Monte Reel - Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure that Took the Victorian World by Storm

Copyright 2013 by Monte Reel

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Title page photograph by Anup Shah/Photodisc/Getty Images
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
Jacket photograph DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reel, Monte.
Between man and beast : an unlikely explorer, the evolution debates, and the African adventure that took the Victorian world by storm / Monte Reel. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Du Chaillu, Paul B. (Paul Belloni), 18351903. 2. ExplorersGabon. 3. HuntersGabon. 4. Gorilla. 5. GabonDescription and travel. I. Title.
DT356.D88R44 2013
916.7210423dc23
2012014075

eISBN: 978-0-385-53423-9

v3.1_r1

To Mei-Ling

It was Paul Du Chaillus luckgood and badto have come of age in the late 1850s and early 1860s, when the world was teetering on the sharp edge of transformation. Religious explanations of history, mans place in nature, modern racial conceptionsall were undergoing contentious reassessments that would profoundly shape the coming centuries. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens and a past full of secrets, Du Chaillu seemed to emerge from nowhere to stumble straight into the center of those debates, helping to push each to unprecedented intensities.

The Victorians might have labeled his story a Grand Conjunctionthe chance alignment of seemingly disconnected subjects that offered new perspectives on each. That notion has served as a guide for me in writing this book. By fleshing out Du Chaillus adventures, Im not attempting to provide a definitive survey of that incredibly fertile moment in history, but I am trying to throw a new angle of light on an era that sometimes feels more familiar than it should.

The books narrative pivots on the discovery of the gorilla, considered at the time to be mans closest relative and the wildest beast on the planet. I am drawn to the notion of wildnesshow it shapes our fears and dreams, and how those fears and dreams can, in turn, reshape the wild. But I never would have stuck with this project if the main attraction had been merely conceptual. The human drama hooked me. Its the story of a nervy young man who rises, and occasionally falls, in a quest to construct a heroic destiny from scratch. Thats the heart of this book.

This is nonfiction. Every scene and every quotation is constructed from historical documents. Physical descriptions and atmospheric details are rooted in factual evidenceletters, books, photographs, sketches, memoirs, and newspaper accounts. For those interested in how the narrative was composed, Ive tried to be as inclusive as possible in compiling the notes in the back of the book.

One of the satisfactions of writing this book was plunging into the atmospheres of Victorian London at its Dickensian peak, of New York on the verge of the Civil War, and of the African interior at its most lush. Its my hope that the reader might experience a taste of the same pleasure I got when researching the book: the thrill of being swept up by an unknown story and carried away in unexpected directions.

MONTE REEL

Hed been hunting in the forests depths for months, but hed never known such silence. No monkeys shook the leaves overhead, no birds cried, no insects droned. The only sounds seemed to come from within: the pulse throbbing in his temples and his own labored breathing.

The previous day the young man had hiked what he guessed was about eighteen miles before collapsing into sleep. But those trails hadnt been nearly as challenging as this onea muddy ribbon twisting up the forested mountainside, inset with loose boulders of granite and quartz. He was in good shape and just twenty-five years old, but each step took its toll. He fell behind his companions, whose bare feet gripped the slippery rocks better than did his leather boot soles. His blue cotton shirt and brown pants were streaked with mud.

Somewhere along the wayit was hard to tell exactly where it beganthe gentlest of whispers broke through the enveloping hush. The higher he climbed, the louder it got: a breathy hiss that grew into a roar. Twisting through the overgrown vegetation, he found the other men standing on a broad, flat shelf of land. A scene like none hed ever witnessed burst open in front of him: a vast pool of swirling water, fed by a majestic torrent that spilled down the angled slope for what looked like a mile. A mist rose from the tumult, obscuring everything in a gauzy veil: the swaying ferns, the logs slanting across the water, the trees ringing the banks. According to his calculations, they were about five thousand feet above sea level.

He paused to drink from the pool, but his rest was brief. A short distance uphill, one of his companions spotted footprints that didnt belong to their own party. The feet that had impressed those marks into the mud were barebut oddly round, with a big toe that seemed to jut away from the other four toes at a severe angle.

When he saw the prints for himself, the hunter felt his heart slam against his rib cage: this was the target hed traveled so far to pursue, and it finally seemed within his reach.

Following the tracks, the men stumbled into what appeared to be an abandoned tribal village. Years earlier, the land had been cleared for huts that had since collapsed. Stray stalks of sugarcane pushed through the ruins. As the hunter broke off a stalk and sucked the grassy sweetness from its marrow, another of the men observed that some of the plants had recently been ravagedviolently torn up by the roots and mangled into pulp.

They looked at one another and grabbed the rifles they wore strapped across their backs.

More tracks led down a hill. The men carefully crossed a stream on a fallen log, and on the other side of the water they encountered a cluster of enormous granite boulders, some as big as small buildings. The tracks here were even fresher, filled with muddy water that hadnt had time to settle.

The hunter circled to the right of the boulders, while a few of his companions walked to the left. He emerged from the granite blockade just in time to catch an obstructed view of four dark creatures fleeing rapidly into the dense cover of forest.

The figures disappeared as quickly as they had exploded into view. Running with their heads down and bodies bent forward, the woolly creatures appeared to him, he later noted, like men running for their lives.

Just minutes before, he might have sworn that the mountain torrent had been the most awe-inspiring sight hed witnessed in his young life. But this blurred vision of bodies in motiongone in the blink of an eyeblew it away.