The Hunt for the Golden Mole Read online

  THE HUNT FOR THE GOLDEN MOLE

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  Ielfstan’s Place

  Sprigg’s War

  Non-fiction

  The View from the Top: A Panoramic Guide to Reading

  Britain’s Most Beautiful Vistas

  Rubbish!: Dirt on Our Hands and Crisis Ahead

  Sea Change: Britain’s Coastal Catastrophe

  Greed: Why We Can’t Help Ourselves

  Copyright © Richard Girling 2014

  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 2014

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

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  e-bookISBN978-1-61902-410-6

  For Caroline

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE – Dr Storer in the Chair

  CHAPTER TWO – Rhinoceros Pie

  CHAPTER THREE – Beings Akin to Ourselves

  CHAPTER FOUR – Werewolf Seized in Southend

  CHAPTER FIVE – Penitent Butchers

  CHAPTER SIX – Resurrection

  CHAPTER SEVEN – Chopsticks

  CHAPTER EIGHT – Ol Pejeta

  CHAPTER NINE – The Virtuous Circle

  CHAPTER TEN – Unpronounceable Teeth

  CHAPTER ELEVEN – Valete et Salvete

  CHAPTER TWELVE – Unbelievabilia

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN – The Mole

  Afterword

  List of Illustrations

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dr Storer in the Chair

  Hanno the Navigator, the Carthaginian explorer of the fifth century BC, also known as King Hanno II, is distinguished by having a crater on the moon named after him. He earned that honour by a feat of seamanship which, 2,500 years ago, established him in the line of pioneers that would lead via Leif Eriksson, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, Cook, Livingstone, Scott and Amundsen all the way to Armstrong and Aldrin. Like the astronauts, Hanno could report a giant leap for mankind, but, unlike Armstrong’s short stride into a cosmic future, his giant leap was backwards.

  History over this number of centuries cannot be viewed in high definition. Fragmentary evidence and the agglomeration of myth leave only faint if highly coloured outlines, like lipstick on the rim of time. But what seems likely is that somewhere between 500 and 480 BC, Hanno set out from the Mediterranean with a fleet of sixty ships which, having passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, made a southward turn into the Atlantic. His mission was to explore and possess as much of north-west Africa as he could lay his hands on. Opinions vary on how far south he got but, in the light of events 2,300 years later, it seems likely that he reached the southern margins of what is now the Gulf of Guinea, and was off the coast of Gabon when he turned for home.

  It was somewhere near here that the sailors found an island occupied and fiercely defended by a race of unusually hairy and furiously savage men and women. By Hanno’s own account, the men were heavily outnumbered by the women and possessed of a ferocity that surpassed all reason. ‘We pursued but could take none of the males; they all escaped to the top of precipices, which they mounted with ease, and threw down stones.’ The Navigator was not inclined to sentimentality or squeamishness. ‘We took three of the females, but they made such violent struggles, biting and tearing their captors, that we killed them, and stripped off the skins, which we carried to Carthage: being out of provisions we could go no further.’

  History now fast-forwards to 1847. An American Protestant missionary, Thomas Staughton Savage, is busy bringing the Bible to West Africa when he meets a group of tribespeople worshipping the upper part of a skull mounted on a pole. But there is more to Savage than holy zeal. Like many churchmen in the nineteenth century, he is an avid amateur naturalist with a devout interest in all Creation. The skull fragment intrigues him. ‘With considerable trouble’, according to one contemporary, he manages to take possession of it, and the saucer of bone is soon making its way across the ocean to Massachusetts. With it go some other miscellaneous fragments and a paper written by Savage, which will be read on his behalf to the Boston Society of Natural History.

  The minutes of the meeting held on 18 August 1847 (‘Dr Storer, Vice President, in the Chair’) record that the discovery was made ‘in Empongwe, near the river Gaboon, Africa’. Laid out before the learned members are ‘four Crania (two male and two female) . . . also the long bones of the extremities, a male and female pelvis, and some other bones’.

  Unlike Hanno, the gentlemen are closely familiar with the races of great ape known collectively as Orangs. They know a chimpanzee when they see one, but they have never reckoned on anything as big as this. The account continues: ‘This animal is known to the natives under the name of ngeena, and is much larger and more ferocious than the Chimpanzée. Its height is above five feet, but it is remarkable for the disproportionate breadth of the shoulders, which is double that of the Chimpanzée. The hair is coarse, and black, except in old individuals, when it becomes gray. The head is longer than that of an ordinary man by two inches, and is remarkable for having a crest of coarse hair over the sagittal suture, which meets at right angles a second, extending over the upper part of the occiput, from one ear to the other. The fore-arm is much shorter than the arm, the hand is remarkable for its great size, and the thumbs larger than the fingers. A slight tuft of hair exists at the extremity of the os coccygis – no tail, no callosities. Its gait is awkward and shuffling, supporting itself on the feet and fingers, and palms of the hands; but not, like the Chimpanzée, resting on the knuckles.’

  And then we hear the echo, rolling back across the millennia. ‘They live in herds, the females exceeding the males in number. Their habitations, like those of the Chimpanzée, consist of a few sticks and leafy branches, supported by the crotches and limbs of the trees, which afford no shelter, and are occupied only at night. They are exceedingly ferocious, and objects of terror to the natives, who seldom encounter them except on the defensive. The killing of an ngeena is considered an act of great skill and courage, and brings to the victor signal honor.’

  The echo rolls on. ‘The Orangs are regarded by the natives as degenerated human beings. The Encheeco, or Chimpanzée, being less ferocious, and more intelligent, is supposed to have the spirit of a Coast-man, but the ngeena that of a Bush-man. Their flesh, when obtained, is eaten by the natives, as well as that of the Chimpanzée.’

  And thus it happened, less than 170 years ago, that science ‘discovered’ the greatest of the great apes, surely the very same species of wordless, hirsute militant that Hanno’s interpreters had called Gorillae. It was a classic example of a then typical event – another species new to science – and typically sent out a worldwide pulse of excitement. Notwithstanding Savage’s fondness for the psalms, natural science was the rock and roll of the age. Monsters and curiosities in menageries and museums were irresistible crowd-pullers, bigger even than music-hall stars or charismatic preachers.

  For a natural historian it was heaven indeed to be alive. Never had there been such an appetite for discovery, enlightenment and creative chaos. Even bibl
ical literalists understood the earth to be, in their terms, a thing of great antiquity, yet its depths and extremities remained as mysterious as the moon. To find a new species in many parts of the world, all you had to do was walk outside and look. Men like Hans Sloane, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Joseph Banks did a great deal more than just look. They observed. And, having observed, they noted, illustrated, collected and catalogued. It was a passion that seized some of the not-so-great minds, too. By sea and land, from Britain, Europe and America, adventurers poured into the unmapped forests, savannahs and wetlands of Africa, Asia, South America and Australasia. Some were men of science, some were men of commerce, some were rascals.

  The decks and holds of ships were packed with animals alive, dying, dead or dismembered. In London, Abraham Dee Bartlett, the extravagant character about to begin a forty-year career as superintendent of London Zoo, received his first gorilla in1858. It reached England as heroes tended to do, like Nelson and Byron in a barrel of spirits. A photograph in one of Bartlett’s books shows the author easing the animal from its cask. The strangely hairless gorilla is posed with one hand raised, apparently gripping what looks like a pitchfork handle, as if trying to pull itself upright, while the other hand ‘holds’ the lid of the barrel. Bartlett was by profession a taxidermist, ever alert to the importance of presentation.

  Abraham Dee Bartlett, superintendent of London Zoo, receives his pickled gorilla in 1858

  Necessarily, he was also alert to the tricks of his trade. When Richard Owen, superintendent of the natural history department at the British Museum and inventor of the word ‘dinosaur’, introduced him to a ‘Monsieur du Chaillu’, who was ‘desirous to have his Gorilla skin properly stuffed’, Bartlett caught the reek of vaudeville.

  ‘I called M. du Chaillu’s attention to the face of the animal, which I told him was not in perfect condition, having lost a great part of the epidermis. In reply he, M. du Chaillu, assured me that it was quite perfect, remarking, at the same time, that the epidermis on the face was quite black, and that the fact of the skin being black was a proof of its perfectness.

  ‘I, however, then and there convinced him that the blackness of the face was due to its having been painted black; finding I had detected what had been done, he at once admitted that he did paint it at the time he exhibited it in New York.’

  On another occasion Bartlett agreed to buy some fowls from a Japanese dealer, but only on condition that he was first allowed to dip their improbable six-metre-long tails in water heated to the melting point of glue. Dealer and fowls immediately took wing. Bartlett was not alone among experts in developing habits of caution. Where there is wonder, there is also disbelief. Many accounts of outlandish creatures recorded in the furthest corners of the world were received, at best, with scepticism. This was true even when there was a specimen to show. Fairground freaks had taught people not always to trust the evidence of their own eyes. One of the most notorious frauds was the ‘Feejee Mermaid’, which tripled the takings at Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York in 1842. Like many other exotic creatures, this one had been assembled by a Japanese fisherman – a monkey’s body, finely stitched to a fish’s tail. Its dried-up, withered appearance and repellent ugliness did nothing to deter the crowds that queued around the block to see it. As more and more bizarre specimens were uncrated, scientific wariness and fear of hoax made stubborn obstacles to credence.

  Who, for example, would believe a beaver with a duck-bill stuck on to it? Even in 1798 this had seemed a bit too rich to stomach, never mind that the man who sent the first platypus back to Britain – Captain John Hunter, Governor of New South Wales – was an unlikely hoaxer. The eminent naturalist George Shaw, Fellow of the Royal Society, co-founder of the Linnean Society and a future Keeper of Natural History at the British Museum, who is credited with the first scientific description of the species, snipped at the pelt in search of stitches but still admitted he could not be certain of its authenticity.

  A century later it was the turn of the okapi to confound the doubters. You can see why. A chestnut-coloured horse with the legs and rump of a zebra, living hitherto unseen in the high-canopy forests of Central Africa? Who would have believed it? A beautiful and exactly detailed painting of the animal, sent to London by the explorer-naturalist Sir Harry Johnston, met with derision and was denounced by the director of the Natural History Museum, Professor Ray Lankester, as a hoax. Only in 1901, when skin and skulls were presented to a crowded meeting of the Zoological Society of London, did the okapi, and Johnston, get their due. The explorer’s reward was to have the species named in his honour, Okapia johnstoni.

  Disbelief came easiest to those whose experience of natural history was limited to periodicals and visits to menageries and museums. The okapi, like the gorilla, was a large and conspicuous item, impossible to overlook. How could it happen that no one had spotted one before? It fell to the great geographer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace to try to explain. In an essay published in 1878, he helped his readers understand what a tropical forest was actually like.

  The observer new to the scene would perhaps be first struck by the varied yet symmetrical trunks, which rise up with perfect straightness to a great height without a branch, and which, being placed at a considerable average distance apart, give an impression similar to that produced by the columns of some enormous building. Overhead, at a height, perhaps, of a hundred feet, is an almost unbroken canopy of foliage formed by the meeting together of these great trees and their interlacing branches; and this canopy is usually so dense that but an indistinct glimmer of the sky is to be seen, and even the intense tropical sunlight only penetrates to the ground subdued and broken up into scattered fragments. There is a weird gloom and a solemn silence, which combine to produce a sense of the vast – the primeval – almost of the infinite. It is a world in which man seems an intruder, and where he feels overwhelmed by the contemplation of the ever-acting forces, which, from the simple elements of the atmosphere, build up the great mass of vegetation which overshadows, and almost seems to oppress the earth.

  So, would not such a paradise be alive with animals? What should any explorer need more than a pair of eyes and time to record what he sees? Where is the scope for mystery? Wallace’s answer to this is of profound importance in the light of all that will follow. ‘The attempt to give some account of the general aspects of animal life in the equatorial zone,’ he says, ‘presents far greater difficulties than in the case of plants. On the one hand, animals rarely play any important part in scenery, and their entire absence may pass quite unnoticed . . . Beast, bird, and insect alike require looking for, and it very often happens that we look for them in vain.’ It is an observation that could be as easily applied to an English woodland or North American forest as to, say, the Amazon Valley. Here in the 1850s Wallace’s friend and collaborator Henry Walter Bates had to cope with disappointment ‘in not meeting with any of the larger animals of the forest. There was no tumultuous movement or sound of life. We did not see or hear monkeys, and no tapir or jaguar crossed our path.’

  If Bates didn’t clock any large animals, it’s pretty certain he wouldn’t have seen too many small ones either. ‘There is in fact,’ as he later acknowledged, ‘a great variety of mammals, birds and reptiles, but they are widely scattered and all excessively shy of man.’ As Wallace describes it, the elusiveness of an animal seems to increase in proportion to one’s desire to see it. ‘The highest class of animals, Mammalia, although sufficiently abundant in all equatorial lands, are those which are least seen by the traveller.’ This simple truism, self-evident to any child who has gone in search of a rabbit, still lays a curse on scientists wrestling with ideas of survival and extinction. It also explains why so many of the earliest voyages of discovery were focused on birds and plants rather than animals.

  Not all of Wallace’s encounters with mammals were born of his own curiosity. Having been bitten on the toe by a vampire bat (the toe ‘
was found bleeding in the morning from a small round hole from which the flow of blood was not easily stopped’), he took to sleeping with his feet wrapped up. But there are times when human intelligence – even intelligence on the Olympian scale of Wallace’s – is confounded by primitive animal instinct. Next time, the vampire bit him on the nose.

  Even Wallace, however, could not make accurate observations while asleep, and his account of the vampires’ behaviour might have been lifted from a Gothic novel. ‘The motion of the wings fans the sleeper into a deeper slumber, and renders him insensible to the gentle abrasions of the skin either by teeth or tongue. This ultimately forms a minute hole, the blood flowing from which is sucked or lapped up by the hovering vampire.’ In fact, as we now know, the animal lands and approaches its victim on the ground.

  Despite all the handicaps – shy, reclusive and nocturnal species, the impenetrableness of thorny, steep, over-heated and unmapped terrain – Wallace in the latter half of the nineteenth century builds a picture of richness, variety and almost comical oddness. In tropical and southern Africa alone, he writes, ‘we find a number of very peculiar forms of mammalia. Such are the golden moles, the Potamogale, and the elephant-shrews among Insectivora; the hippopotami and the giraffes among Ungulata; the hyaena-like Proteles (Aard-wolf), and Lycaon (hyaena-dog), among Carnivora; and the Aard-varks (Orycteropus) among Edentata.’

  Slowly, species by species, zoology was emerging as a scientific pursuit fit for the attention of serious minds. In the space of five years in the 1840s, the number of dead mammals acquired by the British Museum increased from around a hundred a year to more than a thousand. Natural history occupied a third of the museum’s entire floor space, and attracted as many visitors as all the other galleries put together. In its early years, the museum had erected lofty bureaucratic barriers against casual visitors – tickets had to be booked in advance by personal representation, and were granted in scarcely greater number than audiences with the Pope. Now all that changed. As John Thackray, late archivist of the Natural History Museum, would write: ‘The authorities accepted that the museum had a twin purpose: instruction for serious academic people, and rational amusement for the masses. It was felt that exposing the middle and working classes to a comprehensive display of the works of creation might improve their moral fibre and, also, make them proud to be British.’