Monster and Kin, The Gorilla as a Mirror for Humanity

“ Thus, when young men of the Gaboon tribe make excursions into the forests in quest of ivory, the enemy they most dread to meet is the Gorilla. If they have come unawares too near him with his family, he does not, like the lion, sulkily retreat, but comes rapidly to the attack, swinging down to the lower branches, and clutching at the nearest foe. The hideous aspect of the animal, with his green eyes flashing with rage, is heightened by the skin over the orbits and eyebrows being drawn rapidly backwards and forwards, with the hair erected, producing a horrible and fiendish scowl. ”

“ The Gorilla is much dreaded by the negroes who have to pass through the forests frequented by him when engaged in hunting the Elephant; this is not on account of his teeth, although they are sufficiently formidable, but of the enormous strength of his hands, with which he can strangle a man in a moment, and it is even said that the old males never miss an opportunity of performing this operation. It is even said, that as a party of hunters is passing through the forest, one of their number will sometimes disappear suddenly, being caught up by a Gorilla lurking upon the low branches of a tree ”

“ But we must believe that this ape, if provoked or wounded, is a terrible foe, capable of ripping open a man with one stroke of its paw, or of cracking the skull of a hunter as easily as a squirrel cracks a nut. There is a tale of a tribe that kept an enormous gorilla as executioner, which tore its victims to pieces, until an Englishman, doomed to meet it, noticing a large swelling near its ribs, killed it with a heavy blow or two on the weak spot. ”

“ But the researches of this indefatigable and intrepid explorer have proved that the gorilla is, as the negroes reported him to be, a most terrible animal to encounter. When found, he often comes forward to meet the hunter, roaring like a great lion, and beating his breast in defiance. If a rifle-ball does not quickly put an end to him, he will rush upon his assailants, and one blow from his powerful arm will be enough to stretch a man senseless or dead upon the ground. ”

“ The spear is necessarily the principal weapon employed, as the arrow, even though poisoned, does not kill at once, and the gorilla is only incited by the pain of a wound to attack the man who inflicted it. Their fear of the animal is also increased by the superstition which has already been mentioned, that a man is sometimes transformed into a gorilla, and becomes thereby a sort of sylvan demon, who cannot be killed—at all events, by a black man—and who is possessed with a thirst for killing every human being that he meets. ”

“ Again, the baboon is thickly clothed with hair, and goes erect a part of his time. Advancing still higher in the scale, the ourang-outang is less thickly covered with hair, and goes erect most altogether. Still advancing higher in the scale, the gorilla has still less hair, and is of a black skin, and goes erect when moving about. A recent traveler in Africa states that the gorilla frequently steals the negro women and girls, and carry them off for wives. It is thus seen that the gradation, from the monkey up to the negro, is in philosophical juxtaposition, in God's order of creation. ”

“ Raising the fainting girl in his strong arms, the hairy monster rushed down the stairs, astounding the coming firemen with the sight of a ferocious gorilla carrying off a respectable young lady, whose flaxen curls lay lovingly over the dreadful shoulders of the beast, which, with ludicrous failure, endeavored to caress the pallid face of the young lady with his hairy jaws, stiff with padding and whalebone, and nicely lined with blood-red velvet. ”

“ Next instant the bushes in front of us were torn aside, and the most horrible monster I ever saw, or hope to set eyes on, stood before us.
He was evidently one of the largest-sized gorillas. In the gloom of the forest he appeared to us to be above six feet high. His jet-black visage was working with an expression of rage that was fearfully satanic. His eyes glared horribly. The tuft of hair on the top of his head rose and fell with the working of his low wrinkled forehead in a manner that peculiarly enhanced the ferocity of his expression. ”

“ Just as he raised it to fire, the gorilla dashed it out of his hands, the gun going off in the fall; then in an instant, and with a terrible roar, the animal gave him a tremendous blow with its immense open paw, frightfully lacerating the [325] abdomen, and with this single blow laying bare part of the intestines. As he sank bleeding to the ground the monster seized the gun, and the poor hunter thought he would have his brains dashed out with it. But the gorilla seems to have looked upon this also as an enemy, and in his rage almost flattened the barrel between his strong jaws. ”

“ The Gorilla is a poor devil ape, not a "hellish dream-creature, half man, half beast." He is not king of the African forest; he fears the Njego or leopard and, as lions will not live in these wet, wooded, and gameless lands, he can hardly have expelled King Leo. He does not choose the "darkest, gloomiest forests," but prefers the thin woods, where he finds wild fruits for himself and family. His tremendous roar does not shake the jungle: it is a hollow apish cry, a loudish huhh! ”

“ Around the male gorilla, on account of its enormous size and strength, coupled in recent years with frequent lapses from grace provoked by unnecessary and undue interference, there has been woven and unfortunately published a fantasy of inaccuracy and exaggeration—so much so that the very homely old male is visualized as an object of dread. The male gorilla, as the family head, is most solicitous for the welfare of his wives and children—a very human trait. ”

“ One man walking through the jungle will make more noise than half a dozen gorillas make. The gorilla almost always sees and hears a man before he is seen or heard by him. He is shy and will not attack a man unless wounded or provoked to it. He is always on the alert for danger and rarely comes into the open parts of the bush except for food. He can conceal himself with more ease than a man can and has every advantage in making his escape. I do not believe that he will ever approach a man if he can evade him, but I quite believe that he will make a strong defense if surprised or attacked. ”

“ Unless attacked at close range in the forest the great apes are not dangerous to man. When attacked they fight like human toughs, by biting and scratching. They do not fight with clubs, as has been reported. When fighting each other the old males bite chunks out of the faces and the fingers and toes of their adversaries.
The Orang-Utan, Chimpanzee and Gorilla are our three largest apes. The Orang is brown-skinned, like the Malays are in the country he comes from ”

“ Garner furthermore believes that we have little understanding of the gorilla, and points out that these animals have a very happy and harmonious home life, the father being highly domestic and delighting in the company of his wife and children. It is not uncommon to find five or six generations in a certain district of the jungle.
Their near kin, the chimpanzees, are equally clannish, but more musical. They come down from the branches of the trees, seating themselves on the dry leaves and assembling like an orchestra. ”

“ And Gorilla’s hunger grew on him, until his paunch became like an empty sack, and what with his hunger and grief and rage, and furious raving and racing about, his strength was at last quite exhausted, and the end of him was that on the fifth day he fell from weakness across the threshold of the chief’s house, which he had chosen to make his nest, and there died. ”

“ Another thing which is necessary is to entertain or amuse the apes in some way, otherwise they become despondent and gloomy. It is believed by those who are familiar with these creatures that loneliness or solitude is a fruitful cause of death. This is especially true of the gorilla. ”

“ Apparently they did; and Stringer actually had the temerity to reach out a hairy arm and stroke his gorilla on the head. The poor brute shut its eyes in mild contentment.
Could anything have been more pitiably human than this great monster succumbing to such a kindly caress? Were not all those stories of the untamable ferocity of the male gorilla merely due to ignorance and superstition? Were these animals any more malignant and [Pg 210] savage than we should be, had we to face the same daily perils of life in the jungle? ”

“ That this is so, we see most clearly when we consider the family life of the anthropoid or manlike apes—man's nearest cousins in the animal world. All of these apes, of which the chief representatives are the gorilla, orangutan, and the chimpanzee, live in relatively permanent family groups, usually monogamous. These family groups are quite human in many of their characteristics, such as the care which the male parent gives to the mother and her offspring, and the seeming affection which exists between all members of the group. ”

“ The gorilla is evidently polygamous, but when he once adopts a wife she remains so for years, and a certain degree of marital fidelity is observed. The same practice prevails with the natives, with one exception in favor of the gorilla, and that is that I have never heard of one selling one of his wives, which the natives frequently do. ”

“ The fact that man is an actual relative and descendant of the ape is one of the most disagreeable of the many distasteful truths which the human mind in its evolution has come upon. To a vanity puffed, as is that of human beings, to the splitting, the consanguinity of gorilla and gentleman seems horrible. Man prefers to have arrived on the earth by way of a ladder let down by his imagination from the celestial concave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Du Chaillu says that the gorilla skeleton, the skull excepted, resembles the bony frame of man more than does that of any other anthropoid ape. The form and proportion of the pelvis, the number of ribs, the length of the arm, the width of the hand, and the structure and arches of the feet—all these characteristics and some of its habits, appeared to the hunter and explorer to place the gorilla nearer to man than any other anthropoid ape is placed. ”

“ No respectable gorilla, of well-regulated mind, can contemplate it without horror. But the truth must be told sometimes; and the time has come when we must confess that man, weak, born without clothes—cruel, cowardly, and ungrateful man—is of our family; very remotely, I am happy to say, a kind of ten thousandth cousin, but still a direct descendant of our progenitors. From the high estate of gorilla-hood he has descended to that of manhood; and we are in a measure disgraced by his humiliation. This is the fall of man—that he has descended from monkey-hood to humanity. ”

“ But chiefly we have been upon a voyage of discovery, and it ought to be evident now, if it has [Pg 171] never been evident before, that we cannot possibly solve the problem because its most important aspects are not social but human. They have their roots in man’s ironic predicament between gorilla and angel, a predicament perfectly typified by the fact that as he grows critical he realizes that love is at once sublime and obscene and that only by walking a spiritual tight-rope above the abysses can he be said to live at all in any true sense. ”

“ Perhaps some crumbs of comfort may be found by the reactionists in the fact that it is not held by Professor Haeckel, or by any other competent authority, that the link which pithecanthropus supplies welds man directly with any existing man-ape—with gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang. It is held that these highest existing apes are side branches, so to say, of the ancestral tree, who developed, in their several ways, contemporaneously with our direct ancestors, but are not themselves directly of the royal line. ”

“ Apes were formerly considered as a degenerated cast of mankind, because some of them, such as the troglodytes, or the African wood-man, and the ourang-outang, bear a great resemblance to the human form. ”

“ They thrust ambiguous limbs and claws suddenly out of the darkness into the light of your attention. They snatch things out of your hand, they trip your feet and jog your elbow. They crowd and cluster behind you. Wherever your shadow falls, they creep right up to you, creep upon you and struggle to take possession of you. The souls of apes, monkeys, reptiles and creeping things haunt the passages and attics and cellars of this living house in which your consciousness has awakened.... ”

“ For centuries these degraded human races have been sought after, and now whilst it is admitted that dwarfed men exist, it has come to light that most of the stories which led to the belief in their hideous associates were derived from the existence of large man-like Apes—creatures of dread to the natives—whose traditions are full of credulous anecdotes about them. ”

“ It consists precisely in the progressive negation of the primitive animality of man by the development of his humanity. Man, a wild beast, cousin of the gorilla, has emerged from the profound darkness of animal instinct into the light of the mind, which explains in a wholly natural way all his past mistakes and partially consoles us for his present errors. He has gone out from animal slavery, and passing through divine slavery, a temporary condition between his animality and his humanity, he is now marching on to the conquest and realization of human liberty. ”