Stories of the Gorilla Country

". . . How wild and fierce these men looked . . . they showed their teeth, which were filed to a point, and colored black. Their open mouths put me uncomfortably in mind of a tomb; for how many human creatures each of these men had eaten! . . . " Paul Belloni Du Chaillu ( 1831 – 1903) was a French-American traveler, zoologist, and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. In 1921 "Tarzan of the Apes", a hugely popular novel based on Du Chaillu’s stories was published. He was sent in 1855 by the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia on an African expedition. Until 1859, he explored the regions of West Africa in the neighborhood of the equator, gaining considerable knowledge of the delta of the Ogooué River and the estuary of the Gabon. During his travels from 1856 to 1859, he observed numerous gorillas, known to non-locals in prior centuries only from an unreliable and ambiguous report credited to Hanno the Navigator of Carthage in the 5th century BC and known to scientists in the preceding years only by a few skeletons. He brought back dead specimens and presented himself as the first white European person to have seen them. In writing about a new species of hominid Du Chaillu states: " I happened to look up at a high tree which we were passing, and saw a most singular shelter or home built in its branches. I immediately stopped and asked Okabi why the hunters slept in that way in the woods. Okabi laughed, after looking at me quizzically, and then he told me that no man had ever built that shelter. He said that it was made by a kind of man of the woods, called nshiego mbouve", an animal which had no hair on the top of its head. I really thought Okabi was joking. An animal—a man-monkey—with no hair on the top of his head?—a bald-headed ape?" Du Chaillu describes building his own village in Africa: "I IMMEDIATELY began building a substantial settlement, not an olako. I collected from a kind of palmtree a great many leaves, with which to cover the roofs of the building I had to construct. I gathered also a great quantity of branches from the same palm-trees, and sticks, and poles, and all that was necessary to make a house; and finally I succeeded in building quite a village, which I called Washington. I had a dozen huts for my men. This was Washington in Africa, a very different place from Washington in America." In writing of the slave trade Du Chaillu states: "I observed a gang of slaves rapidly driven down from one of the barracoons. I stood and watched. The men were still in gangs of six, but they had been washed, and each had a clean cloth on. The canoes were immense boats, with twenty-six paddles, and held about sixty slaves each. The poor slaves seemed much terrified . . . I was glad that these poor creatures could not see me, for I was hidden from their view by trees and bushes. I felt ashamed of myself—I actually felt ashamed of being a white man!" In writing of a close encounter with a gorilla, Du Chaillu states: "Suddenly an immense gorilla advanced out of the wood straight toward us, and gave vent, as he came up, to a terrible howl of rage, as much as to say," I am tired of being pursued, and will face you." It was a lone male, the kind which are always most ferocious. This fellow made the woods resound with his roar, which is really an awful sound, resembling very much the rolling and muttering of distant thunder. . . .