Paul Du Chaillu: The First European To Exhibit African Gorillas

This is a re-post, because this du Chaillu dude is one of my favorite historical figures right now, along with Frenchman Claude Chappe, who developed the world's very first long-distance communications system (which in 1794 allowed Parisians to know the results of a major battle that occurred over 200 miles away, in less than an hour), and S.A. Andrée of Sweden, one of the world's first and greatest balloonist / explorers.  

Note: word verification is back on for this site. Sorry about that. But at least the satanic locust-like nigerian-style spammer comments have ceased to infest. Bug spray for all of them I say !

[re-blogged from Sunday 7 April, 2013] 

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From today Sunday's New York Times Book Review: 

"Planet of the Ape: Between Man And Beast, by Monte Reel"

And on the cover no less ! 

We talked about this De Chaillu dude not too long ago, because his role in familiarizing Europeans with the higher primates that whites did not even know existed until the mid-1800s, contributes a lot to understanding the mindset of Euros in the midst of the Darwinian Revolution. 

From the perspective of this blog and other Southern nationalist sites such as Hunter Wallace's OD, de Chaillu's contribution to Western justification for slavery - even if it came relatively late in the game (de Chaillu lived from 1831 to 1903) - cannot be overstated. 

Naturally the New York Times makes the very first chronicler of african mountain gorillas out to  be nothing more than a circus performer and a bumbling opportunist, in their review of this book on De Chaillu written by Monte Reel of the Washington Post. 

The fact is that Euros were as confused back then as they are today when it comes to grasping the reality of their own hierarchical exceptionalism. 

To truly understand De Chaillu's gorilla exhibits in the context of slavery in the New World, one must read not "Of Inhuman Bondage" by America's pre-eminent "specialist" on slavery, David Brion Davis, but rather Hunter Wallace of Occidental Dissent and his review of the DBD mega-tome. 

From the Times' Book Review: 

Du Chaillu was a young explorer of part-French extraction, son of a trader, poorly educated but a good marksman, who emerged from Gabon in 1859, after a four-year hunting expedition, with 20 preserved skins of a kind of massive ape, known to the local people as njena. The animal soon took its familiar name, gorilla, by loose borrowing from the ancient Greek account of a voyage by Hanno the Navigator, who claimed to have seen some big and hairy people along the African coast and called them Gorillae, though almost certainly they weren’t actual gorillas. Science now recognizes two species, the eastern gorilla (of which the famously endangered mountain gorillas are a subspecies) and the western, which includes those individuals that fell to Du Chaillu’s gun. But such modern taxonomic dicing is far removed, in time and spirit, from the tale of scientific buccaneering and creationist discomfiture that Reel, a former correspondent for The Washington Post, tells in this intriguing book.

Du Chaillu explaining African primates to a bewildered London audience at the London Anthropological Society, circa 1870