The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff

Author:Richard Conniff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

“An Animal of an Extraordinary Character”

His moment came, oddly, after he had already sailed for home early in 1847, at the end of his years in Africa. The ship he took from Liberia headed eastward at first, under the belly of West Africa, to the Gaboon (now Gabon) River. There it was “unexpectedly detained” for more than a month. Savage stayed at the house of a friend and fellow missionary, Rev. John L. Wilson, in a village just south of what is now the capital city of Libreville.

Wilson and his wife Jane kept a deer, a porcupine, and other species as pets, and also apparently decorated their home with African specimens and curiosities. One skull immediately caught Savage’s attention. It was too large for a chimpanzee, with huge, glowering eye sockets, a high bony sagittal ridge running back like a Mohawk across the top of the skull, and a nuchal crest like a broad shelf across the back—anchor points for huge jaw and neck muscles.

Savage questioned the local hunters, who told him about “a monkey-like animal, remarkable for its size, ferocity and habits.” The shape of the skull, combined with “information derived from several intelligent natives,” convinced him that he was looking at “a new species of Orang.” (The Malay word orang, meaning “man,” made famous by the Southeast Asian orangutan, or “man of the forest,” was still broadly applied to all great apes.)

Savage had corresponded in the past with Richard Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons and Samuel Stutchbury, curator of the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science. Now he wrote to both. “I have found the existence of an animal of an extraordinary character in this locality,” he told Owen, and sent along detailed drawings of the skull, asking him to compare it with an orangutan skull in the Royal College collection.

Savage never actually laid eyes on a living gorilla. He was waiting for his ship to head home, and there was no gorilla population in the immediate vicinity. But he was a good interviewer. Instead of the “marvellous accounts given by the natives…to credulous traders,” local hunters gave him a remarkably accurate description of the gorilla’s appearance and behavior. Among other things, he learned that a single adult male dominated each band of animals, and that the hair tended to go gray with age.

“The gait,” Savage wrote, “is shuffling, the motion of the body, which is never upright as in man, but bent forward, is somewhat rolling, or from side to side.” The gorilla “has the power of moving the scalp freely forward and back, and when enraged, is said to contract it strongly over the brow…so as to present an indescribably ferocious aspect.” But he added, “The silly stories about their carrying off women from the native towns, and vanquishing the elephants…are unhesitatingly denied.”

Savage’s pursuit of this information, and the feelers he put out for specimens, attracted the attention of other traders in Gabon, probably including Capt. Wagstaff. When a local hunter eventually presented Savage with skulls and an assortment of other bones of the new species, a bidding war ensued.

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