From boyhood up Du Chaillu had heard from the natives of Gaboon fearful stories of the cunning, strength, and ferocity of this ape, which is the most dreaded animal on the west coast of Africa. For years he had longed for an opportunity to hunt the gorilla, and when he first saw its tracks, which threw his native hunters into alarm, he relates that his sensations were indescribable, his feelings so intense as to be painful, and his heart-throbs so violent that he actually feared the animal would be alarmed by them.
Du Chaillu chronicles the end of his first successful hunt as follows:
“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. The roar of the gorilla is the most singular and awful noise heard in these African woods. It begins with a sharp bark, like an angry dog, then glides into a deep bass roll, which literally and closely resembles the roll of distant thunder along the sky, for which I have sometimes been tempted to take it where I did not see the animal. So deep is it that it seems to proceed less from the mouth and throat than from the deep chest and vast paunch. 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.”
| The Gorilla. (Troglodytes Gorilla.) |
The explorer relates that flying gorillas so resembled men running for their lives, and their discordant cries seemed so human, that he felt almost like a murderer as he shot them.
Having obtained a number of specimens, he now used his utmost endeavors to obtain an ape alive, and speaks of his success as “one of the greatest pleasures of my life;” to his great grief, however, the intractable and savage brute soon died. Regarding it, Du Chaillu writes:
“Some hunters who had been out on my account brought in a young gorilla alive. I cannot describe the emotions with which I saw the struggling little brute dragged into the village. All the hardships I had endured in Africa were rewarded in that moment. It was a little fellow of between two and three years old, two feet six inches in height, and as fierce and stubborn as a grown animal could have been.”
Several were captured from time to time, but all died after short confinement. Every effort to subdue their ferocity, whether by force or by persistent kindness, utterly failed; they were never other than morose, bellicose, and treacherous.
Another very interesting animal is the nest-building ape, a before unknown species, which was discovered by our explorer almost by accident. Du Chaillu says: