The Hunt for the Golden Mole (8 page)

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'.

A Hagenbeck camel train carrying specimens across south-west Africa. Many captured animals died in transit

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.