Men like Gordon-Cumming and Selous must have known something about the way species interacted, and have had some idea that the tiniest scraps of life at the bottom of the food chain were in some way important to the behemoths at the top. But they were showmen as much as naturalists, and their audiences were not much attracted by small and drab. Who would queue to see a mole? Who knew or cared anything about ‘ecology’ (the word did not even exist until coined by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866). People wanted drama – living colour and bold brushstrokes. Everything else could bide its time. Most species of golden mole were not described until after Gordon-Cumming’s death, and Calcochloris tytonis had to wait until 1968. It may be commonplace now to talk about ‘biodiversity’, ‘ecosystems’ and ‘symbiosis’, but these are modern concepts built jigsaw-fashion over decades. The hunters saw only what was in front of them, one species at a time, biggest first. Who could be surprised that they showed little interest in anything smaller than a dik-dik?
Given the challenges of surviving the African climate, never mind the impossibility of heavy haulage through unmapped forests and plains, it is easy to understand why most of the trade was in heads, horns, tusks and skins. A man with an ox-cart and a rifle – even one as resourceful as Gordon-Cumming or Selous – was not going to bring home a fully grown live hippopotamus. The Natural History Museum would have been nothing without marksmen and taxidermists. There is no irony, intentional or otherwise, in the elevation of Selous to its pantheon of heroes.
All the same, showmen knew very well that live action would sell better than static display, and zoos by definition needed life. There was a powerful incentive to ‘Bring ’em back alive’, as the twentieth-century Texan adventurer Frank Buck would put it in the title of his bestselling book. The problem was that wild animals did not travel well. What started out alive was more than likely to be delivered dead, and few of the survivors would last long in captivity. It was a vicious circle. The high mortality rate only increased the demand for replacements, thus inflating the prices and attracting the kind of entrepreneur for whom the scent of a fast buck was made no less sweet by the stench of corpses. But again we have to understand the spirit of the age. Men in the early nineteenth century did not inflict upon other species any cruelty they were not willing to inflict upon their own. The slave trade in the British Empire was abolished only in 1807, and slavery itself remained legal until 1833. Even during the lifetime of my grandfathers, in the 1890s, African and Arab slave traders were still resisting attempts to close them down. Despite the establishment of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, and of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866, there were very few curbs, legal or moral, on the worldwide trade in birds and beasts.
The heightened sensitivity of the twenty-first century would have been as impossible for the nineteenth century to imagine as the loss of Victoria’s empire. Our double standards might have struck them as absurd. On my way to see London Zoo’s okapi, I linger in the giraffe house, and I ask myself: What do I think about this? Where is my moral centre of gravity? I try to work out how I score. On killing for sport I have a clean sheet. Never done it; never will. People who stand in fields and pick off tame pheasants strike me as, at best, laughable. Great white hunters, eh? Beyond that I am in difficulty. My misgivings about pet-keeping are compromised by the cats and guinea pigs beneath the plum tree in my garden. My tolerance of other species sharing my space is widely variable. I won’t tread on an ant if I can avoid it, and I work at a desk under a tent of undisturbed spiders’ webs, but I’ve killed rabbits and moles, and there are mouse-traps in the kitchen. I eat meat, lots of it, and I have made a public defence of animal laboratories. Nobody could mistake me for a Jain. The zoo therefore triggers a maelstrom of conflicts. The giraffe is not a threatened species. Its range in sub-Saharan Africa has been sadly reduced, and there may be uncertainties about its long-term future, but the IUCN calculates a viable wild population in the region of 100,000 and classifies it as a species of least concern. Its survival does not depend on conservation by zoos. I ought therefore to feel unease, perhaps even indignation, at the sight of these miraculous creatures in confinement so far from their natural habitat. But I don’t. Wherever in the world I go, I am unlikely to come across a happier contrast than between these sleek, apparently contented animals and their unfortunate historical forebears who might have died for nothing more than their fly-whisk tails. I pass on with contradictions unresolved. Situation normal.
High risk – big animals were frequent victims of accidents at the docks
All trafficked animals in the nineteenth century suffered in handling, but the giraffes’ great height, their long necks and gangling limbs, made them particularly vulnerable. Being the most awkward of cargoes, they all too easily fell from dockside cranes. In 1866 two were killed in a fire at London Zoo. In 1876 at Hamburg, three more broke their necks against a wall. In the wild, where they loomed high above the low African skyline, they drew a dangerous amount of attention to themselves. Along with the golden moles, aardvarks and hippopotami, they were counted among the ‘very peculiar forms of mammalia’ celebrated by Alfred Russel Wallace, and were conclusive evidence of Africa’s weirdness. No animals ever caused more of a stir in Europe than the first giraffes, delivered in 1827 by the Viceroy of Egypt as gifts to the British and French governments. They were also easy to shoot, and provided men like Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming during their travels with a regular supply of meat. He reminds us again of the cheapness of animal life:
As we neared the water I detected a giraffe browsing within a quarter of a mile; this was well, for we required flesh . . . He proved to be a young bull, and led me a severe chase over very heavy ground. Towards the end I thought he was going to beat me, and I was about to pull up, when suddenly he lowered his tail, by which I knew that his race was run. Urging my horse, I was soon alongside of him, and with three shots I ended his career.
Another day he chased and shot ‘the finest bull’ in the herd, but took nothing from it but the tail. It was against this ingrained tradition of kill-as-you-go that the live animal traders moved in and developed their businesses. There would be changes in practice but not in outlook. The merchants were not monsters – memoirs reveal some concern for animal welfare – but they were pragmatists who accepted the crude realities of their trade. Purposely or by accident, they would waste as many lives as it took to satisfy their customers.
Where big animals such as giraffe and elephant were concerned, the safest option for a trapper was to target the young. If anything, this actually increased the number of dead. Before you could catch a baby you had to kill its mother and the herd leaders that would defend it. Losses of breeding stock were immense. A zoo official in London reckoned that the price of one live orang-utan was four killed in the wild. Yet this was only the beginning. There is no record of how many captive animals died on the journey from forest or veldt to the coast, but on the evidence of later chroniclers such as Frank Buck we may assume the number was huge. Even that was not the worst of it. Of those that survived long enough to go aboard ship, half were lost at sea.
Good intentions were no guarantee of a humane outcome. In January 1867 Frank Buckland visited Charles Jamrach – a well-known and reputable London animal trader who counted many zoos among his clients. In Jamrach’s shop Buckland noticed the skulls of two Indian rhinoceroses. How had his friend come by these? It was a terrible story, which began when Jamrach sent his son to India to pick up a pair of rhinos and bring them alive to London, where they would have had a value of £1,600 (£151,699 in today’s money). The first part of the enterprise went well enough. Jamrach Junior successfully acquired the animals and, with forty coolies hauling on ropes, walked them 200 miles to be loaded on the Persian Empire, probably at Calcutta. Along with them went food sufficient for 120 days. This should have been enough, but for reasons not explained the voyage was protracted far beyond its normal duration and the animals starved. ‘The poor things were reduced to such extremities that they ate sawdust and gnawed great holes in a spare mast,’ wrote Buckland.
A French collector, Jean-Yves Domalain, reckoned that ten animals died for every one successfully shown in a zoo, a figure that is impossible to verify but which seems unlikely to have been far wrong. Not all the stories were as harrowing as that of Jamrach’s rhinos. Buckland gleefully quotes letters from correspondents describing how monkeys in Brazil and Abyssinia fell for the temptations of alcohol. In the Brazilian case the preferred tipple was cane rum; in Abyssinia it was beer sweetened with dates left out in jars for the animals to help themselves. ‘Monkeys certainly will get as drunk as men if they get the chance,’ observed Buckland’s informant, a Mr J. W. Slade.
The American hunter Frank Buck describes a crafty variation of this trick practised by Malayan natives on an orang-utan. They began by leaving a small tub of water under the animal’s tree. The orang duly examined this, and then overturned it. For two more days the exercise was repeated. The tub was refilled and the orang knocked it over. On the fourth day came the breakthrough – instead of spilling the water, the orang drank it. Its capture now was all but assured. After a few more days of water, the Malays began to add increasing amounts of the native spirit arrack, until eventually the tub was filled with neat alcohol. After downing this, the orang lurched around like a music-hall drunk, beat his tree with a stick and fell down insensible. ‘When he came to, some hours later, he found himself neatly crated at Jesselton [now Kota Kinabalu] awaiting shipment to Singapore.’
But Domalain’s Law is no respecter of ingenuity or patience. Frank Buck bought the giant orang – the biggest ever caught – from its captors and sailed off with it for San Francisco and the Ringling Brothers Circus. Knowing his business, Buck took good care of his investment, which was given a roomy cage and fed on carrots, sweet potatoes, bananas, sugar cane, boiled rice, raw eggs and bread. But knowing his business also meant that Buck could face up stoically to disappointment. With about five days of the voyage remaining, the orang went down with dysentery. The ship’s doctor struggled to inject a serum but the patient – ill-tempered at the best of times – snapped off all the needles. That night the Rajah of All Orangs, as the Malays had called him, lay down and died.
This was the way it had always gone; the way it always would go.
Like any other traded commodity, animals were bought and sold in a competitive market with dominant market leaders. The earliest and greatest of these was Carl Hagenbeck of Hamburg, born in 1844, the son of a fishmonger who also bought and sold wild animals. It was enterprise on an epic scale. According to Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in their exhaustive history of world zoos, in the twenty years from 1866 Carl Hagenbeck shifted 700 leopards, 1,000 lions, 400 tigers, 1,000 bears, 800 hyenas, 300 elephants, 70 rhinoceroses, 300 camels, 150 giraffes, 600 antelopes, tens of thousands of crocodiles, boas and pythons, and more than 100,000 birds. Hagenbeck might have been a big player – Phineas T. Barnum was one of many bulk-buyers who depended on him – but he was still only one dealer in a worldwide market that reaped animals like corn. And of course you cannot have corn without chaff. If you multiply the live deliveries by the Domalain factor of ten, then the true cost in lives rises from the epic to the biblical.
Journeys were dangerous, arduous and long. Seasick animals kept in small cages buffeted and drenched by rough seas had only the slimmest chance of survival. ‘Tossed about without protection for their claws,’ wrote Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in Zoo: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West, ‘big cats tore themselves to ribbons and bled to death, or put their own eyes out.’ But the casualty rate only added to the value of specimens that were delivered successfully. For a consignment of three African elephants in 1870, an American dealer paid Hagenbeck £1,000 – the equivalent of £100,800 in 2012. Hagenbeck at first thought he had made a pretty good deal. ‘But it seems I was wrong. For my American friend took the animals to his own country and sold them for £1,700, £1,600 and £1,500 respectively.’ At 2012 values, the dealer’s £3,800 profit stacks up to £383,040.
But Hagenbeck reckoned himself to be more than just a money-maker. ‘My enthusiasm for my own calling originated more, if I may say so, in a love for all living creatures than in any mere commercial instincts . . . I do not intend to imply that I have not also had an eye to the main chance; but I can, I think, say with perfect truth that I am, and always have been, a naturalist first and a trader afterwards.’
There are good reasons to raise an eyebrow at this generous self-assessment, but Hagenbeck is entitled to some credit for thinking ahead of his time. The zoological park he founded at Stellingen has good claim to be regarded as the first modern zoo. Unlike others of the time it allowed animals to move about with relative freedom in enclosures that bore some resemblance to their natural habitats. ‘I desired above all things, to give the animals the maximum of liberty. I wished to exhibit them not as captives, confined within narrow spaces, and looked at between bars, but as free to wander from place to place within as large limits as possible, and with no bars to obstruct the view and serve as a reminder of the captivity.’ Artificial mountains were thrown up for chamois and ibex. ‘Wide commons’ were provided for animals of the plains, and glens for the carnivores, kept apart from the public by trenches. Modern zookeepers may have improved upon this example, but none has ever expressed a more enlightened view.
To modern ways of thinking, Hagenbeck’s opinions on animal intelligence could seem anthropomorphic, but at least they encouraged compassion. ‘Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves. Their minds are formed on the same plan as our minds; the differences are differences of degree, not of kind. They will repay cruelty with hatred, and kindness with trust.’ This led him to reject the old, barbaric methods of training circus animals through threat of pain. He records with revulsion the sight of four ‘trained’ lions offered for sale at auction in London whose whiskers had been scorched off and who were ‘frightfully burned about their mouths’. By example at his own circus in Hamburg, Hagenbeck taught the world’s showmen that rewarding an animal was a better way to secure its obedience than punishing it for error. Typically, he did not underestimate the importance of his own achievements: ‘There is probably no sphere in which the growth of humanitarian sentiment has been more striking than in the treatment and training of performing animals.’
Typically, too, he did not neglect the bottom line. He looked for profit not just in promoting circus performances of his own but also in supplying trained animals to showmen such as Barnum. Like all enterprises involving the transport of animals, a circus was no place for the risk-averse or the overly sentimental. You might not use the whip or red-hot iron, but the animals were still exposed to hazards against which they had no defence. Hagenbeck himself put together a mixed troupe that included twelve lions, two tigers, several cheetahs and three bears, which he intended to present at the Great Exhibition at Chicago in 1893, and which, after months of preparation, made its debut at Crystal Palace in 1891. All the animals then became ill and died later in Germany of the glanders (an infectious disease usually caused by contaminated food or water), which he blamed on ‘the bad meat which was supplied by the unscrupulous contractor in England’. What is bad for animals is seldom good for humans either – a fact that would strike worldwide terror in the early twenty-first century when a global pandemic of avian or swine flu was thought to be only a matter of time. In 1892 Hagenbeck’s menagerie was hit hard by cholera, which then spread to the unfortunate people of Hamburg. Even this disaster, however, gave him an opportunity to teach the world a lesson. ‘How true it is that cholera is spread through the agency of foul drinking water, was clearly demonstrated by the fact that after the veterinary surgeon had ordered the animals to be given boiled water only, no more of them were attacked by the disease.’
But the vision of Hagenbeck as some kind of latterday St Francis still doesn’t quite ring true. One might reasonably ask how all this empathy with creatures whose ‘minds are formed on the same plan as our minds’ would be reflected in his principal business as an international trafficker of wild animals. The answer suggests an ironclad moral constitution as well as an unsuspected gift for understatement. ‘Unlike the hunter, who is attracted only by the love of sport, the animal trader goes to work. He goes, not to destroy his game, but to take it alive; and consequently not the least of the difficulties with which he is beset is the discovery of some practicable way of bringing back his booty to civilisation. As a rule, every foot of the arduous journey is attained only at the expense of some loss to the caravan.’ But of course the losses begin long before any caravan gets under way. From Hagenbeck’s own account we can see the full and bloody explanation for Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier’s statistics of mortality.
First, the animals had to be tracked down and caught. For reasons already explained, capturing dangerous species such as elephant or rhino meant pursuing the young and killing the adults that protected them. Not all were cleanly shot. Hagenbeck describes the method traditionally practised by Nubian swordsmen on horseback, which at least had the merit of spreading the danger more equally between the hunters and the hunted. Indeed, the men deliberately invited bull elephants to charge at them. This was as ingenious as it was dangerous, and relied on deep understanding of the animals’ behaviour. Success depended on all but one of the hunters riding dark-coloured ponies. Crucially, the last man was mounted on a grey. As Hagenbeck explains, ‘The attention of the elephant, whose sight is not good, is attracted by the colour. Upon the grey pony, the mighty creature usually directs his attack.’ All then depended on the rider’s skill. His job was to flee, but not so fast that the angry elephant lost hope of catching him. He had to keep tantalisingly just out of reach, the bait in the trap. His companions on the dark ponies meanwhile would close in on the elephant from behind. ‘Whoever reaches him first springs from his pony, and delivers a dexterous blow with his sword on the left hind leg of the animal, which cuts the Achilles tendon . . . As the elephant hastily turns to avenge himself upon this new enemy, it becomes the turn of the rider who was formerly being chased to stop, dismount and with a similar blow on the right hand leg to lame the animal on the other side, so that he is totally disabled. If the blows have been delivered with sufficient skill and force, the arteries of the hind legs have been cut, and the elephant bleeds slowly but almost painlessly to death.’ In the kingdom of the weasel, that ‘almost’ reigns without peer.
For giraffes and antelopes the technique was easier. By putting entire herds to flight, all the hunters had to do was wait for the calves to exhaust themselves, when they were easily caught and tied. The hunters would take along a herd of goats to supply the young captives with milk, though this would not prevent more than half of them from dying on the journey. Other species such as hyenas and cats were caught in pits or traps. Hagenbeck took particular pleasure in the method for capturing baboons, which reversed the normal practice of focusing on the young. This time the targets were the highly aggressive tribal elders – dangerous, dominant adults who monopolised the food and who, like villains in a fable, would have their greed turned against them. The first job was to persuade a troop to congregate at a place of the hunters’ choosing. This involved blocking all but one of their regular drinking pools with thorn bushes, then baiting the last one with doura, a primitive form of sorghum which the baboons particularly enjoyed. Then a trap had to be made. This was like a conical native hut, strongly made from stakes interwoven with branches. Once the baboons had settled down, it was carried to the drinking hole, propped up on one side and baited with doura. A cord ran beneath the sand from the prop to the hunters’ hiding place. ‘Then comes the tragedy. A blazing noonday sun drives the thirsty baboons chattering down to their drinking-hole. Some of the biggest males, who have already secured a monopoly of the doura, enter the trap, and commence their feast. The hunter awaits his opportunity: it soon comes; a tug on the cord, the trap closes with a bang, and three great baboons are fairly caught.’
So far so good, but luring them into the trap was the easy part. The ‘really critical and dangerous part of the performance’ was to get them safely out again and render them harmless. The hunters had to move quickly, or the powerful baboons would smash the trap to pieces. First the men would thrust long forked stakes through the walls and pin the animals’ necks to the ground. Then the cage would be lifted off and the prisoners trussed. Hagenbeck, as ever, delights in the detail. ‘First their jaws are muzzled with strong cord, made of palm strips; then hands and feet are tied; and lastly, to make assurance doubly sure, the animal’s whole body is wrapped up in cloth, so that the captive has the appearance of a great smoked sausage! The parcel is then suspended from a pole carried by two persons, and conveyed triumphantly to the station.’ In this case the ‘differences of degree’ between the animal and the human mind were held to be somewhat extreme. Hagenbeck believed baboons to be exceptionally stupid, as well as unattractively violent and ungenerous to ‘their women’.
The policy of kindness which Hagenbeck lavished upon his circus performers in Hamburg did not translate easily to the wilds of Africa. Here pragmatism and practicality held the whip hand over sentiment. You did what you had to. Necessarily at times there was a Cartesian indifference to pain, a supra ethical convenience that was of particular consequence to young hippopotami and crocodiles. These were not afforded the compliment of subtlety or subterfuge. They were simply harpooned. Sometimes they were killed, and sometimes merely incapacitated. In the former case they were left where they fell. In the latter they were captured in the hope that the wound would eventually heal and a live, if lame, animal could be delivered to the customer. According to Hagenbeck, ‘no less than three-quarters of the hippopotami formerly brought to Europe used to be caught in this fashion’.
Other species were caught in pitfall traps. The first snag with these was that lions would often eat the catch before the hunters arrived. The second was the difficulty of raising a half-ton baby hippo out of a hole in the ground. ‘When these creatures are agitated they break into profuse perspiration, which causes them to become so slimy and slippery that it is difficult to make the noose hold.’ The answer was to pass a rope over the animal’s forelegs as well as its neck. ‘As soon as the noose is fixed in position the animal is hoisted a few inches off the ground, by the combined efforts of about twenty men pulling on the rope. Half a dozen others jump into the pit, and bind together the forelegs and the hindlegs, as also the jaws; for the animals are obstinate and malicious, and it does not do to run any risks with them.’
In fact, there are few accounts of men being seriously harmed by captive animals, but many accounts of animals being harmed by men. Hagenbeck describes a caravan setting out from Atbarah in north-eastern Sudan, aiming to cross the desert to an unnamed port on the Red Sea. In preparation for the journey, stalls and yards are packed with young elephants, giraffes, hippopotami and buffalo. Primitive wooden cages are filled with cats, pigs and baboons. Also being lined up are 150 head of cattle, hundreds of sheep and goats, and more than 100 camels. Moving only at night, the caravan creeps along ‘like a great snake, across the wide expanse of glistening sands’. The night-time temperatures do not fall much below the 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) of the day, but at least they are spared the glare of the sun. The large animals are driven along by men on foot – two each for an antelope, three for a giraffe and up to four for an elephant. Smaller animals, such as young lions, leopards, baboons, pigs and birds, travel in rough-hewn cages on the backs of camels. At the very centre of the caravan, pairs of camels are harnessed together with poles lashed across their pack saddles. From each pair of poles hangs a large cage containing a baby hippo, and behind each hippo come another six or eight camels bearing the water it will need during the journey. Every day, in the desert, each rhino will wallow in a bath stitched from tanned ox-hide. The rest of the menagerie is fed, according to inclination, on the milk or flesh of sheep or goat. With agonising slowness they move between waterholes that may be as much as 60 miles apart and are often defended by armed nomads who charge heavily for access. It is what later generations will call a numbers game. As Hagenbeck wrote in Beasts and Men:
However carefully we organise our expedition, it is inevitable that many of our captives should succumb before we reach our journey’s end. The terrible heat kills even those animals whose natural home is in the country. The powerful male baboons are very liable to sunstroke, which kills them in half an hour; and any weak point in their constitution is sure to become aggravated during the journey. Whether this is due to the terror and strain which they underwent at their capture, or to being confined in cramped cages, I cannot say. But the fact remains that not more than half of them arrive safely at their destination, despite our utmost care.
It would take five or six weeks for such a caravan, or the remains of it, to reach the sea. From here, still daily reducing in number, it would be ferried by steamer to Suez, whence it would be either trans-shipped to Europe by vessels en route from India or the Far East, or sent by train to embark from Alexandria to Trieste, Genoa or Marseilles. Hagenbeck himself preferred the railway, even though on one such journey three elephants were killed by rats gnawing their feet. The entire journey from Atbarah took three months. Ironically it was only at the very last stage – elephants or giraffes being marched 8 miles from the docks to London Zoo, for example – that the newspapers took any interest.
Other trips were even worse. Bringing wild foals to Hamburg from Mongolia took eleven months, and cost the lives of twenty-four of the fifty-two animals that embarked. Of more than sixty wild sheep making the same journey, not a single one survived. Despite all this, Hagenbeck’s perception of other species as ‘beings akin to ourselves’ does have a strange consistency. By simple logic, if animals are akin to us, then we must be akin to them, and in the diversity of our own species we should find as much to amaze us as in all the oddities of the jungle. Thus did Hagenbeck hit on ‘a brilliant idea’. Alongside the animals he would exhibit in his zoo and travelling shows, he would display exotic people. He began with a family of Lapps, whom he shipped to Hamburg with their reindeer in 1874.
The first glance sufficed to convince me that the experiment would prove a success . . . On deck three little men dressed in skins were walking about among the deer, and down below we found to our great delight a mother with a tiny infant in her arms and a dainty little maiden about four years old, standing shyly by her side. Our guests, it is true, would not have shone in a beauty show, but they were so wholly unsophisticated and so totally unspoiled by civilisation that they seemed like beings from another world. I felt sure that the little strangers would arouse great interest in Germany.
He was right. ‘All Hamburg comes to see this genuine “Lapland in miniature”’, set up in the grounds behind Hagenbeck’s house in Neuer Pferdemarkt. He attributed its success to the exhibits themselves having ‘no conception of the commercial side of the venture’, so it did not occur to them ‘to alter their own primitive habits of life. The result was that they behaved just as though they were in their own native land, and the interest and value of the exhibition was greatly enhanced.’
The great virtue of Hagenbeck’s account is what seems now like almost reckless honesty. If he expected to be judged, it was by people who shared his passion for enterprise. Just as it raised no objection to the exploitation of beasts from Africa, so contemporary thought presented no obstacle to the human parallel. Efficacy was the test, not ethics. ‘My experience with the Laplanders taught me that ethnographic exhibitions would prove lucrative; and no sooner had my little friends departed than I followed up their visit by that of other wild men.’
These included first Nubians and then Greenland Eskimos, who were displayed in Paris, Berlin and Dresden as well as Hamburg. Then came ‘Somalis, Indians, Kalmucks, Cingalese, Patagonians, Hottentots and so forth’. They were soon worth more to him than elephants. ‘Towards the end of the seventies, especially in 1879, the animal trade itself was in an exceedingly bad way, so that the anthropological side of my business became more and more important.’ The high point came with his great Cingalese exhibition of 1884, when a travelling caravan of sixty-seven men, women and children with twenty-five elephants and many different breeds of cattle caused ‘a great sensation’ in Europe. ‘I travelled about with this show all over Germany and Austria, and made a very good thing out of it.’
There was innocence as well as calculation in Hagenbeck’s thinking, and it may be wrong to convict him of anything worse than naivety, or of being a man of his time. As usual, ironies are not far to seek. Eighty-three years later, the zoologist Desmond Morris, a former curator of mammals at London Zoo, would famously write The Naked Ape, a uniquely unemotional review of humankind as an evolving natural species. It sold by the thousand, and made Morris a household name. As popularisers tend to do, he raised hackles in the scientific community, but his evolutionary approach to human behaviour caused no great offence to liberal opinion. Indeed, with its absence of value judgements it rather chimed with it. By contrast, we look back upon the scientific anthropology of Hagenbeck’s time with something close to revulsion.
Human exhibits – a Greenland Eskimo and his family, displayed by Hagenbeck at his zoo
The nineteenth century was the great age of discovery and classification, when specimens poured into zoos and museums. In London, the British Museum began its system of registering new specimens in 1837, and within a decade it was receiving more than a thousand mammals a year. To a greater or lesser extent, the same thing was going on all over the world. Everywhere, clarity struggled with confusion. Identical species might be given different names by different scientists, or similar names with different spellings, and multiple groups of similar species might be recorded under a single name. It was the age of the enthusiast, when amateur was still a term of approbation applied to men of intellectual curiosity. Despite Darwin (himself a Christian), scientific thought was still channelled through faith in God. The superintendent of the Natural History Museum, Richard Owen, rejected Darwin’s theories and fought with Darwin’s friend Thomas Huxley over what the museum should actually represent. Huxley believed it should be what it has since become, a specialist institution devoted to scientific study within which only a fraction of the collection could be exposed to public view. Owen believed it should be annexed to the Old Testament, setting out with all due wonder and humility the miraculous entirety of God’s divine Creation. Even then, the antique quaintness of Owen’s view opened him to ridicule in press and parliament, but until his retirement in 1883 the museum would kneel more readily to God than it did to Darwin.
In a way it was of no consequence. Whether the inspiration came from God or from the genius of those created in his likeness, there was a hunger for natural science that gripped the imaginations of educated men and women. Throughout the civilised world and beyond, they came forth in multitudes. In England, bewhiskered physicians, learned doctors and reverend gentlemen toured the countryside measuring, classifying and, in later years, photographing everything they saw. Nothing lived that was not labelled, and the inquiry did not confine itself to beetles, orchids and finches. Like Hagenbeck, the inquiring gentlemen soon found themselves as fascinated by their own species as they were by any other. With callipers, rulers and weights they categorised examples of Homo sapiens with a zeal that stopped only just short of the specimen jar. They called their science ‘anthropometry’, and began to speak of ‘breeds’.
In 1900, William Z. Ripley’s anthropological field guide, The Races of Europe, identified among others the Old Black Breed, the Sussex, the Anglian, the Bronze Age Cumberland, the Neolithic Devon, the Teutonic-Black Breed Cross, the Inishmaan and the Brunet Welsh. Like breeds of dog, sheep or cattle, they all had their defining characteristics. Some were dark; others pale. Some had woolly hair; others fair and fine. Some tended to plumpness; others were thin and wiry. All were shown like prize livestock, staring into the distance with empty eyes. To a modern viewer they look more like criminal mugshots – an observation with which I suspect Ripley, then an assistant professor of sociology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would not have been displeased.
He noted with evident approval that members of the aristocracy tended to be blond and tall, whereas the old British types, with their big ugly noses, wide mouths, heavy cheekbones and ‘overhanging pent-house brows’, were coarse and rugged. Noses in particular could speak more eloquently than their owners. According to Bishop Whately in his Notes on Noses, the typical British type was ‘anti-cogitative’, as if the size of the nose were in inverse proportion to the size of the brain. Ripley believed that in the proportion, moulding and texture of flesh, bone and hair he could read every nuance of a human breed’s pedigree and character.
Few if any pent-house brows were raised at this, for his views fitted snugly within the Victorian mainstream. The august British Association for the Advancement of Science had its own Anthropometric Committee, whose paper of 1883, ‘defining the facial characteristics of the races and principal crosses in the British Isles’, had been of great use to William Z. Ripley. The benchmark was Crania Britannica, a vast survey of ancient British skulls by two professional craniologists, Joseph Barnard Davis and John Thurnam. This had been published in 1856 and, by her own ‘very liberal permission and favour’, was dedicated to ‘Her Most Gracious Majesty, Victoria’. In the manner of the time, Davis and Thurnam combined meticulous record-keeping with wild assertion. For the people-watchers of the Victorian empire, racial classification was not just a matter of physical differentiation – height, weight, pigmentation, shape and size of skull – but of psychological, intellectual and moral values too. Hence the belief that lunatics and criminals, like foreigners, could be identified by application of a tape measure to the frontal, parietal and occipital regions of the skull. ‘It would appear,’ reported one celebrated Victorian anthropologist, ‘that dark eyes and black or very dark hair are more common among lunatics than among the general population.’
All too clearly now we can see where this was heading. In less than fifty years, the hobby-science of Victorian country vicars brought us to Hitler’s master race and the greatest catastrophe of modern history. Among the incidental casualties of war was the use of anthropometrics as a study of living populations. No longer could we talk innocently of ‘race’ and ‘blood’. Racial history was not just politically incorrect; it was politically unthinkable. It was also, for the most part, just plain wrong. Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves. For all the suffering he caused, and for all the contradictions of his own example, Hagenbeck’s thinking has a resilient kernel of usefulness. Whether or not we assign moral equivalence to other species, there is virtue in caring. The commodification of animal life, the casual dispensation of unfelt cruelty, kicks open the door to barbarism. If we value the measurable above the infinite, then we lose sight of what it is that makes us human. The wildlife and slave trades of the nineteenth century left scars that have yet to heal. In a sense, Hagenbeck was ahead of his time. Writing of circus animals, he observed, ‘it is impossible to achieve by ill-treatment one-hundredth part of what can be done by humane and intelligent methods’. It could as easily have been a stricture on the treatment of children in the London of Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, or on the Europe of Hitler and Stalin. In searching for the golden mole, I feel, I am connecting with a thread of what ought to be common humanity.
On that front, there are two new points of interest. First, my philosophical friend Oliver Riviere has sent me a picture of a ‘golden mole’ that he has trapped in his English garden. It is undoubtedly golden, it is undoubtedly a mole, and it is a puzzle. The European mole, Talpa europaea, is typically dark slate in colour, but this one is like fine-cut orange marmalade. How to explain? I assume it’s an albino.
More to the point, passing through London I go to look at the stuffed animals in the Natural History Museum. Faded in their cabinets, they are kept now more as historical curiosities than the unique specimens they were when Selous and his contemporaries first took aim at them. A short-beaked echidna shares its case with a duck-billed platypus. There are anteaters and armadillos, a vampire bat, a flying lemur, a pangolin and a hyena. The big cats – cheetah, lion, tiger, jaguar, snow leopard – have faded over time into gaunt, sepia-tinted memories of themselves. Apologetic notices explain that the museum no longer collects skins for taxidermy. But never mind. Here among all the giants and curiosities of the jungle, unregarded and unphotographed by anyone but me, is an unprepossessing scrap of sand-coloured fur. The giant golden mole, Chrysospalax trevelyani, looks nothing like itself. It is tail-less, coarsely furred rather than conventionally moleskinned, with no ears, eyes or visible feet. The process of taxidermy has left it with an improbably shiny, joke-shop nose. Overall it looks more like a novelty slipper than anything that might once have had breath in its lungs. The word ‘giant’ is not misplaced. C. trevelyani is roughly twice the size of other species, including the Somali. The museum label explains that golden moles eat worms and other soil-dwelling animals. They are active in the rainy season but may become dormant during the dry or cold season. Looking it up afterwards, I find that the giant golden mole was first described by the museum’s newly appointed keeper of zoology, Albert Günther, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in 1875: ‘Mr Herbert Trevelyan has presented to the Trustees of the British Museum the skin of a new species of Chrysochloris which he distinguished by its gigantic size . . . He obtained it from a Kaffir who accompanied a shooting-party in the Pirie Forest near King William’s town (British Caffraria), and believes that it must be very scarce or local, as none of his companions had ever seen another specimen. Unfortunately the skull has not been preserved; otherwise the skin is in a most perfect condition. I name this species after its discoverer . . .’
He reported that Calcochloris trevelyani (since renamed Chrysospalax trevelyani) was nine and a half inches long. ‘The colour and quality of the fur reminds one of an Otter; it is moderately long, rather stiff, and of a deep chocolate brown colour, with a dense whitish under-fur. Margin of the lips white. On the abdomen the fur is less dense and shorter; and patches of the whitish under-fur are visible in the posterior parts of the abdomen. Muffle flat, projecting as in the other species, but comparatively narrower. Claws whitish; the inner and outer of the fore foot very conspicuous. The third twice as strong as the second. No trace of an opening for the eye or ears, or of the tail can be discovered.’ Only the first sentence and the last can be verified from the time-worn specimen whose picture now adorns my mobile phone.
I enjoy the diversion, but we are not quite done with Hagenbeck yet. An incident in the 1880s, after a rogue elephant nearly killed a keeper at his zoo, laid bare all the moral duplicities of the soi-disant naturalist. There was no place for sentiment. ‘At any moment a fatal accident might occur; there was no help for it, the monster must be executed,’ he writes. Beings akin to ourselves? Well, not as akin as all that. It is difficult to imagine a modern zookeeper coming to such an unhappy conclusion; and even harder to imagine one colluding in what happened next. If unsentimentality was one side of the pragmatist’s coin, then opportunism was the other. Some people might see an elephant’s death as tragedy. Not many would join Hagenbeck in seeing it as just another opportunity to turn blood into money. The chance came during a trip to England, when he mentioned the condemned elephant to the taxidermist Rowland Ward, who then came up with ‘a most original proposition’.
‘If the elephant were to be had cheap, he said he would willingly buy him from me, for he believed he could easily find a “sportsman” to whom it would be worth fifty pounds to be able to say that he had once shot an elephant!’ Sure enough, hot-foot to Germany came ‘a certain Mr W . . . for the purpose of shooting big game in my Zoological Garden’. The elephant was driven into the yard and tethered to the wall for the hunter to bag his trophy.
All was in readiness, but the hero of the story did not appear. What could have happened? We waited for an hour, and then, as the sportsman still did not arrive, I hastened into the town to remind him of his engagement. I found him and brought him back to the hunting-ground, and at twelve o’clock we gathered around to see the hunter slay his game. The gentleman had brought along his arsenal, but now that he was in sight of the victim the sporting ardour seemed to have unaccountably left him. He fingered his murderous weapons, but did not fire the fatal shot. Presently one of my travellers, who happened to be present, offered to fire the shot, but this the owner of the elephant refused to allow.
The story ends with a cynicism so extreme it becomes bleakly comical. The elephant is ushered back into its stable, a noose is placed around its neck, and six men haul on a rope to hang it from a beam. As an epitaph to an era in which knowledge played hide-and-seek with understanding, it is unimprovable.
But there is something else about Hagenbeck that connects more appealingly to the present. Even now, as more and more species are being hustled to the brink, zoologists still cling to the optimism of their boyhoods. Somewhere, species not seen for decades, even centuries, must be living out their secret lives. Somewhere – in the depths of a Highland loch, in the high passes of the Himalayas, at the sodden heart of a Madagascan jungle – creatures yet unimagined may wait to be discovered. For all his hard-headedness, Hagenbeck never lost sight of the dream.
Independent reports from reliable witnesses, supported by cave paintings, convinced him that the swamps of Rhodesia contained ‘an immense and wholly unknown animal . . . half elephant, half dragon. . . . From what I have heard of the animal, it seems to me that it can only be some kind of dinosaur, seemingly akin to the brontosaurus. As the stories come from so many different sources, and all tend to substantiate each other, I am almost convinced that some such reptile must still be in existence.’ An expedition sent to find it was inconvenienced by fever, vast areas of swampland and ‘bloodthirsty savages’. It returned empty-handed, but the boy in Hagenbeck would not be quiet.
Notwithstanding this failure, I have not relinquished the hope of being able to present science with indisputable evidence of the existence of the monster. And perhaps if I succeed in this enterprise naturalists all the world over will be roused to hunt vigorously for other unknown animals; for if this prodigious dinosaur, which is supposed to have been extinct for hundreds of thousands of years, be still in existence, what other wonders may not be brought to light?
Though the ‘wonders’ of his imagination were coloured by a showman’s lust for size and ferocity, and though the Rhodesian swamp-monster would never be found, serious-minded zoologists ever after have been fired by the same unquenchable optimism, and surprisingly often have been rewarded by the reappearance of ‘living fossils’ or by entirely new species. In my own small way, I am in the grip of it myself. It is not a monster that I seek, but only a tiny scrap of evidence that will prove the existence of the world’s most elusive mole. People still ask me why, and my answer echoes the oldest enticement known to man. Because it is there.
