The Hunt for the Golden Mole (2 page)

And thus it happened, less than 170 years ago, that science ‘discovered' the greatest of the great apes, surely the very same species of wordless, hirsute militant that Hanno's interpreters had called
Gorillae.
It was a classic example of a then typical event – another species new to science – and typically sent out a worldwide pulse of excitement. Notwithstanding Savage's fondness for the psalms, natural science was the rock and roll of the age. Monsters and curiosities in menageries and museums were irresistible crowd-pullers, bigger even than music-hall stars or charismatic preachers.

For a natural historian it was heaven indeed to be alive. Never had there been such an appetite for discovery, enlightenment and creative chaos. Even biblical literalists understood the earth to be, in their terms, a thing of great antiquity, yet its depths and extremities remained as mysterious as the moon. To find a new species in many parts of the world, all you had to do was walk outside and look. Men like Hans Sloane, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Joseph Banks did a great deal more than just look. They
observed.
And, having observed, they noted, illustrated, collected and catalogued. It was a passion that seized some of the not-so-great minds, too. By sea and land, from Britain, Europe and America, adventurers poured into the unmapped forests, savannahs and wetlands of Africa, Asia, South America and Australasia. Some were men of science, some were men of commerce, some were rascals.

The decks and holds of ships were packed with animals alive, dying, dead or dismembered. In London, Abraham Dee Bartlett, the extravagant character about to begin a forty-year career as superintendent of London Zoo, received his first gorilla in1858. It reached England as heroes tended to do, like Nelson and Byron in a barrel of spirits. A photograph in one of Bartlett's books shows the author easing the animal from its cask. The strangely hairless gorilla is posed with one hand raised, apparently gripping what looks like a pitchfork handle, as if trying to pull itself upright, while the other hand ‘holds' the lid of the barrel. Bartlett was by profession a taxidermist, ever alert to the importance of presentation.

Abraham Dee Bartlett, superintendent of London Zoo, receives his pickled gorilla in 1858

Necessarily, he was also alert to the tricks of his trade. When Richard Owen, superintendent of the natural history department at the British Museum and inventor of the word ‘dinosaur', introduced him to a ‘Monsieur du Chaillu', who was ‘desirous to have his Gorilla skin properly stuffed', Bartlett caught the reek of vaudeville.

‘I called M. du Chaillu's attention to the face of the animal, which I told him was not in perfect condition, having lost a great part of the epidermis. In reply he, M. du Chaillu, assured me that it was quite perfect, remarking, at the same time, that the epidermis on the face was quite black, and that the fact of the skin being black was a proof of its perfectness.

‘I, however, then and there convinced him that the blackness of the face was due to its having been painted black; finding I had detected what had been done, he at once admitted that he did paint it at the time he exhibited it in New York.'

On another occasion Bartlett agreed to buy some fowls from a Japanese dealer, but only on condition that he was first allowed to dip their improbable six-metre-long tails in water heated to the melting point of glue. Dealer and fowls immediately took wing. Bartlett was not alone among experts in developing habits of caution. Where there is wonder, there is also disbelief. Many accounts of outlandish creatures recorded in the furthest corners of the world were received, at best, with scepticism. This was true even when there was a specimen to show. Fairground freaks had taught people not always to trust the evidence of their own eyes. One of the most notorious frauds was the ‘Feejee Mermaid', which tripled the takings at Phineas T. Barnum's American
Museum in New York in 1842. Like many other exotic creatures, this one had been assembled by a Japanese fisherman – a monkey's body, finely stitched to a fish's tail. Its dried-up, withered appearance and repellent ugliness did nothing to deter the crowds that queued around the block to see it. As more and more bizarre specimens were uncrated, scientific wariness and fear of hoax made stubborn obstacles to credence.

Who, for example, would believe a beaver with a duck-bill stuck on to it? Even in 1798 this had seemed a bit too rich to stomach, never mind that the man who sent the first platypus back to Britain – Captain John Hunter, Governor of New South Wales – was an unlikely hoaxer. The eminent naturalist George Shaw, Fellow of the Royal Society, co-founder of the Linnean Society and a future Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum, who is credited with the first scientific description of the species, snipped at the pelt in search of stitches but still admitted he could not be certain of its authenticity.

A century later it was the turn of the okapi to confound the doubters. You can see why. A chestnut-coloured horse with the legs and rump of a zebra, living hitherto unseen in the high-canopy forests of Central Africa? Who would have believed it? A beautiful and exactly detailed painting of the animal, sent to London by the explorer-naturalist Sir Harry Johnston, met with derision and was denounced by the director of the Natural History Museum, Professor Ray Lankester, as a hoax. Only in 1901, when skin and skulls were presented to a crowded meeting of the Zoological Society of London, did the okapi, and Johnston, get their due. The explorer's reward was to have the species named in his honour,
Okapia johnstoni
.

Disbelief came easiest to those whose experience of natural history was limited to periodicals and visits to menageries and
museums. The okapi, like the gorilla, was a large and conspicuous item, impossible to overlook. How could it happen that no one had spotted one before? It fell to the great geographer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace to try to explain. In an essay published in 1878, he helped his readers understand what a tropical forest was actually like.

The observer new to the scene would perhaps be first struck by the varied yet symmetrical trunks, which rise up with perfect straightness to a great height without a branch, and which, being placed at a considerable average distance apart, give an impression similar to that produced by the columns of some enormous building. Overhead, at a height, perhaps, of a hundred feet, is an almost unbroken canopy of foliage formed by the meeting together of these great trees and their interlacing branches; and this canopy is usually so dense that but an indistinct glimmer of the sky is to be seen, and even the intense tropical sunlight only penetrates to the ground subdued and broken up into scattered fragments. There is a weird gloom and a solemn silence, which combine to produce a sense of the vast – the primeval – almost of the infinite. It is a world in which man seems an intruder, and where he feels overwhelmed by the contemplation of the ever-acting forces, which, from the simple elements of the atmosphere, build up the great mass of vegetation which overshadows, and almost seems to oppress the earth.

So, would not such a paradise be alive with animals? What should any explorer need more than a pair of eyes and time to record what he sees? Where is the scope for mystery? Wallace's answer to this is of profound importance in the light of all that
will follow. ‘The attempt to give some account of the general aspects of animal life in the equatorial zone,' he says, ‘presents far greater difficulties than in the case of plants. On the one hand, animals rarely play any important part in scenery, and their entire absence may pass quite unnoticed . . . Beast, bird, and insect alike require looking for, and it very often happens that we look for them in vain.' It is an observation that could be as easily applied to an English woodland or North American forest as to, say, the Amazon Valley. Here in the 1850s Wallace's friend and collaborator Henry Walter Bates had to cope with disappointment ‘in not meeting with any of the larger animals of the forest. There was no tumultuous movement or sound of life. We did not see or hear monkeys, and no tapir or jaguar crossed our path.'

If Bates didn't clock any large animals, it's pretty certain he wouldn't have seen too many small ones either. ‘There is in fact,' as he later acknowledged, ‘a great variety of mammals, birds and reptiles, but they are widely scattered and all excessively shy of man.' As Wallace describes it, the elusiveness of an animal seems to increase in proportion to one's desire to see it. ‘The highest class of animals, Mammalia, although sufficiently abundant in all equatorial lands, are those which are least seen by the traveller.' This simple truism, self-evident to any child who has gone in search of a rabbit, still lays a curse on scientists wrestling with ideas of survival and extinction. It also explains why so many of the earliest voyages of discovery were focused on birds and plants rather than animals.

Not all of Wallace's encounters with mammals were born of his own curiosity. Having been bitten on the toe by a vampire bat (the toe ‘was found bleeding in the morning from a small round hole from which the flow of blood was not easily stopped'), he took to sleeping with his feet wrapped up. But there are times
when human intelligence – even intelligence on the Olympian scale of Wallace's – is confounded by primitive animal instinct. Next time, the vampire bit him on the nose.

Even Wallace, however, could not make accurate observations while asleep, and his account of the vampires' behaviour might have been lifted from a Gothic novel. ‘The motion of the wings fans the sleeper into a deeper slumber, and renders him insensible to the gentle abrasions of the skin either by teeth or tongue. This ultimately forms a minute hole, the blood flowing from which is sucked or lapped up by the hovering vampire.' In fact, as we now know, the animal lands and approaches its victim on the ground.

Despite all the handicaps – shy, reclusive and nocturnal species, the impenetrableness of thorny, steep, over-heated and unmapped terrain – Wallace in the latter half of the nineteenth century builds a picture of richness, variety and almost comical oddness. In tropical and southern Africa alone, he writes, ‘we find a number of very peculiar forms of mammalia. Such are the golden moles, the Potamogale, and the elephant-shrews among Insectivora; the hippopotami and the giraffes among Ungulata; the hyaena-like Proteles (Aard-wolf), and Lycaon (hyaena-dog), among Carnivora; and the Aard-varks (Orycteropus) among Edentata.'

Slowly, species by species, zoology was emerging as a scientific pursuit fit for the attention of serious minds. In the space of five years in the 1840s, the number of dead mammals acquired by the British Museum increased from around a hundred a year to more than a thousand. Natural history occupied a third of the museum's entire floor space, and attracted as many visitors as all the other galleries put together. In its early years, the museum had erected lofty bureaucratic barriers against casual visitors – tickets had to be booked in advance by personal representation,
and were granted in scarcely greater number than audiences with the Pope. Now all that changed. As John Thackray, late archivist of the Natural History Museum, would write: ‘The authorities accepted that the museum had a twin purpose: instruction for serious academic people, and rational amusement for the masses. It was felt that exposing the middle and working classes to a comprehensive display of the works of creation might improve their moral fibre and, also, make them proud to be British.'

The works of creation.
One is surprised only by Thackray's omission of capital letters. The scientific world was drifting into two opposing camps – those who believed that Nature was ordained and delivered by God, and those under the influence of Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin, whose theories of evolution were putting the Book of Genesis under sudden and shocking pressure. This was no storm in a teacup. The origin of species was – as it remains – fundamental to the way we think about our rights and responsibilities. Even Christian fundamentalists had to think again about the size of the Ark. It was seldom forgotten that God had granted to man ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and every living thing that moveth over the earth' (Genesis I:28). Only now was the true scale of that dominion becoming apparent.

For the time being, despite the eruption on to the public consciousness of Charles Darwin (the entire first edition of
On the Origin of Species
in 1859 sold out immediately), it was the Old Testament that kept its nose in front. In January 1860 the decision was taken to hive off natural history from the rest of the British Museum – thus, in the words of Thackray, ‘separating the works of Man (books, manuscripts and antiquities) from the works of God (natural history)'. When the new Natural History Museum in Kensington eventually opened its doors in 1881,
visitors found that the superintendent, Professor Owen, had taken this sacred duty all too literally. His museum was a sermon encased in glass, a holy diorama of miraculous Creation in which the scientific voice was mute.