‘Between Man and Beast,’ by Monte Reel (original) (raw)
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Planet of the Ape
"Mr. Paul Du Chaillu Lecturing to the Young Folks of Boston," an engraving from Harper's Weekly, 1869.Credit...Corbis
- April 4, 2013
Our planet nowadays is a well-explored place, where major zoological discoveries are exceedingly rare. True, there are countless kinds of insects and other tiny fauna still undescribed and unnamed in the Amazon and elsewhere; but a new large-bodied animal, a new vertebrate, comes to light seldom. If a previously unknown species of monkey is found (as the lesula was, in the eastern Congo basin, in 2007), the revelation makes news, even if the creature doesn’t happen to have (as the lesula does) a very long nose, a blue tush and the wide, dreamy eyes of Gene Wilder. So it’s hard for us to imagine how sensibilities were affected, in Europe and America, just two and three centuries ago, by the discovery of certain prodigious, unexpected beasts.
No one from the Western world, as far as we know, had laid eyes on a kangaroo until 1770. Emus, orangutans and Komodo dragons came as surprises. The earliest scientific description of a dinosaur, based on mystifying new fossils, appeared only in 1824. But the most provocative of zoological novelties was the gorilla, a Victorian sensation, for two reasons: because it was presented (falsely) as a menacing, aggressive behemoth and because it seemed, in delicious paradox, much too similar to humans for comfort. The gorilla’s very existence suggested — at just the time Charles Darwin was also suggesting — heretical ideas about the origin and nature of mankind. And the man chiefly responsible for bringing this animal to worldwide attention was Paul Du Chaillu, the central character and driving riddle of Monte Reel’s “Between Man and Beast.”
Du Chaillu was a young explorer of part-French extraction, son of a trader, poorly educated but a good marksman, who emerged from Gabon in 1859, after a four-year hunting expedition, with 20 preserved skins of a kind of massive ape, known to the local people as njena. The animal soon took its familiar name, gorilla, by loose borrowing from the ancient Greek account of a voyage by Hanno the Navigator, who claimed to have seen some big and hairy people along the African coast and called them Gorillae, though almost certainly they weren’t actual gorillas. Science now recognizes two species, the eastern gorilla (of which the famously endangered mountain gorillas are a subspecies) and the western, which includes those individuals that fell to Du Chaillu’s gun. But such modern taxonomic dicing is far removed, in time and spirit, from the tale of scientific buccaneering and creationist discomfiture that Reel, a former correspondent for The Washington Post, tells in this intriguing book.
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Monte ReelCredit...Mei-Ling Hopgood
Needing money as much as craving recognition, Du Chaillu initially took his specimens to New York. After an unsuccessful presentation of them, along with other animal trophies and African artifacts, as a sort of freak-show exhibition on lower Broadway, where P. T. Barnum was among his competitors, he tried London. On the evening of Feb. 25, 1861, at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Du Chaillu lectured on his explorations to a formidable audience, including the brilliant anatomist Richard Owen, the Darwin ally Thomas Huxley, the polymath Francis Galton (who would later found eugenics) and William Gladstone. Darwin himself, a homebody with a bad stomach, didn’t attend, but his theory was in the air. On the stage beside Du Chaillu stood a pair of stuffed gorillas, “two full-grown adults,” Reel writes, “positioned in attitudes of diabolical menace.” They didn’t just command attention. They advertised an unspoken question: Do we humans share ancestry with these anthropoid monsters?
Owen and Huxley would soon lock into a bitter, long-running dispute over that question, their argument being just part of a broader societal fuss that newspapers called the Gorilla War. The small points at issue in the Owen-Huxley dispute were arcane details of comparative anatomy, like the hippocampus minor, and the stakes were Darwin’s great idea versus the dogma of human exceptionalism. Du Chaillu and his specimens “had united London in wonder,” Reel writes, “but now they were forcing people to take sides.” The war spread. A popular young Baptist preacher named Charles Haddon Spurgeon gave a lecture on the gorilla at his megachurch, “blurring the lines between theology and theater” and using a specimen borrowed from Du Chaillu as a prop. Spurgeon warned that the next step in Darwinian thinking might be to trace human descent from oysters. Punch magazine published cartoons on the topic; someone wrote a gorilla song; and Du Chaillu’s book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” emerged as a best seller. “More than any animal before or since,” Reel argues, “the gorilla had become an instant cultural phenomenon, dominating every level of public discourse.” Suddenly it was the gorilla in the room — a synecdoche, not just a metaphor.
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