Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  CHAPTER 12

  Darwin’s Firestorm

  One of the larger purposes behind the flurry of orders coming in to Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in the late 1870s, and the pressing need for Hornaday’s expedition to the Malay and Borneo, was the keen competition among unversities and museums to prove or disprove, by means of comparative anatomy, the world-rattling theory of Charles Darwin. The theory was so simple that T. H. Huxley later exclaimed, “How stupid of me not to have thought of it!”1 Plainly stated, Darwin’s idea was that species do not remain fixed and stable over time—they change through a process called natural selection, which favors organisms better adapted to their surroundings. (Darwin himself did not use the term evolution until the sixth edition of his book, preferring instead the term descent with modification.)

  Darwin had been working on his theory for more than twenty years, in his small, cluttered office at Down House, in Kent, but had never published anything about it. Then, in the early summer of 1858, he received a long letter and a draft of a scientific paper from a young British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, at the time, was on an eight-year-long collecting expedition to the Malay Peninsula and Borneo (exploring some of the very same areas that Hornaday would visit two decades later). In what he later described as a “flash of insight,” Wallace had hit upon almost precisely the same ideas as Darwin had—in fact, Darwin later wrote, Wallace’s paper was so similar, “I never saw a more striking coincidence.”2

  Darwin and Wallace eventually decided that they should give a joint presentation about their theory, so that they could both fairly claim credit. The theory was unveiled to the world on July 1, 1858, at a meeting of the British scientific group called the Linnean Society. The meeting was attended by about thirty people; the Darwin-Wallace paper—now considered by many to be the greatest scientific paper ever written—was greeted with no comment at all. One attendee, Reverend Samuel Haughton of Dublin, later wrote that “all that was new in [it] was old, and what was true was false.”3 Neither author was in attendance. Wallace was in Malaya, and Darwin was burying his youngest son, who had just died of scarlet fever.

  But when Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species was published the next year, in 1859, it lit a firestorm of controversy in the life sciences, as well as in the letters to the editor of almost every popular periodical. Even Darwin himself felt deeply conflicted about his book, saying that revealing the theory was “like confessing a murder.” Cartoonists found Darwin all too easy to lampoon, with his vaguely simian features and overhanging Neanderthal brow. He was forever being depicted with a man’s head attached to the body of an ape. In his book, Darwin had barely mentioned how his theory might change man’s kinship with the great apes, but people had been quick to connect the dots, and the resulting controversies rained down out of pulpits and lecture halls in a hail of fire and brimstone.

  Museums and unversities began to compete to build ever more complete collections of natural history specimens and thus bring some facts into the debate about whether species remained fixed and stable over time, and whether—God save us—humans might share a common ancestor with the apes. It was an alarming and preposterous idea, and it was not only churchmen and politicians who were skeptical. The great naturalist Louis Agassiz, of Harvard, had always been steadfastly opposed to Darwin’s ideas and hoped that his museum’s collections—including the specimens gathered by Hornaday for Professor Ward, especially those of the higher primates—would demonstrate the falsity of the “Darwinian theory.”

  The same year Darwin’s book was published, Paul Du Chaillu emerged from the equatorial jungles of the Gabon with the bodies of creatures as otherworldly as corpses from an alien spacecraft. They were covered in black hair, had elongated arms, handlike feet, black, smashed-in faces, and overhanging brows. Even so, a fair-minded observer would have had to admit there was something more than vaguely human about them. Was it really true that these hairy “apemen” were the missing link between apes and humans, as the Darwin-Wallace theory seemed to suggest? The theory was one thing, but how did it hold up in the face of these creatures? The public, thronging to museums and menageries, was terribly curious to see for themselves. Hence, Professor Ward’s great interest in sending William Hornaday to the island of Borneo, which was said to be home to more apes and monkeys than any other place on the planet, especially the odd, long-haired, reddish ape known as the “orangutan.”

  On his way to the penultimate destination of Borneo, Hornaday collected and hunted on the spice island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), following blunt instructions from Professor Ward: “Plunder Ceylon. Rake the island over as with a fine-toothed comb; catch everything you can, and send me the best of it.”4 Hornaday also spent a couple of months on the Malay Peninsula, following in the footsteps of Wallace, whose famous book The Malay Archipelago (published a couple of years earlier, in 1869) he had read. Hornaday was in awe of Wallace’s scientific acumen—Hornaday himself had admitted, at a fairly early age, that “I will never amount to much, scientifically.” Wallace, by contrast, had discerned that in the Malay Archipelago, there was a distinct dividing line—later known as the Wallace Line—in which animals on one side of the line were more closely related to Australian species, and on the other side, to the species of Asia. It was a breathtaking insight that, like the idea of evolution, required an almost godlike perspective spanning vast panoramas of time and space.

  Wallace was also an indefatigable specimen collector, at a time when simply discovering and enumerating the earth’s species, like finding all the Christmas presents under the tree, was one of the principal tasks of science. In 1852, while returning from a four-year exploration of the Rio Negro, in Brazil, his ship caught fire and his entire specimen collection, all neatly tagged and cataloged, was destroyed. So he simply started over. In the Malay Archipelago, between 1854 and 1862, he collected more than 125,000 specimens, of which 80,000 were beetles (and 1,000 of these were species that were new to science).5

  Hornaday also was a tireless collector—a perfect hired hand for Professor Ward’s indefatigable ambitions. From time to time, when he found himself in a port city large enough to accommodate his wishes, Hornaday sent shipments back to Rochester in enormous wooden crates, sometimes twelve or fifteen at a time—great oaken treasure chests of wonders from remote worlds: The iridescendent skins of hummingbirds, fragile as parchment, the size of large postage stamps. A bonneted macque. A tapir, the horse-rhinoceros that looks more like a pig. Tiny, bug-eyed lorises. Skins and skeletons of improbable “mouse deer.” Fantastic birds, from hornbills to argus pheasants.

  If Hornaday lacked the scientific genius of an Alfred Russel Wallace, he was still an acutely observant naturalist, always recording what he saw in amazed and meticulous detail like a curious boy. At one point, he wrote, a villager brought him “a beautiful little tarsier (Tarsius spectrum), alive and unhurt. Although it is a monkey, it jumps like a kangaroo, which it is enabled to do by means of its very long hind legs. . . . The structure of its hands is very peculiar. Each long slender finger terminates in a flat round disc which acts like a sucker of an octopus, and enables the little animal to hold on to a limb by the side pressure of its hands and without grasping, as all the other monkeys do.”6

  Hornaday arrived in Borneo in August 1878. By then, he had been travelling for more than two years. He was twenty-four years old, bearded and deeply tanned, strong and lean as a rail, his belt cinched up two or three notches since the time he left Rochester. His body had been repeatedly wracked by malarial fevers and other tropical diseases, and he’d grown as accustomed as the natives to rough camp life, questionable food, half-rations (or even no rations), the gloomy miasmas of the monsoon season, and the vagaries of good hunting and bad. Like a gunslinger from the Old West, he always carried a weapon, whether a long rifle, a shotgun, or a pistol, and although he’d always been a great shot, now he was even better.

  Among his many other useful and unusual accomplishments
, he had at one point managed to skin and skeletonize an elephant in the deep jungle of India, seventy yards from a tiger’s lair, while suffering from malarial fever. At the same time, he put down a mutiny among the coolies and skinners of his party. All of that took extraordinary fortitude, physical stamina, and the command presence of a general. He was no longer the boastful boy that he had been on that night a few years earlier at the dinner party in Battle Creek, when he first met Josephine and took such pleasure in embellishing the dangers of his upcoming expedition just to see her face flush and her dark eyes dart out at him, full of questioning and concern. Now he didn’t have to embellish anything. He’d faced down a Bengal tiger at thirty paces and conquered him with a tiny rifle. He’d been rushed by elephants; had close encounters with crocodiles, gavials, and monstrous snakes; nearly drowned; fallen into quicksand; had repeatedly run out of money and food; and had for weeks at a time been forced to hunt just to survive. Something else had been happening to Will Hornaday, too, though he did not even know it: he was getting famous.

  At least he was getting famous back in Rochester. Although Professor Ward had objected at first to how much time Hornaday seemed to be spending writing long, descriptive letters—even though, as part of their original agreement, Hornaday had been given permission to write a book about his adventures, so long as it didn’t interfere with his collecting—Ward eventually realized that this epistolary travelogue would be of great interest to the public, but more importantly, would be good publicity for Ward’s Natural Science Establishment. So every time one of Hornaday’s dog-eared letters arrived from somewhere in the far-off bush, sometimes spattered with mud or blood, Ward would pass it along to the Rochester Democrat Chronicle for publication. Some of these letters found their way into the New York Times. Scratching out his letters with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in ink by the light of a tallow candle in some rough-hewn jungle camp, Hornaday thought he was writing only to Professor Ward. He did not realize that he was actually writing for a growing and enthusiastic fan base.

  In 1878, the interior of Borneo was virtually impenetrable. “The heart of Africa,” Hornaday wrote, “is not nearly so inaccessible as the heart of Borneo.”7 The third-largest island in the world, it was covered by an unbroken, mountainous, cloud-shrouded jungle. Ancient seamen called it “the land below the wind” because it was so remote from the trade winds, sheltered in a tropical backwater of sea islands where few Westerners ever ventured. Straddling the equator in the South China Sea, it was ringed by the narrow, crooked peninsula of Malay and the spice island of Sumatra; the archipelago of Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands; and the islands of Sulawesi and New Guinea. Rumors about what might lie in its interior, including a race of men with tails, “beckon to the explorer with whispered promises of undiscovered wonders,” Hornaday wrote.8

  To a farm boy from Iowa barely out of his teens, it all seemed almost unimaginably exotic—and almost as far away from home as it was possible for him to get, in every way. For Hornaday, Borneo represented the pinnacle of his adventures as a collector.

  On his way to Borneo, Hornaday stopped in Singapore to gather information and supplies, and he was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a good-natured Englishman named A. R. Haughton Esq.—a high-ranking official of the British raja of the Territory of Sarawak, on the north coast of Borneo. Haughton told Hornaday that, although local hunters prized the orang for its meat, it had not yet been exterminated in the raja’s territory, and the valleys of the Sadong and Btang Lupar rivers were teeming with wildlife—including, no doubt, orangs.

  Overjoyed by his prospects, he sat down that first night in his tiny hotel room and wrote Professor Ward a letter of thanks:

  At last, after much tribulation, the promised land is reached, and naturally enough my first letter is to the man who got me here. . . . I have reached “the height of my ambition” . . . but for my good luck in falling with you and casting my lot with Ward’s Natural Science Establishment I might at present moment be a long, long ways from Borneo after all.9

  But orangs proved harder to find than he’d hoped. He and his two assistants, Pera Vera and Eng Quee, his Chinese servant, took a government schooner twenty miles up the Sadong River and were introduced to the Malay headman of the village, and then to a party of sea Dyaks, whom Hornaday asked in turn about where to find orangs. Most of them dressed in nothing but bark loincloths, with old bits of colored cloth wrapped around their heads like turbans. Yes, there were orangs in the forest, the men said, but they didn’t really know where—they moved around through the trees. So, accompanied by a guide, Hornaday and his men spent a week tramping through the swampy jungle near the banks of the Sadong, often thigh-deep in water, without success.

  Hornaday had almost given up hope of finding any orangs when two Dyaks arrived at the village and told him that they’d seen two orangs on their way down the Simujan River. Hastily, Hornaday put together a small collecting party in two dugout canoes, with Eng Quee, Pera Vera, and three Malays to serve guides and oarsmen.

  Eight miles up this dark tidal river, Hornaday’s party put ashore at a Dyak village, the first one he had ever seen.10 It consisted not of a collection of houses, but of a single immense longhouse about 190 feet long, 30 feet wide, and elevated about 10 feet off the ground. The floor of the longhouse was made of narrow strips of nibong palm, tightly lashed together like a bamboo mat; it was springy and comfortable to the touch. Sixteen families lived in the communal house, which had a windowless wall at the back, where the families lived, and a huge, open-air platform at the front. When Hornaday and his party climbed up the notched log that served as a ladder to this stilt house, they were immediately surrounded by throngs of filthy, merry children who stared with huge eyes at the “orang-putei,” or white man, and the “orang-China,” or Chinese man. Women produced fresh palm mats, and they sat down on them by a smoldering fire that had been built in the middle of the porch, on a bed of dirt.

  Pera Vera and Eng Quee were chatting with the Dyaks in Malay when Hornaday’s eyes drifted up into the gloomy recesses of the ceiling. There, suspended from a rafter like so many grapefruit, were a bundle of about twenty blackened human heads. They were grimy with smoke and soot from the fire, and so much of the flesh had disintegrated that each one was bound with rattan to keep the lower jaw in place. After he came to feel more comfortable with the Dyaks, he learned, through his Malay interpreter, that human heads were symbols of power and prestige, and that the pursuit of them had led to a state of almost continuous warfare among neighboring tribes. Headhunting had officially been outlawed in Borneo, but it was impossible to stamp it out in these remote regions.11

  Hornaday did not have any particular problem with the ancient custom of headhunting, and in fact, when he later came to live with these people for a month, he grew to admire them very much indeed. Wallace also had a favorable impression of the Dyaks: “The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature on the whole,” he wrote.12 They were the happiest people Hornaday had ever known. Though they were almost wholly without religion, he found that they were highly moral. They were strictly honest, did not covet, and did not steal, even from Chinese or Malays who had mistreated them. Adultery was unheard of. Marriage was celebrated and respected, even though the marriage ceremony was so simple and so casual it almost seemed like child’s play—sometimes just the waving of a fowl above the heads of the betrothed.

  A couple of days later, just after dawn, Hornaday’s small collecting party moved silently up the Simujan River in two dugouts.13 The river had dwindled by now to a width of only twenty feet, although the current was stiff and a dense submerged forest of water palms blanketed either side. Hornaday looked up from his dugout and spotted a couple of disorderly nests of branches and leaves, in a small tree, about twenty feet off the ground.

  “Mias—Orang-utan,” the Malay boatman whispered. “Man of the forest.”14 Orangs, which spent almost their entire lives in trees, traveled through the forest like
nomads, building crude sleeping-nests wherever they found themselves each night and then abandoning them the next morning. As Hornaday’s party slipped down the Simujan, they began to see more and more of these abandoned nests, like arboreal litter, always about twenty feet above the ground or the water. Now they were in the true heart of Borneo, the place where the “old man of the forest” lived. Suddenly, they saw it: a live orangutan in a tree, about a hundred yards ahead.

  “A last . . . a real live Orang utan. How my heart throbbed! But he twigged us as quickly as we did him & hid himself in the thick leaves of a huge creeper that encicled the trunk of the tree. We paddled up as fast as possible but couldn’t see a thing until we got right opposite the tree, when we saw a huge, red hairy arm encircling the trunk.”

  The dugout hung up in the dense thickets of water palm, so Hornaday and a Malay boatman jumped out of the boat and plunged through neck-deep water in pursuit of the orang as he flitted from tree to tree. Eventually, Hornaday brought down his first specimen of the hairy ape-man. He was four feet tall, and seven feet three inches from fingertip to fingertip. (Human beings, by contrast, measure almost exactly the same from head to toe and fingertip to fingertip.) “What an ever-lasting double-geared hug, he could have given a fellow with those tremendous long arms!” Hornaday wrote. Before the day was out, they had taken two more; and after five days, after the Dyaks brought in a couple more, they had nine orangs to dress and prepare meticulously for museum mounting. By the time he was through, Hornaday’s party had collected forty-three specimens of orangutan, including one of the largest specimens ever taken by a naturalist, an immense male they named “Rajah,” whose outstretched arms measured seven feet, ten and three-quarter inches across.