Du Chaillu tells us that the male gorilla is unmolested except by man, and also that he has never known a full-grown male to retreat upon his approach, or to act otherwise than as recorded in the foregoing narratives. Now gorillas live “in the loneliest and darkest portions of the dense African jungle,” and to many of them man must be unknown till he seeks them out for their destruction. As a rule, when a male is discovered it is sitting with its back against a tree—in the way I have pictured it in my imagined scene of rivalry—whilst at least one female feeds about, in its near neighbourhood. Perhaps there will be a young one sitting on the ground, or clinging to its mother’s breast. Now when, for the first time in its experience, a man intrudes thus upon a gorilla’s domestic privacy, and it rises and advances upon him, for what does it take him? Most probably, as it appears to me, for another and a rival gorilla—thus more than returning the “half-man” compliment paid it by Du Chaillu.
There is good evidence that monkeys of all sorts see, in ourselves, but a larger species of monkey, and even the various expressions of the human countenance seem, in some degree, intelligible to them. The gorilla sees suddenly before him, in the gloom of the forest, a creature of the same general shape as himself—of his own colour, too, for his skin is black, and so is that of a negro—whilst in size it, at least, approaches him. Minor differences, such as an unaccustomed slenderness of build, and an inferior development of jaws and teeth, are, probably, but imperfectly grasped. A peculiarly weak and weedy-looking gorilla, that, no doubt, is the general effect produced; but the masculine character is stamped upon the figure, and its approach suggests rivalry. All the details of the male gorilla’s behaviour, on the occasion of these rencontres—as narrated by Du Chaillu—are explained on the above supposition. We can see now, at once, why he does not seek safety in flight, for such a retreat would both derogate from his honour, nor does it seem to be necessary. If, indeed, he saw and smelt man, as any four-footed creature sees and smells him—but instead of that it is only another gorilla that he has to do with—an inferior and less agreeably smelling one, no doubt—a degenerate—but still presuming to rival him in the affections of his spouse. Upon this hint he acts, and is, in consequence, shot by the being that he takes for a very sorry specimen of his own species.
A Gorilla Fight in the Forest.
Space will not allow me to supplement this slight account of the gorilla with a few remarks about those two other large apes—the orang-utan and chimpanzee—which, with himself, make the three nearest approaches to the human species. Indeed, there are not very many remarks to be made, for our knowledge of these most interesting creatures is contained, for the most part, in certain horrid descriptions of the way in which they act when shot; complacent accounts—innocently worded, cheerfully told—of what are really little better than so many cold-blooded, hard-hearted murders. Everything, almost, that we have heard at first hand, has been in connection with these barbarous proceedings—how mothers, for instance, behave when shot with their infants clinging to them, or how the infants act when they find their mothers are dead: how one mias or pappan will weave branches together, to sit upon, whilst it is shot at, and another make a shift to continue alive with legs and arms broken, the spine shattered, and all sorts of other more or less important parts injured in varying degrees: bullets flattened, here and there, too—in the neck or jaws—as lesser, though still piquant additions—enjoyable side-dishes—to the main feast of maimings and manglings.
“Tenacity of life”—“Extraordinary tenacity of life”—is the scientific heading under which cases of the last kind fall, and everyone must have noticed the strange and horrid sort of pleasure with which they are always recorded by those responsible for them—how their spirits seem to rise as the list of injuries grows longer—“the more the merrier,” in fact, and the more harrowing the more welcome. This is what anyone interested in the ways of wild animals has to go through when he seeks for knowledge concerning them—life written very small indeed, and death, with contortions, in great flaring capital letters. Seldom, indeed, do we get the light and joy of the one unclouded by the gloom of the other. As Lady Macbeth says, “Here’s the smell of the blood still.” It is, I own, a mystery to me how a civilised man can deliberately kill a monkey even—much less one of the higher apes. There are many, indeed, who having shot a monkey once, have been so thoroughly upset by its reproachful and very human-like actions that they have resolved never to do so again; but as it is better to be warned through others than by one’s own experience, I will conclude this small work by giving two striking cases of this kind, both of which are quoted by Professor Romanes in his interesting Animal Intelligence.
“I was once,” says Captain Johnson—to take the first of these—“one of a party of Jeekary, in the Babor district; our tents were pitched in a large mango garden, and our horses were piquetted in the same garden, a little distance off. When we were at dinner a Syer came to us, complaining that some of the horses had broken loose, in consequence of being frightened by monkeys (i.e. Macacus rhesus) on the trees. As soon as dinner was over I went out with my gun, to drive them off, and I fired with small shot at one of them, which instantly ran down to the lowest branch of the tree, as if he were going to fly at me, stopped suddenly, and coolly put his paw to the part wounded, covered with blood, and held it out for me to see. I was so much hurt at the time that it has left an impression never to be effaced, and I have never since fired a gun at any of the tribe.”
The second case is to be found recorded by Sir W. Hoste in his Memoirs, and is thus alluded to by Jesse in Gleanings from Natural History: “One of his officers, coming home after a long day’s shooting, saw a female monkey running along the rocks, with her young one in her arms. He immediately fired, and the animal fell. On his coming up, she grasped her little one close to her breast, and with her other hand pointed to the wound which the ball had made, and which had entered above her breast. Dipping her finger in the blood, and then holding it up, she seemed to reproach him with being the cause of her death, and consequently that of the young one, to which she frequently pointed. ‘I never,’ says Sir William, ‘felt so much as when I heard the story, and I determined never to shoot one of these animals as long as I lived.’”
Monkeys are supposed to be less intelligent than men; and yet I never heard of a soldier, shot down in battle, reproaching in this dumb but dreadful way the king or cabinet ministers who had sent him out to be killed. But then, when one comes to think of it, it is not quite such an easy thing for soldiers to do as it is for monkeys. Many a poor fellow, perhaps, may have had it in his mind, and even got his finger ready; but when he looked round, just before dying, for his king or his emperor or the cabinet ministers—why, they were not there, so what would have been the use of holding it up?