{"id":12087,"date":"2011-02-13T23:00:17","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T23:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=12087"},"modified":"2016-06-10T17:20:31","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T17:20:31","slug":"race-sex-and-the-trials-of-a-young-explorer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=12087","title":{"rendered":"Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2011-02-13<\/p>\n

Richard Conniff<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu<\/a>, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon<\/a>.\u00a0 He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa<\/a>.\u00a0 The gorilla\u2019s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin<\/a> published \u201cOn the Origin of Species<\/a>\u201d later that year.\u00a0 The politician Edwin M. Stanton<\/a> was soon calling Abraham Lincoln<\/a> \u201cthe original gorilla\u201d and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa<\/a> for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups\u2014typically black people, or sometimes the Irish.\u00a0 A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins.\u00a0 This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu\u2019s own life.<\/p>\n

When Du Chaillu arrived in London<\/a> for the 1861 publication of his book, \u201cExplorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,\u201d he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious.\u00a0 He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes.\u00a0 He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals…<\/p>\n

…But as I was researching my book \u201cThe Species Seekers<\/a>,\u201d I kept coming across hints of an uglier motive for the attack on Du Chaillu, based on race. A merchant in Gabon made the cryptic assertion that he possessed \u201cfrom reliable sources, information the most exact as to [Du Chaillu\u2019s] antecedents.\u201d\u00a0 Others whispered, as The New York Times<\/em> reported, that \u201cthe suspicion of negro sympathies hangs around him in many ways.\u201d\u00a0 Du Chaillu presented himself as a white man, born in Louisiana<\/a>, and an almost compulsive awareness of race runs through his book:\u00a0 \u201c\u2019You are the first white man that settled among us, and we love you,\u2019\u201d a village chieftain declares at one point.\u00a0 \u201cTo which all the people answered, \u2018Yes, we love him! He is our white man, and we have no other white man.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the <\/strong>Indian Ocean<\/strong><\/a> island of <\/strong>R\u00e9union<\/strong><\/a>, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder.\u00a0 Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was \u201can understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.\u201d<\/strong> In fact, Du Chaillu\u2019s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences<\/a> in Philadelphia<\/a>, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton<\/a> kept a vast collection of skulls there, \u201cthe American Golgotha,\u201d for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The \u201cmysterious and rapid\u201d end to Du Chaillu\u2019s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from \u201ca committee member\u2019s discovery of his maternal ancestry.\u201d<\/p>\n

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory.\u00a0 George Ord<\/a>, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of \u201cthe conformation of his head, and his features\u201d and detected \u201cevidence of a spurious origin.\u201d\u00a0 Ord added:\u00a0 \u201cIf it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee<\/a>, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.\u201d…<\/strong><\/p>\n

…Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum<\/em> in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called \u201cThe Octoroon<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans<\/a> beauty \u201ceducated in every refinement and luxury\u201d who was \u201calmost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 In all three contesting versions of this tale, an \u201cunderhanded Yankee<\/a> overseer\u201d seeks to possess the heroine on the slave market.\u00a0 And in each case, a dashing sea captain foils the nefarious plot and carries the beauty off to freedom.\u00a0 Audiences apparently felt comfortable taking the heroine\u2019s side because she was seven-eighths white<\/a>.\u00a0 But what if the sexes had been reversed, with a white woman falling for a mixed-race man\u2014a man like Du Chaillu, say?…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer The New York Times 2011-02-13 Richard Conniff In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.\u00a0 He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1295,12,1245,459,8],"tags":[2640,5453,5454,2327],"class_list":["post-12087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","tag-new-york-times","tag-paul-du-chaillu","tag-richard-conniff","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47501,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12087\/revisions\/47501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}