In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

CHAPTER XIV IS THE GORILLA ALMOST A MAN?

When Herbert Bradley and I started down from Mt. Mikeno to join the ladies of our party at the Mission of the White Friars we had the skeletons, skins, and measurements of four adult gorillas and the mummified carcass and skin of a baby. I had made death masks of them all and likewise some plaster casts of their feet and hands. I also had 300 or 400 feet of film showing wild gorillas in action, and some general observations of the gorilla's habits in the mountains of the Lake Kivu region on the eastern border of the Belgian Congo in Central Africa. I had the material for which I had come to Africa—material sufficient to make a correct group of gorillas for the proposed Roosevelt African Hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York—but I also had a great deal more, a vision of how to study this animal which is man's nearest relative.

As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man.

I have taken some pains in describing my adventures with the gorillas of Mikeno to show that they were not ferocious. I do not believe that they ever are ferocious, nor do I believe that they will ever attack man except when hard pressed and in self-defence. I think I can also explain why the gorilla has his aggressive reputation. I am going to quote one of Paul du Chaillu's adventures[2] with gorillas and in the quotation put in brackets what Du Chaillu felt, leaving outside the brackets what the gorilla did. If you read the tale as Du Chaillu wrote it, it gives an impression that the gorilla is a terrible animal. If you read merely what the gorilla did, you will see that he did nothing that a domestic dog might not have done under the same circumstances.

Then the underbrush swayed rapidly just ahead, and presently before us stood an immense male gorilla. He had gone through the jungle on his all-fours; but when he saw our party he erected himself and looked us [boldly] in the face. He stood about a dozen yards from us [and was a sight I think never to forget]. Nearly six feet high (he proved two inches shorter), with immense body, huge chest, and great muscular arms, with [fiercely glaring] large deep gray eyes [and a hellish expression of face, which seemed to me like some nightmare vision]: thus stood before us this king of the African forests.

He was not afraid of us. He stood there, and beat his breast with his huge fists till it resounded like an immense bass-drum [which is their mode of offering defiance]; meantime giving vent to roar after roar....

[His eyes began to flash fiercer fire as] we stood motionless on the defensive, and the crest of short hair which stands on his forehead began to twitch rapidly up and down, while his powerful teeth (fangs) were shown as he again sent forth a thunderous roar. [And now truly he reminded me of nothing but some hellish dream creature—a being of that hideous order, half man, half beast, which we find pictured by old artists in some representations of the infernal regions.] He advanced a few steps—then stopped to utter that [hideous] roar again—advanced again, and finally stopped when at a distance of about six yards from us. And here, as he began another of his roars and beating his breast [in rage], we fired, and killed him.

With a groan [which had something terribly human in it, and yet was full of brutishness], it fell forward on its face. The body shook convulsively for a few minutes, the limbs moved about in a struggling way, and then all was quiet—death had done its work, and I had leisure to examine the huge body. It proved to be five feet eight inches high, and the muscular development of the arms and breast showed what immense strength it had possessed.

These facts are no doubt accurate. Du Chaillu and his men pursued a gorilla in the forest. When they came too close he roared at them. I have seen little monkeys scold an intruder in similar fashion. His face twitched and he beat his breast. My motion picture shows a gorilla beating her breast when not at all mad. The gorilla advanced on them not in a ferocious rush but hesitatingly a few steps at a time. They shot it.

I don't blame Du Chaillu for feeling the way he did, for, under the circumstances in which he hunted the gorilla, most people would have had even much worse feelings than he had. Then, too, when Du Chaillu wrote, tales of African exploration were under an unwholesome pressure comparable to that to which African motion pictures are being subjected to-day. I have it on reliable authority that Du Chaillu was twice requested to revise his manuscript before his publishers considered it exciting enough to be of general interest. All I want to point out is that the gorilla should be judged by what he does, not by how the people that hunt him feel.

And it is of more importance to judge the gorilla correctly than any other animal for he is unquestionably the nearest akin to man. Most scientists agree that man and the gorilla had common or at any rate similar ancestors. Since that time man has passed through the dawn of intelligence and developed the power to reason and to speak. But how he developed these powers no one knows. The gorilla has not these powers, but he has so many other likenesses to man that there is no telling how near he is to the dawn of intelligence.

In the whole doctrine of evolution there is no one subject more interesting or likely to be more fruitful to study than the gorilla. He presents most important opportunities to the students of comparative anatomy, to the psychologists, to the many kinds of specialists in medicine, not to mention the students of natural history.

It is very commonly stated, in the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, for example, that the gorilla "lives mostly in trees." Unquestionably this is true of the chimpanzee but I do not think it true of the gorilla. I believe that he has nearly passed out of the arboreal phase of life and is perhaps entering the upright phase and that he is the only animal except man that has achieved this distinction. To stand erect and balanced, an animal needs heels. The plaster cast of the gorilla's foot shown in the accompanying illustration is ocular evidence of what science has long known—that the gorilla has developed a heel. Moreover, the scientists who studied the body of John Daniel, the young captive gorilla that died in New York, discovered that, unlike any other animal, the gorilla has the same full complement of foot muscles which enables man to walk upright. The gorillas I saw in Africa always touched both their feet and hands to the ground in running but most of the weight was on their feet. Their legs are short, their arms long, and they carry the body at an angle of 45 degrees forward. They do not, however, put their hands down flat and rest their full weight on them. They seem to be evolving toward a two-legged animal. And if they spent most of their time in trees they would not have developed heels and leg muscles for walking upright on the ground.

Not only has the gorilla developed a heel, but his big toe is much nearer like man's than that of any other animal. This may seem a small matter, but a big toe that turns out from the foot as a thumb does from the hand can grasp branches and is useful in climbing. A big toe that is parallel with the other toes is useful for walking but not for climbing.

But the gorilla has not lost all his arboreal characteristics by any means. The length, size, and strength of his arms are evidence of the tree-climbing habits of his ancestors. I know that a gorilla can now climb with more ease than the average man. But I only once saw gorillas in trees and that was when I was taking the moving picture of a mother and two youngsters, and an active man could have walked up the inclined trees these gorillas were on about as easily as they did. Nor did I see any evidences of their having been in trees. The German, Eduard Reichenow, who observed gorillas in this same area, agrees that the gorilla is seldom in trees:

While travelling, both kinds of apes (the gorilla and the chimpanzee) move on the ground; yet the gorilla is much more a stranger to tree living than the chimpanzee.... If the gorilla climbs a tree in search of food, he again climbs down the same trunk. Also at the approach of danger he is not capable of swinging himself from tree to tree as the chimpanzee does.

The hand of the gorilla is as interesting to me as his foot. If you look at the illustration of the plaster cast you will see that it looks much like a man's, fingernails and all. You will see that the fingers are bent over. When running he puts his knuckles on the ground. It is a peculiarity of the gorilla that when his arms are extended his fingers are always bent over. He can't straighten them out except when his wrist is bent. I can take the hand of the mummified baby gorilla when its wrist is bent and put it over a stick and then straighten his wrist and his fingers will close over the stick so that I can lift him off the ground and hang him up in this fashion. I suppose that this peculiar characteristic is a legacy of his arboreal life which has not left him even in all the years he has been developing heels, muscles, and toes which are good for ground work only.

I am certain that these Central African gorillas have practically abandoned arboreal habits. Whether the gorillas of the lower country of the west coast have done so likewise I do not know from personal observation. Du Chaillu reported that they did not climb for food nor did they make their nests in trees in that region.

It has been so commonly reported, however, that the Century Dictionary states that "gorillas make a sleeping place like a hammock connecting the thickly leafed part of a tree by means of the long, tough, slender stems of parasitic plants, and line it with the broad dried fronds of palms or with long grass. This hammock-like abode is constructed at different heights from ten to forty feet from the ground."

I cannot help believing that this report arises from a confusion with the chimpanzee habits. The chimpanzee is not strong enough to fight a leopard. Consequently, he has to sleep out of reach of this foe. The gorilla, on the other hand, has no foe but man. No flesh-eating animal in his territory is large enough to harm him. The gorilla is a vegetarian, so he kills no animals for food, and he has not progressed sufficiently along the paths of man to enjoy killing as a sport. He lives in amity with the elephants, buffalo, and all the wild creatures of his neighbourhood, and in the Mikeno region the natives drive their cattle into the gorilla's mountains in the dry season of the year without molestation.

Altogether, then, as the gorilla has no enemies, he has no need to fashion himself a bed out of harm's way. All the gorilla beds I saw were on the ground. They consisted of a pile of leaves, about what the long arms of a gorilla could pull together without moving. I saw no signs of their occupying these hastily constructed sleeping places more than once.

The gorilla makes no abode, has no clothes, uses no tools, unless grasping a stick may indicate the beginnings of such an idea. It is still before the dawn of intelligence with him. Yet scientists tell me that he has the palate and muscles that enable man to talk. In spite of Mr. Garner the gorilla cannot talk, but no one knows how near to it he is. Probably he is a very long way from speech. Of course, a parrot can be taught to talk, but a parrot has no brains to speak of, so that his talking is of no significance. But recent studies of the brain of John Daniel seem to place his brain about on a par with that of a two-year-old child. Now a two-year-old child can both talk and think. If the gorilla with his child's brain could learn to use his voice even like a parrot, we should have come very near to having a contemporaneous "missing link." This, of course, is very unlikely to happen and it is not necessary, for science can make deductions from the gorilla's brain, muscle, habits, etc., which will enable us to understand more of the gorilla's significance for evolution without such a spectacular event as his acquiring speech. I mention such a thing merely as an unscientific way of trying to dramatize the importance of the study of the gorilla.

Of course it does not follow that because the gorilla's palate and muscles are like man's that he will be able to talk or pass out of the barking or roaring phase. The gorilla has what might be called "roaring pouches" that extend down the side of his neck. It is an interesting fact that there is evidence of these same pouches in man, although they are nearly atrophied from long disuse. It seems, therefore, that even if the gorilla does not learn man's speech, man at one time used the gorilla's roar or one of his own.

Man differs from most animals in the amount of variation in the different members of the species. The skull measurements of half-a-dozen lions, for example, will be much more nearly uniform than the skulls of half-a-dozen men. In this particular the gorilla is like man. Their skulls show great variation. The gorilla skulls I brought back will exemplify this. The death masks of these gorillas show another interesting thing which I never noticed until I put the masks of the animals shot on Mt. Mikeno in one group and those shot on Mt. Karisimbi in another. The male and female of Mikeno resemble each other more nearly than either of them do any of the Karisimbi gorillas. Likewise the three Karisimbi gorillas have features more alike than any of them are like either of the Mikeno faces. Whether these are family resemblances or whether they arise from geography, which seems doubtful, as the mountains merge in a saddle at between 10,000 and 11,000 feet, or whether it is accidental I do not know. But the fact suggests a line of study.

I did not see a gorilla in infancy, but there are two interesting accounts of travellers in this region who have seen them. Reichenow says:

I was successful on the hunt to capture an animal only a few days old. It weighed only 2 kg., therefore considerably less than a newborn human child, while an old gorilla considerably exceeds an outgrown man in weight. The whole body of the little gorilla was sparsely covered with hair so that it almost appeared naked; only on the crown of its head there arose straight up a tuft of long brown hairs. This manner of hair growth gave the little ape a particularly human appearance.

When one saw the little being, which flourished beautifully at the breast of a Negro nurse, in its helplessness, one had to become convinced that the gorilla nursling needs the greatest care and attention on the part of its mother. On the soft high bed the mother can well cover with her body the tiny young one which is in great need of warmth, without its running a chance of being crushed by her heavy body.

Late in 1919 I received a letter from an English hunter, Mr. C. D. Foster, which contained the following paragraphs concerning a gorilla hunt on Mt. Mikeno:

I noticed that the nearest gorilla was holding a very small one in her arms. I shot and wounded her and she came toward me still holding the young one. I shot again and she dropped. The rest, by this time, were just disappearing, and having shot two good specimens I did not try to follow them.

I approached the female gorilla and found her lying stomach down resting on her elbows and still clasping the young one. She was evidently nearly dead and I took a photo of her in this position. I then waited for her to die which she did within a few minutes, so I went up to her and took away the baby gorilla which was quite uninjured and apparently was not more than 24 hours old.... The baby gorilla (a female) is now two months old and in the best of health and weighs nine pounds. She has cut six teeth and the only ailment she has had was a cold which she evidently caught from me and which she recovered from very quickly. She does not show any signs of walking yet and up till now I have fed her entirely on cow's and goat's milk and occasionally, when fresh milk was unobtainable, on canned milk.

P. S. Since writing the above, which has been unavoidably delayed in mailing, the young one which I mentioned has died; at the time of her death she was just over three months old.

One of the most interesting facts in this account of Foster's is the fact that the baby gorilla caught cold from him. Animals usually do not catch man's diseases. Seemingly the gorilla is near enough man to contract at least some of them. Probably he is not immunized against any contagious diseases. This free-of-disease state, if it exists, will make him a unique pathological study. And certainly the gorilla differs from other animals in his freedom from parasitical disease. I did not have an opportunity to study him with a microscope, but he is the only wild animal in Africa that I have ever skinned and cut up for scientific purposes that had no visible signs of parasites on him or in him.

Reichenow also has made some deductions about the family life of gorillas in the Mikeno region which are interesting. "The sleeping plans of the members of a gorilla company," he says, "do not lie irregularly near each other but we find them joined in groups of two, three, or four, which lets us clearly recognize that within the herd there exists a division according to families. The nests of a family lie close to each other and are from eight to fifteen meters away from the neighbouring group, so that the various groups seemed closed off from each other by the thick riot of plants, like various dwellings. From the size of the nests we see that always only two of them belong to adult animals; if there are more nests present, these are always smaller and therefore belong to the half-grown young. From this observation we get the noteworthy fact that the gorilla lives in monogamy."

I cannot say that my observations corroborate this deduction. In one of the bands I saw there were three adult males. They might under his theory have been heads of three families. But in the other band there was but one male and several females. The extra females may have been spinster aunts of the family, but on the other hand, it might just as well have been a case of polygamy. The truth is that people know little about the habits of the gorilla. Really to know about an animal requires long and intimate study. Comparatively few people have even shot gorillas. Gorilla skeletons, even, have not been common for study like those of other animals. The avidity with which the doctors of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York seized upon the body of John Daniel shows both how rare and how important the opportunity to study the gorilla is to the science of medicine as well as to that of comparative anatomy. And even less of study has been given the gorilla's living habits than has been devoted to his dead body and bones. Most of the information which man can get of and from this nearest relative in the animal kingdom is still to be had. But unless some measures are quickly taken to get this information, the opportunity will be lost. The gorilla is on his way to extinction. He is not particularly numerous. He is neither wary nor dangerous. He is an easy and highly prized prey to the "sporting" instinct.

As I travelled down from Mikeno toward the White Friars' Mission the fascinating possibilities of the study of the gorilla and its immense scientific importance filled my mind along with the fear that his extinction would come before adequate study was made. These considerations materially led my mind to the idea of a gorilla sanctuary; and I realized that a better place than the one I had just left could hardly be hoped for. The three mountains, Mikeno, Karisimbi, and Visoke stand up in a triangle by themselves. Their peaks are about four miles apart. On the slopes of these mountains, in the bamboos and in the dense forest, there are several bands of gorillas. I judge that there are between fifty and one hundred animals altogether. In all probability the animals in this region stay on these three mountains. Such is the belief of the natives, and it is a reasonable belief because if they left these peaks they would have to travel very considerable distances to find similar security and food supplies elsewhere. This being true the three peaks can become a gorilla sanctuary by the simple expedient of preventing hunters from invading them.

It has been proved over and over again that animals very quickly learn to remain in places where they are safe from hunting. Likewise in those places animals soon learn to accept man without fear just as they do other animals. The case of the bears in the Yellowstone Park is known to everyone. At Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, protection has led even so shy an animal as the mountain sheep to accept man enough to be photographed at short distances. Were the gorillas on the three peaks protected I am certain that in a very short time they would become so accustomed to man that they could be studied in their native surroundings in a way that would rapidly produce most interesting and important scientific results.

This sanctuary would not interfere with any other activity in the country. The gorilla range is not fit for agriculture. The natives use it now as a source for firewood and a grazing ground for their cattle. It could continue to be put to these uses as far as the gorillas would be concerned. Elephants, buffaloes, and other animals might flock into the sanctuary so as to become something of a problem, but their numbers could be kept down without disturbing the gorillas' sense of security.

To create this sanctuary would be comparatively easy and inexpensive. I think it would require first of all that the sanctuary be bounded by a road. I do not think it would be necessary to fence the sanctuary for I believe the gorillas would stay inside its limits. The road would be chiefly for police purposes to make it easier to be sure that hunters stayed outside. The policing of the road could be done by the natives. As the pay of such a policeman is about five cents a day, the maintenance of the force is not a great matter.

Besides the road and the police the sanctuary would need a few trails and a station to consist of a residence for a white director of the sanctuary, living quarters for the scientists, enough servants to keep the station going, and a simple field laboratory. Neither the building nor maintenance for such an institution would be expensive in Central Africa. I know of no other effort of so moderate a size likely to lead to such immediate and valuable scientific results. Moreover, if the study of the gorilla is not made in some such way as this now, it is not likely that it will ever be made at all. If three more gentlemen like the Prince of Sweden go into the Mikeno region there will be no gorillas left there. Gorillas were originally discovered on the west coast and they have been reported at various places across Central Africa from the west coast to the Mikeno region, but in no region are they numerous; and if they should succeed the lion and the elephant as the "correct" thing to shoot, their extinction would be but a matter of a very few years.

On the other hand, a very few years of study by a succession of scientific men from the best institutions would unquestionably produce far-reaching results.