In the winter of 1961, in a far-flung corner of what is now Tanzania, a young Englishwoman sat alone in a tropical rain forest. She was just twenty-seven. But like Jacobs, who was eighteen years older and whose book Death and Life would appear that same year, her stature in the world was about to change. She too was on the verge of rattling the foundations of what had seemed a settled field, defying all expectations for her sex in her pioneering observations of animal behavior. Though at that moment, far removed from the creature comforts of ordinary people, living an elemental life alone in the wilds, a simple tent her only shelter, Jane Goodall didn’t yet know the extent of it.
It was Goodall’s second visit to Gombe, the remote game preserve on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, where a year earlier, the legendary anthropologist Louis Leakey had sent her to study chimps in the wild, caring little that she possessed neither credentials nor academic training, or that in the eyes of the scientific world, she was decidedly of the wrong gender for such work.
It was February, the depths of the rainy season; the grass at its highest was more than twelve feet in places. That morning, as always, she had risen well before dawn, setting out through the dim, canopied forest as the sun was rising. She followed the animal trails cutting through the underbrush. Sometimes she moved on all fours, crawling on bare knees through the dense scrub. Other times she slithered along on her stomach, her eyes scanning the ground for snakes, relieved when the path opened up again. She paused periodically to listen for chimps, faint, faraway cries somewhere deeper in the forest. She watched for dark shapes, a commotion in the leafy canopy, a hairy arm flung out in the course of feeding. She readjusted her direction according to what she heard and sensed. Quietly, painstakingly, she ascended the steeply forested slope, her body like a finely tuned antenna, until she reached the top, her perch these days. There, she settled in for a time, a pencil, her binoculars, and a warped cloth notebook slung across her lap.
The day had started well. Earlier, she’d managed to get reasonably close to a group of chimps, close enough, she jotted in her notebook, to see “sex, face color, etc.” Dressed as usual in khaki shorts, a bland cotton shirt, and sneakers, she had learned to wear inconspicuous clothes; to approach slowly and in a nonthreatening way; to keep a respectable distance, according to what the apes seemed to tolerate on any given day. She had learned, essentially, to become “one” with the forest, weaving herself into its mesh as if she were no different from a bird’s nest or a bushpig, alert to the rustlings in the grass, the faintest perturbation in the leaves.
It was almost a year to the day since her first arrival here. “It does seem a long time ago, in many ways,” she wrote to her family. “Yet sometimes I can look at the Peaks & Valleys & see them with my early eyes.” To Goodall’s early eyes, the peaks and valleys had seemed alien and unforgiving, a nearly insurmountable challenge, made all the more so by the extreme weather. Sometimes the forest was like a “high powered tropical green house,” she wrote home, the heat and humidity infernal, the winds fierce and wildly mercurial. There were slashing storms: biblical rains with thunder that shook the forest floor, lightning fissures that hissed and fractured the dome of the sky, howling morning gales that froze her bones.
The beginning had been the hardest. During her first confusing weeks, seeing the chimps at all, beyond a few fleeting glimpses, had been a feat unto itself. The terrain was perilously steep, with deep, plunging ravines and towering cliffs, presenting obstacles that for a human were impossible to overcome. A chimp encountering a cliff could grab a vine here, a tree limb there, scaling its face in a matter of seconds, while she, its less acrobatic cousin, was left to watch in frustration as it was swallowed into the dense underbrush.
Sometimes she hiked for hours without a single sighting. Chimps are acutely sensitive creatures, easily aroused and upset, running off as soon as they sense a human presence. And with her “minders” in tow, the two local men who the government insisted should accompany her on her daily searches, the problem was compounded. No matter how delicately they approached, the apes seemed to know they were near, erupting in panicked cries, only to vanish in an instant, as if by the wave of a wand.
She had known, of course, there would be challenges. Louis Leakey had said as much. But what those challenges were, she couldn’t have imagined. Three years before, newly arrived in Africa, she had met the charismatic Leakey, her “life’s mentor” quite by chance. Chatting at a cocktail party one night, she had mentioned she was looking for a job; she wanted something that would bring her into contact with animals, she said. “Then you should meet Louis Leakey,” she was told. And so she had, calling up the famous anthropologist cold and making an appointment despite her lack of an introduction.
Leakey was fifty-three years old at the time, “a true giant” of a man, Goodall recalled, whose four decades of fossil hunting would help unravel the puzzle of humankind’s prehistoric beginnings. Charming, wildly eccentric, a brilliant and iconoclastic scientist, he had already written eight important books by then and was head curator of Nairobi’s natural history museum, the Coryndon. He knew Africa’s Stone Age past like none other, having spent his life piecing together the ossified remains of ancient animal species long extinct. An enchanting host, he had given her a four-hour tour of the Coryndon that day and afterward offered her a job as his personal secretary. She had accepted on the spot.
And so, for the next year, she had learned all she could about the animals of East Africa at Leakey’s knee. Not long after their first meeting, Leakey invited her and another young Englishwoman from the museum, Gillian Trace, to accompany his wife, Mary, and him on their annual dig at Olduvai Gorge in Tanganyika. Riding across the vast plains of the Serengeti, perched with Gillian on the roof of the Leakeys’ overloaded Land Rover, she had been ecstatic.
They worked like demons that summer, chipping away at the hard, parched soil with pickax and shovel or hunting knives, the sun a fire on their backs. Toward midday, when the heat was most intense, they cleaned and sorted and labeled specimens, standing in the relative shade of a tarp. In the afternoon, they resumed digging and sifting, rarely knocking off until the light began to fade. She had loved it all, unfazed by the high heat and swirling dust, the dearth of water for ordinary washing and bathing, the mile-long walk to and from the site multiple times each day. When work was over, still energized, she and Gillian would hike up the sides of the gorge, roaming the plains to watch for animals before heading back to camp. “Admittedly, we don’t meet lion & rhino around every bush,” she wrote home. “But we do see Gazelle and . . . Jackals, mongooses & an occasional snake. I am disappointed there are not more of those.” At night, pulling out their camp beds, she and Gillian slept under the stars, surrounded by the whir of insects and the occasional animal cry. It was a charmed interlude she would never forget.
It was sometime near the end of their stay on the Serengeti that Leakey first mentioned his hopes for a study of chimps in the wild. There were no guidelines or precedents for such a study, he told her. The physical challenges were legion. It would be difficult and dangerous, requiring enormous endurance and nerve, the ability to live alone for great tracts of time, to face uncertainty on a daily basis, for nothing was known about apes in the wild. Many believed such a study would be impossible, in fact. “I remember wondering,” Jane later wrote of that night, “what kind of scientist he would find for such a herculean task.”
But back at the Coryndon that fall, Leakey had proposed it to her all the same, convinced she could do it. Watching her work that summer, he later told her, he was struck by her unwavering focus, her energy and grit and perseverance—even in the face of numbing tasks. She had seemed to possess an unusual capacity for solitude, to thrive on minimal food and little sleep—and to be afraid of nothing. These were unteachable qualities, distinctly different from the abstract concepts that came with an academic degree.
Watching her work that summer, he’d also noticed something else: a certain inner stillness, a calm that had got him thinking. Perhaps, he’d begun to muse, a woman would be better suited than a man to a study of wild animals, quieter and less threatening, more patient as an observer, “less likely to arouse male aggression.”
And on this, as on so many of his hunches, the great scientist had been correct. Despite the dangers and the isolation, the difficulties of sighting wild apes on the move, nothing had stopped his young protégé from pushing on with the chimp study. For four long months, Jane Goodall had scrambled up slippery mountain paths and slogged through waist-high grasses. She had pushed through thorns and thicket, dodged snakes and stinging insects, endured battering rains and tropical fevers, clammy clothes and moldy bedding, swarms of malarial mosquitoes and peevish minders—only to triumph. Louis Leakey’s instincts about the hardworking Brit obsessed with the animal world had been spot on. Near the end of her stay, twenty-seven-year-old Jane Goodall had witnessed chimps using tools, an observation that a year later, in the summer of 1963, would turn the scientific world on its head, forever altering our sense of ourselves as a species, and our place in the natural order.
Nothing had been easy or comfortable about her time at Gombe. But then, Jane Goodall had never aspired to the easy or the predictable.
BORN IN NORTH LONDON ON APRIL 3, 1934, VALERIE JANE MORRIS-GOODALL was the first of two children in a comfortable, if increasingly threadbare, household. Her mother, Vanne, was sweet natured and energetic, a gentle beauty with deep reserves of patience and sociability. Progressive for her day, she believed in reasoned discipline rather than physical punishment, the latter the norm for most British parents at the time, choosing to encourage her two daughters, rather than to shame or suppress them. Jane’s father, Mortimer, was a charming if enigmatic man, vital but restless, a racecar driver who was unreliable with money and frequently away. His family, at one time wealthy, had for several generations lived off the fruits of a vast playing-card fortune without adding to the principal. By the time Jane came along, what remained of their riches was mostly gone. The greater part of Mortimer’s portion had been staked as collateral so he could buy the Aston Martin that launched his racing career.
Mortimer was living in London when he met Vanne. It was the early 1930s, and Vanne had moved to the city from her family home in Bournemouth to work as a secretary for a showbiz impresario. Secretly, she longed to be a writer. After hours, she would sit in her boardinghouse room, banging out short biographies of theater people, imagining it would someday be her life’s work. All this was interrupted one evening when a handsome young man who lived two floors up introduced himself. Soon Mortimer was driving Vanne to work in his Aston Martin. He was lighthearted and gentle, and he “laughed a lot.” Later Vanne would say that Mortimer introduced her to a “whirly kind of life.”
Mortimer was a big spender who went through every penny he earned. Though he already had one foot in the racing world, he was still working for a company that laid down telephone cable across England, drawing down a decent salary. Even so, he was perennially in debt; Vanne, giddily consumed with her whirly new life, chose not to notice. They decided to marry, tying the knot in September 1932, in a church in Sloane Square. Afterward, they drove to Monte Carlo in Mortimer’s new green racing car. When they returned, they found a small town house in Chelsea to rent. Vanne quit her job so she could follow her new husband from race to race, where, flying by in an open cockpit at fabulous speeds, unprotected beyond goggles and a fitted leather helmet, he was beginning to make a name for himself. (Drivers in those days raced without benefit of safety harnesses or seat belts.) Her job was now chief enthusiast for Mortimer’s burgeoning career. And when, in June 1933, he drew notice for his driving skill in the grueling Le Mans Grand Prix d’Endurance, marking his arrival as one of Britain’s top racecar drivers, Vanne was as elated as her husband. Almost nine months to the day, on April 3, 1934, their first daughter, Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, was born.
He was a disengaged father, cool and emotionally remote, almost from the beginning. Whatever the ties of home and hearth represented, they were no match for the high-stakes world of men and revved-up machines, the easy fellowship of those who shared his appetites for glamour and vertiginous speed.
Vanne treated her husband’s defection with patient forbearance. Mortimer’s own father had died when Mortimer was nine; he had no model, she felt, for what a father should be. It was certainly more complicated than this, but it wasn’t in Vanne’s nature to assume the worst. Mortimer disappeared into his work, and Vanne gently papered over his absence, seeing no advantage to concentrating on what was missing. Jane later recalled that her father “touched me only once” as a young child.
In the spring of 1935, Mortimer moved the family from London to suburban Weybridge, home to England’s most important racetrack. They settled into a rambling, three-story brick house with an overgrown yard in the rear. Wild sorrel had overtaken the once-trim lawns, adding to the garden’s aura of romantic neglect. Jane, who could now run out into this riotous green world, was entranced. For hours, she crouched in odd corners of the garden, enthralled by the parade of beetles and spiders and ants that trooped by. A vital, and deeply feeling, child, she expressed a powerful affinity for living creatures even at this early age. And it was her good fortune to have a mother who recognized this passion. Vanne not only tolerated her daughter’s growing earth love, she encouraged it. Kneeling beside the spellbound child, she taught her the names of all they saw, how to know the birds by their plumage, how to identify their eggs and their nests.
From watching came the still more powerful desire for possession. At eighteen months of age, Jane gathered up a fistful of earthworms and took them to bed. When Vanne arrived to say good night, the little girl proudly lifted her pillow, eager to show her mother the worms. Vanne gently explained that the wriggling creatures would die if left all night in her bed. “They need the earth,” she told Jane, whose sober little face was now clouded with worry. Minutes later, the worms cupped in Jane’s small-child hands, mother and daughter padded out to the garden, where Jane bravely returned them to the wet soil.
A dreamy child with a vivid fantasy life, Jane had an imaginary friend named Dimmy, who she claimed could fly, a trait she envied enormously. Dimmy could be a cutup. Sometimes he said things that made her laugh out loud.
Jane loved the visits the family made to see her grandmothers, especially Mortimer’s mother, whom she called “Danny” Nutt, “Granny” being too difficult to pronounce. Danny and Major Nutt, Mortimer’s stepfather, lived in Kent, in a great eighteenth-century stone edifice called the Manor House, built, somewhat improbably, inside the ruins of a crumbling castle. The Manor House and castle were on the grounds of a nearby racecourse, which Major Nutt managed. The castle was a marvelous and “melancholic” place, Jane remembered, “all gray, crumbling stone and spider webs.” What Jane liked best, however, were the animals on the grounds: the pack of foxhounds that her grandfather kept; the squawking geese that strutted the lawn; the hens roosting in the five henhouses, who she was allowed to feed, and where she went to collect eggs; the occasional mare and colt from the neighboring racetrack. Life for the cosseted little girl was interesting and full. And then, to her great displeasure, another creature arrived, this one noisy and decidedly unwelcome: a chubby baby sister named Judith Daphne, born four years to the day after Jane. The unanticipated visitor fussed and squalled all night, stealing Nanny’s and Vanne’s attention, which was vexing to the child, who already had to share her mother with a father she barely saw, except from the stands of the racetrack. Vanne went out with Mortimer on most evenings, still immersed in their fast, whirly life. Sometimes they were away on weekends, traveling for races.
There are certain “irreducibles” in the character of each of us, Judith Thurman has written. Some children have an intensity of nature from birth—a pressing inquisitiveness—while others are wary, passive, or withdrawn. While those “original qualities” can easily be dampened, they also “define a mysterious ground of one’s being that defies analysis.” Jane was always electrified by her passions. She was an active and intensely curious child, fiercely independent and full of ideas, a dreamer with a capacity for sustained attention that set her apart, even as a small child.
A story often repeated from her early childhood seems to have anticipated the person she would become. It was the fall of 1939, the same cheerless September that the Swiss chemist Paul Müller made his breakthrough discovery of DDT and Rachel Carson, thirty-two at the time, was living in Baltimore, working on her first book about the sea. Jane Goodall was just five.
Earlier that year, Mortimer had moved the family to a seaside resort in France, to be closer to the European racing scene. Though war was still a dark fantasy, Vanne had begun noticing English and French soldiers in town. Then one day, she got word that the family needed to leave France immediately. That same night, Nanny and the children left by boat from Boulogne. Vanne waited for Mortimer, who was away on racing business. A few days later, he and Vanne crossed the Channel and drove to the Manor House, where all of Mortimer’s extended family waited with apprehension. Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, and two days later, England declared war on Germany. Soon after, the army commandeered the Manor House and its outbuildings, and Danny Nutt turned one of the racecourse bars into a canteen, where she doled out hot tea, cigarettes, and chocolate to the massing soldiers. Vanne went there to help in the afternoons.
It was on one such autumn afternoon that Jane disappeared. An independent child, she often went off alone, usually to visit the stables, to pat the horses and feed them withered carrots. But she wasn’t at the stables that day, nor had Nanny seen her playing near the house. Vanne had arrived home late that afternoon. The child, she realized, had been missing for three hours. The police were called and the neighbors alerted. Even the soldiers billeted on the grounds joined the search. But no one could find the girl. As darkness descended, everyone looked tense. And then Vanne spotted “a small, disheveled figure coming a little wearily” across the field. There were flecks of straw in her hair and clothes, but her eyes, “though darkly ringed by fatigue, were shining.”
“She’s found!” someone called.
“Wherever have you been?” Vanne asked gently, bending down to speak to the child.
“With a hen,” she answered brightly.
She had wanted to find out how hens lay eggs, she explained, and couldn’t see an opening big enough for an egg to drop through. So she had crept into the henhouse and crouched in the straw, waiting quietly for five hours. Finally a hen came in, raised herself up from her makeshift nest, and gave a little wiggle, whereupon “a round white object protruding from the feathers between her legs” appeared. Then, with a plop, it landed on the straw. Wisely, Vanne chose not to reproach her unusually curious child. Looking back on the incident years later, she would recognize it for what it was: though just five, Jane had displayed all the qualities of a born naturalist.
Mortimer went missing on almost that same day. When he returned he was wearing a starched soldier’s uniform. He had joined the battalion bivouacked in the stables beside the family home. That December he shipped out for France. Vanne decided to move to Bournemouth, to live with her mother, the second “Danny,” whose house they called the Birches, a spacious red brick Victorian with gingerbread trim and a lovely tree-shaded garden. Jane would later say it was her first real home.
Bournemouth was a seaside town, and thus a potential target for foreign invasion. Men were laying land mines along the beach, stringing barbed wire across the sands, planting guns in the niches of the cliffs. The town was closed to tourists and the military took over the forty largest hotels. Jane and her sister kept suitcases packed with a few necessities in the front hall, in the event the family needed to flee. They were outfitted with gas masks.
Mortimer was “somewhere in France.” Occasionally he managed a brief visit home, but he was undergoing officers’ training now. His letter writing dropped off, and soon after, his visits. Even on those occasions when he did appear, his stays were disappointing: “We had tea and still Daddy dident come,” nine-year-old Jane wrote in her diary in 1943. “Then I went up stairs had a bath and dressed up as a fairy (in my nighty) . . . Then Daddy rang us and said he wasent coming till to-morrow.” In 1944, Mortimer shipped out to India; the following year, he was transferred to Burma. The bomb was dropped and Japan surrendered. But Mortimer stayed in Kuala Lumpur, returning to England only briefly in 1949, so he could race at Le Mans. By 1950, he had been posted to Hong Kong. Then one day a letter arrived for Vanne, asking her for a divorce. The loss, now official, was by then a quiet one; even for Jane, his absence had already been absorbed.
Life at the Birches, meanwhile, went on, cheerful and largely unchanged. It was a lively and embracing household, ideal for a growing child, a household of women now, the men having gone off to fight the war. Vanne’s two sisters, Olwen and Audrey, were also in residence. Olwen had a “bawdy” sense of humor and a mischievous streak. There were two female lodgers as well, usually single women who had lost their homes to the war’s upheavals. The sole male was Vanne’s older brother—kind but stodgy “Uncle Eric,” a surgeon in London who visited every third weekend. It was the only time the children were told to tiptoe around.
Living in a matriarchy had distinct “advantages,” Jane would later say. “I was never, ever told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl.” Which didn’t mean that either she or Judy got an automatic pass. Quite the opposite. Danny was the “strong, self-disciplined, iron-willed Victorian who ruled over us with supreme authority” even though she “had a heart big enough to embrace all the starving children of the world,” Jane wrote years later. If you coughed but you weren’t really sick, you could expect no sympathy; she believed in the “stiff upper lip” approach to life.
If Danny was the titular head of the household, it was Vanne’s word that held sway in matters involving the children. There were rules, Jane remembered, but there were also indulgences. Rationing began in 1940, and butter, sugar, and meat became scarce. There was very little money. But Danny was a wizard in the kitchen. She could turn one egg into a confection that satisfied six hungry stomachs.
The war left its indelible mark. Its privations taught Jane frugality and welded her family into a tight little corps. It killed “a beloved uncle” and took away her father, who vanished into the military, never really to return, except for brief appearances. The war maimed lives and blew apart nations, killing millions, incinerating cities, unleashing atrocities that were once unthinkable, from the death camps to Dresden to Hiroshima. Jane was five when the conflagration began, eleven by the time it was over. By the final months, as the Allies swept across Europe, she knew some of the worst, having seen the photographs from Dachau and Auschwitz. And yet, though the war touched her in countless ways, it didn’t tamp down her curiosity or her joy. Jane found her “separate peace” in the lush green garden behind the Birches. She found it with her sister, and their two best friends, Sally and Susie Cary, who visited during school holidays. And, perhaps most significantly, she found it amidst the menagerie she kept in the garden.
There were too many creatures to count. Jane had a dog, two pet tortoises, and a succession of cats; a terrapin, two guinea pigs, and a canary; a cache of snails, a stable of caterpillars, and a “lovely big slow-worm,” thanks to a gift from her aunt. The canary slept in a cage, but was free to flit about her room. The guinea pigs were given string leashes, to keep them from disappearing into the hedge. They were joined by a pet hamster, who sometimes “nested” in the upholstery of a chair. The snails, which she and her sister shared, were “racers,” with numbers painted on their shells. They were corralled inside a bottomless wooden box, topped with a piece of glass, so they could dine on dandelion leaves, as the box was repositioned around the lawn.
Most children form an early identification with small animals and benign nature, Dale Peterson, Jane’s definitive biographer, has written, a sympathy reinforced by their nursery storybooks. But as they grow older, this “gently atavistic fascination” gradually fades. For Jane, her identification with animals was formative, inseparable from who she was, and would become. At five she began riding a pony named Cherry. At eleven she sold her dollhouse to buy a dog. As soon as she could hold a pencil, she was posting letters to her friend Sally Cary, reporting on the foods her various crawly friends ate.
An early and ardent reader, sometimes she spent whole days with her nose in a book. Like many impressionable children, she was enchanted by the usual English classics: The Wind in the Willows, the Peter Rabbit stories, The Secret Garden. But the book that ignited her fantasies most was The Story of Doctor Dolittle. “I read it all the way through, and then I read it through again,” she later wrote. “I had never before loved a book so much. I read it a third time before it had to go back.” The child who identified so “ecstatically” with animals couldn’t forget the story of the good physician with a houseful of pets who loved animals so deeply that he learned how to speak their language, and later went to Africa to save the monkeys dying of a mysterious illness. Danny gave Jane the book that Christmas. And so was born the luxuriant dream of going to Africa to live with wild animals. By the time Jane had moved on to the Edgar Rice Burroughs series, featuring Tarzan of the Apes, the orphaned son of English aristocrats raised in the African wilds by an ape mother, the girlhood fantasy had morphed into a given. Everyone in the family accepted the idea that somehow, someday, Jane would leave them to live with the animals of Africa.
From reading, it was only a small step to writing. At seven, Jane was composing sentences and stories; by ten, writing long and grandly in her journals. She sent out stacks of letters. And when the Cary girls arrived for holidays, she wrote plays, which were staged for the household.
The two Cary girls were regular visitors, staying at the Birches for long, languorous stretches of the summer. They were a busy and mischievous little band, on their own for large tracts of the day. Jane, as the oldest, was the ringleader. Fourteen months older than Sally, she was the one who generated the ideas for what the troupe would do. When it was hot, they stripped off their shirts and hosed each other down. Sometimes, hiding in the trees, they hosed down unsuspecting pedestrians. Jane was always enormously inventive. She was bossy, but she made life gayer.
Academics, unfortunately, didn’t elicit the same excitement. Jane found school achingly dull, irrelevant to her interests, and numbingly routine. She bridled at the regimentation, the arbitrary rules, the teachers she found despotic and obtuse. At eleven, she had enrolled at the all-girls Uplands school, a boarding school that also took in day students, among them Jane and her sister. The school was run by a “tall, very strict-looking woman with very thick glasses and boils everywhere,” a friend remembered. The girls were required to wear uniforms, and attendance at morning chapel was expected. School was a trial to be suffered, a renunciation of everything that excited Jane’s imagination: animals, wild nature, the freedom she found walking the cliffs near her house, her dog at her side. “Woke gloomily up to the dreary prospect of school, school, school,” she despaired in her diary of 1949, “stretching into the future like some monster ready to swallow me up.” Two years later, the dread persisted. Though she was a decent enough student, it had morphed now into something more serious: “I suppose that everyone goes through a period of utter despair in their lives,” she wrote. “Well, I’m sure going through it.”
The long slog into adulthood had begun, and Jane’s unhappiness was beginning to express itself physically. For the first time, she was subject to migraines and mysterious fevers, insomnia and inexplicable fatigue. Her “sick days” grew more frequent. Whatever the cause—illness or depression—it scarcely mattered: the symptoms were debilitating, the sense of loss at having to let go of her childhood excitements real. She was also beginning to worry about the future. She was seventeen now and the question pressed. What would she do to support herself?
The career counselor, on her annual visit to Uplands, was baffled by the notion that a well-brought-up girl would want to study wild animals in Africa. When she learned that Jane also loved dogs, she looked mildly relieved: the answer, she suggested brightly, might be photography school. If Jane could learn to shoot pictures of people’s dogs, she might make a living. The real message, of course, was that women didn’t become zoologists or naturalists or scientists of any sort. These were men’s professions, and even then, a male zoologist who elected to study primates might expect to do so in a zoo, or a laboratory cage in Europe or America—never in the wilds. The counselor’s advice went unheeded.
And then, inexplicably, Jane’s aversion to academics began to lift. At the end of the term, she was awarded a prize for writing. The honor required that she dress for the occasion, including stockings. “Foul things—stockings,” she remarked in her diary. That August she had “my first Champagne cocktail.” In November, she bought “her first girdle, a red one.” Her aunt gave her nylon stockings for Christmas. (“I felt awful. I don’t know why. Embarrassed somehow.”) A new English teacher had arrived; they were reading Shakespeare now, lots of epic and lyric poetry; in biology they were delving into heredity and evolution, which seemed “rather interesting.” There were other changes afoot too, these equally unanticipated. She was becoming an object of considerable male attention.
School edged to a close. During her final term, Jane won the writing prize a second time, placing well enough on her exams to qualify for university. But her family couldn’t afford to send her, and it was unclear if she would have gone anyway. She was already preoccupied with what came next.
Journalism seemed a possibility, but Vanne, ever practical, suggested secretarial school, at least for the interim. With secretarial skills, she would be able to find work wherever she went. Mortimer agreed to foot the bill, and Jane, who had just turned nineteen, moved to London, where she rented a room in Chelsea and began classes at Queens Secretarial College in South Kensington. The work was “monotonous,” Jane groused, but she was enjoying London’s social whirl; by March 1954, she had completed the course, doing reasonably well, although the program head, writing in the school’s confidential report, expressed reservations. Miss Morris-Goodall was “a clever girl, but rather smug” and “sometimes inclined to behave as if she has nothing to learn,” she wrote. She was still “quite immature and not really ready for responsibility,” and seems “very anxious to write.” With time, she could be expected to abandon such fantasies and “settle” into a more realistic path: “Will eventually make a good secretary.”
Jane turned twenty that spring, and applied for a secretarial position at Oxford. “I haven’t given up the journalism idea by the way,” she insisted in a letter to Sally (“but I have decided that to write anything worth anyone reading I must have . . . acquired a little experience of life, as they say”). She didn’t get the job, but that August, when another clerical position opened up—this one at Oxford’s Clarendon House—she had better luck. Unfortunately, the exalted setting did little to relieve the tedium of the job, which was “just very boring filing and a bit of typing. Absolutely at the bottom,” Jane remembered. As her twenty-first birthday approached, Jane resolved to leave Oxford and the “boredom of this foul job.” “Do you not think it is time I got something else?” she wrote Vanne.
A family friend secured her an interview at a commercial film studio in London, using his BBC connections from the war. To her delight, it went well and she got the job. By July she had moved back to London, where she found “a dingy basement room” with a bed, a gas ring to cook on, and a lone window looking onto a wall. But she adored the job, and London was thrilling. “Oh, Sally, I am having such a wonderful time,” she wrote her friend. “No more typing, no more writing other people’s stupid letters.”
Schofield Productions was housed on Old Bond Street, above a photographer’s studio and a nightclub, a stone’s throw away from where Vanne had worked twenty-five years before. The studio produced cinematic shorts for advertisements: films about women’s stockings, men’s shavers, motorcycle gear. Jane made herself available for everything. Soon she was greeting clients, projecting films, editing, splicing, helping choose music. The salary was a pittance. Sometimes, to make ends meet, she had to skip meals. But she was finding the cultural offerings of London diverting, second only to the drama—ongoing, a bit confusing—of managing what was becoming a steady queue of male suitors. Wild-hearted and vivacious, a natural flirt, Jane had become, through no action of her own, a beautiful young woman, a creature to whom men were hopelessly drawn. There were more prospects than she could manage, although Brian was the most problematic.
Brian Hovington had followed Jane from Oxford to London. He was good company, smart and certainly honorable, but the romance was hopelessly lopsided. Brian wanted a commitment, and she did not. “I have decided, even more firmly than when I spoke to you on the phone, that he is no husband for me,” she wrote to Vanne. Brian, she added, was “too settled, too fond of creature comforts, doesn’t like books . . . I could go on for ever, but it boils down to the fact that I just don’t love him one bit.”
For all the diversions of London, Jane was feeling vaguely dissatisfied. She loved her job, but something fundamental was missing, some larger purpose she couldn’t quite articulate. And then word reached her that Rusty, her beloved dog, had been killed, run over by a car. She was heartsick. The dog had been her constant companion during her difficult years of school, a source of solace, even during her time in Oxford and London. Losing him made her stop and reflect more generally on what she wanted. So far, perhaps she too had been “too settled, too fond of creature comforts”—as she so dismissively described Brian. Lulled by the glamour of London, the small perks of her job, perhaps she too had opted for the “predictable” and “conventional.” She needed, she realized, to extricate herself from London, Brian, her job. “I have decided that I must go abroad before it is too late,” she wrote to Sally. She was “trying for some sort of job in Sweden,” she added. But at the back of her mind, there lived a second, still brighter hope that she secretly nursed: a friend from Uplands, Clo Mange, had written her in the summer of 1955, just after she began working at the film studio. Clo’s father had bought a farm just outside Nairobi, in Kenya Colony, and she had invited Jane to come for a six-month stay. Now she wrote to Clo again: Was the invitation to visit her in Kenya still open?
Clo’s return letter arrived late that spring, confirming the invitation. Wild with excitement, Jane quit her job and moved back to Bournemouth, where she immediately found waitressing work at one of the posh hotels, living rent-free in the garden shed while she saved for the trip. It was an insane schedule: working three meals a day and two afternoon teas, with only one day off every two weeks. But by October, she had saved 240 pounds, enough for a round-trip ticket to Africa.
That New Year’s Eve, Jane and Keith, her latest beau, went to a black-tie affair, where they drank Champagne and danced until almost dawn. Two and a half months later, in spite of Keith’s marriage proposal that evening, Jane traveled by train to the Southampton docks with Vanne and Uncle Eric. Hugs and tearful good-byes were exchanged, and then the rapturous twenty-two-year-old with big dreams boarded the seventeen-thousand-ton passenger steamship that would carry her to Africa.
THE SEA JOURNEY TOOK THREE WEEKS. WAR HAD RECENTLY FLARED UP on the Sinai Peninsula, closing the Suez Canal, so the ship had taken the slow route by necessity, tracing the contours of the long African continent before finally rounding the Cape of Good Hope and sliding into Mombasa harbor at dawn on April 2, 1957. Jane and her fellow passengers disembarked, wandering the Arab markets in the wilting heat before returning to the boat for last farewells. Then she boarded the train for Nairobi, arriving the next morning just as Clo was emerging from the throng at Nairobi station, accompanied by her boyfriend, Tony, and her father, Roland Mange. Introductions were made and Jane’s luggage collected. Then they drove due north out of the city along a rough dirt road into the highlands, arriving at the Mange farm, Greystones, in time for tea. That evening, after supper, Clo appeared carrying a large, lavishly frosted pink cake with twenty-three lit candles. It was Jane’s birthday. And so began her African adventure.
Arriving in Africa, Jane would later say, felt oddly familiar, like a return to a place she’d always known. “Right from the moment I got here,” she wrote Sally Cary, “I felt at home. Out here I am no longer mad—because everyone is mad.” In a letter written to her family sometime during her second week, she elaborated: “I really do simply adore Kenya. It is so wild, uncultivated, primitive, mad, exciting, unpredictable . . . I am living in the Africa I have always longed for, always felt stirring in my blood.”
Jane was indeed quick to adapt—to the climate, but also to the social whirl of colonial Nairobi. She intended to find work as soon as she could get her footing, not wishing to overstay her welcome at Greystones. But in the meantime, she and Clo were out nearly every night. Often they drove into town for lunch and a swim at the private Muthaiga Club before slipping into cocktail dresses and pressing on to one of the parties that lit up Nairobi’s nightlife. She was mesmerized by the wildlife they passed on these drives in and out. She had already sighted springboks and a hyena, a group of colobus monkeys, and finally her first giraffe: “They are even taller and more impressive than I had imagined,” she wrote home excitedly. One strode right into the road, then “walked away in a most condescending & stately fashion.”
She was surprised by Nairobi’s precipitous temperature swings: the way the sting of the day’s heat was followed by the sharp chill of the nights, especially in the highlands, where, by necessity, a fire was lit every evening. The Kenyan climate can be “slightly degrading in its effect on some rather weak characters,” she wrote home. Jane, however, loved the extremes. In this, as her biographer notes, she closely resembled her father. Jane had “surprising endurance, [an] iron stomach, minimal appetite,” keen eyesight, and a capacity for sustained attention, even under extreme physical duress. But if she was her father’s daughter by “constitution,” she was her mother’s in “sensibility” and character. Like Vanne, Jane possessed deep stores of poise and sociability, and in addition, a certain wildness of heart that men found irresistible. Indeed, within weeks of her arrival, she was already the object of several men’s competing attentions.
Jane had begun seeing a man named Bob, who was part of the horsey set living in the White Highlands, a bastion of colonial privilege where riding, breeding, and racing horses was the main preoccupation. Bob was urging her to consider an equestrian future. She could train horses and play polo, he said, perhaps become a jockey. Unsaid but implied was the idea that she might also become someone’s wife.
And then, quite fortuitously, Jane met a different sort of man, this one older, wilder, and considerably less conventional, a man more than twice her age who would change the trajectory of her life: the brilliant and iconoclastic Louis Leakey. Almost overnight, her attention began to pivot from the affluent White Highlands set, with their private clubs and pristine polo fields, to an Africa more in tune with her own sensibilities: the modest and more gritty milieu of scientists and researchers associated with the Coryndon, soon the beating heart of her new world.
Louis Leakey was an unusual character by any measure. Born in Kenya in 1903, the third of four children in a supremely unconventional family, he was the son of trailblazing missionaries who had raised him amidst the native Kikuyu tribe. He spoke their language, learned their games, and was schooled in their hunting skills. As a newborn, he was left outside the house in a basket, whereupon, in keeping with Kikuyu custom, all the tribal elders had trooped past to give their blessing: each stopping to “spit” on him. In early adolescence, also in accordance with tribal customs, he endured the Kikuyu’s painful circumcision rites, signifying his manhood and his entrance into the tribe. At thirteen, like the other Kikuyu initiates, he moved from his parents’ home into his own mud-and-wattle house, though he continued to be tutored in Latin and mathematics, and spoke French with his parents and siblings over dinner each night. At sixteen, his family returned to England for several years, where he was enrolled in a public school. He found the other boys “appallingly childish,” and the school restrictions “absurd.” In Kenya, after all, he had built his own hut, and for some years had been living unsupervised and alone, as an adult. And while he displayed no talent for cricket—a clear strike against him—he proved to be a passionate and brilliant student. His peers thought him an oddball, certainly. But his good looks and formidable intellect somehow saved him from becoming the butt of schoolboy taunts. He went on to study at Cambridge University, earning top honors in anthropology and archeology, despite his difficulty adjusting to the damp English climate and a culture that he continued to find infantilizing. In the summer of 1926, at age twenty-three, he returned to Africa to lead an archeological expedition, and, realizing he had found his life’s work, never left. Over the next four decades, excavating tens of thousands of Stone Age tools, fossilized bones, and skull fragments, he would change the face of paleoanthropology, increasingly convinced that mankind’s origins were to be found on the continent of Africa, and not elsewhere. It was a notion that contravened scientific theories of the time, but one that ultimately was borne out, largely as a consequence of his research.
Leakey’s singularity went beyond his unorthodox upbringing, however. A bold and original thinker—intuitive, wildly independent, at times tough-minded—he was a maverick by nature as well as nurture. He often described himself as “a white African,” which was an apt characterization. The peculiarities of perspective and circumstance that as a child had set him apart, as an adult freed him from any concerns about conforming to the expectations of polite society. As a grown man, he had simply lost track of what those expectations might be.
By the spring of 1957, when Jane first strode into the Coryndon, Leakey’s eccentricity was on full display. No longer the handsome, vigorous, brown-haired Adonis of his Cambridge days, his hair had gone white, his teeth yellow, and he had developed a distinctive paunch. His standard uniform—a soiled, one-piece khaki coverall—was “missing buttons;” his pockets were “overloaded;” the knees of his coveralls ballooned. An indifferent bather and an unapologetic smoker (cheroots were his particular weakness), he tended “to stink.” Yet his eyes blazed with spirit, and his charm and volubility, his raw exuberance, were infectious. As he walked Jane through the museum that day, she had been transfixed by the deep stores of knowledge he possessed. Dr. Leakey had given her “the whole morning,” she gushed in a letter home. He had described experiments on lungfish that illustrated their amazing tolerance for drought. He had shown her the museum’s extensive collection of snakes, about which she was “naturally very interested.” Though Louis was not yet the soaring international colossus he would become, he and Mary, his second wife and professional partner of some years, had been engaged in their groundbreaking fossil excavations at Olduvai Gorge for some time. He was already an anthropologist of considerable stature, as Jane well knew. She felt enormously privileged to be in his presence, excited and lucky to be offered the job.
Louis’s previous secretary, Rosalie Osborn, had left to study gorillas, he told Jane. What he was less forthright about sharing, for reasons that would later become apparent, were the circumstances of her departure. Rosalie was young and pretty and extremely smart. Louis had met her in 1954 while in England, working on a pig fossil study. The two had begun an affair, and in the summer of 1955, Rosalie moved to Kenya to become Louis’s secretary. Disarmingly magnetic, even in old age, a lively and extravagant talker, Louis could hold “anyone in rapture,” his son Jonathan remembered. “Women came to him like moths to a flame,” a friend observed. “And he enjoyed it; he was a real human that way.” Louis had on occasion had flings with his protégés before, though they were always casual. A shameless flirt, his weakness for women, especially those who were youthful and attractive, was no secret. Mary had learned to tolerate these occasional dalliances. (She herself, in fact, had once been the object of his errant eye.) But this one, she realized, was more serious. As his son Richard later recalled, Rosalie Osborn nearly became “the third Mrs. Leakey.”
For years, Leakey had been trying to secure funding for a long-term study of the great apes. Such a study, he believed, would shed light on humankind’s earliest beginnings. The forests of Africa were home to three of the four species of great apes that remained—gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. For some time, in fact, Leakey had known of a particular tract of protected forest on the edge of Lake Tanganyika where a large population of chimpanzees still lived in isolation. But he had yet to succeed in launching a field study of any consequence. He had tried to send a young male researcher out as early as 1946, but little had come of it. A full decade had passed before he was able to renew his efforts once again, this time sending his pretty secretary Rosalie Osborn to Uganda for a four-month study of mountain gorillas. It was an elegant solution to his domestic troubles: a consolation for Rosalie, with whom he had broken off the affair, and a way to advance his own research into the lives of ancestral humans. But four months had proved insufficient time to collect enough data to draw any significant conclusions. And Osborn’s mother, who until then had assumed her daughter was safely in Nairobi taking dictation for Leakey, somehow got wind of Rosalie’s true whereabouts, whereupon she demanded that her daughter quit the gorilla study immediately. Osborn, who was just Jane’s age, had returned to England in January 1957, only a few months before Jane appeared at the Coryndon, where she eagerly accepted the job.
Jane had known nothing of all this at the time. Had she understood the edgy marital dance into which she was stepping, or been aware of her predecessor’s role in the drama, she would have been considerably less sanguine about the job, perhaps even turning it down. It wasn’t until she’d settled into work at the Coryndon that September that she began to piece together Mary’s disquiet at Olduvai that summer with the gossip in the air. The signs, however, had been there.
That May, when Louis proposed that she join Mary and him on their annual dig at Olduvai Gorge, he had predicated the invitation on Mary’s approval. Jane had been on guard, unsure what to expect. Louis had told her beforehand that he wouldn’t be calling her by her first name, as Mary would view this as “dreadfully familiar.” “She takes violent dislikes or likes to people for no reason at all,” he warned. It was more complicated than this, of course. Beyond Mary’s approval, which seemed hurdle enough, they would have to see if they could find room to add food and water for another person, Leakey had added. They were already taking along another young Englishwoman, Gillian Trace. But Jane had gotten on well with Mary, whom she described in a letter home as “a small, lean woman, with blackened teeth, a perpetual cigarette, & short wavy hair.” Mary had seemed “a little distant” on their first meeting, she told her family, but she quickly came around. After lunch that day at the Leakeys’, Mary had turned to Jane and casually asked, “I hear you might like to come with us to Olduvai.”
Louis Leakey’s interest in Olduvai went back decades. In 1931, at dawn on his first day of digging, he had astonished his colleagues by uncovering a perfectly intact Stone Age obsidian hand ax, the first such human artifact ever found at the site. The significance of this discovery was tremendous, as Leakey well knew. Tools indicated toolmakers, which meant there was a high probability that in addition to further artifacts, they might also find the fossilized remains of ancient humans—or even prehumans, their hominid ancestors. This was the elusive quarry that Jane and Gillian were hoping to uncover that August of 1957, more than twenty-five years later. “The great aim,” Jane scrawled excitedly to her family, “is to find the man who made all the tools.”
They set off in the Leakeys’ overloaded Land Rover six weeks after Jane got the official okay, she and Gillian squeezed uncomfortably amidst bedding, supplies, dog baskets, and the Leakeys’ two dalmatians. On their second day, they ascended the high rim of Ngorongoro Crater and then dropped down to the plains of the Serengeti, which “rise & fall and are covered in golden sun-baked grass and clumps of shrub & thorn trees,” Jane wrote. On their third, they awakened to “grazing herds of eland and gazelles all around.” Later, no longer on a road, but driving bumpily overland, they slowed to watch “the most beautiful cheetah who walked along beside the car, quite unafraid, before turning rather disgustedly from our noisy machine.” Jane was overwhelmed by the raw majesty before her. She had found the Africa of her earliest dreams.
The living conditions at Olduvai, as Louis had warned, were spartan, though Jane hardly noticed. Water was hauled in once a week, arriving on a trailer hitched to a decrepit truck. To make it last, each person was allotted a small bowl for daily washing, plus a shallow weekly bath in a canvas tub. Jane and Gillian grew accustomed to living with “dirty, greasy hair,” as she put it. They rose each morning at dawn and walked the mile between camp and the excavation site several times a day, undaunted by the heat or the ticks, the dust in their hair and noses, the demon wind that kicked up on occasion—even the stinging scorpions, which they always kept an eye out for. Day after day they worked, digging and sweating and swinging their heavy pickaxes, surrendering themselves to the blistering sun, captivated by the “mystery of evolution all around them,” the visible trail of humankind’s connectedness across the long sweep of time.
The days that summer, Jane remembered, were long and physically exhausting, although punctuated by moments of “intense excitement,” the nights soft and starlit, broken occasionally by the cry of a hyena or a jackal somewhere in the dark: haunting “cat-like yowls.” The African staff slept in their own separate camp; Louis, Mary, and the dalmatians in the rear of the old truck; Jane and Gillian in the tent they shared, although they often moved outside, surrounded, as Jane wrote, by “the whole immense vastness of Africa and the Serengeti with the mysterious universe all around and very real.” A little of that first summer would always flicker in her heart.
Louis, Jane wrote home, continues to be his “utterly adorable” self. He is “sweet” and thoughtful and “nothing is too much trouble.” She thought the atmosphere of the camp very “friendly & joking & oh so pleasant—until dinner time.”
Dinnertime was when Mary started to drink, pouring herself glass after glass of brandy. Mary would wobble up to the table, quite “blotto,” Jane added. It was her job to dish out the vegetables, but her serving was often comically unsteady. “One is liable to get 1/2 a bean and 6 potatoes—whilst the cauliflower goes on the table.” Had Jane known the source of Mary’s brooding that summer she undoubtedly would have been more sympathetic. It was only later that she gained some insight into what fed these messy nights.
NEAR THE CLOSE OF THEIR STAY AT OLDUVAI, THE THREE LEAKEY BOYS and a couple of their friends joined the party. It was a “full camp” and “such fun,” Jane wrote. All the young people slept outside, making it feel “rather like a dormitory.” For weeks Jane and Gillian had sought permission to ferry their beds up the side of the gorge—for the view, and so they might see more animals—though it would put them at some distance from camp. Louis said it was too far away to be without a gun, but had finally given in, as long as Hamish, who carried a gun, was with them. One evening, while Mary and the dogs lay sleeping in the van, Louis had crept up the side of the gorge and joined them for a thermos of tea. Later that same evening, he appeared again, this time at 3:30 A.M. Jane was the only one awake. Louis had pointed out constellations as they quietly talked, trying not to wake Gillian or Hamish.
It was that evening that Louis broached the subject of a wild ape study, describing with great excitement his hopes for what such an undertaking might reveal. Before metal and fire and the emergence of language, before large-brained upright Homo sapiens roamed the Serengeti plains, what had the lives of our deepest ancestors been like? he wondered. How had they behaved with each other? How had they lived? Had they expressed love or loss, formed friendships, felt empathy? Had they possessed the capacity to forgive? Nurture their young? Play? Leakey could guess, based on fossilized reconstructions, what ancestral humans had looked like, how they moved, what they might have eaten. But behavior didn’t fossilize; it couldn’t be read in bones and teeth. Wild apes and humankind shared a common ancestor; years of excavations had convinced him of this. It seemed reasonable to assume, then, that if it were possible to identify any behaviors that were common to both modern apes and modern humans, then one could safely conclude that their mute common ancestor would also have shared these behaviors. Modern apes, in other words, held the key, he believed, to solving the mysteries of mankind’s prehistoric past. This, at least, was the hope.
Back in Nairobi that September, Jane settled into life at the Coryndon. So far she was thrilled by the job. The letters she typed for Leakey were fascinating, the work hours flexible. The atmosphere was relaxed and the staff, she told her family, “charming & great fun . . . super.” She liked that there was variety from one day to the next. One morning she would be out with Louis “watching ostrich courtship rituals” in Nairobi National Park, the next escorting a “charming Portuguese professor” about the museum.
But Leakey was becoming a problem. He’d begun showing up unannounced at her apartment at odd hours, one morning proffering a single red rose, a most unwelcome token of his affection. “I begin to see why Mary has taken to the brandy,” Jane wrote home. At first Jane didn’t take his romantic overtures terribly seriously, but when Louis continued to press, she began to worry. “Old Louis really is infantile in his infatuation and is suggesting the most impossible things,” she wrote home. One impossible thing he suggested was a midnight rendezvous at Tsavo National Park, where they would camp for the night, he said, before setting out the next day to explore. Jane was horrified, as much for how his proposal appeared as for fears that he might try to pull any “monkey business.” They were standing in a room full of museum trustees when he handed her the train ticket and hurriedly outlined his plan. She had been too embarrassed to gracefully decline on the spot. And when later he phoned her at the museum, wondering why she hadn’t appeared at the Tsavo station, she had been sitting with another colleague, making it uncomfortable to go into her reasons for failing to show. At work that next Monday, Louis was furious and accused Jane of lying to him. She had let him down, he said, and stomped out of the room. Jane was visibly shaken, but when he appeared later to apologize, she forgave him. The incident, she assumed, was over. But that night, when she returned to her room, there was a note from Louis propped on her pillow: “I had to come back to tell you how much I love you.” She was mortified. The whole thing made her feel “quite ill,” she wrote her family.
Jane’s romantic interests, in fact, were very much elsewhere. On the trip to Olduvai that summer, she had met a handsome young man named Brian Herne, who at the time was encased in a full-body cast. Brian had nearly lost his legs, barely surviving a horrible car accident. The driver had been less lucky, plunging to his death when the truck they were in lost its brakes and flew off a cliff. That September, finally shorn of his cast, Brian appeared one afternoon at the Coryndon in a red MG. He was stopping by to see if Jane knew the whereabouts of their mutual friend Hamish, he explained. Jane was initially unsure about Brian. He was tall and lithe, with chestnut hair and steady blue eyes—unquestionably attractive, but he seemed “very young,” she wrote home, and she was put off by his profession. Brian was a big-game hunter, the youngest licensed professional hunter in Kenya. He made his living guiding well-to-do clients through the backcountry with the express purpose of killing rhinos, lions, buffalo, and other big game, a thought she could barely stomach. Though he was just nineteen, he seemed to have “an external layer of the typical hard bitten and tough white hunter about him,” she told Vanne. But she had soon amended her first impression. After seeing Brian a few times, she decided that “the character underneath” was “one of the nicest I’ve come across out here. Loyal, honest, faithful, etc., etc.” She was pleased when he kept calling.
They were kindred spirits, they found, both drawn to untrammeled nature, to the sensuous and the athletic, to animals and the thrill of adventure. Both loved the violent beauty of Africa, the emptiness and unfettered space. And both possessed a wild streak. Brian took Jane to the Serengeti whenever they could get away. He showed her untouched, “utterly remote” corners he had known as a boy. Brian sat with her under the stars. Brian was “the first person I’ve met out here I have liked sitting alone with,” she wrote Vanne. She was falling in love.
Brian’s family, Jane soon realized, was heavenly too. As were his friends. They were a crazy and uproarious lot, mostly young Kenyans, all of them “quite utterly and completely mad,” she reported. But also “incredibly decent to each other,” kind and loyal and enormous fun. It was “so nice to see.” Soon Jane was running with the pack, hopping from party to nightclub to riotous evenings of all-night dancing. Jane was “daring and game to try anything,” Brian remembered. She was unafraid of fast driving, of doing crazy things. One night they joined a gang of friends who were motorcycle fanatics. The guys kept talking about “doing the ton,” which was code for pushing their bikes up to one hundred miles an hour. Jane expressed interest in doing the ton too. Soon she was straddling a roaring, deep-throated motorcycle, clinging to Brian, as they ripped along a ragged asphalt road outside Nairobi, watching the speedometer needle climb to a thrilling 105. It was hard to say who was giddier, Jane or Brian. Another evening, desperate to escape a wedding reception they deemed boring, Jane and Brian slipped out with a few friends to go dancing at a posh hotel. Once there, Jane did match tricks and walked about with a glass of beer balanced atop her head. Later, deciding it was time for a swim, Jane and a clutch of others stumbled through the dark until they found the hotel pool. Untroubled by their lack of bathing suits, Jane peeled down to her underwear and dove in, followed by Brian and another friend, pronouncing it “quite heavenly” in a letter home later.
By late fall, however, the romance had hit a rough patch. Brian was out of work and still in pain, too lame to resume his job guiding hunting parties. He was almost broke and beginning to worry. To help make up for his lost income, he and Jane had hatched a plan to partner on a series of animal-oriented articles with photographs, which they hoped to sell to American magazines. But like many such literary collaborations, this one was doomed to failure almost from the start. They squabbled about style and content, nearly coming to blows each time one of them made changes to the draft of the other. Eventually they had to abandon the project.
Still, Brian continued to delight Jane in other ways. One afternoon, he presented her with a baby bat-eared fox, an orphan from the Serengeti. The animal was immediately Jane’s most beloved possession, accompanying her each day to her office at the Coryndon, where he slept at her feet. He was the first of a menagerie that soon included a vervet monkey, a mongoose, a cocker spaniel puppy, a Siamese cat, a bush baby, a hedgehog, another monkey, a rat, and a vast array of snakes. “But can you imagine,” Jane rhapsodized in a letter home, “how paradisical (if that is the correct word) it is for me having all these animals around?”
By January, Jane was writing to Vanne about the “complexities” of her feelings for Brian. “Brian, in a lot of ways, I could marry,” she confessed. “The point is that I do love [him],” she went on, but he would “have to change a lot” before she “could marry him.” Even so, she admitted, “I have yet to find a more honest & essentially good hearted man than my Brian. If he didn’t love hunting & if he did love music & literature, he would be ideal.”
Considerably less ideal was Louis’s behavior, which was beginning to be a serious problem. Even with Brian in her life, he refused to give up, sending cut roses to her room, trying to hold her hand, telling her he thought one day she might love him back. “Oh, yes. He is in love with me,” Jane wrote Vanne. “He has been sweet & kind & helpful—& for that I am grateful. But what does he expect & hope—& with no right? Simply that one day—to quote—‘you will love me as much as I love you.’ What right has a man of his age, already on his second wife, to expect & even hope for such a thing?” It was too grim to contemplate. “At Olduvai,” she continued, “I was really & truly sorry for him . . . but I can never describe my utter & complete physical revulsion when I discovered that he expected me to be in love with him—never.”
Jane continued to do battle: “We’ve had a little talk & he’s promised to stop doing this,” she told Vanne. But Louis couldn’t help himself; despite his assurances, he kept going back on his word. At one point Jane threatened to leave the museum. The situation was becoming too awkward and uncomfortable. Finally she and Louis really “thrashed it out,” she reported to Vanne, arriving, she added, at what she hoped was a more realistic state of affairs: Louis agreed to be “merely a father to me,” she explained, and she in turn promised she would “trust him with everything as he valued my friendship more than anything else in the world.” It didn’t go quite as smoothly or quickly as Jane envisioned, but Louis did eventually make the reluctant transition from “suitor to mentor,” though it took time.
Louis, meanwhile, had made one proposition that did interest her, of course, putting Jane in a position that was more complex, no doubt, than she’d initially understood. Sometime during their stay at Olduvai, he told her, he had decided that she would make “an extraordinarily promising” candidate to send on his ape study. He wasn’t worried that she possessed neither scientific training nor academic degree. He preferred, he said, that his chosen researcher should go into the field “with a mind unbiased by scientific theory.” What he was looking for was someone with grit and personal fortitude: “someone with an open mind, with a passion for knowledge, with a love of animals, and with monumental patience.” Someone also who was able to endure months, perhaps even years, away from civilization, as he believed the project might take that long. He hoped she would accept his proposal, and she of course had.
And so it was settled. All that remained was to raise the necessary funds, which Leakey promised to begin working on at once. That fall he wrote to an anthropologist friend at the University of Chicago, soliciting his financial support. The study’s duration would be four months, he explained, although he hoped it might be extended. He mentioned that “Miss Jane Morris-Goodall—from the point of view of personality and interests, and, by the time I send her, from the point of view of training also”—was unquestionably “a highly suitable candidate.” Louis never heard back, nor did he receive a reply from his colleagues at the London Zoological Society, to whom he also wrote. Apparently the scientific establishment found the idea of sending an unschooled, uncredentialed amateur on such a study pure lunacy. But that the candidate was also of the female persuasion made it unthinkable, it seemed. Louis, of course, was dubious of such cultural biases. He had spent his life challenging establishment thinking and was impatient with stock assumptions for which he saw no grounds. The project was temporarily put on hold until he could find the funds, but he was no less determined to see it go forward.
Jane had saved up her salary and as a gift sent her mother a plane ticket to Nairobi. In early September, a bright-eyed Vanne emerged from the Nairobi airport, sinking happily into Jane’s embrace. After so many months, she ached to see her daughter. But she was also concerned about what she called “the Brian problem,” which, as she was soon writing home, seemed even more fraught than what she had imagined. Everyone she met described Brian as “a boy of great charm.” He has “film star” looks, she reported, but he seems to breathe melodrama, “always a SITUATION!!” she added. Vanne was also looking forward to seeing Leakey again.
During a junket to England that spring, Louis had taken Vanne out to lunch, eager to meet the mother of his young protégé. The two had gotten on famously. Vanne found Leakey captivating—genial, brilliant, courtly. He had “a wonderful flow of conversation and a very strong personality, which I liked,” she pronounced. She had been entirely “loath to tear” herself away. When Vanne arrived in Nairobi that September, Louis again proved himself a gracious host. He drove her into the Kikuyu reserve and “through miles and miles of real African country”; he arranged an expedition to the “uninhabited monkey-filled island” of Lolui, where, Vanne wrote, they “sailed on and on and on, under a tropical sky and landed on an uninhabited island, and slept to the sound of a million croaking frogs”; he treated mother and daughter to “a weeklong float” in his research vessel on Lake Victoria. And finally, he took Vanne to Olduvai, setting off across the Serengeti, which “far exceeded in strangeness and beauty” anything she had expected, and where they saw “cheetahs slumbering under a thorn tree, and passed of course Ostrich, wildebeest [and] giraffe.” Vanne was enchanted, fascinated by Leakey’s life and moved by his warmth and generosity. And so began an enduring friendship, fed in part by their mutual affection for Vanne’s young and wild-hearted daughter.
Vanne had planned to stay in Kenya for three months, and then she and Jane would return to England, arriving home in time for Christmas at the Birches. Louis still hadn’t found funds for the chimp study, but he was certain now about where it should take place: in Tanganyika Territory, in a piece of forest known as the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve. Tanganyika Territory was at the time a British protectorate, and the district commissioner there, a stalwart Brit named Geoffrey Browning, was proving testy. He had made it clear that “no European woman would be allowed into the Gombe forests alone.” To satisfy Browning, Jane would have to have a European escort, it seemed, a second someone to accompany her on the expedition. Louis was worried that another person might compromise the research. It had to be someone relaxed, someone compatible, someone who wouldn’t compete. Over lunch one day, he shared the complication with Vanne, as it was weighing on his thoughts. Before fully realizing it, Vanne had volunteered to be that second someone. The revised proposal—that two women go to Gombe instead of one—was now given the green light.
Beyond this, however, everything remained in the air. Jane would stay in England to prepare herself, in the event the money came through. In the interim, Leakey had promised to find her a job, perhaps at the British Museum, or the zoo. And she would begin reading everything she could about primatology and chimpanzees. Two weeks later, mother and daughter boarded the ship that would carry them home to England. Brian and his family were there to see them off. Hugs were shared, farewells and promises pledged, and then the ship pulled up anchor. Jane waved madly, feeling her eyes tear up as she watched the coastline of Africa recede into a faint bluish blur. She hoped she would be returning in a few months, but nothing was certain.
JANE ARRIVED HOME TO A “SMILING LONDON,” AS SHE WROTE, “SUNNY & with a lovely nip in the air,” and that January, after an equally lovely Christmas, moved in with her sister, Judy, to their father’s London flat. Mortimer, as always, was away. It felt in some ways as if she’d “never left.”
To her delight, Louis had delivered on his promise. There was a position awaiting her at the London Zoo—actually not in the zoo proper, but in the film library of Granada Television, which was housed on the grounds, and at the time producing an extended series about animal behavior. Jane was charged with cataloguing cans of films with animal shots—exceedingly boring work, she reported. But she was pleased to have a job. At lunchtime, she liked to meander around the zoo, although, as she wrote her friend Bernard Verdcourt in Nairobi, “there are some animals which I can’t bear to see caged, especially the African ones.”
Jane had bought a “cheap” car. And to amuse themselves, she and Judy began to hang out at a hip little coffeehouse called the Troubadour, on Old Brampton Road, Earl’s Court. The Troubadour had a tatty bohemian feel, with exposed beams, antiques on the walls, and a low-lit downstairs room with pillows on the floor. It was a popular venue for poets and underground musicians, and had a small stage for poetry readings and performances. It was there, one autumn evening, that she met the charismatic Robert Young—handsome, clever, and soon a serious suitor. Robert was twenty-six and an aspiring actor. He thought Jane “an extremely interesting woman,” whose ambitions, he remembered, were “way ahead of her time.” Jane was equally taken with Robert, who would soon become her second real love.
The romance moved quickly. By February 1960, Jane and Robert were engaged. Robert, who still hadn’t met the family, traveled to Bournemouth, where Danny pronounced him “charming.” Vanne, however, was noticeably reserved, perhaps because of the financial uncertainty of Robert’s chosen profession, perhaps because it was hard to imagine how Jane’s plans to return to Africa meshed with Robert’s aspirations to a life onstage.
Louis, meanwhile, had finally recognized he was getting nowhere in his efforts to interest the usual institutional sponsors in his proposed chimp study. It was time to pursue less orthodox channels. He would try his luck with his American friend Leighton Wilkie, an inventive, slightly wacky midwesterner who had made a fortune manufacturing cutting tools. Leighton had met Leakey in 1955, at a Pan-African Congress on prehistory, where Louis, in his inimitable fashion, had thrilled the crowd with a bit of stagecraft: performing a live demonstration of how to butcher a freshly killed antelope, using Stone Age tools. Leighton, as a tool man himself, was duly impressed. He was soon underwriting a portion of Leakey’s work at Olduvai each year, dispensing small but regular grants. That February, after Leakey got word of Leighton’s annual gift, he wrote to thank his benefactor, and to lobby for a second small grant, this one to fund his chimp project, which he hoped, he said, would begin in September 1959. A brief proposal was appended to the letter, in which he described the researcher he’d selected, a Miss Jane Morris-Goodall, “who has worked in Kenya with Dr. Leakey,” delicately sidestepping any mention of the fact that Jane had served in a secretarial capacity rather than a scientific one. Happily, Leighton asked no questions, writing back an enthusiastic letter pledging $3,000 in seed money for the “very interesting” chimpanzee study. At long last, the project was to become a reality.
This welcome news was soon followed by an even more momentous event. At Olduvai that July, Louis and Mary had dug up a hominid skull that was soon determined to be the world’s earliest man. Dubbed the “Nutcracker Man” or, as the Leakeys privately called it, “Dear Boy,” the skull swiftly became international news, aided in part by a documentary aired by the BBC that captured the Leakeys’ excavation in all its glory. Almost overnight the couple became global superstars, and Louis embarked on a whirlwind lecture tour that took him to seventeen different scientific institutions and universities, many of them in America, where audiences found him riveting.
But the greatest turn to come of Leakey’s newfound celebrity was that it earned him entrée to the National Geographic Society, where one November afternoon, an eloquent Leakey was able to interest the society’s president, Melville Bell Grosvenor, in the saga of the Nutcracker Man. By the end of their meeting, Grosvenor had agreed to grant the Leakeys $20,200 toward further research in return for exclusive American publication rights to the story. It was the beginning of an extremely auspicious partnership between the Leakeys (who up until then had been operating on a shoestring) and the National Geographic Society. Louis’s article, “Finding the World’s Oldest Man,” would appear in the September 1960 issue of National Geographic, generating a groundswell of excitement. The offbeat and colorful paleontologist, as Grosvenor had sensed, possessed enormous popular appeal.
Leakey flew back to Kenya from the U.S. in December 1959, stopping briefly in London, where he gave Jane the news that the grant from Leighton Wilkie had, as promised, come through. “I saw Leakey during the past 2 or 3 days—he took Ma & I out to dinner & the theatre,” Jane wrote her friend Bernard. He reiterated that the chimp study was now “all fixed . . . honestly Bernard, if I stop & think about it, I get simply terrified—not of the actual job, but of the responsibility.” Leakey’s reputation would now be resting on her work too, Jane realized. It was a quiet worry she tried her best to contain.
The study now real, Jane doubled down on her informal reading, quitting her job at Granada Television at the end of March so she could give her full attention to the work before her. Two of Leakey’s colleagues had helped her compile a reading list, and one of them, John Napier, agreed to give her a two- to three-month private tutorial in primatology.
She was perplexed to discover how little was actually known about primate behavior. In the early twentieth century, several venturesome scientists had collected dead gorillas in Africa and then dissected them, eager for clues as to diet, tooth size, reproductive organs. There were a few behavioral studies of apes in captivity on record too, most notably by two distinguished psychologists, Wolfgang Köhler and Robert Yerkes. Other than that, not much.
Yerkes, a Yale man, had set up a research center in Florida in 1930, convinced that by observing apes, he might better understand the biological components of human psychology. Apes, he believed, could become helpful “servants of science” and “contribute importantly to human welfare.” It was the same rationale that Rachel Carson’s first boss had offered for their work at the Bureau of Fisheries. Animals, the thinking went, could be harnessed to serve human ends. They were auxiliary to their human overseers, a useful resource to exploit for advancing mankind’s needs.
Yerkes was in many ways an outlier, however. It was his surmise that apes were “guided” by emotions that were not unlike those of humans, and that they were “probably capable of rational and symbolic thought.” He saw no “obvious reason,” he wrote, “why the chimpanzees and other great apes should not talk.” To test out this theory, a baby chimp was placed in the household of a psychologist named Winthrop Kellogg and his wife, Luella, who for several months raised the chimp “alongside their own infant son, Donald.” Soon enough, Donald was speaking while the chimp, to the Kelloggs’ disappointment, “remained mute,” although they were convinced that he understood at least one hundred words. But then, rumor had it, the experiment was abruptly halted. Apparently the Kelloggs’ baby had stopped speaking and begun making chimp sounds. Studying primates in captivity clearly had its limits. Yerkes, like Leakey, longed for a study of chimps in their natural habitat.
In 1929, Yerkes managed to send a young Yale psychologist, Harold C. Bingham, and his wife, Lucille, into the eastern Belgian Congo. The couple hired a small army of African porters that numbered forty at one point, spending the next two months in the field, creeping through the bush, looking for gorilla prints, examining nests. Occasionally they did get close to an actual ape, but when this happened their fears often got the best of them, especially on the day when an edgy Bingham, startled by the sight of an excited gorilla, grabbed his gun and shot him dead.
The following year, Yerkes dispatched a second Yale psychologist, Henry W. Nissen, to the African bush, this time to French Guinea, for a nine-week field study of wild chimpanzees. No matter that this “one-man expedition,” as Nissen described it, actually included three African assistants and a half dozen porters and guides. Nissen’s chief concern was how to do the research, since there were still no earlier studies from which to draw. He built a series of “blinds” and hid expectantly behind them. But he quickly found that the “sharp-sighted chimps” were unconvinced by his ruse; they knew an interloping bit of architecture when they saw one, vanishing instantly into the bush. He pondered using “lures”—that is, leaving “chimp delicacies at the same spot day after day,” but scotched this plan for lack of time. More fruitful, he decided, would be to “surround a group of chimps with a circle of hired African helpers” and impede the apes’ wanderings for a day or so—this to give him time to notate basic information about “group size and compositions, age, sex, and so on.” But nothing went as envisioned; the exercise was an unqualified disaster. Guns went off, grass fires were lit by forty hired African helpers, another gang of club-wielding helpers dragged a baby chimp from some trees. Understandably, the traumatized chimps—screaming, panicked, terrified—failed to yield any useful clues about their everyday behavior. Out of ideas and with little time left, the bewildered American psychologist and his entourage of porters took to tracking the apes on foot, “listening for the hoots and cries of chimps” and then moving furtively toward the sounds, usually with little success. Given all this, it was hardly surprising that the conclusions Nissen reached were at best “simplistic”—“the chimp is nomadic, having no permanent home”—and at worst wrong.
Jane was “shocked” by the image of Nissen and his club-wielding porters. As far as she could tell, he had learned little more than the skittish, trigger-happy Harold Bingham, which was almost nothing at all. With some disgust, she perused two other published field studies—one on gibbons, the other on red-tailed monkeys. In both instances, the researchers had gathered what behavioral data they could and then slaughtered their subjects to determine their “age, sex, reproductive condition”—even their stomach contents.
“More slaughter of the innocents,” she thought.
Distressed by the thinness of the literature, she ventured out to the London Zoo on occasion, eager to conduct her own informal studies of chimps in captivity. “But there were only two bored psychotic individuals in a tiny cement cage with iron bars. I could learn little there,” she later wrote. She was shocked by the conditions they were in.
One night Jane showed Nissen’s monograph, “A Field Study of Chimpanzees,” to Robert Young, a decision she almost immediately regretted. “The more he reads the more worried about me he gets,” she wrote Vanne.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF MISS V. J. MORRIS-GOODALL’S ENGAGEMENT TO Mr. R. B. Young appeared in the Daily Telegram and Morning Post on May 13, 1960—a stroke of bad luck, it turned out, as the timing couldn’t have been more terrible. Just days later Jane got word from Leakey that preparations for the ape study were finally in place. He had procured the necessary supplies and had two plane tickets and the final permits from the Tanganyika Game Department in hand. Marriage to the dashing Robert Young was now hastily postponed, and two weeks later, after tearful, departure-gate promises that the couple would wed as soon as Jane returned, Jane and Vanne flew by prop plane from London to Nairobi, arriving the next morning.
They encountered their “first setback” almost immediately. Apparently, a feud was brewing between two rival groups of fishermen camped along the shore bordering the chimpanzee preserve; it was making conditions at Gombe extremely dangerous, Louis said. Never without a backup plan, Louis decided to divert them instead to Lolui Island, where Jane could conduct “a short trial study” of the vervet monkeys there to get some research practice. The two women were loaded onto a train to Lake Victoria, where they were met by Hassan Salimu, the captain of Louis’s cabin cruiser, who ferried them across the vast sealike lake to Lolui Island the next day.
Like Bingham and Nissen before her, Jane Goodall was effectively beginning her research without “serious precedent, established preconception, or standard method,” as her biographer has written. She had nothing to build on. No one had researched wild vervet monkeys before; few had studied wild apes. It was all uncharted territory. Nissen had adopted a “hunter’s technique,” moving quietly and stealthily toward his research subject, until he could see what he had been tracking by sound. But stealth can go only so far, since it usually signals a predator preparing to assail its prey. Stealth telegraphs danger, imminent threat, the need to flee. Instinctively, Jane adopted a different style, doing more or less as she had done as a young girl watching the small wild animals near her home: she moved openly, rather than in secret, paying careful attention to how close she could get, and what movements were perceived as threatening, to how and where to direct her gaze. The Lolui Island study, she would later recall, “taught me a great deal about such things as note-taking in the field, the sort of clothes to wear, the movements a wild monkey will tolerate.” Jane’s approach was improvisational at this point, but she was learning with each encounter, noting not only what methods worked, but also those that didn’t. “At 2:15 an adolescent entered the two tall bushes nearest to my tree, and I was too close for him. He started to give a warning call, and soon an adult female, a male & another J[uvenile] had joined it,” she wrote. “I curled up & pretended to go to sleep. Soon they all stopped,” she added, with some satisfaction.
Jane’s methodology parted ways with Nissen’s in another respect. Following her intuition, she chose not to approach the Lolui Island monkey population in a general way, as a “species,” but instead to try to get an understanding of the species by observing “individual members.” This meant noting and then remembering distinctive features—initially so she could differentiate one monkey from the next, making it easier to describe their individual behaviors, but soon also so she could note how and when they interacted, and, by extension, if and how they were connected, if indeed they were. To this end, descriptions such as “mature female with very pink, large conspicuous nipples” or “adult male—very handsome creature in his prime” soon gave way to names—the first cardinal sin of conventional scientific practice, where researchers were expected to assign numbers to their subjects. (Jane, however, didn’t yet know this.) Within days, the small infant who continued to be cradled in the arms of “the huge female” had become Sammy. By the second week, Sammy’s mother had been named Bessie. The “very obvious pregnant” young female with nipples “very small in comparison to the other adult females” was called Lotus. Months later, at Gombe, as Jane got to know the chimps she was watching as individuals, she would do the same, giving them names that defined them as distinctive personalities. “I had no idea that this, according to the ethological discipline of the early 1960s, was inappropriate,” she later wrote.
Jane’s approach, so different from the narrower and more generalized focus of her predecessors, represented a critical change in orientation, a shift from an emphasis on counting and measuring things, to a focus on mapping relationships. Field zoology up until this time, writes Peterson, “typically consisted of specimen collection: shooting wild animals and measuring their remains.” Jane was looking for something else: she was searching for connections, the ties that bound together the monkeys as a species, but also as a community of distinct individuals, a society connected by a web of relations and interdependencies. It was an approach akin to that of Jacobs, who argued that generalizations about cities got one nowhere. It was only by observing the unique and particular features of individual blocks, in distinct and individual neighborhoods, and how they connected, that one could possibly get a sense of how the city as a whole worked. Just as Jacobs renounced “the statistical city,” which described urbanism as a mathematical abstraction rather than as a living community of people, so Goodall intuitively rejected the notion of approaching the chimps as numbers and statistics. “In the form of statistics, these citizens could be dealt with intellectually like grains of sand, or electrons or billiard balls,” Jacobs had written. The same, Goodall would soon argue, was true of animals. They couldn’t be abstracted as a species. One had to begin from the bottom up, with the individual and the particular and build from there.
LOUIS FINALLY GAVE THEM THE GO-AHEAD TO PROCEED TO GOMBE IN late June. Jane and Vanne returned to Nairobi at once, loaded up the Land Rover, and then set off on the eight-hundred-mile journey south into Tanganyika Territory. Three days and several punctured tires later, they rolled into the town of Kigoma, a single main street shaded by mango trees, with a red-dirt square, an open market, and a train station, only to encounter their second setback: the dusty port town was in crisis. Violence had flared up in nearby Congo, just twenty-five miles away, on the far side of Lake Tanganyika, following its liberation from colonial rule. Belgian refugees, mostly women and children, were pouring in by the boatload, terrified by tales of machete-wielding hooligans who had turned on their former overlords. Once again, the expedition to Gombe would have to be put on hold. Jane and Vanne joined the volunteer corps that same day, making Spam sandwiches, doling out chocolate and hot soup, helping the displaced Belgians onto trains. In their free time, they wandered the market, where one afternoon they hired a cook for the expedition, a local Kigoma man named Dominic Charles Bandora, whom they came to love. Finally, a little over two weeks in, the game warden, a gentle young Brit named David Anstey, deemed it safe to proceed.
THE BREEZE WAS UP ON THE MORNING THEY LEFT, WHIPPING THE WATER into a meringue of small waves. Anstey had arranged for a launch to ferry them twelve miles up the lake to Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, tethering the little aluminum dinghy Leakey had sent to the stern. Jane remembered standing on deck, eyeing the little dinghy and having the strange disembodied feeling that she was “living in a dream.” The dinghy would soon be their only link to the outside world.
They chugged steadily north, plying their way up the jagged coastline. Deep ravines cleaved the steep, flat-topped cliffs in places. Pockets of forest filled the narrow valleys, through which fast-moving streams spilled to the lake. Occasional fishing villages crouched at the foot of these forested slopes, simple mud-and-grass huts, a few roofed in corrugated tin. And then, as the southern boundary of Gombe appeared, the landscape noticeably changed. Now the mountains were higher and steeper, swaddled in impenetrable-looking tropical forest. A few makeshift fishermen’s huts speckled the white beach; on the sand beside them, silvery fish glinted in the sun; otherwise there were no signs of civilization. Later, Vanne would admit that she had been “horrified” by the sheer slopes, the “impenetrable appearance of the valley forests”; Anstey told Jane afterward that he had guessed that she would be “packed up and gone within six weeks.” She had looked, he recalled, so “terribly young.” Anstey had also been worried that blowback from Congo “would send baddies, vagabonds, hooligans, murderers or what-have-you across the lake and knock her in the head,” he confessed.
A small gathering of people awaited them on the shore—a handful of fishermen, two African scouts who lived by permission in the preserve, and an ancient, birdlike man of imperial bearing, ceremoniously attired in a red turban and an equally red European overcoat. The old man was Iddi Matata, they soon learned, the unofficial head of the fishing camp. Matata proceeded to deliver an impassioned welcome speech in Swahili, whereupon Jane and Vanne, as Anstey had counseled, presented the old man with a small gift. All parties apparently satisfied, the onlookers dispersed, and then David Anstey and Matata’s six children helped Jane and Vanne set up camp. Dominic’s tent was placed just above the beach; Jane and Vanne’s was erected on slightly higher ground, in a clearing shaded by oil palm trees. It was, they felt, ideal. Their tent had a raised flap veranda in the front, a separate washroom in the rear, and was roomy enough to accommodate two camp cots set side by side, as well as various tin boxes that held their gear. A “small gurgling stream” tumbled right behind it, with cool, clear water that ran so fast they could wash their feet, or simply soak them on torrid days when the heat stung. Vanne had spotted a small pool deep enough, she hoped, to wash her hair, which, she reported home in a letter, was now “so stiff with dust that it stands up like a halo.” In short order then, a deep hole was dug to serve as a latrine, and a baffle of woven palm leaves built to ensure privacy. And finally, a makeshift kitchen—a few poles and a straw roof—was erected near Dominic’s tent. That evening, the little party, which still included David Anstey, dined on a splendid meal that Dominic had cooked: soup, followed by a stew with potatoes, then canned oranges and coffee. And then they all trooped off happily to bed.
JANE FELT AN IMMEDIATE KINSHIP WITH THE AFRICANS SHE MET. SHE was startled therefore to learn that her embrace of the locals was not altogether reciprocal. A rumor had spread that she and Vanne were government spies, and that their purpose in coming was to exaggerate the chimpanzee count, which would further buttress the government’s case for keeping the forest a protected preserve. Jane was sympathetic. The locals had once cut wood for their fishing boats in this forest; many believed they would be reborn there, after death, as chimpanzees. They still dreamed of reclaiming the thirty square miles of rich black earth for themselves. It was a delicate situation and David Anstey, familiar with local ways, negotiated it with enormous aplomb, meeting with an agitated crowd of some twenty fishermen and villagers the day after her arrival. They talked it through, agreeing finally on a compromise: Jane would do her chimpanzee watching in the company of a few “hired assistants,” who would monitor her counts, making sure she wasn’t inflating them. One of her minders, it was decided, would be the “good-humored” Adolf Siwezi, a game scout already employed at the reserve; the other, the “tall and lean and silent” Rashidi Kikwale, who would serve as her guide and porter. It was also understood that she would hire the son of the chief of Mwamgongo village, a fishing settlement just north of the preserve. Jane was upset by the news. She had imagined that she would set off through the forest unencumbered and alone, she told her family. That night, she went to bed feeling “depressed and miserable.” But by the next morning, she’d resolved she would make the best of an imperfect situation. “I do hope it’s all going to work,” she added.
Gombe was an Eden of sorts, more stunning, even, than Jane had imagined. The forest was festooned with flowers; the plunging valleys were lush with green. “I wish you could be here—even for a day,” she wrote her family soon after arriving. “It is so beautiful, with the crystal clear blue lake, the tiny white pebbles on the beach, the sparkling ice cold mountain stream, the palm nut trees.” Wildlife abounded. There were hippos and herds of buffalo, bushbucks and bushpigs, a few “reclusive leopards” and even the occasional hyena. Birds swooped across the forest canopy in great numbers. Crocodiles lurked along the lakeside. The primate population was copious, including olive baboons; red colobus monkeys; blue, red-tailed, and vervet monkeys; and an astonishing number of chimpanzees. There were smaller species of course too: civets and elephant shrews; genets and mongooses; chameleons, geckos, and skinks. And snakes: giant pythons, some a terrifying sixteen feet long, with back-curving teeth as big as a dog’s; slumberous, six-foot-long Nile monitor lizards; and naturally, a number of poisonous varieties too (night adders, spitting cobras, black mambas, vine snakes, bush vipers). Gombe was also home to all manner of biting insects: venomous giant millipedes, scorpions, and assassin bugs; spiders, tsetse flies, and safari ants—this in addition to an army of malarial mosquitoes, all to be avoided.
Jane had arrived anticipating these perils, secure in the knowledge that she was where at last she was meant to be: living amidst the feral splendor of a beautiful and fecund, if at times violent, Africa. She knew, for instance, that chimpanzees were dangerous wild animals, capable of ripping off a person’s arm; that leopards were solitary hunters more threatening to humans, many said, than lions; that a black mamba’s bite would paralyze you in less than an hour, with only a few more left before you died. Still, it came as a shock when, during her first week, two fishermen rushed up excitedly and led Adolf, Rashidi, and her to a tree near the lake. Its bark was gashed in a hundred spots, the result, apparently, of a lone bull buffalo that had charged one of the fishermen the night before. The terrified man had managed to clamber up into the tree, where he clung to an upper branch for more than an hour, while the buffalo rammed the tree repeatedly, trying to shake his quarry loose.
Jane took the fishermen’s warning to heart, later describing her own eerie encounter with a buffalo, which she nearly bumped into one morning as it lay in the dark before dawn, no more than six yards away. “Fortunately the wind was strong, its sound covering the small noise I made, and it was blowing from him to me,” she wrote. “I was able to creep away undetected.” Another time, while camping alone in the hills, she heard the “strange sawing call” of a hunting leopard close by in the dark. She was terrified, having what she called “an ingrained illogical fear” of leopards. She put a blanket over her head, hoping for the best, and was lucky. Another evening, this much later, she was walking back to camp along the lakeshore, wading in the water to avoid a huge rock, when she saw the slippery black body of a snake. She instantly froze. It was six feet long, and from the slight hood and dark bands striping its neck, she knew it was a Storm’s water cobra—a lethal snake with a bite for which, at the time, there was no antivenom. It moved toward her, riding an oncoming wave, and then part of its body actually settled on one of her feet. Jane stared down at it, disbelieving, barely breathing until the wave rolled back into the lake, sweeping the snake with it. Heart “hammering,” she leaped out of the water then. These incidents, however, were exceptions. In general, as she would later write, her fears of being hurt by a wild animal were “almost nonexistent” at the time. She truly believed that the animals she was living amidst would sense that she meant them no harm, and would thus leave her alone.
Louis tended to share this belief, while also insisting that she have “a reasonable understanding” of how to behave if she encountered an animal unexpectedly. She knew, for example, that the most dangerous thing one could do was to get between a mother and her young, or to come upon an animal that had been wounded and couldn’t run, or one that had, for some reason, “learned to hate man.” But these were perils, she added, “no more dangerous—and probably even less dangerous—than those that could beset one in any city, and I was not concerned.” Indeed, unlike the few researchers before her, Jane was inclined to identify and even empathize with the animals she moved among, rather than to fear them. She possessed a fundamentally different conception of her own place in the scheme of things. Instinctively, she neither envisioned nor experienced the natural world as a hierarchy in which mankind stood at the top, separate and superior. She felt herself to be as one among a complex web of creatures: part of, and not separate from, the animal kingdom.
Curiously, this difference in her fear response (beyond Jane’s obvious bravery) has some biological basis, it turns out. Recently, UCLA researchers discovered that, biologically, men and women respond differently to stress, explains Nina Simons, codirector of the Collective Heritage Institute. “Men tend to react with a fight, flight or freeze response. But when women are stressed, our bodies release a hormone called oxytocin, which is also released in childbirth. Women tend to respond with a desire to connect with others—we socialize. Instead of ‘fight or flight,’ we ‘tend and befriend.’ The very act of connecting with other people calms the bodies’ response to the stress.” It was this deep-felt desire to “connect” with her study subjects that most separated Jane from her predecessors. She was unafraid, in effect, to identify with them. “There is a way of looking at chimps which is an absorption of them and not a projection of you,” Jane explains.
HER FIRST DAYS OUT IN THE FIELD SEEMED PROMISING. ADOLF, HER game scout, had reported seeing chimps feeding in a giant msulula tree in a valley near the northern border of the preserve the morning after she arrived. The next day, she, Adolf, and Rashidi set off in the aluminum dinghy, disembarking at the mouth of a river. From there, they started up the forested valley, following “the fast running stream,” she remembered. It was beautiful and cool, with “thick vegetation,” the forest canopy high above their heads, filtering the sunlight. They saw buffalo prints and bushpigs, brilliant red and white flowers, a kingfisher flash by. After twenty minutes, the climbing grew more difficult, the undergrowth thicker, more tangled with vines. At times they had to crawl. And then they heard the cries of a party of chimps in the valley to their north, “low, resonant pant-hoots,” a wild chorus that grew louder as they drew closer. Jane was enormously excited. Adolf led them to a grassy clearing directly across the valley from the msulula tree, a good spot, he assured her, for her viewing. Moments later, she saw the first of several chimps clamber up a palm trunk and into the branches of the giant tree.
For the next hour or so, Jane peered across the ravine through her binoculars, trying to sort out what was happening in the leafy msulula. It was frustrating. The foliage was extremely dense. At such a distance, the best she could make out was a few dark shapes, a perturbation in the leaves, the flail of an occasional arm. There seemed to be a lot of comings and goings. She watched a group of chimps file down and vanish into the forest, and then another party arrive. Or was it the first group returning? She couldn’t be sure. Nor could she distinguish anything about size or sex. Were they all males? Females and their young? A combination of both? The second group gorged for a while on fruit and then they, too, filed down the palm ladder and disappeared. She was eager to sample the berries herself, keen to see if she could glean anything about the chimps’ feeding preferences, so a few minutes later, she, Rashidi, and Adolf edged quietly toward the msulula. “This was a mistake as they were still in the lower trees nearby and we startled them,” Jane wrote. “We heard them moving about, cracking twigs.” But “only one animal did we see during this time,” she added with exasperation.
Day after day, for the next two weeks, Jane watched the feeding ritual in the msulula, noting what she could. Sometimes she saw large groups feeding; other times it was only one or two individuals. Often, when a party left, they divided in two and headed in different directions. Sometimes she heard cries in the forest all around her. Were they signaling to each other, calling out their locations, keeping track of the whereabouts of the whole troop? Or was it incidental, nothing at all? On two separate nights, she insisted on sleeping out in the forest, so she could observe the chimps as they rose in the morning. Adolf and Rashidi lay close to the little campfire they built, sulky and unhappy to be out. Jane slept farther back, swaddled in a blanket.
And then, at the end of July, the msulula abruptly stopped fruiting, and just as abruptly, the chimps disappeared too. Now Jane’s days were spent scouring the forest valleys from daybreak until dark, tracking elusive creatures that rarely, if ever, appeared. It was an impossible situation. The chimps, if she glimpsed them at all, seemed to vanish in an instant, dark and fleeting apparitions. For a while she chalked it up to there being three of them. She tried to leave Adolf and Rashidi on an overlook, from which they could still track her progress, while she pressed on alone. But the apes were no less skittish. Even from across a ravine, they seemed to sense her approach and flee. “How can I ever see any behavior?” she lamented in her journal, admitting that a “mood, a depression” had settled in. Time was passing; soon enough her funding would run out. If she couldn’t produce results, Leakey would be unable to generate any further support. She tried not to feel despondent, but it was hard.
Eight dispiriting weeks followed, and Jane’s successes, when they occurred at all, were short-lived. The threesome combed Gombe’s valleys as best they could. Sometimes the dense undergrowth made passage impossible. Other times, the slopes were too slippery to ascend, or the ravines too sheer to climb either up or down. They followed the streambeds deep into the mountains, searching for signs of feeding. But they found no other fruiting trees.
Added to these challenges was the more delicate human problem of dealing with her “minders,” as Jane had begun to call them. Both Adolf and Rashidi were lovely men, able and well intentioned. But neither was particularly inclined to keep up with her pace, having neither the stamina nor the will to do so. She couldn’t completely blame them, she wrote home. What madness it must have seemed, from their point of view, to push up and down the densely forested slopes, relentlessly, day after day, torn and scratched by brush and thorns, bitten by bugs, clawed at by branches, searching for creatures far more agile than they. She suspected both men thought her unreasonable; she could see it in their faces sometimes: dismay when she insisted on beginning work well before dawn; distress when she decided to stay out all night, sleeping on the damp forest floor; confusion when she forgot to break for lunch. “This is the trouble with having to be accompanied on my observations,” she complained in a letter home. The two Africans, she went on to explain, had been famished that day, pressing for a return to camp for lunch. “People do need food and things & I must try to remember,” she admitted. She didn’t mean to be a “slave-driver,” she added. She knew it was hard and exhausting work, a job for them. This she must remember too.
Vanne, meanwhile, was engaged in some gentle diplomacy of her own, aware that some of the locals still regarded Jane and her with suspicion. Before leaving England, Leakey had told Vanne that the surest way to win the locals’ hearts was to come bearing medicine. Vanne had taken him at his word (despite having no medical training), packing great quantities of aspirin, cough medicine, bandages, Epsom salts, and other home remedies. As soon as they were settled, she’d let it be known that she would offer simple medical help to anyone who needed it. Her first patient was an ancient, emaciated man with oozing ulcers on his leg, “the most ghastly, livid swelling on his ankles that I have ever seen,” Vanne wrote, “the bad part . . . all red and yellow.” Vanne was worried he might lose his foot and urged him to go to the hospital in Kigoma, but the old man refused. So, for the next three weeks, she washed and soaked the leg in hot water and antiseptic. And then one morning, to everyone’s amazement, the ulcers began to drain. A week later the sores were clean, the swelling gone.
And so began Vanne’s clinic: four poles and a thatched roof. Word of course spread quickly. Soon people were lined up for treatment—thirty on the first official day, sixty by the following week. Nothing did more to dispel any lingering suspicions about the two peculiar women who had traveled so far to live in Gombe’s forest than Vanne’s clinic, Jane would later say.
AUGUST WAS SWELTERING. “SUFFOCATING BY 9 AM,” VANNE WROTE home. Their hair, she added, was “permanently wet & hot.” Vanne started to run a fever in the middle of the month; within days Jane was seriously feverish too.
On the morning it hit, Jane was miles from camp. She and Rashidi had been sitting quietly, in a high spot with a clear view of an open glade, when they saw two chimps pass below them. Then Jane heard “a measured tread.” Down the hill, heading straight for her, came an older, white-bearded chimp. Male, “palish face, long black shining hair.” He got to within ten yards, and suddenly saw her, his expression stunned. He stopped. Stared. Tilted his head from one side to the other, as if mildly quizzical. Then he turned and galloped off into the thicker underbrush. But he didn’t completely disappear. Though he was out of view, she could hear him circling around until he was below her. He climbed up a tree, his head just visible through the foliage, and watched her for several minutes. Then, his curiosity apparently sated, he clambered back down and resumed his journey down the ravine. It was the beginning of a change in her luck, though she didn’t yet know it.
Vanne’s temperature spiked to 105; Jane’s hovered at 104. For days the two women lay side by side on their cots, too weak to do anything but reach occasionally for the thermometer. Dom begged them to see a doctor in Kigoma, but both felt too sick to make the trip. So he tended them as best he could, feeding them tea and hot broth, urging them to eat. Things went from bad to worse then. One night Dom found Vanne “collapsed and unconscious outside the tent” and he helped her back to bed. They had been told there was no danger of malarial fever, as it didn’t exist in those parts, but this turned out not to be true and it was likely this is what had struck them. At the urging of friends, they began taking antimalarial pills.
Jane by now was feeling “frantic” about the time she was losing. Three months had passed and “I felt I had learned nothing,” she wrote. During the last week of August, her fever now beginning to ebb, she forced herself up and out, setting off alone for the mountain directly above camp. It was cool as she left, still early, dawn a pale flush at the horizon. A part of her didn’t want Rashidi and Adolf to see her in her weakened state. But she was also tired of “coddling” the two men. She knew that she was risking “official displeasure.” But at that moment she didn’t care. Free of her minders, she would be able to move at her own pace. Still, the going was slow. Several times she had to stop, unsure if she could make it. “Earth kept vanishing & head throbbed like an engine,” she wrote.
She pressed on, climbing what seemed an agonizing slope, steep and terrifically slippery in places, until she reached a rocky overlook halfway up the ridge. “Ogre” she would call that ghastly hill. She knew at once that it was an ideal viewing spot. From where she stood, she could peer down into the thickly forested valley just below her, but also to the ridges beyond.
Too weak to climb farther, she decided to sit for a while, scan the valley for signs of chimpanzees. After some minutes, she thought she saw movement on the black, charred slope just beyond her. Lowering her binoculars, she turned. There, standing and staring at her, stood three chimps. She was sure they would flee, for they were no more than eighty yards away. Except for the white-bearded chimp, who had stumbled upon her quite by accident, she had never gotten closer than five hundred yards—and even then, they had always vanished before she could observe anything especially illuminating. But the three chimps continued to stand and then after a moment calmly moved on, slipping into the leafy vegetation below. Here was affirmation of what she’d felt all along: the apes would be less frightened if she was by herself.
Later that morning, still perched in the same spot, she was rewarded again: peering through her binoculars, she sighted a party of chimps heading down the opposite slope, moving toward some fig trees growing along the stream that cut through the valley. They were followed shortly after by a second troupe, this one traversing the bare, burnt slope where earlier she’d seen the three. She was sure this group also saw her, as “I was very conspicuous on the rocky peak.” But while they all “stopped and stared and then hastened their steps slightly as they moved on again,” they didn’t run in panic. After “some violent swaying of branches,” they joined the first group and then fed together in the fig tree. Later, she followed their progress as they moved off, this time as one enormous group. She spied two small infants “perched like jockeys on their mothers’ backs.” It was a turning point, the first sliver of light after three dismal months of no sightings. “I’ve discovered more—since my fever, in about five days, than in all the dreary weeks before,” Jane wrote home excitedly. And so began a new chapter.
By the middle of September, Jane had lugged a small tin trunk up to the “Peak,” as she’d dubbed the overlook, stocking it with coffee and a kettle, a blanket and a sweater, as well as a few tins of baked beans. When the chimps slept close to the overlook, she often stayed there too, to save herself the awful trudge up Ogre in the morning. By now, Adolf and Rashidi had been replaced by two professional game trackers, Soko and Wilbert, courtesy of Derrick Dunn, a white hunter and an old friend of Brian Herne’s. Dunn, a huge, “square-faced” fellow, had met Jane in Nairobi and instantly fallen in love. Having learned of the trials she was facing, he had sent two star trackers from his safari business to help—and, perhaps, also to advance his romantic prospects.
Soko, the more temperamental of the two, didn’t last long. He was quickly replaced by a third scout, a compact little man nicknamed Short. Wilbert, Jane reported, was enormously tall, and “always looked immaculate even after scrambling on his belly along a pig trail.” But his tenure too was short-lived. He couldn’t adjust to the food in camp.
By the middle of October, Jane and Short had settled into a workable routine: each would set off in a different direction, with the understanding that they would meet up at various times to exchange information. Once a chimp was sighted, even if they were together, it was understood that Short would hang back so that Jane could work her way closer alone. On the nights she decided to stay at the Peak, she would let Vanne know by sending a message down with Short, who always swung by to check on her late in the day.
Life fell into “a rhythm.” Every morning, Jane rose at 5:30 A.M., dressed, ate a slice of bread, hastily made coffee, and then trudged up the mountain in the dark, emerging at the Peak just as dawn was breaking. For the rest of the day she wandered the mountains, searching the rugged terrain alone: walking, pausing, thinking, looking, remembering—seldom returning until well after dark. Dinner was always late. Sitting in the gentle glow of their campfire, she and Vanne quietly shared stories. Then, perched on her flimsy cot, Jane would write up the day’s field notes under the halo of her camp lantern, swatting at mosquitoes as she wrote, often still at it until well after eleven.
Dogged, seemingly tireless, Jane continued at this pace throughout the fall, her energy rarely flagging. She was learning a new kind of slowness: how to watch and wait, alert to the slightest quiver in a tree, the snap of a branch, a faint cry rising from somewhere in the forest. She knew by now that the chimps often moved in small groups, at times even alone, almost always in absolute silence. She knew they were edgy, excitable creatures, easily agitated, acutely sensitive to the tread of an alien in their mazy green world. She had learned that sometimes it was necessary to wait for hours and hours, even for the privilege of a single sighting.
Still, bit by bit, she was beginning to “piece together” something of the chimps’ patterns: the way they groomed and mated, moved and slept; their food sources and facial expressions, group sizes and repertoire of calls. As the weeks slid by, time collapsing, rarely a day passed now when she didn’t have at least one useful sighting. She was coming to know the terrain: the open woods and twelve steep-sided valleys; the sheer ravines and grassy ridges; the rugged slopes and craggy overlooks; the dense green forest pockets, where the chimps spent most of their time.
And by now she had established her methods. Just as she had done at Lolui Island, Jane approached the chimps openly, but always with extreme deference. She gauged her distance by reading their gestures, moving in as close as they seemed to allow. She dressed blandly, shunning colors and “unnatural” patterns, trying her best to blend in. If the apes seemed upset or distracted by her nearness, she tried to feign indifference, sometimes making a show of scratching herself, other times pawing the ground for food, hoping to appear as just another primate foraging for its supper. “The first chimp went close to the trunk and hid in the leaves, watching me,” she reported. “I began to look for insects, digging in the ground with my hand & pretending to eat.” Though she could never really be sure, there were times she felt the ploy worked. Of course often it didn’t: “I thought we could get closer to the 5 in the pocket & possibly see them nest building, but this was a failure,” she wrote. “As we got round they climbed down & disappeared.”
Occasionally though, the chimps seemed to tolerate her presence, provided she was seated and remained perfectly still, and the apes were “in fairly thick forest,” as happened in mid-September: “The first old boy sat with his knees up, his arms folded across them and his chin on his arms,” she noted with surprise. “Only the other large one did not look quite at ease. The other two both sat very comfortably, and they all stared at us.” Soon after this encounter, she reported a second, this one with two male chimps, one an “old & grizzled male with white beard,” who had sat “only about 15 yards away” and quietly watched her: “Absolutely no fear. Scratched one shoulder & then the other. Rubbed his chin.” She was astonished. She had never been closer than eighty yards.
Jane recorded every aspect of what she observed, from the obvious to the obscure. Like Carson, she approached her work with a kind of blinkered intensity, drawing upon all her senses, filling her notebooks with close, physical descriptions, precise and meticulous detail. “This is the first opportunity I had of seeing the male genital organs closely. The testicles of the old man were enormous, hanging down like a great bag,” she wrote. “The penis, which was not erected, was a dull pink.”
She labored to capture the tenor of their cries, to weigh their character and mood, even to guess at their meaning. Writing in September, she described hearing a spell of prolonged screaming that erupted every ten to fifteen minutes. “Each occasion was a series of high pitched, fairly short, loud screams. Pain or fear?” she wondered. “Pretty sure it was the same animal.”
She noted how they moved: “They all went rather fast, using a movement that was almost like a ‘crutch walk’ but consisted of moving both arms forward together & bringing the legs forward altogether,” she wrote of one group.
She studied what they ate, even going so far as to sample the nuts and sour fruits she saw them consume. One “acorn-like nut” tasted “rather like palm nuts.” It was “oily,” she added, with “the most unpleasant, bitter pungent taste—I could not get rid of it for a long time.” Another, a berry, was “round & purple with a small stone.” She collected feces and probed them for dietary clues. “Dry, dark brown, and fibrous,” she wrote of one sample.
She watched and recorded how they made their arboreal nests: “It squatted in a leafy tree, near the top. It then rapidly pulled small leafy branches towards it . . . treading on them to hold them in place. It then sat down . . . stood up & pulled off a branch from higher up which it incorporated into the nest. This it did 4 times . . . It then lay down, hardly visible, and later picked a very small bunch of leaves, which it appeared to place under its head. Then it stretched right out so that its feet projected beyond the structure of the nest.” Later, once the nest was vacated, Jane crept up and tried it out for herself. “Very comfortable & springy indeed,” she pronounced.
“WE INTERACT WITH THE ENVIRONMENT FIRST AND FOREMOST THROUGH our bodies,” Diane Ackerman observes in A Natural History of the Senses. “There is no way to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.” Like Carson and Jacobs, Jane began her work here: with her senses, the lived and felt and observed, unbound by ideology or preconceptions. She not only “saw things differently, she saw different things,” to paraphrase Sally Helgesen, who has written at length about the distinction between men’s and women’s styles of seeing. Men, Helgesen observes in The Female Advantage, tend to have “a bottom line, sharply focused, linear way of thinking” that often excludes any role for emotion or empathy. Women’s style of observation, by comparison, is often more “broad and wide-ranging.” Women are continually perusing the situation “for more information,” while men tend to focus more narrowly on an immediate goal, restricting information to make actions more efficient. The origins of these differences, Helgesen suggests, may go back to hunter-gatherer societies. Men went out for an occasional big hunt, a specific event with a definite climax; women foraged and planted, tasks requiring repetition, perhaps explaining something of their “process orientation.”
Nissen, with his “guns and grassfires” and club-wielding “helpers,” saw no place for empathy or emotion. He cared little about process. In his clumsy and ultimately reductive approach, he couldn’t imagine the chimps as a pool of individuals with distinct and separate personalities—or see them as sentient. Instead, he approached them in an abstract and mechanistic way, conceiving of the species as a “biological monolith,” as Jane’s biographer notes, an unvarying and homogenous corps about which “simple and definite laws of behavior” could be easily deduced, and then uniformly applied to all. He saw, in other words, a sharp line between us and them.
Jane, by contrast, was drawn to the small dramas and affections that passed between particular chimps. It was precisely the individual and the emotive that interested her: “I saw one female, newly arrived in a group, hurry up to a big male and hold her hand toward him,” she wrote. “Almost regally he reached out, clasped her hand in his, drew it toward him, and kissed it with his lips.” Another time, she watched “two adult males embrace each other in greeting.”
She was fascinated by the “spectacle” of the youngsters at play, their visible joy and obvious imagination. She saw “youngsters having wild games through the treetops, chasing each other or jumping again and again, one after the other, from a branch to a springy bough below.” She watched “small infants dangling happily by themselves for minutes on end, patting at their toes with one hand, rotating gently from side to side.” Once, “two tiny infants pulled on opposite ends of a twig in a gentle tug-of-war.”
She was struck too by the palpably close and nurturing relationships between mothers and their young. “After eating two fruits . . . the mother reached out—right arm, and picked up her child,” Jane noted. “She held it to her breast—in exactly human fashion—right hand behind its shoulders, left cradling it, & for 5 minutes it sucked.” She was intrigued by the apparent friendships between adults as well. Often, during the heat of midday or after a long spell of feeding, she saw “two or more adults grooming each other, carefully looking through the hair of their companions.” These were more than incidental encounters, she sensed; they indicated relationships, bonds, and connections. They suggested sentience, feeling, perhaps minds.
While many details of their social interactions were still obscured by distance and the poor quality of her binoculars, Jane was beginning to recognize certain individual chimps. As an aide-mémoire, she tried to record whatever distinguishing features she could see. “Dark mark on left side of face, behind and below eye,” she wrote of one female. The infant with her had a “large white rump patch,” among other salient traits. Just as she had at Lolui Island, intuitively Jane sensed that the riddle of the species “as a collective” could best be cracked by observing individuals. And, just as before, she began giving those chimps she could recognize names. “I now know some of them by sight,” she wrote home excitedly. “I know the hideous Sophie with her son, Sophocles. I know the bearded grizzled old Claud, and an almost bald old lady who, I think, must be Annie.” It was a clear departure from Nissen’s shallow and generalized focus.
Yet seeing things differently didn’t automatically translate into seeing them better. Though Jane had now spent more days than Nissen actively tracking chimps in the field, and was slowly and quietly habituating them to her presence, she was also painfully aware that she had yet to add in any significant way to his general observations. Nissen had noted that the chimps slept in arboreal nests and “wandered” a lot; that they liked company and were early risers; that they “ate fruits and berries and other vegetable matter.” Jane had corroborated these general conclusions, certainly, but she still hadn’t pushed beyond them. She still hadn’t found what Louis was looking for: some fundamental behavior that both modern humans and modern apes shared. And then, sometime in October, George Schaller appeared.
George Schaller was a zoologist of some renown. Warm and approachable, uncommonly perceptive, he and his wife, Kay, had just completed a groundbreaking study of mountain gorillas in the misty volcanic forests of the Belgian Congo, pushing far beyond what Rosalie Osborn and her successor had seen in their gorilla study in Uganda. Curious, naturally, to hear what Schaller had learned, Leakey had contacted the couple, inviting them to the Coryndon; after a morning of animated conversation, he had urged them to go to Gombe to visit Jane.
Jane liked the Schallers immediately. For two days, she and George searched the valleys together, visiting all her “usual haunts.” Unfortunately, their luck wasn’t good: there were no chimp sightings. But their conversations both evenings were tremendously illuminating. In his months of wandering the forest, Schaller had adopted a method much like Jane’s, he told her: moving openly, trying to appear “boring,” never carrying a weapon, avoiding direct eye contact with his subjects. Like Jane, Schaller believed that the apes were “sentient creatures with humanlike emotions” and that the species could best be understood by studying individuals. It was “really nice to talk to someone who really understood what I was doing & why, & who didn’t think I was completely crazy,” Jane wrote her family. She had shared her fears of failure that evening, she added, her sense that time was running out, and George, listening closely, had offered his advice; “George said he thought that if I could see chimps eating meat, or using a tool, a whole year’s work would be justified,” she reported.
George Schaller, like Nissen before him, had concluded that wild apes were vegetarians. Gorillas, from all he had observed, seemed to enjoy a diet of leafy green plants, a slight variation on the fruits, nuts, and berries Nissen described as the menu of choice for chimpanzees. Apes were neither hunters nor meat eaters, it was generally assumed. And since neither man’s fieldwork seemed to contradict this notion, the idea still held. Though of course, as Schaller provocatively suggested, no one actually knew for sure.
The idea now planted that her chimps could possibly be carnivorous, Jane was perhaps more curious than usual when one morning, late in October, she spotted a wild ruckus in the trees. She peered through her binoculars. It was hard to see exactly what was happening. The foliage was especially dense at the spot where she saw the frantic blur of motion. She heard a few “angry little screams” and then glimpsed three chimps, one of whom was holding “something which looked pink.” She stared. After a moment or so, the chimp—a big white-bearded male—seemed to be chewing away at the pink object. “Suspected meat,” she scrawled in her notebook excitedly. The limp, pink something—“no hair or fur . . . a baby of some sort. No head”—was indeed meat, Jane soon confirmed. “But impossible to know what it was,” she added. She watched the big male chimp clutch the thing to his chest and then “he lifted it to his mouth & seemed to ‘suck’ rather than to bite, at the limp end.” He moved then to some lower branches, only to be followed by a female who “beseechingly” put out her hand and touched his, repeating her entreaties again and again. “No response,” Jane observed. Then the female “presented her bottom to him” (a sexual and submissive gesture)—one further bid, it seemed, for a taste of the prize. Still no response, despite the fact that she continued to stare longingly at the male, or was it at the tantalizing pink flesh he continued to hoard?
The “unidentified victim,” Jane would later conclude, was an infant bushpig, a fact she would soon confirm in subsequent sightings, all variations of the same fascinating, albeit gruesome scene. It was a momentous discovery, the first “eyewitness” account of meat eating among wild chimps. And, in less than a week, it would be joined by a second, even more remarkable discovery, this one life changing: she got a clear sighting of chimps using tools.
The incident occurred in early November 1960. Exhausted after a morning of bellying through the underbrush, Jane had set off along the mountain path just above camp, drawn by the pant-hoots of apes somewhere up the ridge. The trail was considerably more open than the one she’d just battled; she knew it well. She was approaching within a hundred yards of a termite mound when she stopped. There was “a black object” in front of the mound and she couldn’t remember having seen a tree stump there before. It was a chimp, she now realized, dropping down quietly. She ducked behind some greenery, hoping she could peer unseen through the scrim of leaves. The chimp seemed to be “picking up things” from the termite mound and putting them in his mouth.
“Very deliberately he pulled a thick grass stalk towards him & broke off a piece about 18” long,” she noted. Then he poked the grass stem into a hole, and withdrew it. Unfortunately his back was toward her, obscuring a lot of her view, but she could see he was chewing. She watched him climb onto the top of the mound, his back still toward her. “Then he got down—after peering hard in my direction, & vanished down the hill.”
As Jane would soon learn, in the world of chimps, bugs of all stripes—ants, crickets, wasps, beetle grubs—are vital sources of protein. But of all the insect foods, the mound-building termites are the most coveted. Other creatures—baboons, birds, monkeys, and even humans—catch the winged members of the colony on the fly, pouncing upon the “plump” termite specimens as they emerge from their mounds and take wing. But only chimpanzees have invented a means of extracting the nonwinged members—the “soldiers”—from their tunneled homes, fashioning a tool to fish them out. The chimps choose a long stem of grass or twig, adjust it “to create a long, smooth, and flexible probe,” and then poke the tool strategically into one of the sinuous exit tunnels of the mound. The soldier termites, provoked by the incursion of this strange object, clamp on with their mandibles and hold fast, only to be drawn out as the chimp extracts his tool. He then slides the termite-clad straw through his lips, sweeping them one by one into his mouth, and happily chews them up. This is what Jane had just witnessed.
Jane’s first glimpse of the “termite-fishing” chimp was followed two days later by a longer and more satisfying sighting. This time there were two male chimps, one quite visible, the other more skittish, moving quickly out of sight. Quietly, Jane approached through the tall grass. The bolder chimp appeared to be aware of her. But after a pause, in which he seemed to look around cautiously, he returned to his labors.
After a few minutes . . . he looked in my direction, peered, got up, climbed to the top of the [termite] hill, and gazed directly at me. Then he got down, resumed his original position, & continued eating termites. I could see a little better the use of the piece of straw. It was held in the left hand, poked into the ground, and then removed coated with termites. The straw was then raised to the mouth & the insects picked off with his lips, along the length of the straw, starting in the middle . . . He chewed each mouthful. Occasionally sat with his lips open as he poked up a new load.
Jane realized it was the same male she had sighted two days earlier, the white-bearded one. Actually his beard was more gray than white, she now decided. “Grey beard, fingers looked greyish, dark face, only a little bald. Very handsom,” she scrawled. She dubbed him “David Greybeard” and watched for another forty-five minutes, at which point he rose and left, following behind the second chimp, who had briefly reappeared. Jane waited fifteen minutes and then moved in to “examine the scene of the repast.” But the instant she got there, she heard “low hoots” and then noisy screams. “So—they had been watching me had they! I pretended to eat termites—which must have infuriated them!—& then quietly moved away & sat down.”
Greybeard was, she was now sure, the same chimp she had watched “termite fishing” for the first time. He was also the same male she had witnessed a week earlier with a pink slab of meat in his hand. Jane didn’t see Greybeard again at the termite mound, though she would see others feeding there. But she did have another astonishing encounter. She was walking one day and saw Greybeard just below her path. They both stopped. She sat, and then he did too, pulling up his knees and facing her directly as he calmly watched. “I was able to observe him excellently,” she wrote in her journal that evening. He groomed his wrist and his knees, and then looked up again, reaching to scratch his back. “He then spent about 5 mins stroking his beard with his left hand (like a man thinking), & rubbing his thumb along upper lip. During this he occasionally glanced casually at me. He is a very nice chimp.”
A few days later she came upon him again, this time sitting in a tree. “He had his back to me, but as I sat down he turned to face me. He was perfectly aware of my presence—as he had been all along.” While the other chimp in the tree appeared more anxious, he also didn’t flee. And then “a large male baboon walked past below them . . . He glanced at me casually & went on. I felt that it was the proudest moment of my whole life—all 3 accepted me.”
David was, as Jane would reflect two and a half decades later, “the first chimpanzee I saw eating meat, the first to demonstrate the use of tools, and the first to permit my close approach in the forest.” Almost from the start, he was less fearful than the others, more tranquil and subdued. Perhaps he had more curiosity? His “quiet, almost thoughtful” acceptance of her “alien, ghostly, ponytailed” presence in the woods seemed to “calm” the fears of the larger community. The chimps were clearly tied to one another in mysterious and fundamental ways. “Because he lost his fear of me so soon, he helped me to gain the trust of the others,” Jane would write.
LEAKEY WAS STUNNED BY THE NEWS. IN HIS WILDEST MUSINGS, HE hadn’t imagined a breakthrough of this caliber or import. Jane had been mailing him carbon copies of her field notes on a weekly basis, and after her second sighting at the termite mound, sure by then of what she’d witnessed, she had sent a telegram with the news. He could barely contain his excitement. Having devoted his working life to searching for the tools of ancestral humans, Louis believed—as did most of his colleagues—that making and using tools effectively defined “human.” That Jane had witnessed chimps not only using, but also shaping tools to their own ends came then as culture changing, a revelation with profound and sweeping implications. Cabling her back that same afternoon, he offered his now-legendary words: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Jane’s plans were to leave Gombe on December 1, 1960, at the official end of the five-month study. But with the meat-eating and tool-using observations of October and November, Louis was now determined that the work continue. His instincts about Jane’s energy, stamina, and determination had been correct. However unorthodox and untutored her methods, they had yielded impressive results. Now the challenge was to legitimize this young, scientifically unschooled woman in the eyes of the world. He would begin lobbying for more funds at once, he told her. More importantly, Jane would need academic credentials now. Otherwise, the scientific community would dismiss her work as naive, the fruits of an eager if impressionable amateur; without a degree, she would be openly challenged, an easy object of derision.
As always, with a well-placed mix of gentle pressure and persuasive charm, Louis worked his magic. Jane was soon enrolled in a doctoral program in ethology, the science of animal behavior, under the direction of Professor Robert Hinde at Cambridge University, no mean feat given that she lacked the usual prerequisite—an undergraduate degree. She would begin her studies in a year. Leakey’s appeal to National Geographic for additional funds went equally well. Still dazzled by the great man’s drawing power after his celebrated article about the world’s earliest man, the National Geographic agreed to a second grant for $1,400—enough to support Jane’s work at Gombe for another year. It was bracing news.
Vanne returned to England in the middle of November. Jane left for Nairobi soon after, sorely in need of a break, spending Christmas with friends before her return to Gombe in mid-January 1961. This time she was alone, however, and her social world was completely African. The stipulation that she be accompanied by another European had been conveniently overlooked, and her ties to the community, once so tentative, had by now deepened, as had her affection for her small camp staff, who increasingly felt like family. Even her Swahili was coming along.
Jane’s love life, by contrast, had grown complicated again. Derrick Dunn was sending her “unrequited love letters,” his interest rekindled after having seen her in Nairobi. Her engagement to Robert Young still hung in the balance. Recently she had sent him a letter declaring that “everything was rather hopeless” and that she “didn’t see how it could work.” In his return letter, Robert had mentioned a rumor he heard that she was “living with Dr. Leakey, who had now left his wife.”
Camp life, meanwhile, was presenting its own small calamities. A giant rat had taken up residence in her tent. It was eating her insect nets and lately had moved on to her blankets and sheets. Though it was captured in a trap, a second rat was soon picking up the slack, its appetite equally ravenous. Happily, it too was caught. One afternoon, she was vaguely amused to discover a scorpion on the sleeve of her sweater. A few days later, she saw a leopard stalking shiveringly close to camp. For weeks, she’d suspected the beautiful dark creature lived somewhere nearby. She had heard an unearthly sound, “unlike any sound I can describe” and then seen a “tail above the grass—held up & over his back a little,” she said. As always, despite the obvious dangers, she took these sightings in stride.
By now she’d shed all but Saulo David, her one remaining field assistant. On most days, she moved through the mountains alone, meeting him at some appointed time. George Schaller had left her with a polythene sheet before his departure. Now, on rainy days when she encountered wet vegetation, she could peel off her pants and tie them around her waist, keeping them dry beneath the waterproof sheet—yet another advantage of being alone. Sometimes it was so wet she moved shirtless through the tall grasses too.
The months that followed were unlike any she had ever known. It was an interlude of great rapture and solitude: immersive, piercingly beautiful, at times hard. Living alone in the forest, there were moments when she felt a mystical union with the elements, tied to the rain and the winds, the sun and the moon, the chimps that moved about her in the great primeval woods. The world seemed intensely alive. “Inanimate objects developed their own identities,” she wrote. “Like my favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, I named them and greeted them as friends. ‘Good morning, Peak,’ I would say as I arrived there each morning; ‘Hello, Stream’ when I collected my water; ‘Oh Wind, for Heaven’s sake, calm down’ as it howled overhead.” She loved to sit amidst the giant forest trees when it was raining, “to hear the pattering of the drops on the leaves and feel utterly enclosed in a dim twilight world of greens and browns and soft grey air.” As with Carson’s experience of the sea, and Jacobs’s the systems of the city, Jane felt the forest as a “living, breathing entity,” an organism that pulsed with life. She became “intensely aware of the being-ness of trees,” she wrote. Touching the “rough, sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant,” she felt “a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches.” Though she missed Vanne terribly, Jane had always been at home with her aloneness. Sleeping by herself on the forest floor, listening to the rustle of the ancient forest trees, watching the moon over the “soft sighing lake,” there were times when “a powerful, almost mystical knowledge of . . . eternity” swept through her. “I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself,” she wrote. “The longer I spent on my own, the more I became one with the magic forest world that was now my home.”
It was during this time that Jane would have her most memorable sighting, a drama more startling and indelible, she wrote her family, than any behavior she had yet seen. It was the end of January. She had passed the morning watching a circle of chimps romping and wrestling in the trees. And then the rain had begun. It was a drenching downpour. Within minutes she was soaked to the skin, water streaming through her hair, down her back. She imagined the chimps would take shelter under one of the forest giants. But they hadn’t. Instead the chimps divided into two neat groups, one led by a large male she called Paleface, arranging themselves into two parallel rows, leaving about fifty yards between them. “It was most organized,” she reflected. Both lines began moving slowly up the grassy slope and then, as each neared the top, one by one, in rapid succession, each chimp left his troop and hurtled back down, charging diagonally across the hill, running and twirling, arms swinging and flailing like scythes. Sometimes they leapt at low-hanging branches as they passed, grabbing at them, snapping off sections. Other times they dragged the branches behind them, or waved them wildly in the air, leaping and charging as they ran, all this “in a pouring rain with thunder rolling above, & vivid lightning flashes,” she wrote. On and on they danced, wild and ecstatic, the scene increasingly dreamlike: “primitive hairy men, huge and black against the skyline, flinging themselves across the ground.” For it was only the males, she noted. And so it continued for thirty minutes, a scene of such mysterious intensity she struggled to describe it. And then “the rain dance,” as she was calling it, ceased. The chimps climbed into the trees, seeming to gaze now quietly in her direction. “I felt all the time that it was for my benefit. I wonder?” Jane scribbled in her journal. Then slowly they descended, making their way quietly to the “brow” of the hill. “Silhouetted on the skyline,” several climbed a tree for a moment, waiting for the others to catch up. Paleface, who had been the ringleader, was the last to go. “He stood up, holding a sapling in his left hand, looking at me. His giant silhouette against the grey sky was impressive . . . The actor taking his curtain call.”
It was another turning point, not only revealing new depths of emotion and play, but also, more importantly, the presence of ritual in the social life of primates—organized, perhaps even symbolic behavior shared and understood by all. The sharp line dividing human from nonhuman had further blurred. Later, Jane would take these ideas further, seeing in these rain displays the seeds of early human spirituality, the animistic worship of water, sun, and things that primitive man didn’t understand. Though she couldn’t yet name it, what she had witnessed, in effect, was the primal beginnings of religion.
The rain dance was one of Jane’s most stunning observations of that first year: an incident of great beauty and incandescence. Yet for all its seeming magic, it hadn’t occurred by accident, nor had it come quickly or without significant struggle. Jane’s openness and great powers of intuition; her insistence on moving alone and always without a weapon; her reliance on qualities that, for want of a better word, are generally associated with the feminine—empathy, vulnerability, self-effacement—what Dale Peterson has called her “revolutionary” approach to “sterile old masculine science,” had something to do with it certainly. Yet much of her achievement was also the consequence of qualities that were “neither especially masculine nor feminine but rather neutral and sexless,” Peterson adds. Jane’s pioneering breakthroughs in that early period, her fresh insights into the animals she moved among, were also the result of fiendishly hard work: grueling days of false starts and dead ends; weeks of exhausting, often fruitless, tracking; months of physical hardship and inclement weather. It took grit and perseverance, an almost superhuman level of physical stamina, to accomplish what she did.
JANUARY BROUGHT LASHING RAINS, UNRELENTING HEAT, HUMIDITY that was choking. The grass “shot up” until it was over twelve feet high in places, making slow, drenching business of Jane’s daily slogs. There were days when nothing would dry, when the trails were perilously slick, when a rogue wind kicked up from out of nowhere. Sometimes, unable to see her way through the vegetation, she had to climb a tree to get her bearings. And there were other challenges. The dampness made a swamp of her bedding. It rotted her clothes and spread mildew through her books and papers like a galloping pox. Unassuming scratches turned into oozing wounds in such high-voltage heat. Skin ulcers erupted on her legs. At times she was beset with inexplicable fevers, headaches that hammered at her skull, strange bouts of insomnia she couldn’t explain. Lately, she wrote her family, a mysterious “white & fungus-y” thing had taken up residence between her toes. She assumed it was from being in wet sneakers “all day long, for 4 months.” Now “suddenly it’s gone under the nails—all the cuticles. . . . will my toes drop off. What can I do?” she added with a note of dark humor.
Still, even with all this, she soldiered on, her spirits bright, never slowing her pace, or scaling back her efforts, spending long, solitary days slogging through the mountains, rising before dawn, returning to camp after dark, just as before. And so the weeks passed.
By early February she was getting at least one good sighting a day, some that lasted for hours at a stretch, a welcome change from before Christmas. Distance, however, still remained a challenge. “100 yards,” she wrote home, was still “not far away.” And with the foliage, it wasn’t always possible to identify individuals, even at close range. Added to these obstacles, in late February she hit a rough patch. It was odd. Weeks passed and she wasn’t able to recognize a single chimp she had seen before, despite the meticulous notes she kept. David Greybeard, whom she had watched at such close quarters in November, had seemingly vanished.
But then things began to improve again in March when, to her surprise, a few chimps began to show up at camp. At first it was only one or two. Several palm trees near her tent had started to produce nuts. And there were new black seeds on a yellow tree nearby. The chimps, she realized, were coming to feed. At first, she didn’t make too much of these camp sightings. They were occasional and always brief. One or two chimps would arrive, feed, and then vanish, with rarely any variation in the pattern.
Her forays into the mountains, meanwhile, were getting better. The chimps seemed less and less afraid; she was finally getting close enough to identify individuals again, amassing more and more detail about their patterns and social habits, their facial expressions and individual personalities. Lately she’d felt sure enough about six new chimps to give them names. She could now recognize Mike (“large black faced male, not a very conspicuous beard”) and William (“round chin, a long upper lip that wobbled”), Wilhemina and Lucy, Lord Dracula and two-year-old Fifi, “who rode everywhere on her mother’s back.” She felt she was finally beginning to accomplish something. Waiting at camp for an occasional sighting now seemed wasteful by comparison.
And then, in early May, David Greybeard made his first cameo appearance in camp.
She had been in her tent that morning when she’d heard “a rustle” and then seen a dark male chimp streak up a tree, where it quietly began feeding. She’d known somehow it was Greybeard, even before confirming it with her binoculars. Unperturbed, he’d remained in the palm, feeding calmly as she walked around the tree with her camera, finally standing directly beneath him. “Can it be true? I have just been under the tree talking in a loud voice to him,” she wrote her family. “He didn’t even look. Isn’t it too ridiculous for words? Better than George’s [Schaller] ‘Junior’ who sat 25 yards away. This is not 25 feet.” That night, dragging her camp bed and its mosquito net out of the tent, she planted herself under the tree, only to experience “the strangest awakening I’ve ever had!” When Greybeard appeared the next morning, he paused on his way up the palm to peek under the mosquito net. Then, apparently satisfied, he calmly resumed his climb, gorging on palm nuts for the rest of the morning as Jane watched him from her bed below: “chimp watching in bed!!!”
Soon Jane was leaving David Greybeard ripe bananas, which he usually “demolished—skin and all” on the spot. One afternoon, after passing him on one of the trails, she stepped aside, deciding to head back toward camp, only to discover that Greybeard was following her, though at some distance. Every time she stopped, so would he. She reached camp before him, in time to toss a few bananas near the palm tree and grab her camera. Sitting at the open front of her tent, she watched him amble into camp ten minutes later. Barely glancing in her direction, he grabbed the bananas and sat, no more than six yards away, facing her as he polished off the fruit. She could scarcely believe he was comfortable letting her sit so near. It was the beginning of a deeper level of habituation for the chimps.
JANE LEFT FOR A BRIEF HOLIDAY TO REST AND RECUPERATE IN NAIROBI at the end of May. Gaunt and exhausted, for the first time in months she slept in a proper bed, ate real meals, and saw old friends, including Clo, who to Jane’s dismay was now trapped in a violent marriage. When she returned to Gombe two weeks later, the rains had let up, as had the oppressive humidity. She could finally admit how tough the conditions had been. “There were times, during my last session here, when I wondered if I could possibly exist through those 4 months,” she wrote Bernard Verdcourt. She had been “full of foreboding” upon her return. Now, however, she was pleasantly surprised. The chimps were being “utterly charming & friendly,” she told him. They seemed “less anxious, easier to approach.” Although they had been “reasonably tame before” they were now “suddenly more so.” Recently, she had sat “for ages” only ten yards away from a large male. “At times he came even closer to reach for a fruit,” she added.
This, in the end, was the triumph of Jane’s first year at Gombe, as Peterson writes: that she’d successfully habituated these normally skittish and secretive wild creatures to her presence, slowly and patiently earning their fragile trust. Beyond her discovery of chimps eating meat, making and using tools, and dancing ecstatically in the rain, Jane had found a way to move openly among them, getting closer to wild apes, and seeing more of their social lives and their behavior than any human ever had. No one, with the exception, perhaps, of George Schaller, had entered their world to such an extent.
BEFORE JANE GOODALL’S TIME AT GOMBE, ZOOLOGICAL STUDIES IN THE wild, if they occurred at all, were still relatively short in duration. Those few researchers who ventured out tended to keep comfortable distances, watching from protected blinds. The accepted paradigm was still scientist as “manipulator and voyeur: elevated, protected, distanced.” Typical was the Dutch primatologist Adriaan Kortlandt, who, following scientific convention, built a sort of outdoor lab on a papaya plantation in Belgian Congo, where he then staged a series of controlled experiments, watching for results from crow’s nests in the trees. In one of his best-known experiments, Kortlandt placed a “realistic,” mechanically operated stuffed leopard in areas where wild chimps would see it, “to test the apes’ anti-predator defense technique.” (Never mind that the chimps might not have found the mechanical leopard all that realistic looking.) To guess at their food preferences, he put out “egg-laden nests,” chameleons tied to nets, and a small, freshly slaughtered forest antelope “made to look . . . alive.” In each case, the relationship was always the same: observer as spin doctor, observed as object, separate and subordinate.
Jane’s alternative approach put “observer and observed in the same field,” facing each other on the same terms, equals. It was a shift in stance that carried stunning implications. By sharing the same footing as her study subjects, moving freely and openly among them, “on foot, unarmed, lightly clothed, often alone, always unprotected,” Jane Goodall had crossed into unknown scientific territory. By envisioning her apes as living “in a parallel universe,” separated, as her biographer has written, “not by an uncrossable gap in feeling and perceiving,” but by “a partially reversible failure of communication and understanding,” Jane Goodall had opened the door to the previously unthinkable: that chimpanzees were dynamic and willful beings with personalities and a repertoire of similar, perhaps identical emotions and perceptions to humans. “This young, scientifically naive woman,” observes Peterson, “had chosen to sail right off the edge of the map.” The results—unexpected, astonishing, culture bending—would ultimately spark a revolution in the way humans see animals and, in turn, themselves.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC WAS A GENEROUS PATRON, BUT THEIR CONTINUING support came with conditions. In exchange for underwriting the research at Gombe, the staff was expecting an eye-popping story about Jane and her wild ape project, complete with the sort of elegant, high-resolution photographs for which they were famed. And so, by necessity, Jane’s focus was now to change. The challenge going forward was how to capture these elusive, highly acrobatic creatures in some acceptable way on film.
Louis, as always, was overly optimistic. Without fully understanding the complications, he had misrepresented how close Jane was getting to the chimps, suggesting to the magazine’s editors that a professional photographer could “possibly” go to Gombe by July 1961. That person, however, would have to be a woman, he added—for Jane’s comfort, but also for appearances, although “only if Miss Goodall agrees and things are going well.”
Jane didn’t agree, and things weren’t going terribly well. A second person, she worried, would shatter the chimps’ all-too-tenuous trust, which she had worked so hard in the last year to win. Although the apes weren’t frightened of her, they didn’t like to be watched, she insisted. Even alone, it was often not possible to approach closer than fifty to a hundred feet. She couldn’t imagine how they’d respond to an additional person with “a big glassy eye.” Privately, she also had deeper qualms. She was wary of sharing her achievement with someone else, especially a woman whom she didn’t know. And beyond this, there were technical challenges she wasn’t sure that anyone, Leakey included, understood. The heavy, cumbersome equipment would have to be lugged up treacherous slopes, often through thornbushes and extreme thicket, sometimes over slippery rocks, flooding rivers. The heat and humidity would wreak havoc on cameras and lenses, no matter how well covered. The forest was dim and shadowy, the apes quick and kinetic, reducing the likelihood of adequate light or clear shots. If an outside photographer ultimately proved “absolutely” necessary, she preferred to have someone she already knew, she told Leakey in a letter. In the meantime, “I want to do my own photos—or have a jolly good try first.”
National Geographic was dubious. But at Leakey’s urging, they initially relented. Perhaps, they wrote, sending their own female photographer was not such a good plan, since admittedly the woman they had in mind had no experience with wild animals. But what about hiring Leakey’s son Richard instead? wondered Melville Bell Grosvenor, president of the Geographic. Perhaps he would be more acceptable to Jane, “since he is no stranger to her.” Richard knew a lot about photography, and also “knows the animals and would not be unduly alarmed about being alone with them in the jungle.” Regardless, the National Geographic Society was air-expressing “a wide-angle Rolleiflex camera” and a good supply of high-speed film, he told Leakey, which would be arriving any day. He was hoping for twelve to fifteen pages of “top quality” pictures to accompany Jane’s article.
Louis’s answer to Grosvenor’s proposition was an emphatic no. Richard couldn’t possibly upend his plans and go to Gombe at such short notice. Furthermore, Jane, who happened to be in Nairobi that week, had tried the camera the National Geographic sent and found it “far too heavy and clumsy,” and “will not take it with her into the field,” he explained. “What would you like me to do with it?” In an expression of solidarity with Jane’s plight, he had bought her a lighter, “more straightforward” camera with a telephoto lens she could handle, he said. It was small enough to serve as what he called “a camera round her neck.” He hoped, however, that the Geographic would send out a second camera with better telephoto lenses and a tripod.
National Geographic responded with dispatch, immediately posting the second camera, three stronger telephoto lenses, batteries, a tripod, a light meter, film, caption cards, and special cartons to simplify the return shipments of exposed film. Also included in the package was a note from Joseph Roberts, the magazine’s assistant director of photography, which he called “the shortest correspondence course in photography ever written.”
Short or not, the level of technical detail it contained immediately gave Jane “a raging headache.” The situation was laughable, she wrote her family. “If only they realized the conditions . . . For instance, yesterday I was inching my way up a mountain side, clinging onto rocks & roots. And I bumped into some chimps. Well, there they sat, yelled at me a bit, ate a bit . . . & went on their way. Wonderful view. Super photos—if I could have taken them. But as I really hadn’t enough hands & feet to secure me to the mountain’s surface, how could I take out my one simple little camera? Let alone if I’d had millions of lenses & tripods stuck all over me!”
Five weeks later, a penitent Jane was writing back to Roberts, apologizing for not having touched the second camera, which remained in Nairobi and confessing to “not having previous camera experience, I’m afraid.” She explained that she didn’t think she’d use the camera until later anyway, “as I feel that a determined effort at close-up photography will very definitely upset the animals.” Finally, she admitted that she’d exposed only a single test roll of film—taken from “the neck-hanging” camera—in two months. She was enclosing it with the letter.
The roll, once developed at the magazine’s photo lab, proved even more dismal than the editors expected. “Of 37 exposures on this roll,” reported the illustrations editor, Robert E. Gilka, in an internal memo, “16 are so underexposed as to be unreadable, 10 are spoiled because of camera motion, and 6 are not useable for other reasons.” There was one shot the magazine “might possibly use, a shot of Miss Goodall sitting on a hillside scanning the area for chimps.”
It was clear that a second person would absolutely be necessary to man the big camera. Louis and Jane now floated the idea of sending out Jane’s sister, Judy. At the time Judy was working at the British Museum. Perhaps she could take a short leave from her job, suggested Leakey, if the Geographic could pay her expenses to Africa and back? Judy looked a little like Jane, which meant the chimps might be more accepting of her. And she had “some experience of color photography,” he assured Grosvenor. The response, sent by National Geographic’s vice president, Frederick G. Vosburgh, was decidedly clipped: “The production of satisfactory photographs . . . requires considerable experience as well as aptitude, and this assignment would tax the skill of even a professional photographer.” The answer was an unequivocal no.
Unmoved by Vosburgh’s objections, Louis pressed on with the plan anyway. If National Geographic was unwilling to be more accommodating, if they couldn’t see their way to spending a little bit more for such a worthy story, then he would seek support elsewhere, since “it has got to be done.” In an uncharacteristically cool letter back, he told Vosburgh that, as they were caught in an unfortunate “deadlock,” he saw no alternative but to sell first rights to the story and pictures to another British publication. The matter was left there.
Judy arrived in Gombe that September, startled to see how “skeletal” her sister had become. Jane was glad for the company, and Judy, as always, was game, cheerful in the face of grim skies and peculiar rations, the standout being “crisped termites.” For the first week or so, the weather was good. The chimps were present in significant numbers, and both sisters had opportunities for promising shots. But then quite abruptly the rains descended, earlier that season than usual, heavier than anyone remembered. The blanketing clouds dimmed the light; the humidity gummed up the cameras, the mist-shrouded forests made it impossible to see. Periodically, Judy now had to take one or the other camera to Kigoma, losing time while she waited for frozen shutters or stuck gears to be repaired. “I can’t remember when I last wrote,” Jane wrote Louis in early November. “Had I been ill with a weird fever that left spots all over my face?” By now, the weeks of failed photography were not only weighing on Jane’s spirits but also her health. She had developed shingles and was feeling increasingly hopeless. “I hate to write such depressing news, but you’d better be warned—it has made me feel that my entire work has been a failure. This, I suppose, is not true, but I just can’t help feeling miserable about everything.” In truth, there had only been one really good day of photography during that entire fall, she admitted.
The year limped at last to a close. Jane and Judy both left Gombe in December 1961, reaching Bournemouth in time for Christmas. Their twenty-four rolls of exposed film—one in black-and-white and the rest in color—were immediately airmailed to Washington, D.C., to be developed at the National Geographic offices. They waited nervously for some word.
When the letter arrived on January 2, the news was not good. Robert Gilka noted that except for one shot, the photos were “not exciting.” Due to “a lack of good pictures of the animals in their native habitat,” he wrote, the magazine had decided not to publish the story of Jane and her chimp research project. “I wish that we were in a position to publish an article on your subject because it is an unusual and fascinating [one],” he added patronizingly. However, “this shortcoming is so serious as to preclude attempting to illustrate a story.” The project was effectively dead. Deflated, both Jane and Judy left Bournemouth a few days later. Jane was headed to Cambridge to begin her first semester, Judy to London to reclaim her job at the British Museum.
SHE MISSED GOMBE IMMEDIATELY. CAMBRIDGE IN WINTER WAS GRAY and socked in; it seemed cold and colorless after Africa, meager and claustrophobic. And she was worried about almost everything. Leakey had persuaded the higher-ups at Cambridge to accept her field journals from Gombe as the basic research for her doctoral thesis. She would be working, he told her, under the wing of Professor William Thorpe, who would guide her readings. The plan was to spend half her time at Gombe, collecting more data, and the rest at Cambridge, writing up her results in an “appropriate format.”
Her first interview with Thorpe, however, didn’t go well. The eminent professor seemed stiff and humorless, vaguely distracted, and she was upset by his myna bird, who after swooping about the room, landed on her and began pecking, eventually drawing blood. She was relieved when she got word that Thorpe had decided to reassign her to one of his colleagues, Robert A. Hinde, the resident monkey expert.
A brilliant scholar, Professor Hinde was by 1962 a legend at Cambridge. “Incredibly handsome,” as a former student remembered, with “piercing blue eyes,” a “craggy” face, and “silvery gray” hair, he was proud, certain, serious, and on occasion, volatile—a whip-smart critic who was known to suffer no fools. “He was not aggressive,” recalled another former student, “but he was very smart—and he could make you feel completely stupid.” He was reputed to have reduced many a young female student to tears. “He would ask a penetrating question and look at you with those penetrating eyes.” Yet Hinde was also one of the few professors who readily took on female students. Ultimately, he was a mentor to women, a rare champion where champions were few.
Jane was “terribly in awe” of the great professor in those first tentative months. During their weekly tutorials, which took place in his apartment at St. John’s College, she would say little, she remembered, as he “pointed out the flawed reasoning behind some attempt to describe and quantify a portion of the data, or explained just why it was that certain words were not acceptable in the scientific circles of the time.” He wasn’t stiff or formal, she added; he was “youthful,” and a touch odd. He would “sprawl” on the floor in front of the fire, as he read and critiqued her work. There were times when he would tell her that “I’d better go and do a lot of reading before I continued to make a fool of myself (not that he put it quite in those terms, but his meaning was clear).” She often trudged home “filled with frustration and sometimes despair. Back in my digs I would hurl everything into the corner of the room: page after page, written so carefully, now marked all over with Robert’s comments and criticisms. How desperately I longed to give it all up and go back to the chimpanzees and the forests.”
But anger can be a potent spur. Proud and a touch stubborn, tenacious by nature, Jane didn’t give it all up. And often, by the next day, even when she didn’t agree with everything Hinde had said, she did understand why he had said it. As time passed and they grew more familiar, when Jane continued to disagree, instead of holding back, she returned for another round of heated debate. The distinguished professor and defiant pupil grew accustomed to locking horns.
Hinde’s task, as he saw it, was to teach Jane the language of “ethology,” his first challenge being to help her convert her handwritten Gombe journals into an acceptable scientific form. This meant a language, as he put it, that was cool, “quantitative,” and scoured of sentiment, which is to say, standardized. Instinctively, Jane had set down her raw data as a narrative, a series of anecdotes and stories, complete with an elaborate cast of characters. This, she learned, was naive and unscientific, unacceptably subjective. Such an approach supposed humanlike individuality, feelings, and sentience. From an ethological point of view, “ascribing personalities to the different chimps” was a cardinal sin, she wrote. “Only humans have personalities, I was told. Nor should I have been talking about the chimpanzee mind—only humans, said the scientists, were capable of rational thought. Talking of chimpanzee emotions was the very worst of my anthropomorphic sins.”
She wondered, at times, if she’d been mistaken in coming for her Ph.D. The only things people at Cambridge seemed to appreciate, she lamented in a letter home, were “graphs & statistics.” It got, she added, “rather depressing.”
“I had no undergraduate degree. I had not been to college, and there were many things about animal behavior that I did not know. For one thing, I did not think of the chimps as ‘study subjects’ but as individuals, each with his or her own personality. I was learning from them, not only about them.”
And, as Jane was also learning, there was another, even more fundamental problem with her method. According to the language of ethology, her focus was supposed to be on the species as a collective and not on chimps as individuals at all—even as numbers; it was best to concentrate on behaviors that were “typical,” she was told, those that were innate and predictable, fixed and demonstrably true. The atypical was deemed less important, if not irrelevant.
This was hugely problematic from her point of view, only a part of the story. She didn’t object to writing about typical behaviors—chimpanzee nest-making practices, mating rituals, standard feeding preferences. These were elaborate and fascinating behaviors—worthy, certainly, of attention. She wasn’t blind to the importance of knowing and understanding the typical. But how could she discount the atypical behaviors, the mysterious exceptions to the rules? The unusual friendliness of David Greybeard? The singular mothering style of Ollie and Flo? The inexplicably close kinship between David Greybeard and his friend Goliath? She had seen David and Goliath holding hands, tickling, and chasing each other in circles, wrestling and laughing in seeming delight. These were anomalous behaviors, but they were no less revealing than those that were common to the species. It could be argued, in fact, that they were more revealing. They indicated emotional complexity, depths of expression beyond the automatic and instinctual, the unnerving possibility that chimpanzees might, like humans, have individual personalities, emotions, and even minds.
She and Hinde continued to spar over these questions. Hinde was wary of soft science, mistrustful of anything that couldn’t be absolutely verified. Like most primatologists at the time, he hewed to a traditional view of ethology, advocating a stripped-down, mechanistic approach, science made immaculate and predictable. It was important, he felt, to scrub the data of the subjective. The goal was to describe animal behavior in measurable ways, to parse out the irrefutably true, while avoiding the messy and subjective—the “possibly true.”
In truth, their philosophical differences went to the heart of a fault line that was beginning to appear not only in science, but also in the larger culture. In Jane’s empathy and respect for her study subjects, she was challenging the very notion of a value-free neutrality, countering the view that the world could be parsed out in wholly objective, mechanical ways. Like Carson and Jacobs, she was refuting the idea that in nature there existed a simple, mechanistic template that could be applied to all (whether in the service of eliminating city slums or bothersome insects) or that elements in nature could be examined—or understood—stripped of their context. This meant factoring in the social fabric, recognizing the fragile web of connections and interactions that constituted the larger system. Her work, like theirs, left room for intuition and the efficacy of the individual, the anomalous and the contradictory, personal testimony and the common sense of direct observation. It was a shift in emphasis that in the early sixties was quietly beginning to build in reaction to the increasingly specialized and autocratic direction of the culture. “This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame in which it fits,” Carson had written.
Though she didn’t necessarily intend it, like Carson and Jacobs, Jane stood at the crossroads of the interplay between intuition, personal experience, and social change. In drawing attention to the being-ness of animals, Goodall was speaking directly to a cultural shift that was just beginning, a gathering moral commitment to social justice and the humane treatment of all races, and, by extension, all living things—from animals to the earth.
IN THE SPRING OF 1962, AS CARSON WAS EDITING SILENT SPRING, GOODALL received an invitation to speak at a scientific conference. It would take place in London, in mid-April, and was sponsored by the Zoological Society of London. Louis, of course, insisted she attend.
The conference, in retrospect, would prove something of a turning point. Even at the presymposium party, remembered one of the participants, there was “a sense of occasion. There really had not been a primate conference before. It was the feeling that a field might be opening up.” Among the attendees expected were the leading lights of the primatology world, including Desmond Morris, Jane’s old boss at Granada TV and film unit; Irven DeVore, who had studied baboons in Kenya; Adriaan Kortlandt (of stuffed mechanical leopard fame); and Solly Zuckerman, the formidable secretary of the Zoological Society and the chair of that day’s events.
Solly Zuckerman was by 1962 a force to be reckoned with. Big and self-important, with a barbed wit, a “red face” and a “perfectly parted” mop of wavy white hair, he was a man at home with power: smart, ambitious, charming when he needed to be. Unapologetic about his appetites, a shrewd collector of people, he was partial to fine suits, good whiskeys, and well-connected friends, a political animal to his teeth. As a young scientist, he had been a research anatomist at the London Zoo, his specialty the social behavior of baboons, a position he had parleyed into an academic post at Oxford and a well-received book, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, for a time the bible of pre–WWII primatology. These notches in his belt were soon followed by an appointment to the Ministry of Defense as chief scientific adviser, and, eventually, a knightship, in recognition of his services during the war. Officially “Sir Solly” now, a titan in the primatology world with an entourage of rich and powerful friends, he was not a character to contradict or cross.
On the first day of the symposium, Jane nervously took the floor, the fourth of eleven speakers, following directly after her two most significant predecessors, Adriaan Kortlandt and Rosalie Osborn, Louis’s former secretary and lover.
Standing before the sea of mostly male faces, Jane touched briefly on her discovery of chimps making and using tools, and then almost immediately moved on to speak about chimpanzee feeding behaviors: the amount of time chimps spent eating, the methods they used to retrieve foods, the wealth of foodstuffs they consumed. “Sixty-one different vegetable” varieties, she told the audience, “four different insect species,” and the meat of mammals. It was the first such mention of apes eating meat, and was followed that day by several other speakers who discussed the same, including an upbeat Irven DeVore, who showed a grisly film clip of baboons devouring the bloody flesh of some unrecognizable animal.
The protocol at such conferences was still quite buttoned down in 1962. Men wore suits and ties; women—those few present—long skirts, white gloves, and the occasional pillbox hat with a veil. If a member of the audience wished to ask the speaker a question, it was directed first to the chair, who in this case was Solly Zuckerman, who would then turn to the speaker and restate the question. Only then was the speaker allowed to answer.
That day, recalled Desmond Morris, Solly Zuckerman was “very hostile” toward Jane, disparaging her behind the scenes as one of the “amateurs.”
During his brief baboon study at the London Zoo thirty years earlier, Solly Zuckerman had observed adult baboon males herding females to form harems. Based on this somewhat dubious bit of proof, given that the baboons were living in artificial confinement and not in the wild, he had decided that a harem system was “characteristic of all primate groups.” After Jane’s talk, curious to hear her views on the matter, Desmond Morris rose to ask if she had observed harems among the chimps. Solly ignored the question, whereupon Desmond asked it a second time. Again it was ignored by the chair. At this point Desmond, breaking with protocol, turned to Jane and asked her directly. Jane responded. No, she explained, the male chimpanzees she had observed did not acquire stable harems.
This was clearly too much for Solly, who, having written at length on the subject, remained deeply invested in his own conclusions. At the close of the day’s proceedings, during his official summary, he opened with the cutting comment that “there are those who are here and who prefer anecdote—and what I must confess I regard as sometimes unbounded speculation” in their study of primate behavior. He wasn’t at all sure, he added smugly, that this constituted “a real contribution to science.”
Solly Zuckerman now proceeded to grandstand. On and on he droned, touching on “dominance relations” and “primate sex ratios,” territorial issues and chimpanzee feeding patterns, circling back repeatedly to the “over-riding importance” of his signature book of thirty years before. While it might be true, he asserted, that some baboons had been seen eating meat on occasion, these sightings were to be discounted, since the baboon was clearly “a non-carnivorous animal in most places where it exists.” As for Miss Goodall’s most irregular account of chimps eating meat, it would be “a useful point to remember,” he continued, his voice oozing with condescension, “that in scientific work it is far safer to base one’s major conclusions and generalizations on a concordant and large body of data than on a few contradictory and isolated observations, the explanation of which leaves a little to be desired.”
The matter, in other words, was settled. In spite of what Jane Goodall or anyone else might have claimed that day, Solly Zuckerman could “assure” the assembled that all the monkeys and apes of the world were vegetarians and not carnivorous. One needed only to refer to his book.
Desmond Morris remembered receiving a letter of appeasement from Sir Solly soon after the conference. He hoped Desmond would forgive him for having avoided the question about chimp harems, he said. “I realize you were only trying to provoke discussion,” Solly offered, “in the same way,” he continued, that he was sure Desmond could appreciate his “anxiety” that a subject of such scientific import “should continue in the unscientific shadows because of glamour.”
Solly Zuckerman’s glib putdown of Jane’s presentation, his efforts to trivialize, if not undercut, her work, calling it essentially “glamour” masquerading as science, would be a foretaste of a certain kind of resistance Jane would encounter on occasion through much of her distinguished career, writes Peterson: the idea “that her legs were too nice, her hair too blond, her face too fine, her manner too feminine for anything she said or wrote to be taken all that seriously.”
But primatology, which had pretty much always been a boys’ club until then, was changing. It was Sir Solly’s contention—and he was not alone—that the secret to all primate behavior could be unlocked with a single key. That key, he further insisted, pivoted on two grand but simple themes: sex and violence.
Yet even by the 1960s, this view was beginning to be challenged. Instead of “great simplicity,” a fixed pattern of behavior that applied to all members of the species, researchers were discovering great variety and complexity in the social lives of many primate species. Yes, there were stable harems, as Sir Solly claimed. But there were also “monogamous pairs” and solitary outliers, promiscuous couplings and shifting alliances within stable groups. Beyond the basic hormone-driven “sex and dominance” behaviors of Solly Zuckerman’s muscular vision were activities and actions that spoke of other, more nuanced impulses: friendship, “choice, kinship, learning, maternity, paternity, planning and politics.”
Indeed with time, despite the scorn of the Sir Sollys of the world (and there were others), Jane’s own view of chimpanzees as autonomous and emotional creatures who are self-aware and self-directed would increasingly become the mainstream view. Though Jane would be unjustly dismissed as an “amateur” and not a professional, just as Carson and Jacobs both were; though she would be assailed, like them, for framing her arguments using “anecdotes,” rather than the dry jargon of science—and scorned, also like them, for writing for a popular audience and not to the elite of her field, she would also find herself on the right side of history. (In 1967, before her Ph.D., when her first bestselling book, My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees, was published, her Cambridge mentor is said to have gasped in horror, “It’s—it’s—it’s—for the general public!”) Solly Zuckerman would find himself a footnote in the long slow march of science, while Jane Goodall, in time, would become one of the most acclaimed scientists of the twentieth century, her methodology used for recording the social lives of animals from whales to ants. But not, of course, before she had absorbed her share of flak.
BACK IN WASHINGTON, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S MELVILLE BELL GROSVENOR sat stewing in his office. Two months had passed since rejecting the Jane Goodall piece and he was having second thoughts—not about the photographs, he still believed they were unacceptable—but about letting go of the story, which he now believed was a big mistake. Recently, a stunning letter from Leakey had arrived, endorsing Jane’s work and updating him on her discoveries—including the meat-eating and tool-using sightings, about which Grosvenor had been unaware. Grosvenor had always believed in the Goodall story. It was strong and exceptionally dramatic. But now he also realized it was scientifically significant. The National Geographic “must make every effort to get it,” he told David Boyer, the staff photographer he wanted for the project. If, that was, Leakey hadn’t already sold it to another publication. He wrote now to Louis in Nairobi, and Jane at Cambridge, suggesting that they pay Jane a sizeable sum to leave Cambridge for three weeks in February and fly to Gombe with Boyer to get the pictures they needed. He hoped, he added, that Jane would also be willing to write an in-depth article telling the story of her discoveries. Jane wrote back immediately. It was impossible, she explained. She was presently at work on her Ph.D. Additionally, given the travel time involved, it made no sense to go for so few days, especially in February, which was often the worst of the rainy season. The chimps would be hard to find, extremely challenging to photograph. Leakey’s return letter was even more emphatic. The answer was no.
But the National Geographic Society wasn’t so easily spurned. That March, in an effort to convince Leakey of their seriousness (and perhaps to woo both Jane and him back into the fold), they voted to award Jane the Franklin L. Burr Prize for Contribution to Science, which came with a cash stipend. The society hoped, they wrote, that Jane would fly to Washington in April to present her findings. In a separate letter to Leakey, they also agreed to fund her research at Gombe for another year. Louis was sufficiently seduced.
Back in Nairobi, Leakey returned now to the photography question. He had recently met a brilliant wildlife photographer, he told Jane, a young Dutchman named Hugo van Lawick, who he thought would be ideal for the job. The young man, he went on to inform the National Geographic editors, was “familiar with wild animal behavior.” He “lives in Nairobi, so could get to the chimp site within a few days.” As for the delicate business of his being male, if the Geographic would be willing to pay for Jane’s mother’s expenses as well as Jane’s, Vanne could again serve as her “chaperone,” handily solving any questions of propriety.
Baron Hugo van Lawick was young, gifted, and dashingly handsome. He was also painfully shy. Reasonably sure he’d glimpsed Jane Goodall a year earlier, in June 1961, at the home of his then-employers, the filmmaking couple Armand and Michaela Denis, he was feeling apprehensive about his new posting. The Denises were friends of the Leakeys and Jane had stopped by briefly for photographic advice. Hugo doubted she’d noticed him that day, though he remembered her beauty and poise quite distinctly. How, he must have wondered, would the two of them fare, living in a tiny, remote camp in the forest, far from creature comforts or the usual human distractions? Jane’s mother was due to arrive in several weeks, but until then, it would be just Jane and him. With some hesitancy, he cabled to say he would be arriving on August 15.
Hugo needn’t have worried. Jane returned to Gombe that July, having left Cambridge at the close of the term, and when Hugo appeared a month later, they took to each other immediately. Beyond Jane’s seeming ability to live without eating, which Hugo, who was rather partial to food, found perplexing, and Hugo’s occasional smoking, which required adjustments on Jane’s part, they got on famously. Hugo, like Jane, was ardent about his work. He shared her love of nature, her sense of kinship with the Africans, her identification with the pure, primitive beauty of the landscape. He felt, as she did, that he belonged to Africa.
Twenty-five years old at the time, slight, with a muscular build, thick dark hair, and “a face burnt red-brown by the African sun,” Hugo had mostly lived a nomad’s life. Born in Indonesia, at age four he had lost his father, a Dutch pilot, to a plane crash. His mother, overnight a widow with two small sons to support, had moved the family to Australia and shortly after to England, before finally settling in Holland at the close of the war. Hugo, who had been happily ensconced in an English boarding school until then, elected to stay in Devon, an arrangement that lasted until his mother could no longer pay the tuition. Though a titled family, the van Lawicks were not a wealthy one. At ten, when the family coffers tapped out, young Hugo was forced to leave England to finish his schooling in Holland.
He was drawn to animals and wild nature, even as a boy, and by age fourteen, he had added photography to these passions, hoping he might find a way to combine them to make a life. The family had a long and esteemed history of military service, so a career in photography ran against this tradition. But his mother encouraged him to follow his heart, however tenuous his plans appeared to her. And so, after a short stint in the Dutch army, Hugo had joined a film company as an assistant cameraman, and then worked for a time as a still photographer before finally decamping for Nairobi in 1959, where he was hired as a cameraman for the Denises, who were making a name for themselves producing the first nature films for television. It was while working for the Denises that Hugo met Leakey, who happened to be looking for someone to make a background film for one of his National Geographic lectures. Struck by Hugo’s work, Leakey hired Hugo for the film, and, extremely impressed with the results, eventually recommended him to Grosvenor, who proceeded to hire the young Dutchman, which is how he came to be at Gombe that summer of 1962.
“Hugo is charming and we get on very well,” Jane was soon writing to her friend Bernard Verdcourt at the Coryndon. “We are a very happy family.” They quickly established their system. Jane would find a spot where she felt the chimps would return, and the following day, the two of them would haul up Hugo’s heavy equipment—a bulky wooden tripod, several lenses, metal storage boxes. At the “crack of dawn” they would then build a rough hide, where she would leave him with “her blessings” and then continue with her own observations.
The chimps, she was pleased to see, seemed to remember her from six months before, which was enormously cheering; despite her worries, she hadn’t lost ground during her time away. David Greybeard was becoming so comfortable in her presence, in fact, so accustomed to visiting camp, that one morning she awakened to the sight of him sitting quietly beside her bed, finishing off a banana he’d cadged from a storage box. “He IS a devil!” she wrote home. “I shooed him off & closed my eyes.” But the day’s most astonishing development, she added, had come later, when once again Greybeard ambled into camp. It was “the happiest: the proudest, of my whole life to date,” she wrote excitedly. “David G—yes—he has TAKEN BANANAS FROM MY HAND. So gently. No snatching. The first time I held one out he stood up & hooted, swayed from one foot to the other, banged the tree, & sat down. So I threw it to him. The next one he came & took.”
Even more encouraging, Greybeard’s increasing tameness seemed to extend to a tolerance for Hugo too. The chimps “have accepted the presence of Hugo van Lawick with his tripods and lenses in the most wonderful way,” she wrote to the Geographic Society. “The method I have always followed—never hiding from the chimpanzees, never following them when they have moved away from me, and never appearing particularly interested in them—has, at long last, paid dividends.”
Those dividends soon included roll after roll of photographs, which both Hugo and Jane continued to take throughout that fall. Robert Gilka, increasingly pleased with the images he was seeing, now began to ask for specific shots. He wondered, he wrote Jane, if Hugo could possibly get a photo of her standing in a stream washing her hair? Though it is possible, he added, “Hugo might be too embarrassed to ask you to do this for him.” Jane sent back a letter in late September: “You will by now have stills of me washing my hair—though Hugo is going to take some more in a more forested part. You needn’t worry about him being embarrassed. I haven’t noticed it yet!”
Hugo, as Jane would later write, was “just the right person for the job.” As they sat together by the campfire each night, serenaded by the whir of insects, the larger world outside seemed “so far and remote,” she wrote her family, “and our conversation is mostly chimp-chimp-and more chimp. Hugo loves them as much as I do, and we have got some simply wonderful film as a result.”
By the beginning of December, National Geographic was writing to say that they had enough strong photographs “to make a fine layout” and were now ready to move forward with the chimpanzee article. William Graves, a member of the editorial staff, reiterated the National Geographic’s preference for what he called “a first person, anecdotal type of article which includes not only the remarkable and hitherto-unknown scientific data you have gathered on chimpanzees but also a little of your dramatic personal experience while making the discoveries. In fact, not a little of the personal drama but a lot.” He urged Jane to begin writing at once, telling her they needed the manuscript “as soon as you can possibly send it.” What he didn’t yet know was that Jane had been working on the article for some time. In a return letter dated December 19, 1962, she noted that she was just putting the finishing touches on her first draft and would send it on immediately.
DAVID GREYBEARD’S BOLD ACCEPTANCE OF THE BANANA JANE HANDED him stayed with her. Both Jane and Hugo longed to get closer to the apes, not only for better still photographs and film footage—Hugo was simultaneously shooting a movie—but also for more thorough and precise observations. Despite the frequency of Jane’s encounters, they were still a matter of happenstance, random and serendipitous, as they both knew. Jane’s gut instinct had always been to reduce the distance between her world and theirs, to effectively “tame” the wild apes, so she could move more freely among them.
The idea of luring the chimps into camp on a regular basis—effectively “provisioning” her study subjects—thus held obvious appeal. It wasn’t so different, she and Hugo reasoned, from having a fig tree in camp that was perpetually in fruit. And so, however accidentally it started, the practice of setting out bananas in camp began.
The chimps were quick to catch on. By the summer of 1963, they were sauntering into camp with breathtaking regularity, sometimes twenty apes in a single day. David Greybeard and his friend Goliath, an alpha male, were the first to appear. But other males soon followed, becoming bolder and more approachable by the day. And finally came the females, adolescents, and youngsters, opening a thrilling new window onto mother-child relations, as well as the ritual particulars of mating.
This randy topic came into especially sharp focus that summer, when the soon-to-be-famous Flo, “the most hideous old bag in Chimpland,” as Jane put it, but also the most sexually “popular” with the males, began to make regular visits, “quite won over to the idea of popping in for an odd banana.” Flo’s appearance in camp drew “millions of males along here with her,” Jane wrote Leakey—particularly that August, when she “developed her first pink swelling,” providing opportunities for observations Jane hadn’t yet seen. (During estrus the female chimp’s genitals redden, signaling sexual availability.) David, Jane told Bernard Verdcourt in a letter, sometimes greets Flo “in the most fabulous way—did I tell you how he once kissed one of her nipples and pinched the other! The men have a naughty habit of poking a finger up their lady friend’s vagina when greeting her!”
But if the quality and depth of Jane’s sightings were multiplying, so too were the dangers. Provisioning was increasingly becoming a point of vulnerability. The bananas drew baboons to camp as well as the chimps, sparking violent skirmishes between the two species. Additionally, the chimps often sparred among themselves in their contest for fruit, adding to the general aggression in camp. One day an agitated chimp “rushed about with all his hair out,” Jane wrote her family, and then hurled a two-pound rock almost twenty feet. “It was quite fantastic,” she added, downplaying the danger. On another occasion, Hugo had thrown a rock at Goliath, fearing he was about to chase Jane. Ever since then, she reported, “Goliath has borne Hugo a grudge.” He “has chased him 4 times.”
Both Leakey and Melvin Payne, the Geographic Society’s executive vice president, wrote to express their concerns. “I know you have complete confidence in your friends, but I have a continuing apprehension that they may suffer a momentary lapse and forget their friendship with you,” Payne cautioned. Louis was similarly alarmed. A weak chimp could easily rip the arm off a strong human, he reminded them. Not only were she and Hugo at risk, he warned, they were also endangering the chimps, since if any human at all was injured, including one of the local fishermen, “some interfering officer” would no doubt shoot a chimp. Jane was angered by Leakey’s letter, which she found mildly patronizing if not unfair. He wasn’t there, after all; he had no idea. As a precautionary measure, Jane and Hugo had by now had a steel cage built, which would provide them with a retreat in case of emergency. The cage was “foolproof,” she assured both men. But what really raised her hackles was the implication that she was jeopardizing the chimps. “Louis, can you really think that I honestly haven’t thought and thought about the safety of my chimps?” she wrote. She and Hugo were also experimenting at this point with ways to regulate the number of bananas that any single chimp could take. Eventually they would move the feeding area some distance from camp, as well as dispense bananas from boxes by remote control, to reduce the fighting. But that first summer they were still finding their way.
Jane continued to insist that the provisioning was worth the risks. “We now have 21 regular visitors to camp,” she wrote her landlady at Cambridge. “This means that for the first time I can get continuity in my observations.”
“To be able to follow the interrelationships from DAY TO DAY, instead of simply seeing the same two animals together once a week or even once a month—well, I can really say now, that I know chimps,” she insisted in a letter to Leakey.
Jane’s practice of provisioning her chimps would eventually come under fire. Her critics would claim that the banana feeding made the apes “more aggressive than they would otherwise have been.” Whether this was true or not is debatable. Certainly the practice was very much in keeping with the “manipulative traditions” of European ethology. In time Jane would distance herself from the practice, just as she would later discourage the researchers to whom she passed the baton at Gombe from having direct physical contact with the chimps—most immediately, to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt, since chimps were four times stronger than humans. But also because of concerns over spreading infectious diseases to the apes, which would later become a problem. Yet in the summer of 1963, provisioning would prove spectacularly successful in lifting the veil on the mysterious and endlessly fascinating lives of the chimps at Gombe, allowing for a deeper level of habituation than Jane had yet achieved.
IN AUGUST 1963, LESS THAN TWO YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF Jacobs’s Death and Life, and a year after Carson’s Silent Spring, the National Geographic Society sent out to its subscribers three million copies of its popular magazine. In it, readers encountered an exotic story by an extremely pretty and unknown young British woman who had been living alone with wild chimpanzees in a remote African forest for more than a year. Jane Goodall’s thirty-seven-page-long feature, “My Life Among Wild Chimpanzees,” captured the public’s imagination for myriad reasons. With its charming, first-person narrative and intimate tone, its personal anecdotes and unapologetic expression of empathy for the animal world, it was clearly written by an amateur and not a credentialed scientist. And yet, its content indicated that its obviously fearless twenty-nine-year-old author had made significant scientific breakthroughs. In photo after photo, Goodall—slight, ponytailed, sometimes even shoeless—was pictured standing astonishingly close to wild animals known to be dangerous and unpredictable. In one, she was handing a chimpanzee a banana, as if the creature were tame. In another, a chimp was letting her touch him. There were shots of chimpanzees carrying meat, proving they were carnivorous; chimps shaping twigs and using them to fish for termites, evidence of tool use; chimps with the author in the forest, conveying her open embrace of the natural world and her courage in the face of danger. The article opened with a moody shot of Goodall sitting, swaddled in a blanket, in front of a flickering campfire, her face in silhouette against a vast lake below her and the night sky above. To paint the scene further, there were photos of local fishermen by the lake, an image of the author’s mother handing out medicines under a thatched roof with poles, and, in a nod to the Spartan conditions of camp life, a fetching shot of Goodall standing in a rushing stream washing her hair.
Readers were enchanted. Within days, Jane was buried in messages from friends, letters from readers from around the globe, solicitations from publishers and journalists. It was the beginnings of a celebrity that Jane could neither have imagined nor been prepared for, a degree of visibility that, if at first exhilarating, was soon overwhelming. For in addition to the acclaim her article brought came all manner of intrusions and assumptions, notes from naysayers and weirdos as well as fans, all of whom wanted to weigh in, if not get close to the young, blond-haired beauty who had traveled to Africa and lived with wild animals in an isolated rain forest miles from any village and unreachable by road.
A Connecticut woman sent a letter pleading for more information. She had “been conducting cancer research on my own body,” she said. She was now “fighting for survival to complete my work.” Her “only hope in this battle” was to know the precise names of the “eighty-one different kinds of chimpanzee foods” mentioned in the article.
A kook from California, upset by the spiritual ramifications of chimps making tools, wrote “to question the state of Jane’s soul”: “I thought to myself, gee here is a beautiful young lady, brains, ability, plenty God given talents, HOW MUCH DOES SHE GIVE ‘GOD’ IN RETURN??? . . . You are working hard for your Doctor of Philosophy, how hard are you working for YOUR CROWN IN HEAVEN?”
“Whenever I think of Africa and Apes,” pronounced a young male from Pennsylvania, “a funny feeling charges up and down my spine.” In the woods near his house, he said, he enjoyed diving “through the trees free as an Ape.” He often camped out in “high platforms” he had made in the trees, and was now determined to go to Africa after high school graduation to “live among the apes, just as Jane was doing.” He felt confident that he wouldn’t “have much trouble following them because I am built like one. After I get in contact with them I could get cameras and other equipment and record their habits and daily life.”
There were of course letters from well-wishers too: Malcolm MacDonald, a former British MP and cabinet minister, sent a note saying that he was so impressed by the article that he was having it “bound in leather” so it could live in a prominent place in his bookshelf. Sir Julian Huxley, the eminent zoologist and grandson of the renowned Victorian biologist T. H. Huxley, wrote to ask if there was any chance of joining Jane on her next trip. A celebrated German zoologist sent a letter proposing a film collaboration about her work. Hugo, who had been pushing hard to finish his own Gombe film, was understandably threatened. “Your fascinating account of life among the chimpanzees leads me to believe that the subject might serve as a basis for a popular book,” wrote more than one publisher, including Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin. Brooks (who had just published Silent Spring) would later become the American publisher of Goodall’s 1971 bestseller, In the Shadow of Man.
Jane tried her best to rise above the uproar, gently discouraging the solicitations from strangers, the proposed visits by journalists, the suggestions for film collaborations and related stories. Even so, the human world seemed increasingly to intrude. The shadow side of her instant celebrity would be a loss of the great, rapturous solitude she had enjoyed in the forest with her chimps. That fall of 1963 would be the last she and Hugo would spend at Gombe alone.
JANE AND HUGO LEFT THAT DECEMBER, HUGO DECAMPING FOR NAIROBI, Jane to Bournemouth for Christmas, and then on to Cambridge for her third term. By now, however, they were romantically involved and were thus feeling particularly unhappy at the prospect of what was to be a four-month separation. Hugo decided to take matters into his own hands. On the day after Christmas, Boxing Day in Britain, he sent a telegram to the Birches. “WILL YOU MARRY ME LOVE STOP HUGO.”
Jane accepted by return cable. “You can’t imagine the cables . . . that went whizzing . . . between here and Africa, Africa and Holland, Holland and here,” she wrote Sally Cary. “My goodness. 7 letters all at once from Hugo . . . did I like emeralds!! So back went a cable—‘love emeralds love you’!!! Back came a cable—what size was my finger? . . . Back went an answer . . . And in the middle of all this frantic cables from Africa to Washington, Washington to Africa and to England . . . about files and tapes and more films.”
The wedding would take place three months later, on March 28, 1964, Easter Sunday, at Chelsea Old Church, London. Jane wore white and carried daffodils and arum lilies. A clay model of David Greybeard stood atop the wedding cake and bubbly wine was served instead of Champagne. (Champagne, Jane said, was “just a snob value waste of money.”) Louis Leakey, unable to attend, sent a tape with his congratulations, after which a telegram was read aloud from the National Geographic Society, announcing that the bride had been awarded a second Franklin L. Burr Prize for Contribution to Science. Giddy with happiness, the Baron and Baroness Hugo and Jane van Lawick returned almost immediately to Gombe, stopping for a brief reception in Nairobi, followed by a quick side trip to the Leakeys’, before pushing on to rejoin their beloved chimps.
AS EARLY AS THE SUMMER BEFORE, JANE HAD DECIDED THAT SHE wanted to establish a permanent research center at Gombe so the work might continue long term. She had already realized, as she put it years later, that “there was no way that one person, no matter how dedicated,” could make a truly “comprehensive study of the Gombe chimpanzees.” That fall, having secured Leakey’s blessings, she approached National Geographic for funds, and by the end of 1964, plans had been approved for a series of primitive, semipermanent buildings. By March 1965, two prefab aluminum units sheathed in bamboo were in place, the smaller of which—dubbed Lawick Lodge—a single room that would become Jane and Hugo’s sleeping quarters. Two assistants had also been hired, one to do clerical tasks, the other to continue the research while Jane and Hugo were away. Jane was due back in Cambridge in March 1965, to work on her doctoral dissertation; Hugo had an assignment in East Africa, to film wild animals for National Geographic.
Grudgingly, Jane returned to England as planned. But her focus was increasingly divided. Beyond the punishing work on her thesis, she now had other pressing obligations. She had promised National Geographic a second chimpanzee article (which she sent them in February), as well as a draft of her first popular book, My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees. (The latter, when it was completed a year and a half later, would make her an even bigger star among the public.) Additionally, she’d agreed to give a lecture in September in Vienna, for the prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation, and another in October at the Royal Institute in London, both of which required preparation. By November, she was working “flat out on the final stages” of her dissertation, she reported, writing herself ragged and living on “Nescafe and the occasional apple,” rarely getting enough sleep. She “surfaced” briefly in December, she told a friend, long enough to register the groundswell of excitement over the December issue of National Geographic, the cover of which carried her picture, and the CBS television special Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, which aired two weeks later, on the twenty-second, raising her profile even further. (The audience that evening was estimated at twenty million.) Feeling the wind at her back, she caught a flight for Nairobi, arriving in time for Christmas with Hugo, and then spent “a delightful month on the Serengeti,” only to have to rush back to England in early February for “horrible oral exams,” followed by a series of lectures in the U.S.—one in Washington, D.C., before thirty-five hundred people in the grand auditorium of Constitution Hall. By the spring of 1966, having received formal notification that she had passed her doctorate exams, Jane was finally back at Gombe, after more than a year’s absence. But by now she was a much-lauded, much-courted figure, increasingly visible and in demand. Though she didn’t yet know it, she had entered the next, more public and peripatetic phase of her life; the seeds of her future activism were already in the wind.
JANE’S LIFE OVER THE NEXT DECADE WOULD BE AN ITINERANT ONE. Hugo’s photography work would take the couple to the Serengeti, then north to the national parks in Uganda and back to Ngorongoro Crater, where for weeks, sometimes months at a stretch, they watched, tracked, photographed, and wrote about wildlife, most immediately hyenas, wild dogs, and jackals for a book they collaborated on called Innocent Killers. Despite these hiatuses, the research at Gombe went on, aided by a changing cast of international research assistants, which grew from a handful to two dozen or more with time.
The highs and the lows of the work would continue too. In 1969, in a heartbreaking tragedy, one of the researchers, Ruth Davis, fell to her death. A polio epidemic struck in 1966, paralyzing and then killing some of the chimp families that congregated at the feeding site. At Jane’s urging, an emergency supply of oral vaccine was flown in and administered to both the people and primates at Gombe, but not before more chimps had succumbed. Other sadnesses followed: David Greybeard died of natural causes in 1968, and then ancient Flo in 1972, a year after the publication of Jane’s bestselling book, In the Shadow of Man. Flo’s son Flint, “hollow-eyed, gaunt and utterly depressed,” died soon after of heartbreak.
The research, meanwhile, continued to deepen. By the mid-1970s, the first shocking observations of chimp warfare and chimp cannibalism had been made, revealing the darker side of the chimpanzee psyche. Human violence ratcheted up too. In May 1975, rebels from neighboring Zaire kidnapped four researchers from camp, including three Stanford students, nearly shutting down the Gombe operation. Stanford, which had been funding the project since the early 1970s, pulled its support, and for the next few years, American students stopped coming, leaving it to the Tanzanian staff members to continue the data gathering, which they did.
And then, quite abruptly, the trajectory of Jane Goodall’s life changed. It began in 1986. Jane had been writing and doing a bit of teaching at Stanford. Her seminal book on chimpanzee behavior, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, had just been published to considerable acclaim. She and Hugo had raised a son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick—nicknamed Grub—mostly at Gombe, while continuing with the research. “I was in a dream world,” she says. “I was out there with these amazing chimpanzees. I was in the forests I dreamed about as a child.” And then in November 1986, Goodall attended a primate conference in Chicago. For the first time, all the chimp people across Africa were brought together, she explains, as well as people studying chimps in noninvasive ways in the lab, and in captivity. There was a session on conservation. “That’s when the shock hit me,” she says. “Every place in Africa where chimps were being studied, their numbers were plummeting. Forests were disappearing; human populations were growing; habitats were being destroyed. Chimps were being killed by the beginnings of the bush meat trade; there was still some live animal trade too, shooting the mothers to get the babies, which utterly shocked me. So actually, as far as I know, I didn’t make any decision. I went as a scientist—I had my Ph.D. by then—and left as an activist. Just like that. I couldn’t go back to that old beautiful life.”
Goodall had no set plan. “I don’t know what the hell I thought I could do,” she recalls. “That’s what was absurd.” She set off across Africa, searching for partners and financial sponsorship, talking to whomever she could, determined to make a difference. She found eventual support from Conoco in the Congo, and from America’s James Baker, who sent letters to heads of state in advance of her visits. But it wasn’t until a few years later that she saw clearly what needed to happen.
It was the early 1990s and she was in a small plane, flying over Gombe. “I knew there was deforestation,” she remembers. Throughout the years, in her trips across the lake, she had noticed bald pockets along the park’s borders. “But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw from above, which was this little island of forest surrounded by miles and miles of bare hills; more people than the land could support; people too poor to buy food, land over-farmed and unfertile.” That’s when the lines of connection between the fate of humans and the fate of the earth’s endangered species and ecosystems hit home, she says: all were intertwined.
“I realized that until we addressed the poverty of the people who were chopping down the forest for firewood and farmland, we couldn’t even begin to try to save the chimps, and this is true all over, not just for the conservation of chimps, but the conservation of any species.”
Goodall teamed up with a partner, and together they launched a local conservation program, which they called TACARE. It was important from the very beginning, she explains, that their approach be respectful, that it not be a “bunch of arrogant white people telling the locals what to do to make their lives better.” So they pulled together a group of amazingly committed Tanzanians, local people who went from village to village talking to the residents and asking them what they thought could be done to improve their lives.
The approach worked, creating a natural opening. The people wanted better health facilities, better education for their children, better techniques for growing food, “so we tackled those things first,” Goodall remembers. “We had very little money, a tiny grant from the EU for twelve villages around Gombe. But we started anyway.” The team’s first challenge was to restore fertility to the land. It had to be without using chemicals, not only because they couldn’t afford them, but also because “I already knew how evil they were,” she says. (Goodall had read Silent Spring, and is a great admirer.) They developed innovative ways of capturing the soil, which had washed away when the trees were cut. Free nurseries were set up, providing fast-growing tree species for building and firewood. Water projects were introduced, and then women’s health, education, and microcredit programs.
That was perhaps the most important part of the initiative, Goodall believes. As the women’s education improves, family size begins to drop, and the standard of living rises for everyone. “You do this by keeping the girls in school during and after puberty,” she explains. “Mostly they quit because there are no proper toilets, no sanitary supplies, no privacy, so you realize you’ve got to have proper lavatories.”
The microcredit loans were tremendously important too. “The women choose their own projects, and whatever they do, it has to be environmentally sustainable, so they start little chicken farms, tree nurseries so they could sell seedlings, little pineapple farms.” They begin small, but their projects grow, as did the program.
TACARE proved to be a magnificent success. “The real encouragement,” Goodall says, “is that as soon as the people’s lives began to improve, they began to allow trees to come back.” As a result, they have set aside the land the government requires them to put into conservation in such a way as to make a buffer between the Gombe chimps and the villages. “The villagers understand the watershed. They understand that you can’t destroy the trees along the edge of a stream or the water level will decrease. They’ve seen it happen. So they completely understand the problem. The trees and the water and the environment and their future wealth and happiness are all mixed together, all interconnected.”
As for the chimps’ long-term prospects, this is more difficult to say. Today TACARE is in fifty-two villages, spreading beyond Gombe to the south, so the chimps in the greater Gombe area now have three times more forest area than they did ten years ago. They have an opportunity to interact with other known chimp groups, which is critical to maintaining genetic diversity, their only real hope for survival. It’s a start in offsetting the sharp population declines they have suffered in recent decades, but only a start.
Goodall feels that time is running out. Her worries these days extend beyond the fate of the chimps, to the fate of endangered species across the globe. She’s now on the road three hundred days a year, advocating for sustainable development and worldwide protection of habitat. She’s committed to working on a global scale, to lobbying for changes that will have the greatest impact. “We are now in the sixth great extinction,” she says, a note of despair edging her voice. “Our human impact on the planet, our greenhouse gas emissions, our reckless damage to the natural world, all these have been devastating.”
If a bug disappears, one might think it doesn’t matter. “And it might not,” she adds.
“But that little bug that looks so insignificant could be the main food source of a fish, and that fish could be the main food source of a bird, and that bird, you know, could be the main creature that’s distributing the seeds of a certain kind of plant, and the seeds that grow into that certain kind of plant could be the main food source for some larger creature, and on it goes. We now know that whole ecosystems can collapse because of the loss of one little piece. In other words, it’s the web of life. I think it’s unfortunate that we talk about ‘biodiversity’ because people, ordinary people say, what the hell is biodiversity? But the web of life, this makes sense.”
What doesn’t make sense, Goodall reflects, is the fact that our intellect is so hugely developed, and yet we persist in destroying the planet. “How is it possible that the most intelligent creature to ever walk the planet is destroying its own home?” she asks. “There seems to be a disconnect between the clever brain and the human heart.” Instead of saying “how does this decision affect my family, our people years ahead, we’re saying how does this affect me, my pocketbook, the next shareholder’s meeting.” We’re not borrowing from the future, she insists, “we’re stealing from it. We need to change that.”
To this end, Goodall has lobbied senators and trade group leaders, World Bank officials and policy makers, timber company CEOs and ambassadors from the U.S., France, Tanzania, Burundi, and other countries, often with success. She recently convinced a consortium of timber-company chiefs to make protecting wildlife a part of their business code. Her push to have chimpanzees recognized as endangered led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to recommend that chimps in captivity be granted the same protections. “I think a lot of what I do is just talk to people,” Goodall says. “And I am not aggressive.” But it’s more than this. Like Carson and Jacobs, Goodall knows how to inspire people. Her ability to win hearts and minds, to move an auditorium packed with people, or a wealthy donor she’s seated beside at a gala dinner, gives her a persuasiveness that few can claim. Her manner may be gentle, but Goodall’s passion and conviction are clear. She’s an extremely compelling character.
Goodall is eighty-three now, though she hardly seems it. Her gaze is direct, her gait strong, her energy unflagging despite a schedule that would be grueling for someone half her age. If her spiritual home remains Gombe, her actual home is the road. She hasn’t slept in the same bed for three consecutive weeks in more than twenty years, she recently told Paul Tullis of the New York Times. “It never ceases to amaze me that there’s this person who travels around and does all these things,” she adds. “And it’s me. It doesn’t seem like me at all.”
Driving her on, she says, is the need to raise awareness. “I have to raise money,” she admits, “but my goal is awareness.” Which is where children come in. In a world beset by increasingly dire news about the environment, Goodall finds great hope in the promise of young people. “If you get children out into nature, in the right setting, they just thrive,” she says. “You don’t have to teach them. You just have to allow them to be. And yet so many never get that opportunity.” Her first priority, therefore, is growing the youth program she started in affiliation with the Jane Goodall Institute, the conservation NGO she founded in the 1970s, “because if the young people of today lose hope, we might as well give up.”
Roots & Shoots, as the program is called, began with twelve students in Tanzania in 1991. Today it’s in 114 countries, with more than 100,000 active youth groups, each initiating projects to improve the world and protect the environment. Its growth has been swift and dramatic. At COP21, the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris, Goodall recently unveiled a giant interactive map showing every Roots & Shoots chapter across the world. “We’re calling it the tapestry of hope,” Goodall says. “You just click on a certain place and the projects there come up.” There are chapters in North America and parts of Latin America; in Europe and Asia, including China; in Africa and the Middle East, mainly Abu Dhabi. “It’s completely magical, and it’s not even finished. There are some groups that we haven’t even heard from yet, because they have only occasional Internet connections.”
Equally inspiring is the range of projects the kids undertake. There are kids planting trees, kids doing urban gardening, kids growing food or butterfly gardens in schoolyards. There are children volunteering to work in dog shelters, groups going out on weekends to clear invasive species from a prairie area in Texas, others doing the same in wetlands in Taiwan. There are kids raising money to help victims of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, groups working with street children, groups starting Roots & Shoots programs in refugee camps. In China children are going to visit other children who are long-term patients in hospitals, to cheer them up.
The important thing, says Goodall, is that the kids generate the projects themselves. “Our job is to listen, to hear their voices. We don’t tell them what to do; we let them find their own passions, empowering them to take action.” What’s exciting is “they are all growing up, moving into the adult world, taking that philosophy with them.”
The larger message, Goodall insists, is that individuals can make a difference. “I think the main reason that people do nothing, that people go along in a state of denial about what is happening, is that they look around the world at the problems and they feel helpless and hopeless, and they think, well, I am just one person, what can I do? So the thing is that as one person, we can’t do anything. But if we start making considered choices, choices in our everyday actions, the little things—what we buy, what we wear; if we think carefully about the consequences of those choices—how was it made, where did it come from, was it child slave labor, was it cruelty to animals, et cetera, then we start making different choices. Small choices. But multiply those small choices by a hundred, a thousand, a million and then a billion and then you start to see a different kind of world.”
Cultivating “a romance of limits,” to use the author and environmentalist Bill McKibben’s words, would seem to be a difficult sell in this age of rampant materialism. But to Goodall it comes quite naturally. She likes to tell the story of a lecture she gave several years ago. Afterward, she received letters from two separate people who had attended: one was from Hong Kong, the other from Holland. Both writers loved sports cars, they said, and both were about to buy the sports car of their dreams. “In my lecture I had repeated Gandhi’s quote ‘The world can provide for human need, but not human greed.’ So when we go to buy something, we should say to ourselves, ‘Do I really need it?’ Both of these men, from two completely different cultures, were going off to get their sports cars and then they remembered what I had said, and they said, ‘Damn Jane.’ One of them actually gave the money he would have spent on the car to the Jane Goodall Institute. I’ve got many stories like that. One man sold his house. He said, ‘I realized I didn’t need such a big house.’ You never know who it’s going to be, or how they will react,” she adds. “It’s why I keep doing what I do.”
Nearly fifty-six years have passed since Goodall first set foot onto Gombe’s pebbled shores. Yet in some respects, she is not so changed. She still requires minimal food and little sleep. She still exudes accessibility, despite near constant intrusions by flocks of admiring strangers wherever she travels. She still favors the same simple uniform—khakis, a neutral-colored shirt, sneakers—whenever she returns to Gombe. Twice a year, on her brief trips back, she still stays in the same cinder block house where she, Hugo, and Grub lived in those early pioneering years, and which she later shared with her second husband, Derek Bryceson, a principal in Tanzania’s first democratically elected government and now deceased. The house, reports a recent visitor, is filled with old magazines and animal skulls. It has a proper door, “but the windows are chicken wire.” The idea is to keep animals out, but to let in “as much of Gombe’s atmosphere as possible.” Which is just as Goodall wants it. Five and a half decades after her first consequential visit, her gray hair pulled back in the same low ponytail, Goodall still requires few creature comforts.
Her days are crowded, she admits, even at Gombe. Yet shoehorned between meetings in Kigoma to discuss land-use policies, visits to local Roots & Shoots chapters, side trips to Nairobi and Burundi, conversations with ambassadors and officials, Goodall on occasion still walks the same forest paths that she first explored so many years ago, her senses attuned now, as then, to every stir in the trees, every rustle and quiver in the tall grass. She still finds solace in the peace of the deep green forest where it all began.
“People often ask me, ‘Why aren’t you still there?’” she says. “I wish I could be,” she admits. “I yearn for the days that are gone. I have a wonderful team there and I still love being out in the forest on my own. But Gombe is not like it was, and we have to save those chimps, which also means saving the earth. As long as I can, I have to keep trying.”