by Monte Reel
“She was so motherly to me—and has remembered me in her will,” he wrote to a friend just after Maria’s death. “It was the kinder of her as she had several sisters and a brother. I am writing from the house of Judge Daly and I will stay with him this winter.… He is like a father to me.”
When Judge Daly died several years later, he left up to twenty-five thousand dollars more in a trust fund for Paul’s use, which was a relative fortune before the turn of the century. Paul used the money to travel the world and to continue to explore the no-man’s-land between science and myth.
LITTLE COULD have been less likely for a mixed-race child of a French-African island than to develop a strong personal affinity for traditional Nordic culture, but it was oddly natural for someone who felt most at home in the realm of legend.
In the 1870s, Paul—now in his forties—became fascinated with the idea that the English-speaking peoples were descendants not of the Anglo-Saxons but of the Vikings. After spending nearly five years journeying throughout Scandinavia, he wrote a two-volume travel narrative called The Land of the Midnight Sun. Eight years later he followed with the eleven-hundred-page The Viking Age, which sorted through Norse mythology in an effort to explain the origins of what he considered the “terrible bravery” and “love of conquest” of English-speaking nations.
In the Nordic myths, Paul found historical roots of the kind of heroism that had shaped his worldview from his earliest years. He delved deeply into the stories of characters like Sigurd, the prototypical Viking hero who, according to some of the legends, is born illegitimately, is raised by a foster father who schools him in the art of war, then fulfills his destiny as a hero by slaying a monstrous dragon. In addition to his travel book and mythological opus, Paul wrote his own version of a modern Norse myth, which he published as a novel for boys that he titled Ivar the Viking: A Romantic History Based upon Authentic Facts of the Third and Fourth Centuries. The book, which he began writing when he was nearly sixty, includes descriptions of Sigurd (a wise elder in the story) that could have served as snapshots of the author: Sigurd “had traveled far and wide, and seen countries that were unknown to most people; he was short of stature, and had attained the meridian of life; gray hair was beginning to show itself.”
Paul’s late-to-bloom immersion in Nordic life earned him an energetic following among Scandinavian immigrants in the United States. In 1896, the U.S. senator Knute Nelson lured him to his home state of Minnesota to deliver campaign speeches in support of the Republican presidential nominee, William McKinley, and to capitalize on Paul’s “marked weight with the Scandinavians of Minnesota,” according to a journalist writing in the Saint Paul Globe. The following year, Paul lobbied to land the position as U.S. ambassador to Sweden from McKinley.
Paul lost out in his ambassadorial bid to a veteran U.S. diplomat, but the Scandinavian community in the United States never forgot him. Numerous Scandinavian social clubs from New York to Chicago granted him membership, adopting him as one of their own.
“They are a grand, noble race,” he said during one of his New York lectures about the people of Norway and Sweden. “A good, steady, law-abiding people, and I hope lots of them come here.”
Incredibly, the racially ambiguous chameleon who at various times in his life claimed Africa, Europe, and America as his ancestral home ended his life identified more as a Scandinavian than anything else.
IN 1901 a seventy-year-old Paul embarked on his final journey, a trip to Russia that he hoped would result in another travel narrative. Just before he left, he stopped in Washington, D.C., to make some final arrangements with Russian diplomats and the U.S. consulate office. A reporter found him energetically pacing the lobby of the Arlington Hotel, a blunt little plug of a man who couldn’t stand still.
“Mr. du Chaillu’s books and explorations need no introduction, but his personal appearance does,” the journalist wrote. Paul, he observed, still looked remarkably young—boyish, in fact, aside from a white mustache.
“I believe in the power of youth to make one young,” Paul explained, “and I avail myself of it at every opportunity. I cultivate young men and women, follow their habits, adapt myself to their customs, and partake of their pleasures. I eschew the gouty, crabbed old ones who pooh-pooh all pleasures and stay at home nursing their aches.”
That was why, he said, he was headed to Russia—to undertake another adventure. He planned to travel the entire country, meeting everyone from peasants to the czar, immersing himself in the culture just as he had in Africa and Scandinavia.
The world had changed, entering a period of rapid specialization and industrialization. Adventurers like Paul’s old ally Richard Burton, who died in 1890, seemed to belong to an earlier age when large pockets of the world still felt unexplored. Paul seemed reluctant to let go of that time.
“I am restless, curious to see things, but after I will see Russia I will die happy,” he said. “I need action. I have been living too high, and it is not good for young men to live too high.”
He left for Russia in June 1901 and spent most of his first year in St. Petersburg studying the Russian language, employing two teachers for lessons that lasted six hours a day. A year later, he wrote to a friend, “I hope good health will be granted to me also that I will retain my powers of observations until I have accomplished my work—I want my book on Russia to be one of my best. I suppose you will laugh when you read this and exclaim: Paul does think he is getting old.”
At about 10:00 a.m. on April 30, 1903, he was reading a newspaper at breakfast in the restaurant of his hotel when two men heard him speak to no one in particular. “I can’t see,” he said. “There must be something the matter.”
He tried to get up from his chair, but he seemed weak. With help, he staggered to a business office down the hall. Doctors were called, as was a friend who lived in St. Petersburg.
“I am dying,” he told his friend before he was taken to his room to lie down. He struggled all afternoon to speak, and when the American ambassador visited his room, Paul seemed to try to remove his right hand from under the bedclothes to greet him, but he couldn’t. He was moved to a hospital, where he died at 11:00 p.m.
The American consul placed telegrams to Washington in an attempt to locate any of Paul’s surviving relatives. The response came back: “Have the remains embalmed, placed in a vault, and await instructions.” Eventually, the consul’s office tracked down some friends who had known him for fifty years, yet none could provide the name of any family member, no matter how distant. Henry Hoyt, who had managed Paul’s trust fund as the executor of Judge Daly’s estate, in an affidavit reported that despite having a friendship with Paul for twenty years, he “never heard him speak of having any living relative.” By default, Hoyt became Paul’s executor. But aside from a few scattered papers and personal belongings found in his room in St. Petersburg, Paul had no estate.
He had given away almost everything he owned, to friends and museums, over the course of his lifetime. His “estate” was valued at less than five hundred dollars. A headline attached to a short article printed just after his death in the New York Times read, “Du Chaillu Died Poor.”
His body arrived in New York on an ocean liner in June. A funeral was held at the Park Presbyterian Church. Representatives from several Scandinavian benevolent societies attended, and the Swedish Glee Club of New York sang a hymn. The Reverend Anson P. Atterbury delivered a short eulogy to the scattering of friends who attended.
“Now that the earthly ending has come to his life, we look back and are surprised to see how strangely varied was that life,” Atterbury said.
Paul’s gift, the reverend told them, rested in his protean adaptability, the adroitness that allowed him to seek out and thrive in places of dizzying variety, in extreme circumstances, among people of all kinds.
“As an explorer, as lecturer, as author, as social companion and investigator, he made the world largely his own,” the reverend said as he stood next to the
casket. “Known and welcomed on three continents, he had everywhere, yet nowhere, a home.”
Epilogue
A large upright gravestone, supporting an ornamental granite sphere, sits in a shady grove in the middle of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The inscription on the stone reads:
PAUL B. DU CHAILLU
AUTHOR AND AFRICAN
EXPLORER
BORN IN LOUISIANA
IN THE YEAR 1839
DIED AT ST. PETERSBURG
APRIL 16, 1903
The name of the man buried in the vault below the marker is correct, but almost all the details—the place of his birth, the date of his birth, even the date of his death—are wrong. It is a perfectly fitting monument for someone who made certain that a sterile listing of places and dates would utterly fail to capture the truth of his life. But gravestones are never the last word.
IN 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, a novel that revitalized the action-adventure genre for the twentieth century, just as the stories of R. M. Ballantyne and H. Rider Haggard had for the nineteenth century. The narrative arc of the novel might have seemed wildly imaginative to readers, but Doyle didn’t pluck it out of thin air.
The story follows the explorations and adventures of an expeditionary crew led by Professor George Challenger, whose descriptions of demoniac jungle beasts to the learned societies of London earn him derision as a liar and charlatan. The embattled explorer, true to his name, challenges his most vocal critic to accompany him on a return expedition, where he can prove the veracity of his original descriptions. After a hair-raising escape from pursuing natives, the crew returns to London, where once again Challenger steps onto the platform of the Zoological Institute and earns vindication through the applause of his peers.
More than a decade before the novel was published, Paul Du Chaillu had accompanied Doyle on a tour of Chicago. Later, in 1908, Doyle included a direct reference to Paul in an adventure story he’d set in Gabon that appeared in his Round the Fire Stories. But in The Lost World, the explorer’s name is never mentioned. Doyle’s devoted fans have generally agreed that the prototype for Professor Challenger was William Rutherford, a physiologist who taught at the university Doyle attended. It’s true, to a point: Rutherford provided Doyle with the superficial details that defined Challenger’s character, such as his booming voice and his bushy beard. But Paul Du Chaillu’s presence is felt on almost every page.
The same could be said for many of the stories that helped define the swashbuckling strain of popular culture that permeated the early twentieth century. Jack London, who set the standard for wilderness-based adventures in the twentieth century, said Explorations and Adventures was one of the first books he ever read, at age seven. When London died in 1916, both volumes of The Viking Age sat on top of his bed stand, occupying the same primary position as they had for five years running. Paul permeates London’s stories of the wild, as he does Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan tales. Yet if a reader tries to put a finger on a concrete example of his presence in those works, Paul virtually disappears.
Then there’s King Kong. Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 film set the Hollywood standard for two genres that continue to saturate pop culture: action-adventure and horror stories. Paul’s name isn’t mentioned in the film, but his influence is unmistakable. Cooper admitted as much in 1965 when he told an interviewer that a turning point in his childhood arrived when his great-uncle handed him an old book written nearly thirty years before he was born. “I made up my mind right then that I wanted to be an explorer,” Cooper said. The book was Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa.
ON THOSE rare occasions when Paul’s name surfaced in the public discourse following his death, it was almost always mentioned in reference to the gorilla. The animal had always sat at the very center of his personal mythology, and it continued to play the central role as his story evolved after his death.
Mountain gorillas were first discovered just six months before Paul died, and this subspecies—less mobile and more approachable than Paul’s lowland variety—eventually afforded field scientists better opportunities than ever to amass knowledge of the gorilla’s habits in the wild.
Gorillas, it was determined, are not particularly dangerous to humans if they are treated with a sort of deferential respect. As Paul observed, they are fairly strict vegetarians (insects are an occasional exception), not predators. They are capable of great strength and violence, but they are generally harmless if not provoked. It is an incontrovertible fact that human beings pose a far greater threat to gorillas than gorillas do to humans.
As poaching and deforestation in the twentieth century turned gorillas into a vulnerable species, Paul’s name became something akin to a mild slur. He symbolized human arrogance, the man who invented the damaging stereotypes that had turned people against gorillas, planting false impressions that now threatened the very survival of the species. His life story was abbreviated into an archetype that, given his personal history, was full of irony: Paul was the hubristic colonial interloper who abused a foreign continent and every living thing on it.
Paul’s exaggerations and self-serving stories deserved criticism, but they didn’t change the fact that even a century after his travel, he’d still given the world more accurate information about lowland gorillas than anyone else. Twentieth-century researchers definitively established that gorillas really do stand on two legs, beat their chests, and charge humans with terrifying swiftness if they are threatened, just as he described. Paul didn’t know that such displays are usually meant to scare threats away, not to inflict actual physical harm. If he had simply stood still and assumed a nonthreatening posture, as he did the time he stumbled upon a gorilla without his gun, those charging gorillas almost certainly would have pulled up well short of him, veering off to the side instead of attacking. But achieving that sort of composure—simply to stand still when staring down an animal that at the time was wholly unknown—would have been anything but simple. Paul had no way of knowing that the gorillas likely wouldn’t have hurt him had he lain low, and it’s unreasonable to have expected him to intuit it. His errors and exaggerations can’t be ignored, but they can be understood. He was astonished by the mysterious animals he encountered in the forest because they were, in the eyes of one who viewed the animals without the benefit of any frame of reference, truly astonishing. When we realize this, the fact that a young man with no formal training got so much correct becomes more noteworthy than his shortcomings.
George Schaller, a field biologist who in 1960 published the first thorough study of mountain gorillas in the wild, lamented the fact that Paul’s imperfections had caused his work to be forgotten. “This was unfortunate, for he was basically a competent and reliable observer,” Schaller wrote.
Now, in the twenty-first century, Paul is undergoing yet another reevaluation. A recent academic collaboration between the University of Lyon and Omar Bongo University in Gabon united French and Gabonese historians, ethnologists, primatologists, linguists, and geographers who retraced parts of Paul’s route. Together they produced a series of scholarly articles that aimed to assess the explorer’s impact on the country. Those articles were collected and published by the French National Center for Scientific Research as Cœur d’Afrique: Gorilles, cannibales et Pygmées dans le Gabon de Paul Du Chaillu (Heart of Africa: Gorillas, Cannibals and Pygmies in the Gabon of Paul Du Chaillu).
Taken as a whole, the project represents an overwhelmingly positive reassessment of his place in the history of equatorial Africa. The articles collectively conclude that the information Paul provided about the country’s natural history, languages, and ethnology was mostly accurate and surprisingly varied. Given the dearth of written sources that predated Paul’s, his work has become an invaluable starting point for serious scholarly research of Gabon’s history.
Paul had correctly discovered links between the roots of different native languages, had accurately described tribal customs that had never b
een observed before, and helped modern scholars imagine life in a time and place that lacked a written history. Jean-Marie Hombert, a French linguist, and Louis Perrois, a French ethnologist, wrote that Paul’s investigations of the country’s oral histories, languages, ethnological makeup, and natural habitat “allow us to perceive through him a historical, cultural, and natural landscape that in the end is quite different—and certainly more complex and accurate—than we would have ever dared to imagine before.”
The concluding essay in that collection was titled “The Posthumous Revenge of a Forgotten Explorer.”
REVENGE CAN take root in unexpected quarters and require generations to reach fruition. It can also drip with an irony that can be appreciated only in hindsight.
The resuscitation of Paul’s reputation within Gabon itself can be traced back to the man who’d been his most bitter enemy there: R. B. N. Walker, the English trader who in 1861 accused Paul of inventing his adventures and publicly cast aspersions on his parentage and racial background.
Among the episodes that Walker accused Paul of inventing was his supposed climbing of Mount Andele in the Eshira territory, the farthest point inland that he claimed to visit during his first expedition. Even after Paul’s second expedition vindicated some of his descriptions from his first book, some geographers remained skeptical as to whether he had actually reached the Eshira territory, or instead—as Walker argued—had simply relied on descriptions from natives to describe it.
Walker lived in Gabon for years after his attacks on Paul. He died in England in 1901, passing his meager assets to a son named Harry, who lived in Surrey. His will made no mention of the other children he had left behind in Gabon—at least a dozen of them, the mixed-race children born to various Mpongwe women.