone. Her chest wound was critical, and her head had been pummeled by the clubs when the hunters bound her. One of her arms was also badly broken.
After she spent one agonizing day in captivity, her groans diminished to faint whimpers, then tapered into silence. The infant hugged her breast, trying to coax milk from her. Taking advantage of their stillness, Paul set up his camera and began the painstakingly difficult process of trying to capture a discernible image on glass plates. Eventually, he took a portrait of the two gorillas. But the mother was dead, and the baby clung to her in sad desperation.
“Her death was like that of a human being,” Paul wrote of the mother, “and afflicted me more than I could have thought possible.”
He tried to nurse the infant on goat’s milk, keeping it alive for four days.
“It had, I think, begun to know me a little,” he wrote.
The surviving young male was still in good health when Paul’s new and repaired instruments finally arrived in mid-1864. Just as he’d done with the chimpanzee, he penned the gorilla in a box and gave the captain of a ship an ample store of bananas to feed the animal. As incentive, Paul promised the captain an extra hundred pounds if the gorilla made it to London alive. Paul even guaranteed the cargo by registering it in care of a mari
time insurance firm. “I had sent him consigned to Messrs. Baring, who, I am sure, never had any such consignment before,” he wrote.
Paul watched the canoe carrying the gorilla get drenched by breakers, and he could see that the dousing only made the animal more angry. Paul hoped that fiery spirit wouldn’t be entirely dampened by the long journey on the steamer; he wanted his friends to see the animal with its aggression intact. If a gorilla jumped out of that box dockside in England, blind with panicked rage, Paul knew none of those spectators would again accuse him of exaggerating the gorilla’s menace.
BEFORE HIS instruments arrived, Paul wrote a letter to John Murray requesting a copy of the book Cosmos, by Alexander von Humboldt.
Humboldt had been an invisible guiding hand behind all the how-to-explore books that Paul had studied. The German explorer had journeyed widely throughout Central and South America between 1799 and 1804, and his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America had set the standard for exploratory narratives. As a meticulous observer of natural phenomena, Humboldt was the model for generations of scientific travelers, and handbooks like What to Observe and The Art of Travel repackaged many of his ideas to advise would-be explorers exactly where their attentions should be directed.
Cosmos was Humboldt’s ultimate statement, a manifesto celebrating the essential interconnectedness of the universe’s natural processes. He published the first volume of the five-volume work in Germany in 1844, and it wasn’t released as a complete edition in English until 1858. Drawing on Humboldt’s lifetime immersion in scientific fields that ranged from geology to botany, the book’s driving idea is that the natural world is wholly relational: a “chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other.” The highest calling of man, he believed, was to perceive the existence of these connections.
Humboldt was full of ideas that would have made a strong impression on Paul, though some of them directly challenged the worldview that he’d subscribed to during his first expedition. Humboldt didn’t particularly like sportsmen, and in his book on South America he disparaged the “troops of marauders, who roam over the steppes killing the animals merely to take their hides.” With the publication of Cosmos, Humboldt was advancing ideas that presaged the ecological movement of the next century. Around the same time that Paul read the book, it was helping to inspire a burgeoning realization that mankind could permanently and adversely alter nature by altering the chain of connections. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who had read parts of Cosmos as early as 1845 and 1850, respectively, helped spread Humboldt’s influence among English-language readers, but none reinterpreted his ideas as forcefully as George Perkins Marsh, whose 1864 book, Man and Nature, would prove to be the seminal document for the conservation movement. Marsh suggested that when human beings targeted certain species for slaughter or destroyed a part of the environment, it could result in consequences no one could have foreseen.
These were novel ideas for the time. Like almost everyone else, Paul had always treated nature as inanimate clay meant to be molded by man. But as he prepared for this new expedition, different ideas were infusing the world of exploratory science. He was by no means in the vanguard of promoting them, but he couldn’t help but notice that the prevailing wisdom concerning the killing of animals was changing. His personal objectives reflected it.
“It was not my object on the present journey to slaughter unnecessarily these animals,” he wrote, “as the principal museums in civilized countries were already well supplied with skins and skeletons, but I devoted myself, when in the district inhabited by the gorilla, to the further study of its habits, and the effort to obtain the animal alive and send it to England; hoping that the observation of its actions in life would enable persons in England to judge of the accuracy of the description I gave of its disposition and habits; at least to some extent, as the actions of most animals differ much in confinement from what they are in the wild state.”
The statement of purpose was open to interpretation. He undoubtedly desired to elevate his enterprise above that of a mere sportsman, but it also served to disarm anyone who might accuse him of failure if he didn’t bring back the same kinds of specimens he’d collected years earlier. Regardless, this much would be certain: for the rest of his life, Paul would travel the world widely, and he would never again travel as a hunter of wildlife.
“I am perfectly tired of this Gorilla business,” he wrote to a friend while he waited on the coast to begin the expedition, “and I intend to have nothing to do with the beast in the future.”
WEEKS LATER, letters arrived in Gabon reporting that the young gorilla Paul had shipped to England had died at sea. But Paul wasn’t around to receive the news. He’d already departed the coast. His journey, finally, had begun.
Just before he left, on August 20, 1864, he sat down in his hut and pulled out a notebook, penning a series of letters on those thinly ruled sheets. His mood was somber and reflective. One after another, he addressed notes to many of his closest friends, including the Reverend William Walker, John Murray, Henry Bence Jones, Sir George Back, and Commander C. George at the Royal Geographical Society. To Owen, he sent a shipment of mats, native cloth, a drum, and a harp. He thanked each of them for their kindnesses over the years, and he assured them that he would work hard to reward the faith they’d shown in him. He said he was optimistic, as always, but he clearly recognized that his expedition could kill him. During his first journeys into the forest, he’d been naively unaware of many of the dangers that faced him, and back then there was little pressure on him; he could have simply abandoned his journey if ever it got too rough. This time, he vowed that he would push himself to the absolute limit. To Back, he wrote:
In a few days I am off for the interior and I shall push on until I shall find insurmountable barriers that will stop me, and even then I will try with patience and perseverance to go further. I will work hard, and if Him who guideth the steps of man allows me success I shall perhaps reach the Nile. I am in very good health and good spirits and think I will be able to reach very far into the interior, but my hopes after all may be blasted for I am aware of the many accidents which may stop me on my onward cause, disease may get hold of me and may lay me prostrate in a desolate country. I know that I may perhaps die forsaken by all or that I may be killed by treachery. I have thought of all of these things and I have come to the conclusion that I may also succeed.… My whole soul is in the work I am to undertake. I pray to have strength to accomplish it.
When Roderick Murchison received Paul’s letter, he was struck by the optimism that leaped out from the page. Murchison immediately wrote to Owen: “It is so good, so superior to his earlier letters, so full of fire, noble and self-sacrificing resolution, that I shall read it as our opening morceau at the Geographical, November 12.… Never were we more in the right than when we stood up for this fine little fellow.”
During the RGS’s annual anniversary meeting the following May, Murchison announced for the first time that the young explorer hoped to travel all the way to the Nile. Murchison told the members that during his delay on the coast, Paul had already collected and sent back to London numerous specimens, including thousands of insects that he had painstakingly captured in glass test tubes. The young man that so many had dismissed as a cavalier fabulist was proving himself a true man of science, Murchison said.
“In his last letter to me, written on the point of departure from the coast, he begged me not to be uneasy about him for a year or two,” Murchison said. “As M. Du Chaillu has rendered himself a photographer, as well as an astronomical observer—advantages he did not possess in his first journey—we are sure, if his life be spared, to reap a rich harvest on his return. And so, let us wish him God-speed by the way! In boldness of conception nothing in the annals of African research has surpassed his present project.”
CHAPTER 38
The Armies of the Plague
About fifty men accompanied Paul during the first leg of his journey inland. Most expected to be replaced by porters from other tribes deeper inland, but ten were Nkomi tribesmen—the same group that helped during his previous expedition—who promised to stick with him for the duration of his journey, come what may.
Paul outfitted his crew, dressing all the men alike in blue woolen shirts, canvas pants, and red worsted caps. They looked like a traveling army, and in some respects they were. They were issued rifles and assigned specific stations under Paul’s command. Most were simple carriers, hauling the outfit in large, plaited cane baskets strapped to their backs. The ten permanent members enjoyed a slightly higher rank, which helped guarantee their loyalty. At some point early in the journey, Paul realized that they believed he was taking them to London, the “white man’s country,” which lay beyond the jungle and where any man could accumulate unimaginable wealth, just as Paul apparently had.
He failed to correct this misconception.
They traveled first by canoes, then on foot. His most trusted man walked in front, and Paul brought up the rear, ever vigilant in case any of the porters tried to break away from the group with some of the valuable supplies. They trudged through swamps, soaking rain, and clouds of mosquitoes. His stash of Epsom salts dwindled as the feet of his men grew sorer.
He explored the Rembo Ngouyai, a branch of a river he’d discovered on his first journey, borrowing canoes from local tribes, following unmapped tributaries inland, riding out rapids, portaging picturesque waterfalls.
He rarely bothered to lug his shotgun, opting instead for a walking stick and a notebook. Verifiable data was his target, not dangerous beasts. But he quickly discovered that scientific observations could be as elusive as any gorilla.
The overcast skies vexed him. He’d painstakingly pour out a silvery pool of mercury into a tray, creating an artificial horizon; he’d carefully protect the mercury from any breeze, covering it with a glass pyramid. When he was finally ready to capture the reflections of stars and measure their angles, the heavens would cloud over and refuse to clear. When he reached the fabled falls of Fougamou, which he’d heard about during his previous journey but was never able to reach, he was determined to take a photograph to prove that he personally saw them. To get a clear shot, he ordered his men to cut down a tree near the water’s edge. By the time the tree fell, a fiendish bank of clouds conspired to sabotage his exposures. At twilight he finally surrendered, putting the camera back in its case without capturing a clear image.