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If subtraction be made of what was known before, the sum and substance of what M. Du Chaillu has affirmed as a matter of his own observation respecting the Gorilla, is, that, in advancing to the attack, the great brute beats his chest with his fists. I confess I see nothing very improbable, or very much worth disputing about, in this statement.
A man is bound to know whither he goes, hang it all! and not fly off like a bird. Before anything else, the Tarasconian wanted to peruse the accounts of great African tourists, the narrations of Mungo Park, Du Chaillu, Dr. Livingstone, Stanley, and so on.
It is to be presumed that careful dredging will bring to light many more: the pools are said to produce a small black fish, local as the Proteus anguineus of the Styrian caves, to mention no other. I was curious to hear from Mr. Mackey some details about the Muni River, where he travelled in company with M. du Chaillu.
Among the first stands Burton, who ranks as a great traveller in all parts of the world, and who, besides his trip on Lake Tanganyika, has visited Dahomy, the Cameroon Mountains, Abeokuta, and many other places. We regret to have to omit the travels and wonderful adventures of Du Chaillu through the gorilla country and other portions of tropical Africa.
I will therefore close it by mentioning this strange belief that Du Chaillu asserts exists among the African warriors: “The charmed leopard’s skin worn about the warrior’s middle is supposed to render that worthy spear-proof.” Let us now take a brief retrospective glance at the FACTS mentioned in the foregoing pages.
But this has been encroached upon year after year, on the South by Livingstone and Cumming, on the North by Barth, on the East by Barton, and on the West by Wilson and Du Chaillu, until the discoveries have almost touched each other.
Battel had evidently not seen the animal, and with his negro informants he confounds the gorilla and the "bushman;" yet he possibly alludes to a species which has escaped M. du Chaillu and other modern observers. Mr. Here we find distinct mention of three anthropoid apes.
The incidental mention which the missionary traveller, Livingstone, makes of his thirty-seventh attack of fever, and Du Chaillu of his fiftieth, and the exhaustion of the last of fourteen ounces of quinine which he had taken on his journey, are ominous of the inhospitable reception which the country gives. But as soon as the traveller passes inland he comes into an entirely different region.
For instance, Africans believe, not in soul nor in spirit, but in ghost; when they called M. du Chaillu a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe.
THE VIKING AGE, H. F. Du Chaillu, 1889. The Hansa THE HANSA TOWNS, H. Zimmerman, 1889. CAMBRIDGE MODERN HISTORY, Vols. I and II. Dutch Sea Power Ruth Putnam, 1898-1912. HISTORY OF COMMERCE IN EUROPE, W. H. Gibbins, 1917. THE SEA BEGGARS, Dingman Versteg, 1901. H. H. Frost, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, January, 1919.
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