by Nick Webb
Douglas was incandescent with admiration for what nature and Darwinian processes had achieved, and he understood those processes well enough to realize that there was no great teleological endgame towards which they were striving. In Mostly Harmless he observes, “Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen.”
Everything is contingent. The endless shuffling of the genetic pack and untold billions of biological accidents produced variations. Most were eliminated promptly by a harsh environment or predation; very few were advantageous and conferred some reproductive advantage. Flukishly this blind churning produced a self-aware primate and a breathtaking variety of other flora and fauna. There is no reason why such an unlikely thing should endure. The Earth Mother does not exist save as a comforting metaphor. We do not have to be.
Douglas knew this. He was profoundly influenced by his friend Richard Dawkins and intrigued by the strange details of what Mark Carwardine had to tell him about various endangered species. His fascination was quite unconventional; it wasn’t so much a matter of observing the strange behaviours, bizarre instincts, off-beat mating procedures* 181 and so on that these rare creatures might manifest. What he wanted to imagine was the world as these animals might perceive it. It was for that reason that Douglas was so stricken by the fate of the Yangtze dolphin which assembles its model of its environment through sound. The poor animal has almost certainly vanished from the Earth now and the last remnants of its doomed species were maddened and, as it were, blinded by mankind’s marine engines before extinction. Or what, Douglas wondered, does the world “look” like (we humans are locked into our visual paradigm) if it is mapped mainly by smell? The rhinos with their colossal nasal membranes* 182 (larger than their brains) and terrible eyesight would have seen Douglas like some obsolete computer screen without enough pixels, but they could have smelled him on the wind half a kilometre away. Sight is effectively instantaneous, but smell isn’t. Douglas’s insight here was to realize that as a result a rhino’s view of the world is rich with the sense data of things past—in a way they “see” in time.
Douglas’s determination to master the complexities of zoology was paralleled by his desire to be at least passable in photography. Alain le Garsmeur put up with Douglas standing behind him when he took pictures. Douglas wanted to learn from a professional. Amateurs sometimes delude themselves into thinking photography is all about equipment, but it’s not. Douglas favoured motordrive Nikon F3s with those fast, eye-wateringly expensive ED lenses. In the gadget shop in The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Dirk describes how he could move from total ignorance of something to total desire for it, and then to actually owning it—all within forty seconds. That was Douglas in a camera shop. But you can have the snazziest equipment on the market and still take pictures of people with telegraph poles sprouting from their heads. Photography is about having an eye, and a good technique for acquiring one is to observe an expert. Douglas’s photography improved beyond all measure. This may be why he dedicates the book to Alain, who was good-natured beyond the call. Taking photographs while a Douglas-shaped man-mountain looms over you cannot be easy.
Douglas took a cavalier attitude to money and equipment which on one occasion made Mark terribly angry. They were flying into Beijing; as usual Douglas was pile-driven into the ground by his burden of kit. One of the larger bits was an excellent 400mm Nikkor telephoto lens that Mark coveted but could never have afforded to buy. Later, on location on the Yangtze, Mark noticed it was missing. It was heavy. Douglas had decided to leave it on the plane.
On another occasion in Wunan in China they found themselves in the foyer of a hotel when Douglas just had to write something down before it fell into one of those irrecoverably lost files of mental notes where people over eighteen store their best thoughts. Neither of them had a pen, but there was a shop in the hotel selling rugs and carpets. Douglas asked there if he could borrow a pen. Ungraciously, the shopkeeper refused. “What is your most expensive rug?” asked Douglas. They showed it to him. “If I buy it, will you give me your pen?” said Douglas. They would. He did. He was thrilled. Mark was appalled. The rug eventually did arrive back in Islington.
Mark and Douglas had been delighted to find an aye-aye. It was the first official sighting for years, and the only time one had been photographed in the wild. An expedition from National Geographic Magazine equipped with helicopters, landrovers and “a budget you could buy one of the smaller nationalized industries with”* 183 had failed to find one in nine months. Instead a young zoologist and a science fiction writer had located one in the pouring rain on their second night in the jungle. Were the portents good, or what?
For some time Mark had been trying to persuade the BBC to make some programmes—originally planned as six—about endangered species. When he and Douglas found the aye-aye, they were pretty pleased with themselves, and the BBC was pleased with them too. The series was conceived for TV, but as Mark did more research, he found to his dismay that the cost would be prohibitive. Just getting the permit to film on the Yangtze would take nine months and £200,000.
Instead the project was reconfigured as a series for Radio Four. Mark would do the logistics, never Douglas’s strongest suit, and provide the exper-tise. In his head Mark already had the melancholy list of species teetering on the edge of a man-made abyss. Douglas would write the scripts and talk. Add one radio producer, Gaynor Shutte, and there was a programme in the best traditions of the BBC: funny, wide-ranging, educational, heart in the right place—and, above all, cheap.
The series was commissioned, though the budget was never sufficient for what they had in mind. Fortunately Heinemann came to the rescue by buying the associated book for a hefty advance that Douglas, despite being a bigger name commercially, insisted should be split evenly with Mark as co-author. “Don’t even think about it,” Douglas instructed Ed Victor. Out of the advance Mark and Douglas had to pay for all of their travel and for their own sound engineers. There was usually one per trip: Stephen Faux was a regular, and on several occasions the resourceful Chris Muir, immortalized by Douglas’s anecdote about trying to buy condoms in China in order to turn a microphone into a hydrophone. The funds certainly did not cover Douglas flying first class. Despite some refined liberal guilt, he always upgraded, sometimes leaving Mark in scum class at the back of the plane while Douglas was plied with drinks and stewardesses in the front.
Of course, the Douglas deadline factor soon kicked in. They had hoped to go in 1986, but Douglas was under too much pressure. It wasn’t until the second half of 1987 that they got on the road, and the bulk of their travels took place in 1988. They could not fly seamlessly from place to place, so had to return to Britain (or, in Douglas’s case, often to France) after every sally.
Two minor digressions from this period about Douglas’s huge generosity. The first:
The taxman does let tax exiles back into the country for a specified number of days. They have to be careful not to exceed the permitted dose of home for, if it notices, the Revenue will pursue you to the ends of the Earth, or off-planet if necessary. During one of his returns from exile Douglas, following all precedent, had a lavish party in Duncan Terrace. It’s one which particularly sticks in my mind because of the suits. He had commissioned some wonderful suits and jackets from a tailor (Topfit Tailors, Kowloon) in Hong Kong while en route to Australia, and he arranged to pick them up on the way back some months later. But in the meantime he went scuba diving and embarked upon a diet of appalling rigour. What’s more, the state of his relationship with Jane was making him fraught. Whatever the reasons, when he collected his bespoke clothing from Hong Kong he was two stones (28lbs) lighter than when he had commissioned it.
“I will never put the weight back on,” he lied, “and if I do, I will get it surgically removed.”
Now back in London Douglas had these superb suits, all raw silk and cashmere. They caressed the body like a naughty liaison, but they were made to measure for
a man who was 6’5" and weighed eighteen and a half stone. Fortunately these coordinates also define me. Douglas was a half-inch taller, and I’m a smidgen fatter. In the middle of this party I was made to strip and try on these amazing suits which did indeed fit me extremely well. Sophisticated Islington media folk, emboldened with champagne cocktails, came up to stroke the fabric even as I clambered into these garments. Up till then my tailor was army surplus. Despite being the gaffer of a paperback publisher (Sphere), at that time I only had one suit, and that felt as if it had been made from recycled Shredded Wheat packets. Hmm, I thought, I shall wear a different suit every day for a week and see if my colleagues notice. They did. On day one. My publisher friend Roger, who knew about such things, told me that I’d been given at least three grand’s worth of superior suiting (double at London prices).
Second:
Douglas was infuriated with Mark Carwardine because he bought a counterfeit Rolex Oyster watch in Bali for the equivalent of a fiver. It was only partly brand name snobbery on Douglas’s part, for he also suffered from a kind of philosophical anxiety about what’s real. Mark’s knock-off was indistinguishable from the original except for a slight difference in the movement of the second hand. Though exquisitely made, mechanical watches in an age when the second is defined by billions of transitions of a Cesium 133* 184 atom are, of course, obsolete technology. To put a modern quartz movement into a posh case in order to fake obsolete technology that perversely adds value would have appealed to Douglas’s sense of the absurd. Anyway, he felt Mark should enjoy the “real” thing—and bought him a genuine Rolex Oyster for his birthday.
••••••
The Last Chance to See expeditions took place in 1988. There is no point in describing them because Douglas himself wrote about them in that book with unmatchable humour and panache. Mark was co-author, and given all he contributed this is eminently just, but Last Chance to See is written in the first person and is unmistakably Douglas’s voice. It was his favourite book, and if you have not read it yet, please do.
For those unfamiliar with the book, it is a compelling mix of wittily observed travelogue and natural history documentary of the highest intelligence. The story begins with a meeting with an Australian venom specialist, Dr. Struan Sutherland, who advises the two adventurers very sincerely not to get bitten. Fortified with this wisdom, Mark and Douglas visit the Komodo dragons (disgusting), the Northern White Rhino, the gorillas of Zaïre (Douglas feels an extraordinary affinity with these primates, our closest relatives), the kakapo in New Zealand (a tragic bird of which more anon), the river dolphins of the Yangtze, and finally the Rodrigues fruitbat on Round Island, Mauritius (strange). Mauritius, the erstwhile home of the Dodo, Douglas considered a significant place in our understanding of life on Earth. “As Galapagos gave us the idea of evolution, Mauritius gave us the idea of extinction.”* 185 On the way Mark and Douglas encounter some remarkable examples of homo sapiens, a number of whom make you feel quite good about mankind. The book is wonderful, full of colour and amusing stories, and all the more powerful for not editorializing too obviously. “The intention,” Douglas told Michael Leapman in his interview for the Radio Times, “is to be serious, but because I’m a comedy writer the tone will be light.”
There is real anger in Last Chance that as a species we could be so careless. For instance, it is so improbable that a rhino could have evolved at all that we allegedly thinking primates should cherish it in astonishment. The rhino is a bad-tempered, nimble, two-ton, armour plated animal with a great nose, crappy eyesight and a complex, multichamber biochemical processing plant to digest the otherwise indigestible vegetation and turn it into more rhino or heroic quantities of excrement (none of which is wasted). There are now only thirty White Rhino left in the world; that this amazing creature should be shot, not even for its meat, but because of two excrescences of ossified hair on its nose is beyond belief. The wickedness of the slaughter takes on another dimension of stupidity when you realize that the reason is a trade in ceremonial dagger handles as props for Yemeni men to look chunky, or to help credulous orientals reduce fever or get erections (for which rhino horn has no value whatsoever—it’s basically hair, guys, for God’s sake).
In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Large areas of the developed world escaped from a ruthless experiment in large scale social engineering to discover the joys of feral capitalism, and in October and November of that year the radio series of Last Chance to See was finally broadcast on Radio Four. It was a success, albeit not another cult on the scale of Hitchhiker’s, for it worked supremely well on radio. The interpersonal chemistry, the humour, the soundscape, the engagingly snuck-up-upon information (part travelogue and part nature documentary), all wove together with real charm. Douglas had a good radio voice, and he was back to what he enjoyed the most—performing. The admixture of polemical zeal gave the broadcasts an extra bite.
The book, as usual, followed a more vexed path. Last Chance to See is truly inspirational, and quite a number of current zoologists and related specialists were attracted to their subjects because of it. Douglas was rightly proud of it. As usual, though, the easy-reading conversational style was hell to produce. In order to write he retreated to a rented villa in Juan les Pins, an enchanting but definitely discovered village near Monaco on the Mediterranean coast of France. Mark came out to join him.
It was a disaster. Between the motion and the act, as Eliot says, falls the shadow. Douglas had sunk into one of his states of listless vacancy and infected Mark with the same condition. Every day they’d get up, have a leisurely coffee, then go for a walk to clear their heads before the serious business. But distractions lay in wait for them. Time stretched. They fell out; they got together again. They’d plan lunch. They’d eat lunch. When their spirits were ebbing, they’d nip into Monte Carlo for some fun. They were suspended, in abeyance, marooned in paradise. Their paralysis had a personal cost for Mark who had a serious girlfriend and was flying back and forth to England most weeks to see her. He’s sure that working on the book scuppered that relationship. Somehow over three months passed without the two of them producing very much at all. Sue Freestone visited them to deliver a righteous kick up the collective rectum. Michael Bywater paid a call, and reports that they were in an emotionally charged state. As an emotional man himself, it’s doubtful that he would have calmed them down.
In the end, as deadlines whizzed by, they got down to it. Sue Freestone and her Heinemann colleagues told them: “As soon as there’s enough for a respectable book, stop. We cannot wait any longer.” Two expeditions never made it into the final text, not because they lacked interest; Douglas and Mark simply ran out of time. It’s a pity, as both concern attractive creatures that need all the help they can get—the Juan Fernandez fur seal of Chile and the Amazonian manatee. I have always thought of Douglas as a manatee, and it would have been interesting to hear his views on these large, gentle marine mammals which live in water so freighted with silt that, like the doomed Yangtze dolphins, their sensorium is largely one of sound. In his long interview with Michael Leapman in the Radio Times, Douglas talks about how the threat to the manatee is the threat to the whole rain forest. Its complex ecology is crucially dependent on the free-flowing river systems that even in 1989 were being diverted into hydroelectric schemes that were already silting up.
The book was published in 1990 by Heinemann and by Pan the following year. Douglas’s publishers around the world picked it up too. Most of the critics loved it, especially in America (Atlantic Monthly said it ranked with the best set pieces of Mark Twain). Only Beth Levene in the New York Times was less than ecstatic (“an uneven travelogue”) but even she found the heroic efforts to save the animals inspirational. Nothing quite like it had ever been written before. Although it did not explode on the market like one of the Hitchhikers, it has steadily reprinted.
Douglas was mortified, and not just for reasons of commercial self-interest, that the book did not immediately sell millions.
He cared deeply about the message in it, and was inspired by his experiences to give time and money to Save the Rhino and the Dian Fossey Foundation. Indeed, it was his lecture at the Royal Geographical Society that prompted the UK branch of the Dian Fossey Foundation to write to Douglas. They were thrilled and surprised to receive immediately, by courier, all the cash that he happened to have in the house at the time: quite a few pounds, a number of dollars, some francs and really rather an impressive number (over 2,000) of Deutschmarks left over from a recent tour.
It’s worth quoting his account of his first meeting with a gorilla:
A kind of humming mental paralysis grips you when you first encounter a creature such as this in the wild, and indeed there is no creature such as this. All sorts of wild and vertiginous feelings well up in your brain, that you seem to have no connection with and no name for, perhaps because it is thousands or millions of years since such feelings were last aroused . . .
The feeling I had looking at my first silverback gorilla in the wild was vertiginous. It was as if there was something I was meant to do, some reaction that was expected of me, and I didn’t know what it was or how to do it. My modern mind was simply saying, “Run away!” but all I could do was stand, trembling, and stare. The right moment for something seemed to slip away and fall into an unbridgeable gap between us and the gorilla, and left us gawping helplessly on our side.
Douglas felt deep in his bones that when he looked into the eyes of a gorilla he was seeing a fully conscious creature. Jane Goodall said that Douglas wrote very movingly of the gorillas’ lives in the wild and did not ask, like Bentham would have, can they reason? He asked instead: can they suffer?
