When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (12 page)

The professor chopped the brain into four chunks and then had each chunk sliced into 7,500 microscopically thin sections. This required a custom-built brain slicer, not unlike the slicing machines used to cut Parma ham.

Some slices were stained purple and black for study under microscopes. The rest were left untouched in order that future generations might be able to study them.

Vogt and his team of Soviet scientists spent years studying the slices of brain and trying to make sense of their findings. The results of their scientific tests were eventually set down in fourteen volumes bound in green leather and embossed with a single word: LENIN.

But neither the professor's work, nor that of the scientists that followed in his wake, was ever published. It was not until 1993 that Dr Oleg Adrianov, one of the Brain Institute's most distinguished technicians, was finally allowed to publish a paper on Lenin's brain.

There was good reason why the findings could not be made public earlier. Lenin's brain did indeed hold a secret, one so shocking that the Soviet hierarchy was determined to keep it under wraps.

The secret was this: his brain was no different from that of anyone else. ‘A brain is like a water melon,' said Dr Adrianov, ‘ninety-five per cent of it is liquid.' Although Lenin's brain had unusually large pyramidal neurons, this had no reflection on its internal mechanism. ‘Frankly,' said Dr Adrianov, ‘I do not think he was a genius.'

And what of the rest of his body? For many years his corpse was under the supervision of Yuri Denisov-Nikolsky. When asked about his macabre job, he confessed to having shaking hands whenever he touched it.

‘Not every expert is allowed to restore such treasured historical objects, like a Raphael or a Rembrandt. Those who do it, we tremble. I feel a great responsibility in my hands.'

Boris Yeltsin was the first senior political leader to suggest that Lenin should be buried. He said that following the collapse of the Soviet Union it was no longer appropriate to keep his corpse on show.

But neither he, nor Vladimir Putin, nor any other senior politician has been inclined to remove from display what must surely rank as one of the most macabre tourist attractions in the world.

So there he lies, marble white, wrinkled and sometimes a little mouldy. His brain, meanwhile, is being held in storage a mile or so across town, sliced into 30,000 slivers mounted on glass slides. No one has yet proposed that body and brain should be reunited.

 

2

Into the Monkey House

The Bronx Zoo in New York attracted large crowds of visitors whenever newly acquired animals were first put on display. In previous years, it was the elephants and lions that had been the crowd-pullers. Tigers, too, proved extremely popular.

But in September 1906, the zoo's new addition was altogether more alluring. Ota Benga was a pygmy from the African Congo and he had been locked up in the monkey house.

Ota Benga had been brought to New York by an American businessman-cum-missionary named Samuel Phillips Verner. Verner had travelled to the Belgian Congo in 1904 in order to acquire an assortment of African pygmies for display at the St Louis World Fair.

Verner first met Ota Benga while on an expedition deep into the equatorial rainforest. He managed to barter him for a pound of salt and a roll of cloth. Ota Benga was unwilling to leave Africa on his own and managed to persuade a few companions to join him on an expedition to North America. It was a voyage that was to change their lives.

Ota Benga proved an instant (if controversial) attraction at the world fair. He was put on display with other pygmies in the fair's anthropology tent.

Part of the attraction was his strange teeth; they had been filed to sharp points when he was a young boy, as part of a Congolese ritualistic ceremony. Newspapers described him as ‘the only genuine African cannibal in America'.

Ota Benga returned briefly to the Congo after the fair but made a second visit to America with Verner in 1906. This time, his treatment was far more injurious. After a brief spell at the American Museum of Natural History, he was moved to Bronx Zoo.

The zoo's director, William Hornaday, was quick to realize the appeal of a ‘human savage' on display. Aware that it was controversial, he sought the backing of Madison Grant, the distinguished secretary of the New York Zoological Society.

Grant thought that it was a brilliant idea; Ota Benga was to live in the monkey house, along with a parrot and an orangutan called Dahong. The display panel read: ‘The African Pygmy, Ota Benga. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.'

In an article for the Zoological Society's bulletin, Hornaday wrote enthusiastically about the zoo's new acquisition: ‘A
genuine
African Pygmy, belonging to the sub-race commonly miscalled “the dwarfs”. Ota Benga is a well-developed little man, with a good head, bright eyes and a pleasing countenance. He is not hairy, and is not covered by the “downy felt” described by some explorers.'

His presence in the zoo excited controversy from the opening day. Indeed, it was to spark a violent debate about racism, evolution and evolutionary Darwinism.

The
New York Times
initially defended the decision to put him in the monkey house. ‘We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter,' declared their editorial. ‘It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place from which he could draw no advantage whatever.'

The debate intensified with every day that passed. White churchmen were dismayed by Ota Benga's presence in the monkey cage, not because it was inhumane but because they felt he was being used to promote Darwin's theory of evolution. This was something that many of them opposed.

African American churchmen were even more appalled by Ota Benga's new home. Pastor James Gordon spoke for many when he said that ‘our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls'.

Before long, Ota Benga was released from the monkey house and allowed to wander freely around the zoo dressed in a white linen suit. But this scarcely helped his plight.

Visitors taunted him and tried to poke and prod him. According to William Hornaday, ‘he procured a carving knife from the feeding room of the Monkey House and went around the Park flourishing it in a most alarming manner'.

The
New York Times
now changed its tune and joined the growing chorus of dissent about Ota Benga's treatment. The newspaper complained that his time at the zoo had only served to brutalize him. At the end of 1906, he was released from captivity and housed in an orphan asylum in New York.

Ota Benga always dreamed of returning to Africa but it was not to be. When the First World War broke out – and the Atlantic crossing became too dangerous – he despaired of ever making it back to the Congo. Depressed by his experience of life in the ‘land of the free', he stole a pistol and shot himself through the heart. He was buried in an unmarked grave in New York.

The American Museum of Natural History retains a life-size cast of Ota Benga's head and shoulders. To this day it is not marked with his name or any indication that he was a human being. The label has just one word: ‘pygmy'.

 

3

The Human Freak Show

She was forced to squat in front of a jeering mob, a bewildered stranger who was far from home. The crowd stared at her protruding buttocks and oversized vulva before cracking lewd and bawdy jokes.

Sarah Baartman had arrived in England a few weeks earlier, in the autumn of 1810, and had already earned herself unwitting notoriety as the ‘Hottentot Venus'. Now, she was displayed (to a fee-paying audience) as a sexual deviant and an example of the inferiority of the black race.

Baartman had been brought to England from Cape Town by a British doctor named William Dunlop. He was fascinated by her large buttocks and genitalia – a common trait in the Khoisan people to whom she belonged – and realized that she had the potential to earn him lots of money. He coerced her into travelling to London with the promise that she would get very rich.

Sarah Baartman's arrival in the capital came less than three years after the abolition of the slave trade. She was taken to fashionable Piccadilly where, outside number 225, she was exposed to the city's baying crowds.

According to a contemporary account, she was paraded on a two-foot high stage ‘along which she was led by her keeper and exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered'.

Her promoters had originally intended her to be completely naked, but this proved too risqué. Instead, she was ‘dressed in a colour as nearly resembling her skin as possible'. According to
The Times
, ‘the dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators are even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form'. The show's promoters knew what the punters were paying to see: they billed Sarah's genitals as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey's throat.

The spectacle of an enslaved woman being put on public display courted controversy from the outset. Among the outraged was a young Jamaican named Robert Wedderburn. He knew all too well the horrors of slavery, for his mother had been the slave of a Scottish sugar plantation owner. When she had fallen pregnant, Wedderburn senior had sold her to an aristocrat friend with the proviso that the baby should be free from birth.

Robert's rough upbringing left him with a strong sense of justice. He was appalled by the spectacle of Sarah Baartman being paraded before the crowds. After courting the abolitionist African Association, he petitioned for her release.

In November 1810, the attorney general tried to discover whether ‘she was exhibited by her own consent'. Two affidavits were produced which suggested that she had never agreed to be brought to England for public display.

The first affidavit revealed that she had been brought to Britain by people who referred to her as their private property. The second described the degrading conditions under which she was exhibited.

Sarah herself was also questioned. She claimed that she had not been coerced and had been promised half the profits of her travelling tour. But her testimony was flawed and was almost certainly made under coercion.

The attorney general backed the attempt to stop the freak show, but the court ruled that Sarah had entered into a contract of her own free will. The show went on.

After four years on the road, Sarah was moved to Paris where she was sold to a travelling circus. Her promoters made extra money by exhibiting her at society functions where she proved an instant hit with the guests.

At one ball she was dressed in nothing but a few feathers; Napoleon's surgeon general, George Cuvier, was fascinated by the sight and began a detailed study of her body.

Sarah eventually turned to alcohol and prostitution and died in 1815, possibly of syphilis. Cuvier managed to acquire her corpse, which he promptly dissected. He then pickled Sarah's genitals and brain, and put them on display, along with her skeleton.

She remained in the Musée de l'Homme until 1974, when public revulsion caused the pickled body parts to be removed. But it was not until 2002, after the intervention of Nelson Mandela, that her remains were finally returned to her native South Africa and given a decent burial.

Sarah was neither the first nor last person to be displayed as a human freak. Seventy years later, another human specimen found himself being paraded through the streets of London. His name was Joseph Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man.

His skeleton is yet to be buried: it is still housed in the pathology collection of the Royal London Hospital.

 

PART II

Just Bad Luck

It was just like a mountain, a wall of water coming against us …

I had to swim and crawl to get back to the controls to put the ship back on course.

GÖRAN PERSSON, FIRST OFFICER ON THE
CALEDONIAN STAR
WHEN THE SHIP WAS HIT BY A 90-FOOT FREAK WAVE.

 

4

Freak Wave

On Boxing Day 1900, the Scottish supply ship SS
Hesperus
dropped anchor close to the Flannan Isles, a windswept group of islands near Scotland's Outer Hebrides. The vessel had come to deliver essential supplies to the three lighthouse keepers who had been left on the island some three weeks earlier.

The
Hesperus
's crew were expecting the usual welcome: two of the keepers normally rowed out to greet the arriving vessel while the third raised a flag as a sign that all was well. But on this occasion, there was no sign of any rowing boat and no raising of the flag. Captain Harvie gave a blast on the ship's siren and awaited a response. There was none.

More intrigued than alarmed, he ordered two of his crew – Joseph Moore and Second Mate McCormack – to row ashore in the ship's boat.

When the men landed at the island they shouted greetings to the keepers. There was no reply. All they heard was the echo of their own voices. As they made their way towards the lighthouse, they grew increasingly concerned. There was no sign of any life and the lighthouse's outer door was locked.

Moore had a set of keys and now proceeded to unlock the building. With trepidation he pushed the creaking door and stepped inside. Silence. He called the men's names. There was no one. James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald Macarthur had mysteriously disappeared.