Gradually the truth came forth, but not until many Europeans had wandered in Gorilla Land. One Andrew Bartlett was an English sailor, who got caught by the Portuguese for some reason or other, and was kept a prisoner in Angola, which is situated nearly ten degrees south of the line, and near the great virgin forests, which are the haunts of the Gorilla and Chimpanzee, and his “strange adventures” were published in 1625, by Purchas, in “His Pilgrimages.”
Battel speaks of two monsters which excited the fears of the natives. “The greatest is called Pongo, in their language, and the lesser is called Engeco. This Pongo is in all proportion like a man, but that he is more like a giant in stature than a man: for he is very tall and hath a man’s face, hollow eyed, with long haire upon his brows. His bodie is full of haire, but not very thick, and it is of a brownish colour. He differeth not from man but in his legs, for they have no calfe. He goeth always upon his legs, and carrieth his hands clasped on the nape of his necke, when he goeth upon the ground. They sleepe in the trees, and build shelter for the raine. They feed upon the fruit that they find in the woods, and upon nuts, for they eat no kind of flesh. They cannot speak, and have no understanding more than a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods, make fires when they sleepe in the night: and in the morning when they are gone, Pongo will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out, for they have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together and kill many negroes that travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon elephants which come to feed where they may be, and so beat them with their clubbed fists and pieces of wood that they will runne roaring away from them. These Pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong ten men cannot hold one of them; but they take many of their young ones with poisoned arrows. The young Pongo hangeth on its mother’s belly with its hands clasped about her, so that when any of the country people kill the females, they take the young which hangs fast upon his mother. When they die amongst themselves, they cover the dead with great heaps of boughs and wood, which are commonly found in the forests.”
The Pongo appears to be the Gorilla, and Battel tells much truth about it, mixed up with absurd fiction, whilst the Engeco, or as it is called by the natives of the Gaboon, the enche-eko, is the Chimpanzee.
Early in this century, in 1819, Bowdich says, in a description of a mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, “that the favourite and most extraordinary subject of conversation when in the Gaboon River was the Ingena. This is an animal like the Orang-Utan, but much exceeding it in size, being five feet high and four feet across the shoulders. Its paw was said to be even more disproportioned in its breadth, and one blow of it is said to be fatal. It is commonly seen by the natives when they travel to Kaybe, lurking in the bush to destroy passengers, not to eat them, for it feeds principally on wild honey which abounds.”
MALE GORILLA.
Sometimes, the natives assert, when a company of villagers are moving rapidly through the shades of the forest, they become aware of the presence of the formidable Ape by the sudden disappearance of one of their companions, who is hoisted up into a tree, uttering, perhaps, only a short choking sob. In a few minutes he falls to the ground a strangled corpse, for the animal, watching his opportunity, has let down his huge hind-hand and seized the passing negro by the neck with a vice-like grip, and has drawn him up into the branches, dropping him when life and struggling have ceased.
FEMALE GORILLA AND YOUNG. (From the Transactions of the Zoological Society of London.)
The missionaries, when they were established in the Gaboon region, found that all along the coast the Gorillas were believed by the natives to be human beings, members of their own race degenerated. Some natives who had been a little civilised, and who thought a little more than the rest, did not acknowledge this relationship, but considered them as embodied spirits, the belief in the transmigration of souls being prevalent. They said that the enche-eko, or Chimpanzee, has the spirit of a coastman, being less fierce and more intelligent than the enge-ena, or Gorilla, which has that of a bushman. The majority, however, fully believed them to be men, and seemed to be unaffected by the arguments offered to disprove this fancy; and this was especially true of the tribes in the immediate vicinity of the locality. They believed them to be literally wild men of the woods. Nevertheless, they were eaten when they could be got, and their flesh, with that of the Chimpanzee and other Monkeys, formed and still forms a prominent place in the bill of fare.