Kerri Smith

This is the Nature Pastcast, each month raiding Nature’s archive and looking at key moments in science. In this show, it’s back to the 1870s as society came face to face with its animal relatives.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Voice of Nature: John Howe

Nature, A weekly illustrated journal of science. Thursday, June 29th, 1876. Notes, page 200. During last week, a young living male gorilla was seen at Liverpool for a few days on its way to Hull, and thence to Germany. It had been brought from the West Coast of Africa by the German African Society’s Expedition, and measured three feet in height. This is the second specimen of a gorilla which has, with certainty, been seen living in this country. The first, twenty years ago, was mistaken for a chimpanzee.

[Music: The Gorilla]

Oliver Hochadel

I think it’s fair to say that at the time, all of Europe was in a kind of gorilla fever.

Monte Reel

There was a real fascination with primates and particularly the gorilla because at that time, the gorilla was considered to be man’s closest relative in the animal kingdom.

Oliver Hochadel

My name is Oliver Hochadel. I’m a historian of science and among my case studies is the history of the nineteenth-century zoo.

Monte Reel

My name is Monte Reel and I’m the author of Between Man and Beast. It’s a book about the discovery of the gorilla in the 1850s and 60s. Today, we know, for example, a chimpanzee genetically shares more in common with humans than a gorilla, but at that time based on studies of the bone structure, generally scientists agreed that the gorilla was the closest relative, and it was a new animal. It had been just very recently discovered. In 1847, the first gorilla skull had been collected and identified. Paul Du Chaillu, the explorer who was the first one to really describe gorillas in the wild, he encountered them during expeditions that he undertook first in the late 1850s. He described them as almost like monsters.

Oliver Hochadel

Strong and powerful with this wild roar.

Monte Reel

So, it really kind of titillated the imagination.

Oliver Hochadel

But no one has ever seen it – at least in Europe – so people, nations, zoos, entrepreneurs, are trying to get their hands on a live gorilla.

Monte Reel

And that interest drove some people to do some pretty incredible things. In the United States, for example, P. T. Barnum, the famous showman, in 1860 took out an advertisement saying that he was displaying an ‘animal’ that he called ‘The What Is It?’

Barnum’s Museum! Unprecedented success! Delighted audiences! 5,000 people daily. Among the curiosities is the celebrated ‘What Is it?’ pronounced by so many people to be the connecting link between man and monkey.

Monte Reel

It was really a hoax and quite a cruel hoax. Incredible as it seems today, he actually purchased a human being – it was microcephalic man who had walked with a stoop and had a large-shaped head that was kind of unique to the viewers of his expo at the time, and Barnum essentially dressed him up in a monkey suit and put him on display. They were going to these extremes to try to convince people that they had a gorilla to exploit this interest and fascination that the public had.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Monte Reel

There were all sorts of popular culture reverberations when the gorilla sort of hit the scene. There were novels that were written, there were plays that were staged, musicals, there was even a short-lived dance craze called the gorilla quadrille:

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Monte Reel

It doesn’t really surprise me that Nature would have been interested in this because a lot of the scientific journals of that time and a lot of the scientists of that time were sort of intimately involved in following these developments of specimens arriving.

Voice of Nature: John Howe

The gorilla had been brought from the West Coast of Africa by the German Africa Society’s Expedition, and measured three feet in height.

Oliver Hochadel

A German expedition that starts in about 1873, 1874, has high-floating ideas about exploring Western Africa. They were trying to explore the geography. There was even talk of crossing Africa, which was entirely a delusion and they more or less completely fail. They can’t achieve any of their goals. And rather by coincidence, one of the members of the German expedition – a physician by the name of Julius Falkenstein – receives a present from a Portuguese colleague because he had helped him, he treated him for free. And all of a sudden, what looked like a huge failure, a lot of money spent for nothing, might actually turn out to be a huge success. When they set sail in May, June, 1876, they were quite worried that the gorilla would not survive the journey as had happened with all the gorillas before, and for that very reason they hadn’t even told their German superiors about their acquisition. They were travelling with a sort of little menagerie on board, that includes antelopes, all kinds of birds. The little gorilla was actually allowed quite some freedom. He had his own bed. He could actually move freely on the ship. They had put up towels so he could swing around, so from the reports we have, it seems the gorilla had actually a fine time on that voyage and he survived, and on June 24th, 1876, the ship came into the harbour of Liverpool. When they came to Liverpool and stayed there for a couple of days in a hotel, word went around. The hotel was kind of beleaguered. People were strolling around the hotel trying to catch a glimpse.

Monte Reel

At this time, the evolution debate was very much evolving itself so there were lots of gaps in knowledge, and the gorilla was wide open to misinterpretation. The gorilla instantly became the face of the evolution debate and one person who had a lot to do with that was Richard Owen, who sort of seized on the gorilla and seized on Paul Du Chaillu’s specimens as a way to try to prove Darwin’s theory of natural selection wrong. Owen’s theory was that the gorilla could prove his idea that humans and the higher apes could not be related, that the differences in their brain structure specifically were too great to be explained by the slow workings of natural selection. He was famously opposed in making that argument by T. H. Huxley. Huxley believed that the differences between gorillas and humans were not that great and that the difference between man and a gorilla was less severe than the differences between a gorilla and lower apes, for example, lower primates. Huxley defended Darwinism and basically argued that these specimens could not disprove the theory, and those two kind of battled using the gorilla as kind of the centrepiece of their battle over Darwinism.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

(Extract from Monkeyana in the May 1861 edition of Punch)

Then Huxley and Owen,

With rivalry glowing,

With pen and ink rush to the scratch;

'Tis Brain versus Brain,

Till one of them's slain,

By JOVE! it will be a good match!

Says Owen, you can see

The brain of Chimpanzee

Is always exceedingly small,

With the hindermost "horn"

Of extremity shorn,

And no "Hippocampus" at all.

Next Huxley replies, That Owen he lies, And garbles his Latin quotation; That his facts are not new, His mistakes not a few, Detrimental to his reputation.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Oliver Hochadel

A few days after they had come to Liverpool, the German expedition took another boat that would bring them to Hamburg. At that stage, it was not clear where this young gorilla, Pongo, as the gorilla was called, this marvellous acquisition, would end up. The zoo in Hamburg tried everything in a kind of bidding war to get hold of that gorilla but after a few days in Hamburg, the expedition by train went to Berlin.

Voice of Nature: John Howe

Nature, July 13th, 1876. The living gorilla, which we referred to a fortnight ago as being at Liverpool, after travelling from Hull to Hamburg, was forwarded to Berlin in the aquarium of which city we believe it is to be deposited.

Oliver Hochadel

The aquarium was in fact an indoor zoo founded in the late 1860s. We have reports about long queues outside the aquarium. With all the pre-history and the idea of this violent beast able to kill indigenous people, this is the image people had in mind when they were talking about the gorilla. What happens? Pongo is, at that time, about two years old. He’s tiny and he is cute. Small gorillas do not have the sagittal crest yet on their skull. They will look quite different to older gorillas and far more human – the way they were behaving and interacting. For example, Pongo had a little dog that he played with in his cage in the aquarium. So, in other words, it did not meet at all the expectations at all of a wild, ferocious beast.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Voice of Nature: John Howe

Nature, November 22nd, 1877. The Berlin Aquarium suffered, on November 13th, the loss of what was certainly, from a scientific and from a financial standpoint, the most valuable zoological specimen in Europe viz., the famous gorilla Pongo, whose human-like form and playful antics became so familiar to Londoners during the last summer.

Oliver Hochadel

In November 1877, that is about 14-15 months after his arrival in Berlin, suddenly Pongo dies. There are different theories. It might have been some kind of diarrhoea. Another interpretation is that it was some kind of tuberculosis.

Voice of Nature: John Howe

The loss to the Berlin Aquarium is no small one as it had lately refused an offer of £2,500 for the animal. Not less severe is the loss to the scientific public.

Oliver Hochadel

But as soon as is well, already the day he dies, he’s being dissected in the Charité, the hospital in Berlin, and they have kind of all the soft tissue, the brain, the guts ‘fresh’, and they are particularly struck by the brain that they find hard to tell apart from the brain of a child. So, the dissection reveals even more closely the close relationship between gorillas and humans.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

I would not say that it convinced people of Darwinism – that would go too far – but the zoo provides and the apes there provide a medium for enlarging the idea, for putting it into people’s minds. By that time, the late nineteenth century, everybody understands what the ape theory means, some kind of rough version of evolutionary theory. It doesn’t mean that they’ll all convinced or anything, but the idea is now firmly in place and has to be faced somehow.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Nature, a weekly illustrated journal of science. London and New York: Macmillan and Co.

Music: The Gorilla Quadrille by Charles Handel Rand Marriott

Kerri Smith

You’ve been listening to the Nature PastCast, produced by me, Kerri Smith, and with contributions from historian Oliver Hochadel and author Monte Reel. The music you heard was the Gorilla Quadrille, composed in the 1860s by Charles Handel Marriot and performed by George Nedem, Emily Renshaw and Lorna Bradey from Simon Langton Boys School in Kent. The poem about Owen and Huxley comes from the May 1861 edition of Punch. Sound effects were provided in part by LG at freesound.org and Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com, under a Creative Commons license. Next month, Nature deals with the impacts of World War II on science.