Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

388

FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF ANTHROPOID APES.

CHAPTER XX.

Summary Account and Comparison of the great Apes of Africa: the Troglodytes Gorilla, the T. Kooloo - Kamba, the Chimpanzee (T. niger), and the Nshiego Mbouve, or T. calvus.

In this chapter I propose to give the reader, in a collected form, the results of my researches into the habits of those species of man-like apes which I met in the forests of Equatorial Africa. Of these the gorilla is the chief; and I was the first white man who has systematically hunted this beast, and who has at all penetrated to its haunts. The others - the Troglodytes calvus, or nshiego mbouve, and the T. Kooloo-Kamba-I had the satisfaction to be the first to make known, by preserved specimens and by description. Such particulars as have been mentioned already in the course of this narrative I shall not repeat here, it being my wish to give in this place only a general view of these animals— their structure, habits, and modes of life-such as would have unduly interrupted the narrative, and been less satisfactory to the reader, had it been interspersed in various places there.

For several centuries naturalists had been vaguely cognizant of the existence.of a very peculiar and remarkable species of ape in Western Africa. It was named by Tyson, in 1699, the Homo sylvestris, or Pigmy. Linnæus, in some of the editions of his Systema Naturæ, calls it the Homo Troglodytes. Blumenbach named it the Simia Troglodytes, and under this name the chimpanzee afterward became generally known. This—the chimpanzee-was the first species of anthropophoid ape known to the scientific world.

Later, naturalists became acquainted with another species, brought from Borneo-the orang-outang. This animal differed from the African ape in being covered with reddish-brown hair. It was called Simia satyrus.

In 1780 the skeleton of another large ape was sent from BaLavia to Holland by Baron Wurmb, the resident governor, who

DISCOVERY OF THE GORILLA.

389

called it the pongo. It received from naturalists the name Pongo Wurmbi.

Up to the year 1829, when Cuvier revised his summary of our knowledge of the animal kingdom in his Regne Animal, our knowledge of the anthropophoid apes was limited to these three species.

It was long suspected by eminent naturalists that the pongo of Wurmb was but the adult form of the orang. On the other hand, it was found that the facial angle of the young orang of Borneo, and of the young chimpanzee of Africa, by the predominant cranium and small jaws and teeth, approached nearer than any other known mammalian to the human species, and especially to the lower negro forms. This was the opinion of leading comparative anatomists, some of whom maintained that these forms belonged to or denoted separate and advanced species, until, in 1835, Professor Richard Owen, the illustrious British comparative anatomist, investigated the state of dentition of these heads, and established the fact that they belonged to the young of a larger species.

In 1812 Geoffroy St. Hilaire made the genus Troglodytes for the chimpanzee, and this classification has been adopted by all who have come after him.

Meantime there had been vague rumors of the existence in Africa of another and larger species of ape. It was not, however, till 1847 that the scientific world was startled by unexpected evidence of the existence of this new species. A skull was discovered accidentally, toward the close of the year 1846, by Rev. Dr. J. Leighton Wilson, now of New York, and then a missionary of the A. B. C. F. M. on the Gaboon, West Africa. Dr. Wilson afterward obtained another skull and part of a skeleton, which he presented to the Boston Natural History Society.

The first discovered skull Dr. Wilson presented to Dr. Savage, of Boston, who afterward procured another, the skull of a female; and from these various bones Dr. Savage and Professor Jeffries Wyman made the descriptive memoirs printed in vol. v. of the Boston Journal of Natural History, by which the existence of this new and singular animal was first announced to the scientific world.*

* Other memoirs are in vols. v. and vi. of the Bost. Jour. of Nat. Hist., by Prof. Jeffries Wyman, describing four crania and a skeleton; in vols. iii. and iv. of the Transact. of the Zoological Soc. of London, by Prof. Richard Owen, describing the

[blocks in formation]

This brings me to an examination of the accounts brought by various travelers, from Hanno down to a recent period, of an animal resembling more or less the real gorilla, and which have been supposed to allude to that animal, and to be evidence that they saw and killed it. The record of Hanno's voyage is one of the most curious fragments of antiquity remaining to us. His voyage is supposed to have taken place in the sixth century before Christ, though some critics place it at a much later period. He was sent out by the government of Carthage to circumnavigate the African continent. His journal begins with the following sentence, which sufficiently relates the object of his voyage: "It was decreed by the Carthaginians that Hanno should undertake a voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and found Lybo-Phoenician cities. He accordingly sailed with sixty ships of fifty oars each, and a body of men and women to the number of thirty thousand, with provisions and other necessaries." According to Pliny, he was to follow the coast-line of the continent till he reached the Arabian Gulf.

[ocr errors]

The passage in the Periplus, or voyage of Hanno, in which it is supposed he alludes to the animal now known as the gorilla, reads as follows: "On the third day, having sailed from thence, passing the streams of fire, we came to a bay called the Horn of the South. In the recess was an island like the first, having a lake, and in this there was another island full of wild men. But much the greater part of them were women with hairy bodies, whom the interpreters called gorillas. But pursuing them, we were not able to take the men; they all escaped from us by their great agility, being cremnobates (that is to say, climbing precipitous rocks and trees), and defending themselves by throwing stones at us. We took three women, who bit and tore those who caught them, and were unwilling to follow. We were obliged, therefore, to kill them, and took their skins off, which skins were brought to Carthage, for we did not navigate farther, provisions becoming scarce."

According to Pliny, the skins were hung in the temple of Juno,

skeleton; in vols. xxxvi. and xxxvii. of the Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, by Duvernay; and in vol. x. of the Archives du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, by Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Dr. Wyman and Dr. Savage named the new animal the gorilla, a name applied by Hanno, an old Carthaginian navigator, to the wild hairy men which he found on the coast of Africa.

HANNO DID NOT SEE THE TRUE GORILLA.

391

and the name gorillas was changed to gorgones. Two of these skins were yet in the temple at the time when Carthage was taken. "Penetravit in eas (Gorgades Insulas) Hanno Pœnorum imperator, prodiditque hirta feminarum corpora, viros pernicitate evassisse, duarumque gorgonum cutes argumenti et miraculi gratia in Junonis templo posuit, spectatas usque ut Carthaginem captam."

Comparing this account with the habits of the gorilla, as set forth farther on, I believe the reader will join me in the conclusion that the animal seen and captured by Hanno was not the gorilla of our day, though it may have been the chimpanzee. The huge gorilla consumes so great an amount of vegetable food that no considerable number could have found sustenance on an island such as Hanno mentions. Moreover, unless its habits have undergone a very great change, it is not likely that the males would have retreated and left their females in the lurch. In my experience, the male invariably advances toward the foe, and secures the safe retreat of its female, and on such occasions acts with ferocious courage. Again, to capture even a female gorilla by hand and by simple force is, I think, impossible. No one who has seen the animal in its native forests, and watched the exhibition of its enormous strength, would believe it.

It seems probable, therefore, that Hanno met only the Troglodytes niger, or chimpanzee, which is common in the mountains and forests of Senegambia, and which does not attack man. Even of this, however, I doubt if his men captured any adult specimens. They took, probably, some half-grown females, who were not active enough to get away.

Andrew Battel, an African traveler, whose adventures were taken down by Purchas, and printed in his "Pilgrims," is the first in modern times who makes mention of two different African apes, the pongo and the engeco. He was for a while prisoner to the Portuguese in Angola, and has this passage on the apes:

"The greatest of these two monsters is called pongo in their language, and the lesser is called engeco. The pongo is in all proportions like a man, for he is very tall, and hath a man's face, hollow eyed, with long haires upon his brows. His body is full of haire, but not very thicke, and it is of a dunnish color. differeth not from man but in his legs, for they have no calfe. He goeth alwaies upon his legs, and carrieth his hands clasped on

He

[blocks in formation]

the nape of his necke when he goeth upon the ground. They sleepe in trees, and build shelter for the raine. They feed upon the fruit that they find in the woods, and upon ants, for they eate no kind of flesh. They can not speake, and have no understanding more than a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night, and in the morning, when they are gone, the pongos will come and seat about the fire till it goeth out, for they have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together, and kill many negroe that travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon elephants which come to feed where they be, and so beat them with their clubbed fists and pieces of wood that they will runne roaring away from them. The pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong ten men can not hold one of them; but they take many of their young ones with poisoned arrows. The young pongo hangeth on his mother's belly with his hands fast clasped about her, so that, when the country people kill any of the females, they take the young which hangs fast upon the mother. When they die among themselves, they cover the dead with great heapes of boughs and wood, which is commonly found in the forests."*

This description of Battel seems to me the nearest correct of any down to Bowditch, of whom I am presently to speak. I be lieve that the gorilla is not found south of the Setti-Camma River, this being the last point to which I have been able to trace it. The language of the Mayomba people has some affinity to that of the Mpongwe, though greatly differing from it. The word engeco, which is applied by Battel to the smallest of the monster apes, is undoubtedly the nshiego of the Mpongwe and Camma tribes of this day. As for the word pongos, I am at a loss. It can not apply to the Mpongwe tribe, for this tribe has emigrated to the Gaboon within this century; three of the Ndina, the former possessors of the river, remaining alive to this day; and in Andrew Battel's time the Mpongwe tribe were living far in the interior, and their name was unknown, supposing them to have had even existence as a tribe then. Unfortunately, I was unacquainted with Battel's story when I was in Africa, or I should have inquired among the Mayomba people as to the origin and meaning of the name, if, indeed, any traces of the word remain after more *Purchas, His Pilgrims, Part ii., p. 984. London, 1623.

« AnteriorContinuar »