Between Man and Beast

by Monte Reel

  Owen’s argument hinged on his study of human skulls, including those that Paul provided him with from West Africa. Owen wasn’t ready to argue for equality of the races, but he stated, “I have observed individuals of the Negro race in whom the brain was as large as the average one of the Caucasian; and I concur with the great physiologist Heidelberg, who has recorded similar observations, in connecting with such cerebral development the fact that there has been no province of intellectual activity in which individuals of the pure Negro race have not distinguished themselves.” The comparatively minuscule cerebral differences between whites and blacks, Owen wrote, marked “the unity of the human family in a striking manner.”

  When Paul was preparing his second book about his most recent African adventures, Owen once again lent him his full support, agreeing to write an analytic essay to be included as an appendix to Paul’s narrative. The essay—a detailed analysis of ninety-three human skulls Paul had collected—praised the explorer as one who’d earned “the respect and gratitude of every genuine lover and student of the science for its own sake.” Owen concluded that in all of the African skulls he examined, the essential characteristics that marked them as different from all other species “are as definitely marked as in the skulls of the lightest white races.”

  Owen hoped that this evidence might prove useful in his argument that men didn’t evolve from gorillas. It didn’t. Human racial differences and similarities, we now know, are relatively recent developments and practically irrelevant in evolutionary terms. Transitional forms between men and apes are to be found not by looking at racial variations but instead by finding evidence of extinct species in the fossil record—that is, “the missing link.”

  The overall thrust of Huxley’s argument—that scientific evidence suggests men could have evolved from apes—was sound, even though some of his arguments were wrong. The inverse applies to Owen. History has put him on the losing end of the Darwinian debate, but some of the main arguments he used against his enemies now appear correct and honorable. In the Gorilla War, the battles Owen won were those he hadn’t intended to fight.

  CHAPTER 42

  The Explorer

  Paul spent much of 1866 in the London suburb of Twickenham at the observatory. The building’s owner kept what he called an “open house” for artists and writers, allowing them to work in the building, whose thick walls—reinforced to support the heavy revolving roof—provided silence and sanctuary. Most people used the building as an office, but Paul took full advantage of the offer, moving into the building and adopting it as a semipermanent home. He was given a key to the locked iron bridge that spanned the river and led to the building’s door, and he came and went as he pleased.

  He often worked alongside Henry Walter Bates to write his book about the second expedition. Bates was a legendary naturalist, having traveled to the Amazon rain forest with Alfred Russel Wallace, the man whose hypothesis concerning how natural selection might influence evolution sparked Darwin to publish his own theory. Bates had stayed in the Amazon for eleven years, shipping back over fourteen thousand species to England, more than eight thousand of which were considered “new.” His book of travels, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, had been published in 1863 to great acclaim and, more important, to no dispute. With Murray’s encouragement, Paul handed his narrative journals over to Bates, who helped shape them into the book A Journey to Ashango-Land: And Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa.

  Francis Burnand, a celebrated humorist who wrote for Punch, often worked in the observatory in a room near Paul’s and looked forward to their mutual pipe-smoking breaks for the reliable entertainment they’d provide. Burnand delighted in Paul’s inability to sit still, thinking him “a most amusing man, and very excitable.” He’d goad Paul with questions about his book or about the geography of equatorial Africa, just to see how he’d respond. Paul “would demonstrate the situation by the aid of tables, chairs, sticks, and anything that came in handy. He would act the stalking of animals, the getting within measurable distance of the gorilla, would show us the almost insuperable difficulties of trapping one of these monster monkeys.”

  After his successful presentation at the RGS, Paul had regained some of the celebrity that he’d enjoyed in 1861, which helped him indulge what was becoming one of his favorite pastimes: romantic flirtation. He was, according to numerous accounts, an inveterate charmer, the kind of guy who’d rush to open a door for a lady, showering her with smiles and flattery as she passed. “He was a devoted admirer of the fair sex,” Burnand wrote of Paul, “and the fairer her fairness the greater was his devotion.” Once, when Burnand spotted a beautiful young actress he knew as “Miss Furtado” passing the observatory on a slow-moving pleasure boat, Paul demanded an immediate introduction, and the two men pursued the boat in canoes. They were invited on board. “Within a few moments Du Chaillu had become generally popular, had made friends all round, and had fascinated the attention of La Belle Furtado,” who seemed utterly enchanted. Another man, the proprietor of the Adelphi Theatre, also was clearly interested in winning the young actress’s attention. He was thrown so off balance by Paul’s apparent success, Burnand later reported, that he fell into the river, where he lost his toupee.

  WHEN PAUL’S second book was published late in 1866, the reviews, in both England and the United States, were overwhelmingly favorable. Paul was now cast as a victim of unjust suspicion, a genuine explorer who’d patiently overcome the professional jealousy of his rivals.

  “Nothing is more characteristic in his book than the admirable temper of its writer,” concluded Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts. “He naturally desired to vindicate himself, and cause his assailants to ‘eat dirt.’ He has certainly done so; but the dish is cooked daintily, and in the very best French style and taste.”

  RODERICK MURCHISON and the other eminent men of the Royal Geographical Society affirmed Paul’s promotion from adventurer to explorer. They voted to pass an honorary “testimonial” acknowledging his contributions in the fields of geography and natural history, and they awarded him a cash prize to help pay for the loss of his equipment.

  “You have all heard how … an unlucky accident brought upon him the calamities by which his enterprise was cut short,” Murchison told the members of the RGS. “But even as they are, his results are of considerable importance. For he has not only corrected the geography of his former field, but advanced about 150 miles further into the interior than on the previous occasion.”

  Murchison suggested that the “unshaken gallantry” that Paul had demonstrated during his travels might have been bred into him from birth. “In all respects, I recognize in Monsieur Du Chaillu a true type of the country which gave him birth,” Murchison said. “And if France has just right to be proud of him, we also, as well as our kinsmen the Americans, among whom he has also lived, may claim him as our own.”

  The fact that Murchison apparently didn’t know the full story of Paul’s heritage wasn’t the point. With those words, and the ovation they inspired, Murchison seemed to be offering Paul a tempting possibility: complete acceptance. He finally belonged somewhere.

  Exactly where that might be, it seemed, was completely up to Paul.

  THERE IS a space that exists between truth and falsity, a region where both can commingle and metamorphose into something powerful. It’s the place occupied by myths, and it’s the territory that Paul explored more thoroughly than any other.

  A boy, doomed to a life of inescapable oppression, is cast out into the world. A ragged orphan, he is found washed up beside a river. With the help of a wise teacher and the force of his own determination, he masters skills that will guide him through life. He is tested through a series of far-flung adventures. He slays his beasts. His glory is cruelly snatched away from him, and all seems lost. Facing his most desperate challenge, he summons all the courage and perseverance he has developed over the broad course of his adventures. Finally, he achieves what on
ce seemed ungraspable: freedom.

  This is where Paul chose to reside: safe within a mythology of his own making. To live in that realm was to be completely free, but that freedom would have dissolved the moment he committed to any one of the numerous identities he’d been slipping in and out of for years. After his public triumph, Paul could have settled into a role as an authority on equatorial Africa in general or on the region’s natural history in particular. If he had chosen to, he could have focused on gorillas, taking advantage of the fact that he had more verifiable expertise concerning this animal than any man alive. But he didn’t pursue any of those paths. In fact, he would never attempt to see a gorilla in the wild again. He would never return to Africa.

  He could have owned up to his past. But rumors continued to swirl about his ancestry, and Paul never publicly acknowledged the truth. For his entire life, he would keep afloat all the fictions that had made his identity impossible to pin down. He didn’t want to be African, or French, or American, or British, or a naturalist, or a showman, or a big-game hunter, or an anthropologist, or a geographical explorer. He clearly wanted to dance between all of them without getting trapped under any one label.

  He did not, by any stretch of the imagination, conform to the twenty-first-century ideal of a man who embraces his background and refuses to surrender to the unjust biases against his people; instead, he chose to live in a self-created universe where racial boundaries simply didn’t apply to him. Within that mythology, the ultimate objective—the golden ring—was to become a perfectly free and autonomous individual. Freedom of that kind allowed a person to belong everywhere, which is another way of saying that he belonged nowhere in particular.

  CHAPTER 43

  No-Man’s-Land

  Paul left England shortly after his second book was published, returning to Carmel, New York, where he prepared for a series of lectures that would carry him across a country recovering from the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. From Syracuse to Chicago, he told stories that dripped with sensational details—the same kinds of details that had earned him fame, not the kinds that had earned him respect among the learned societies.

  On stages around the country, he settled into a character that would cling to him for the rest of his life: l’ami Paul, or “Friend Paul,” a genial storyteller who could read the crowd with the intuitive reckoning of an old sailor, detecting the strongest currents, riding them for all they were worth. If he heard laughter from the audience when he demonstrated the gorilla’s manner of walking, he’d launch into exuberant pantomime, complete with a throaty chorus of sound effects. If people chuckled when he mentioned that many of the tribal kings he’d encountered practiced polygamy, for example, he’d riff on the subject at length, playing it for laughs, indulging the crowd’s appetite for exotica with stories of men who had more wives than they could count.

  Journalists reflexively described him as a grown-up child, an avuncular sprite. Children loved his act. Immediately after he began his lecture tour, a New York publishing firm asked him to write a book for children based on his real-life adventures.

  “They think it will have immense sale here,” Paul explained to John Murray, in a letter sent from Carmel in the spring of 1867. “They want it ready for August. I will write it myself and have the English corrected.”

  That book, called Stories of the Gorilla Country, became the first of five popular adventure books for children that he wrote about Africa in the following five years. “Friend Paul” had become a literary brand.

  AFTER SETTLING in the United States, Paul rarely returned to England. He kept in touch only sporadically with many of the figures who’d been instrumental in his rise to fame.

  Richard Owen still occupied a privileged place in Britain’s social and scientific hierarchy, but his influence waned considerably as Darwinism strengthened its foothold. Owen continued to oversee the British Museum of Natural History, and Queen Victoria knighted him. He was even elected to the Club, the most exclusive private society in England, which was founded by Samuel Johnson and limited to only forty members. But Darwin’s circle of friends and followers, who now represented a new scientific establishment, continued to distrust him. Years after the gorilla debate had died down, Darwin believed that Owen was still secretly scheming to discredit him and his friends. No longer did Darwin treat his senior colleague with polite deference. Suspecting Owen of writing another anonymous review criticizing his theory in 1872, Darwin wrote of Owen in a letter: “I used to be ashamed of hating him so much, but now I will carefully cherish my hatred & contempt to the last days of my life.”

  T. H. Huxley became an eloquent advocate for a brand of rational inquiry that ideally remained free from political, religious, and social pressures. Perhaps more than any other scientist of his day, he helped compose the version of history that would define the era for later generations. Because he was the spokesman of the new establishment, Huxley’s judgments mattered. After Owen died in 1892, his grandson wrote a laudatory two-volume biography of him. To assess Owen’s place in scientific history, an essay was commissioned to serve as an afterword. Huxley wrote it. The sixty-page assessment was measured and gracious, stating that Owen deserved respect despite his work and beliefs regarding transmutation, not because of them. “The reader must bear in mind that, whatever view is taken of Sir Richard Owen’s speculations on these subjects,” Huxley concluded, “his claims to a high place among those who have made great and permanently valuable contributions to knowledge remain unassailable.”

  Huxley’s final judgment of Paul Du Chaillu carried similar weight among scientists. Although many of Paul’s disputed descriptions were eventually supported, he never achieved the unqualified acceptance of the new scientific elite.

  Paul and his specimens had been instrumental in driving Huxley to write Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, but the text barely references him. Paul’s absence was conspicuous enough to require explanation: Huxley explained that he refrained from quoting Paul’s work not because he thought his depictions of the animal in the wild were improbable but because they had been presented in a scientifically unacceptable manner. Paul’s melodrama and romance had no place in science, even if many of the discoveries he brought to light were valid.

  “It may be truth,” Huxley wrote of Paul’s work, “but it is not evidence.”

  THE WRITER J. M. Barrie, famous as the creator of Peter Pan, once observed that during his life he’d met three African travelers—Henry Morton Stanley, Joseph Thomson, and Paul—and all three were committed bachelors (Stanley later married, when he was nearly fifty). “One of them says, after returning from years of lonely travel, a man has such a delight in female society that to pick and choose would be invidious,” Barrie wrote.

  The anonymous comment could have easily come from Paul, who became a close friend of Barrie’s and who regularly sprinkled similar asides into his lectures in the United States. As in almost everything else, when it came to personal relationships, Paul liked to portray himself as the ultimate free agent, too committed to an unchained life of travel to commit to any one person or even group of people.

  He never married. In the years that followed his expeditions in Africa, he bolstered his reputation as a charming romantic, but aside from numerous but unspecific references in newspaper articles and letters to his “gallantry” and affinity for beautiful women, little or no evidence of romantic relationships exists. More than two decades after Paul’s death, the French journalist Michel Vaucaire attempted to unearth evidence of any romantic relationships Paul might have had, but he came up empty. “I have been unable to find the slightest trace of any lasting affair,” Vaucaire wrote. “It cannot be said that there was any woman in his life, or any great romance.”

  Of course, if Paul was hiding a romantic preference for men, it might help explain his lifelong bachelorhood and his discretion concerning intimate relationships. But no evidence of this exists, either.

  His personal corres
pondence strongly hints that the kind of relationship he valued most wasn’t romantic at all, but rather the kind of love that binds parents and children. The missionaries John Leighton Wilson and his wife, Jane, who had adopted him as a teenager, provided him with a prototype of filial love that he actively sought to replicate throughout his lifetime. Until the day he died, Paul almost always lacked a fixed address, instead choosing to live as a semipermanent guest in the homes of a rotating cast of prominent couples.

  In Philadelphia, he stayed regularly with George W. Childs, a newspaper publisher, and his wife, Emma. In Chicago, the journalist John Anderson and his family kept a special room in their house reserved especially for Paul, who sometimes boarded with them for months at a time. During much of the last decade of his life, Paul lived principally with Charles Daly and his wife, Maria. Judge Daly, as he was known, was a former chief justice of the New York courts, and he had also served as the president of the American Geographical Society, where he had met Paul. Eventually, the two men joined the board of directors of a humanitarian organization called the Philafrican Liberators’ League, a group dedicated to securing the freedom of slaves inside Africa, and they became close friends.

  Mr. and Mrs. Daly—with Paul in tow—divided their time between a house in Manhattan and their country estate near Sag Harbor. When Maria was dying in 1894, Paul discovered that she had taken pains to guarantee his future.