Specimens by Richard Conniff

Author:Richard Conniff [Conniff, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NATURE
Publisher: Blackhound Books
Published: 2012-01-03T03:00:00+00:00

Paul Du Chaillu. (Stories of the Gorilla Country, 1895)

But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder. Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was “an understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.” In fact, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton kept a vast collection of skulls there, “the American Golgotha,” for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The “mysterious and rapid” end to Du Chaillu’s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from “a committee member’s discovery of his maternal ancestry.”

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory. George Ord, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and detected “evidence of a spurious origin.” Ord added: “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.”

In England, the mathematician Augustus de Morgan echoed these feelings. He found the running battle over Du Chaillu so entertaining that he sent a congratulatory note to his friend William Hepworth Dixon, editor of The Athenaeum, calling “this Gorilla matter … a godsend” for a journal that had begun to seem stodgy. Then, without stating the racial gossip outright, he drove the point home with a joke based on the old urban legend of a brewer who serves up an unusually good batch of beer, only to find a dead body at the bottom of the vat. But in this case, the body belonged to a black man. That’s the secret for lively reading, De Morgan concluded: “A negro in the vat every time!”

Though it’s only conjecture, sex may also have played a role in the savaging Du Chaillu endured in England. He was an enthusiastic socializer, whose address books in later life were full of notes about “calls to make” “notes to send,” and new acquaintances, both male (“lawyer good fellow”) and female (“of medium height with dark chestnut hair … an exquisite figure … graceful”). A friend later passed the word “sub rosa” to an acquaintance that Du Chaillu was “rather too fond of women.”

Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called “The Octoroon.” It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans beauty “educated in every refinement and luxury” who was “almost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.