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Histories: Gorillas, I presume
01 October 2005

Paul Collins
THE trip was not going well. In April 1847 the Reverend Thomas Savage
had been travelling from his missionary posting in present-day Liberia
in West Africa when illness forced him to stop off in what is now
Gabon. He convalesced at the house of the Reverend J. L. Wilson, the
senior American missionary official in West Africa.

"Soon after my arrival," Savage wrote later that year in the Boston
Journal of Natural History, "Mr Wilson showed me a skull, represented
by the natives to be that of a monkey-like animal, remarkable for its
size, ferocity, and habits." An incredulous Savage immediately saw
that the skull did not correspond to any known ape. It must belong to
a whole new primate species, one larger and more powerful than humans.

The mysterious skull could not have found a man better prepared to
appreciate it in all of Africa. After graduating from Yale Medical
School in 1833, Savage decided his vocation was to be a missionary and
asked to be sent to Cape Palmas in West Africa, where a settlement of
freed North American slaves was being established, and where Savage's
medical skills would come in handy. It was as an amateur naturalist in
Africa, though, that Savage gained fame. He was an inveterate
collector, and by 1834 had already written a paper on chimpanzees with
Jeffries Wyman, a rising young star at Harvard Medical School.

Savage immediately sent word of his latest find to Wyman, as well as
to England, to Samuel Stutchbery of the Bristol Philosophical Society
and to Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Savage
and his host Wilson then collected accounts from the local Mpongwe
people of the shy yet fearsome creature they called the Enge-ena. A
fuller picture soon emerged: it lived in hilly inland countryside,
slept in trees and was rarely seen. The skull had been procured by a
slave, a great hunter captured from another tribe. His feat "was
considered almost superhuman" - so remarkable, in fact, that the
Mpongwe had immediately granted the man his freedom. The Enge-ena he
killed was said to possess "an indescribably ferocious aspect", Savage
noted. "The killing of an Enge-ena is considered an act of great skill
and courage, and brings to the victor signal honor."

But Savage wanted more. Above all, he wanted both male and female
skulls, so that he and Wyman could write a paper describing this new
species. He quickly ran into a problem, however: Stutchbery. The
impatient naturalist had decided he couldn't wait for Savage to finish
his research. Instead he hired a certain Captain Wagstaff to go to
Gabon and seek out gorilla skulls, plunging the captain and the
reverend into a bidding war for gorilla bones. This, Savage wrote
wearily to Wyman, "occasioned me great trouble in procuring the
specimen". Thanks in part to his friendship with the Mpongwe
chieftain, and probably in larger part to the hefty £25 bounty he
offered, Savage came away with the prize: two male and two female
skulls, and a male and female pelvis, and assorted ribs, vertebrae and
limbs.

Examining the bones back in Boston, Savage's partner Wyman also had an
advantage over his British rivals: he had a chimpanzee skull from his
previous collaboration with Savage. Owen at the Royal College of
Surgeons - inheritors of the vast collection of specimens built up by
the great 18th-century surgeon John Hunter - had just about everything
else, but no chimp. Wyman's material advantage made it easy to
establish that the gorilla was something more than an overgrown chimp.

Wyman and Savage's paper, published in the Boston Journal of Natural
History in December 1847, was the first full description of the
creature that Wyman, mindful of Hanno's account, named Troglodytes
gorilla. Savage provided anecdotes about the gorilla's behaviour and
habitat, while Wyman wrote sections that carefully demonstrated the
substantial differences between the gorilla and other great apes. But
it was a close-run thing. The American pair narrowly squeaked into
print two months before Stutchbery and Owen, who had named the new
species Troglodytes savagei. When Owen heard that the Americans had
beaten him to it, he conceded defeat. And so Wyman's name stuck until
a later taxonomic reclassification of the Western Lowland Gorilla
resulted in the wonderfully emphatic Gorilla gorilla gorilla.

Wyman went on to achieve some measure of fame for his careful work as
a naturalist and as a teacher to US philosopher William James.
Reverend Savage lived rather more quietly, working for most of the
rest of his life as a rector in Mississippi. At first, the impact of
their discovery was largely limited to the scientific world, and it
was another decade before whole gorilla specimens began appearing in
any numbers in Europe. Shot by such adventurers as the French-American
writer Paul Du Chaillu, they were preserved for the long sea-voyage
with whatever happened to be on hand at African seaports, typically by
sealing them into a cask of spirits. After a long sea journey, the
pickled apes gave off an unbelievable stench, but they were such rare
finds that nobody much cared.

Displays of stuffed gorillas and gorilla skeletons became the hot
tickets of the day, with newspapers reporting that fashionable young
women were suddenly befriending stuffy museum trustees in the hope of
seeing "those dear, dear gorillas". A "gorilla ballet" took to London
stages - though without any actual gorillas. Cartoons in Punch
proclaimed the ape "The Lion of the Season" and the Gorilla Quadrille
For Piano flew off the shelves of sheet-music stores.

So what about bringing a live gorilla back from Africa? After Charles
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the public
clamoured to see these mysterious primates. But gorillas proved
fragile in human hands, and appeared particularly vulnerable to
pulmonary ailments. The few that reached Europe almost invariably died
shortly after their arrival. America, with its even longer sea voyage,
failed to get hold of a live gorilla until 1897, and that one died
four days after landfall. The misery of captured gorillas was so
apparent, and their mortality rate so appalling, that in 1908 the
London Zoo finally refused to buy them; a decision that would stand
until 1932.

Victorian showmen had fewer scruples. They knew that a gorilla meant
money, whether it was genuine or not, and so they happily showed off
any ape they could get their hands on as a "gorilla". But in one of
the great odd twists of ape history, it seems one live gorilla had
already toured England without anyone realising it.

In 1855, a strange sort of chimpanzee was kept by George W. Wombwell's
famous travelling menagerie. "Jenny" survived a few months before
dying of pneumonia in Scarborough in March 1856. The dead creature was
promptly sold to Charles Waterton, an eccentric
naturalist-cum-taxidermist. Waterton was fond of creating fanciful
"nondescripts" from assemblages of animal parts, and so Jenny's skin
was altered and stuffed to form a hideous horned simian sculpture
titled - for Waterton was an ardent Catholic - Martin Luther After His
Fall.

But what the menagerie had been touring with was not a chimpanzee at
all. Later examination revealed that Jenny was a juvenile gorilla. The
remains of the first gorilla to live outside Africa now survive only
as a bizarre taxidermic joke in the Waterton Collection at the
Wakefield Museum in Yorkshire. It would be decades before any other
gorilla survived in Britain for as long as Jenny had. And so it was
that squalling babies, runny-nosed urchins and exasperated mothers
unwittingly witnessed the world's rarest captive animal, and for a few
pence on English village greens were granted a sight denied to the
most respected men of science.