by Monte Reel
It is a tremendous task that I have undertaken. The ordinary difficulties of the way, the toilsome marches, the night watches, the crossing of rivers, the great heat, are as nothing compared with the obstacles and annoyances which these capricious villagers throw in our way. I begin to dread the sight of an inhabited place. Either panic-stricken people fly from me, or remain to bore me by their insatiable curiosity, fickleness, greediness and intolerable din. Nevertheless I am obliged to do all I can think of to conciliate them, for I cannot do without them; it being impossible to travel without guides through this wilderness of forests where the paths are so intricate; besides, we could not make our appearance in the villages without someone to take us there and say a good word for us.… I am forced to appear good-tempered when, at the same time, I am wishing them all at the bottom of the sea.
His misery wouldn’t last long. The expedition that he originally anticipated lasting as long as five years was about to confront an insurmountable tragedy.
THEY TRUDGED into a small village called Mouaou Kombo, which lay in the middle of dense forest about 440 miles from the Fernan-Vaz Lagoon, where he’d begun. Paul planned to hire more porters there for the continued march east. But the Mouaou villagers informed him that the occupants of another settlement farther inland had sent word that they would attack this village if Paul were allowed to pass into their territory.
Paul thought diplomacy might work. He sent two members of his party ahead to negotiate with the villagers. But a short time later, four sentries from the other village arrived to inform them that the matter wasn’t negotiable. Paul was simply not welcome.
Sensing tension, the Mouaou Kombo chieftain offered Paul refuge in his hut. But some of Paul’s porters who remained outside tried to intimidate the sentries by firing their guns in the air. Something went wrong.
According to Paul’s account, which is the only one that survived, one of the porters discharged his rifle before raising the barrel to the sky. An errant lead ball whistled through the village. Soon, he heard screams from one of the huts.
“I rushed out, and not far from my hut I saw, lying on the ground, the lifeless body of a negro; his head shattered and the brains oozing from his broken skull,” Paul later wrote.
The man who had fired cowered in horror. “Oh, Chaillie, I could not help it,” he told Paul. “The gun went off!”
The victim was a local resident of Mouaou Kombo, the tribe that had welcomed Paul and his men. The village chief accosted Paul. “You say you come here to do no harm and do not kill people,” he shouted. “Is not this the dead body of a man?”
Paul was in no position to plead innocence. As the chieftain tried to restore order among his people, Paul ducked into his hut and began to pack up. He feared that the Mouaou villagers might riot at any moment. Paul began throwing journals, bullets, revolvers, watches—everything he could reach—into his bags.
As he hurried, the shouts and curses grew louder. Another woman had just been found dead in her hut, apparently killed by the same stray bullet.
The entire village rose up in a cry for war.
Paul and his men ran.
THEY SPRINTED into the forest under a hail of arrows. One nicked Paul’s hand. Another pierced the leg of one of Paul’s porters, throwing a limp in the man’s stride.
As they fled, every once in a while one of the men would turn around and fire a gunshot at the villagers giving chase. Although each blast seemed to freeze the Mouaou, they continued their pursuit.
Paul’s men had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry; the range of their rifles far exceeded that of the bows and arrows. The twisting forest paths protected both sides, because clear shots were practically impossible. As the chase continued, Paul feared the local villagers might know shortcuts through the forest, allowing them to ambush his men.
After about four or five miles, the villagers remained within earshot. Paul called on his men to stop.
“I felt that it was time to make a stand and give them a specimen of our power,” he later explained, “for if we allowed them to go on in this way there would be danger of their rousing against us the villagers ahead, and then it would be almost impossible to escape.” The porter who’d been wounded in the leg nervously speculated that the locals were using poisoned arrows. It wasn’t paranoia: some natives in the interior coated their arrowheads with the toxic extract from a liana when hunting.
The men waited a few moments until they saw the first of their pursuers, and they opened fire. Paul saw a couple of the villagers fall.
They turned to run again, and Paul felt a hot stab of pain in his side.
His leather revolver strap had absorbed most of the arrow’s impact, but he’d been hit. Again, his men turned to open fire, while Paul fingered his wound and worried about the possible effects of poison. Unless the firepower convinced their pursuers of their potency, he believed, the villagers might surround them at nightfall and kill them.
They ran to a hill and dug in for their last stand. Paul saw one of the villagers fall and another take a rifle ball in the face, “to all appearance his jaw broken.”
This time, the brutal assault worked. When they began to move again, the locals gave up the chase.
PAUL AND his men continued their quick march for several more miles, not entirely convinced that they were safe. Paul estimated they probably traveled twenty miles that day, before they ate and rested. His side hurt, but the wound wasn’t serious. The porter who’d been hit in the leg, however, was in great pain, but Paul had no medicine left. In their flight, many of the porters ditched much of their loads, unable to run while carrying them. Paul couldn’t blame them. He’d done the same.
For the next two months, they rushed to retrace in reverse the route they’d followed months earlier. In front of them, the smallpox plague had reduced some of the villages to mere ghost towns. Behind them, wars raged.
When the tribes they encountered pressed them for details about their escape, the group “took care to conceal the fact that we were the aggressors,” Paul wrote. But their discretion soon wore off. Some of the men began to brag about how many men they had killed.
When Paul reached Quengueza’s village, he learned that smallpox had spread through the area shortly after he’d left it. Instead of the thriving settlement he’d known, the area was now barren. Most of the people had moved to another village.
Paul eventually found Quengueza, whose “kingdom” had been obliterated. The old man wanted to leave the coast, the country, the continent. “If I was a young man,” he told Paul, “I would go with you to the white man’s country. And even old as I am, if your country was not so far off, I would go with you.”
Both knew it wasn’t going to happen. The Nkomi men who had stuck with him had returned alive, but only Paul would make it to London.
A CAPTAIN bound for England agreed to take him, even though Paul had no way of paying him. He’d lost almost everything during the rush back to the coast.
Somewhere in the jungle, discarded in the bush, were the glass plate photographs, his cameras, the sextants. Of all the equipment he had taken into the forest, only two watches and one barometer made it out.
Just before he boarded the ship, Paul wrote a letter to Murray, his publisher. It was short, a courtesy to let him know he was alive, though not well.
“You have no idea of the trials I have had to encounter,” he wrote. “I have passed through the plague, fire and water.”
Throughout the long boat journey to England, a murky lethargy clung to him. It was now almost exactly one year after he arrived in Gabon to begin what Murchison had called the boldest African expedition ever undertaken.
His failure had been nothing short of spectacular.
CHAPTER 40
The Jury of His Peers
The Royal Geographical Society’s most anticipated meeting of 1866 was its very first, held on January 8 in Burlington House. Paul, the featured speaker, had first set foot in this building five years befo
re, when he unveiled his gorillas. Now thirty-four, he retained the energy of a young man eager to prove himself. But this time, the tension in the room was of a different character. To Paul, the people filling the lecture hall must have seemed like an enormous jury, eager to examine his evidence and pass judgment. It wasn’t simply his expedition that was on trial. It was his dignity.
No gorillas shared the stage. No drawings depicted the slaying of wild beasts. He told no jokes, spun off no ad-libs. He planned to stick closely to his prepared text, which summarized his two-year ordeal, from his canoe spill on the coast to the disastrous escape from Mouaou Kombo. His speech sketched courses of rivers, the customs of tribes, the features of the landscape, his discovery of the Pygmies, the spread of the plague, and, of course, the habits of the gorillas he’d observed.
Transitions were unnecessary, because the thematic glue that held every disparate observation together was the question on everyone’s mind: Was he telling the truth?
PAUL QUICKLY acknowledged that the outcome of the expedition fell far short of its goals. But all was not lost. His photographs had vanished, he explained, but the details he provided were delivered with the precision of a meticulous note taker. Instead of judging distances in terms of how many days it took to hike them, he spoke in terms of latitudinal degrees. Instead of “hellish dream creatures,” he relied on concrete, observable details when describing the gorillas he encountered in the forest and the others he kept in his encampments. He spoke, in other words, in a language that his audience could trust: that of empirical data.
The information came from his collection of leather-bound notebooks—practically the only things he’d managed to save during his desperate retreat from the jungle. The pages were jammed with statistics. Even on the days that were marred by tragedy and sickness, he had stayed up late in his encampments after the other men had gone to bed, puttering outside by the weak light of a bull’s-eye lantern. He’d boil water in a copper kettle, squint at an astronomer’s almanac, and fiddle with the sextants. In one notebook, he noted the meridian altitudes of stars to determine his latitude. He charted lunar distances and calculated the altitude of nearly every campsite. He’d also kept a narrative diary with the same obsessive determination to document his every move. On one line he’d describe how the Sword of Orion appeared that night in the sky. Flipping ahead one month, he could find the exact hour of the evening in which he counted thirty-six individual droplets of water on the back of a single leaf. He had notes documenting the length and breadth of the main streets of the villages he visited, the mineral composition of the soil, the distinguishing features of the architecture, and the dress, rites, and even the hairstyles of the people he met. He kept a comparative vocabulary list for each new language he encountered. When stung by an insect, he had noted the species and tried to gauge the intensity and duration of the pain. It was the kind of immersion in the natural world that even photographs might not have captured.
He’d managed to save nearly all those details, and in Burlington House they saved his reputation.
SOME OF the people in the crowd weren’t surprised. Even before he had returned to England, several unrelated events had begun to rehabilitate his standing.
Murchison, for example, didn’t care that Paul never made it to the Nile. As far as he was concerned, Paul had already proven himself beyond doubt. Early during his stay on the African coast, he had sent back some items with Captain Vardon that aroused quite a bit of interest in the back rooms of the RGS. One was a harp—the same kind of fiber-stringed instrument that had provoked Thomas Malone to mock Paul. In the RGS’s official proceedings it was reported that Murchison had “deposited it in the hands of the finest lady harp-player that he was acquainted with, the Duchess of Wellington, who has assured him that musical sounds may be produced from it, though the strings are made from fibres of grass.” About the same time, Richard Owen had been thrilled to discover that Paul had sent home a complete preserved specimen of a Potamogale velox, the otter-like animal that had been lampooned as the Mythomys velox by Gray’s army of skeptics. An article in the Transactions of the Zoological Society had declared Paul’s original description of the animal essentially accurate.
The geographical speculations from the first journey had also been reevaluated during his absence. At the same time that Paul had been winding his disastrous course through Gabon, French exploratory boats had been pushing up the country’s Ogowé River. On its first try, the French expedition turned back in the face of native hostilities. But a second attempt gave geographers a better idea of the true course of the river system, and the finding supported many of the geographical conjectures that Paul had included in Explorations and Adventures. The German cartographers who earlier had insulted Paul by placing the villages he visited very near the coast redrew their maps, pushing the sites inland.
Finally, in the weeks before Paul’s speech, Edwin Dunkin, the head of the Royal Observatory, spent six hours a day poring over the astronomical data in Paul’s notebooks. His assistant worked even harder, laboring over the measurements for nine hours a day. After ten days, they still were only half finished. But Dunkin had seen enough to report to the RGS on the same night of Paul’s speech that he was “astonished at the multitude and accuracy of M. Du Chaillu’s astronomical observations.”
John Gray didn’t attend the lecture, nor did Charles Waterton; the eighty-two-year-old Squire had died just six months before, after tripping over a bramble while carrying a log outside his mansion. But one of Paul’s persistent critics was hard to miss among the hundreds squeezing into the lecture room: Winwood Reade.
At times during the presentation, it seemed as if Paul were addressing his comments directly at the young writer who’d accused him of lying about seeing chest-beating gorillas. “After these opportunities of further observation,” Paul said, “I see nothing to retract in the account I have formerly given of the habits of the gorilla.” The delivery, given all he’d been through, was defiantly matter-of-fact.
Reade was relatively gracious, considering the bad blood that had flowed between them. He later wrote to the Times to praise the explorer he’d previously disparaged. “I will only add that if M. Du Chaillu’s forthcoming book is to be as modest and as free from melodramatic gorillas as the paper which he read at Burlington-House,” Reade wrote, “he will deserve to be admitted as an authority by bona fide scientific men.”
CHAPTER 41
Accidental Victories
While Paul had been in Africa, the Darwinian view of natural selection had become increasingly accepted among specialists. Even Owen seemed to soften his criticisms of a theory that was becoming difficult to deny.
In early 1866, Owen published a paper on the anatomy of vertebrates that the London Review interpreted as a “significant though partial admission … of the truth of the principles of Natural Selection.” Owen denied that he’d adopted Darwin’s views, responding to the Review by saying that his recent paper had simply reiterated ideas about links between species that he’d first proposed in 1850. That being the case, Owen suggested that Darwin—not himself—should be considered the “adopter” in the matter. Darwin, who was still battling illness and had begun working on a book about variations in domesticated plants and animals, was exasperated by what seemed to him an unscrupulous ploy by Owen to turn defeat in the evolution debate into an unearned victory. In a new edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1866, Darwin reminded readers that Owen had been arguing against his theory for years. T. H. Huxley was delighted when he read the new edition. “What an unmerciful basting you give ‘Our Mutual friend,’ ” he wrote to Darwin.
As Darwin and his circle of friends became more powerful in Victorian scientific circles, Huxley’s debate with Owen over man’s relationship to the gorilla—a spat that the press referred to as “the Hippocampus Debate”—continued at a low boil. In 1863, Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, the first book devoted wholly to the subject of human ev
olution, had included an attempt to defeat Owen once and for all when it came to the gorilla’s relationship to man. He provided more evidence that versions of the three brain structures Owen had claimed distinguished humans from apes—including the hippocampus minor—could in fact be found in the lesser primates.
As far as Darwin’s supporters were concerned, Huxley was the victor. But Owen didn’t surrender. Instead, he identified a weak spot in Huxley’s argument, modified his own views, and renewed his attack.
OWEN HAD published a monograph titled Memoir on the Gorilla in 1865. In it, he tried to clarify his argument—and undercut Huxley’s apparent victory—by saying that he never denied that a rudimentary version of the hippocampus minor could be found in apes. Instead, Owen said that the ape version of the hippocampus minor was so different from the human version that it didn’t even deserve to be called by the same name. Huxley’s “victory” in the hippocampus debate, Owen suggested, was an empty one.
The argument swayed few among Darwin’s supporters, many of whom dismissed Owen as a desperate revisionist. But elsewhere in his gorilla memoir, Owen adopted a new strategy of attack that would eventually prove far more effective against Huxley, even if few of his contemporaries recognized it.
In Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley had sharpened his contention that the differences between men of varying races were as great as those between men and apes. His argument relied on the false and now-disproven assumption that human racial groups could be placed on a straight evolutionary line that progressed from “lower” (blacks) to “higher” (whites). When he wrote that “men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes,” Huxley was effectively suggesting that blacks were more closely related to gorillas than they were to Europeans. He was wrong, and Owen sensed his vulnerability. Throughout 1865 and 1866, the embattled Owen repeated arguments he’d been making for years, trying to reframe the gorilla debate. He didn’t do so because he believed in social equality for blacks; he did it to seize on Huxley’s mistake and defend his own persistent belief that humans didn’t evolve from gorillas.