The French naval officers, whose letters are appended to the late M. Isidore Geoff. Saint Hilaire’s excellent essay on the Gorilla,[5] note in similar terms the width of the Gaboon, the trees that line its banks down to the water’s edge, and the strong current that sets out of it. They describe two islands in its estuary;—one low, called Perroquet; the other high, presenting three conical hills, called Coniquet; and one of them, M. Franquet, expressly states that, formerly, the Chief of Coniquet was called Meni-Pongo, meaning thereby Lord of Pongo; and that the N’Pongues (as, in agreement with Dr. Savage, he affirms the natives call themselves) term the estuary of the Gaboon itself N’Pongo.
It is so easy, in dealing with savages, to misunderstand their applications of words to things, that one is at first inclined to suspect Battell of having confounded the name of this region, where his “greater monster” still abounds, with the name of the animal itself. But he is so right about other matters (including the name of the “lesser monster”) that one is loth to suspect the old traveller of error; and, on the other hand, we shall find that a voyager of a hundred years’ later date speaks of the name “Boggoe,” as applied to a great Ape, by the inhabitants of quite another part of Africa—Sierra Leone.
But I must leave this question to be settled by philologers and travellers; and I should hardly have dwelt so long upon it except for the curious part played by this word “Pongo” in the later history of the man-like Apes.
The generation which succeeded Battell saw the first of the man-like Apes which was ever brought to Europe, or, at any rate, whose visit found a historian. In the third book of Tulpius’ “Observationes Medicæ,” published in 1641, the 56th chapter or section is devoted to what he calls Satyrus indicus, “called by the Indians Orang-autang, or Man-of-the-Woods, and by the Africans Quoias Morrou.” He gives a very good figure, evidently from the life, of the specimen of this animal, “nostra memoria ex Angolâ delatum,” presented to Frederick Henry Prince of Orange. Tulpius says it was as big as a child of three years old, and as stout as one of six years: and that its back was covered with black hair. It is plainly a young Chimpanzee.
In the meanwhile, the existence of other, Asiatic, man-like Apes became known, but at first in a very mythical fashion. Thus Bontius (1658) gives an altogether fabulous and ridiculous account and figure of an animal which he calls “Orang-outang”; and though he says, “vidi Ego cujus effigiem hic exhibeo,” the said effigies (see Fig. 6 for Hoppius’ copy of it) is nothing but a very hairy woman of rather comely aspect, and with proportions and feet wholly human. The judicious English anatomist, Tyson, was justified in saying of this description by Bontius, “I confess I do mistrust the whole representation.”
It is to the last mentioned writer, and his coadjutor Cowper, that we owe the first account of a man-like ape which has any pretensions to scientific accuracy and completeness. The treatise entitled, “Orang-outang, sive Homo Sylvestris; or the Anatomy of a Pygmie compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man,” published by the Royal Society in 1699, is, indeed, a work of remarkable merit, and has, in some respects, served as a model to subsequent inquirers. This “Pygmie,” Tyson tells us, “was brought from Angola, in Africa; but was first taken a great deal higher up the country”; its hair “was of a coal-black colour, and strait,” and “when it went as a quadruped on all four, ’twas awkwardly; not placing the palm of the hand flat to the ground, but it walk’d upon its knuckles, as I observed it to do when weak and had not strength enough to support its body.”—“From the top of the head to the heel of the foot, in a strait line, it measured twenty-six inches.”
These characters, even without Tyson’s good figures (Figs. 3 and 4), would have been sufficient to prove his “Pygmie” to be a young Chimpanzee. But the opportunity of examining the skeleton of the very animal Tyson anatomised having most unexpectedly presented itself to me, I am able to bear independent testimony to its being a veritable Troglodytes niger,[6] though still very young. Although fully appreciating the resemblances between his Pygmie and Man, Tyson by no means overlooked the differences between the two, and he concludes his memoir by summing up first, the points in which “the Ourang-outang or Pygmie more resembled a Man than Apes and Monkeys do,” under forty-seven distinct heads; and then giving, in thirty-four similar brief paragraphs, the respects in which “the Ourang-outang or Pygmie differ’d from a Man and resembled more the Ape and Monkey kind.”
After a careful survey of the literature of the subject extant in his time, our author arrives at the conclusion that his “Pygmie” is identical neither with the Orangs of Tulpius and Bontius, nor with the Quoias Morrou of Dapper (or rather of Tulpius), the Barris of d’Arcos, nor with the Pongo of Battell; but that it is a species of ape probably identical with the Pygmies of the Ancients, and, says Tyson, though it “does so much resemble a Man in many of its parts, more than any of the ape kind, or any other animal in the world, that I know of: yet by no means do I look upon it as the product of a mixt generation—’tis a Brute-Animal sui generis, and a particular species of Ape.”
The name of “Chimpanzee,” by which one of the African Apes is now so well known, appears to have come into use in the first half of the eighteenth century, but the only important addition made, in that period, to our acquaintance with the man-like Apes of Africa is contained in “A New Voyage to Guinea,” by William Smith, which bears the date 1744.
In describing the animals of Sierra Leone, p. 51, this writer says:—
“I shall next describe a strange sort of animal, called by the white men in this country Mandrill,[7] but why it is so called I know not, nor did I ever hear the name before, neither can those who call them so tell, except it be for their near resemblance of a human creature, though nothing at all like an Ape. Their bodies, when full grown, are as big in circumference as a middle-sized man’s—their legs much shorter, and their feet larger; their arms and hands in proportion. The head is monstrously big, and the face broad and flat, without any other hair but the eyebrows; the nose very small, the mouth wide, and the lips thin. The face, which is covered by a white skin, is monstrously ugly, being all over wrinkled as with old age; the teeth broad and yellow; the hands have no more hair than the face, but the same white skin, though all the rest of the body is covered with long black hair, like a bear. They never go upon all fours, like apes; but cry, when vexed or teased, just like children. …
“When I was at Sherbro, one Mr. Cummerbus, whom I shall have occasion hereafter to mention, made me a present of one of these strange animals, which are called by the natives Boggoe: it was a she-cub, of six months’ age, but even then larger than a Baboon. I gave it in charge to one of the slaves, who knew how to feed and nurse it, being a very tender sort of animal; but whenever I went off the deck the sailors began to teaze it—some loved to see its tears and hear it cry; others hated its snotty-nose; one who hurt it, being checked by the negro that took care of it, told the slave he was very fond of his country-woman, and asked him if he should not like her for a wife? To which the slave very readily replied, ‘No, this no my wife; this a white woman—this fit wife for you.’ This unlucky wit of the negro’s, I fancy, hastened its death, for next morning it was found dead under the windlass.”
William Smith’s “Mandrill,” or “Boggoe,” as his description and