The Biographer's Tale (9 page)

• • •

H
E SET OFF
for Ovampoland in 1849. His father had died in 1844, which had scattered the family and freed him from the medical profession. Immediately after this death, he had travelled to Egypt and along the Nile to the Sudan, where he met the St. Simonian Arnaud Bey, and the wild Mansfield Parkyns, who lived amongst a crew of drug-dealers and slave-traders, dressed in a leopardskin, with a shaven head and Moslem tuft. He had made an earlier student expedition along the Danube to Constantinople from Vienna, where he had been told his own worth as a young male slave. It appears that he may have contracted an infection in the Sudan, after “one night's pleasure,” which may have been responsible for his sudden cessation of interest in women. (This great student and exponent of the virtues of breeding men of genius never reproduced himself; his long marriage was childless.) He spent a few years, between the Syrian and the South-West African expeditions, hunting, shooting and fishing in a desultory way—he records a journey to the Shetlands for seal-shooting and bird nesting, with “the weird experiences of a fisher society, living in a treeless land, with whale-jaws for posts, and with no knife in their pockets larger than a penknife, having only tobacco and string to cut with it.”

He tells how to shoot and land a seal. He adds, “I would not shoot a seal now, but youths are murderous by instinct and so was I.”

One of the aims of the Ovampoland expedition was to shoot hippopotamus in Lake Ngami. His friend, Henry Hallam, gracefully refusing an invitation to join a hippopotamus
shoot in the Sudan, had expressed envy, from the point of view of a destroyer of coveys of pheasants, of the proposed target, a large, stationary grey pachyderm. It was not clear whether the lake existed or was simply a dry sandy bowl. There was the further problem of the Boers, who “had been very unruly, and had affirmed their intention of keeping the newly discovered lands about Lake Ngami to themselves and of refusing passage to every Englishman.”

He set off, accordingly, on a different route, landing in Walfisch Bay and traversing the territories of the yellow Namaguas, the black Damaras and the Ovampo (“pure negroes of a high type” according to him). The Namaguas, he said, were “yellow Hottentots” with hair growing in tufts on their heads, and speaking a language full of clicks. They had a strain of Dutch blood, and most of them spoke a little of the Dutch language. Their leaders at that time were Jonker, Cornelius, Amiral and Swartboy. They were engaged in continual combat with the Damaras, raiding cattle and selling them. They had decided that no further white man should cross their border. There were also the Ghou Damup, probably a branch of the Ovampo, and the Bushmen, nomadic, good hunters, amongst whom FG spent several days at Tounobis, trying to learn about Lake Ngami. He travelled with a Swede, Charles Andersson, who had come to England to make his fortune.

“His capital wherewith to begin consisted of a crate of live capercailzie, two bearcubs, and the skin of one of their parents. He was then so naïve that, seeing an auctioneer's placard about a forthcoming sale of farm stock, in which was included '20,000 Swedes,' he, not knowing that in the language
of farmers ‘swedes' meant ‘turnips,' confessed afterwards to a thrill of terror lest they should be his compatriots, and lest he himself might be pounced upon and sold as a slave together with them.”

FG's
Art of Travel
devotes several pages to a traveller's outfit under the headings of
Small Stores, Various
(fish-hooks, scalpel, bistoury, awls, etc. etc.),
Heavy Stores, Various
(saddles, water-vessels, ammunition),
Stationery
(30 lbs, of ledgers, ink, books to read etc., “say equal to six vols. the ordinary size of novels”),
Mapping Materials
(31 lbs) and
Natural History
.

“Arsenical soap, 2 lbs; camphor ½ lb; pepper ½ lb; bag of some powder to absorb blood, 2 lbs; tow and cotton, about 10 lbs; scalpel, forceps, scissors etc., ½ lb; sheet brass, stamped for labels, ½ lb … 16 pillboxes; cork; insect-boxes; pins; tin, for catching and keeping, and killing animals; nets for butterflies … 10 lb. Geological hammers, lens, clinometer, etc.… 4 lb.

“Specimens. (I make no allowance for the weight of these, for they accumulate as stores are used up; and the total weight is seldom increased.)

“Total weight of Natural History materials (for an
occasional
collector) … 30 lb.”

He also took some odd and cumbersome things. What are we to make of his decision to make himself agreeable to Nangoro, King of the Ovampo, who were “under strict discipline, secret and very resolute,” by investing him with “a big theatrical crown that I had bought in Drury Lane for some such purpose”? It is certain that he offended Nangoro, when invited to eat with him, by refusing to take part in a cleansing ritual in which the host spat gargled water over the
face of the guest—a counter-witchcraft expedient of Nangoro's own devising. When the Damara chief, Jonker, would not reply to his request for passage, he mounted his riding-ox (he gives detailed instructions for breaking oxen to be saddled) and, jumping a river, trotted briskly up to Jonker's hut, through the wall of which the ox pushed its head. FG was dressed in hunting pink, cap, cords and jackboots. What possessed him to travel all the way into the desert lumbered with this gear? It intimidated Jonker, briefly, and a treaty was made between the Namagua and the Damara, which barely survived FG's departure, giving way to further massacres.

He may also have offended Nangoro with his attitude to women; he rejected, summarily, his offer of the Princess Chipanga.

“I found her installed in my tent in negress finery, raddled with red ochre and butter, and as capable of leaving a mark on anything she touched as a well-inked printer's roller. I was dressed in my one well-preserved suit of white linen, so I had her ejected without ceremony.”

He preferred his women at an experimental distance. He was triangulating the country carefully, using his sextant and landmarks, which had to give way to lunar observations when he went beyond the limit of the landmarks, in North Damaraland and at Elephant Fountain. He spent time at the mission station in Barmen measuring a Hottentot lady.

“I profess to be a scientific man, and was exceedingly anxious to obtain accurate measurements of her shape; but there was a difficulty in doing this. I did not know a word of Hottentot, and could never therefore have explained to the lady what the object of my footrule could be; and I really
dared not ask my worthy missionary host to interpret for me. The object of my admiration stood under a tree, and was turning herself about to all points of the compass, as ladies who wish to be admired usually do. Of a sudden my eye fell upon my sextant, the bright thought struck me, and I took a series of observations upon her figure in every direction, up and down, crossways, diagonally, and so forth, and I registered them carefully upon an outline drawing for fear of any mistake: this being done, I boldly pulled out my measuring tape, and measured the distance from where I was to the place where she stood, and having thus obtained both base and angles, I worked out the results by trigonometry and logarithms.”

It may be that FG preferred human beings in a net of invisible lines of trigonometric measurement and triangulated distances from the moon. He observed of the Damara that there was “hardly a particle of romance, or affection, or poetry, in their character or creed, but they are a greedy, heartless, silly set of savages.”

However, he loved, and closely observed, his cattle. He had nearly a hundred wild Damara cattle, broken in for the wagon, for packs, and for the saddle.

“I travelled an entire journey of exploration on the back of one of them, with others by my side, either labouring, or walking at leisure; and with others who were wholly unbroken and who served the purpose of an itinerant larder. At night, when there had been no time to erect an enclosure to hold them, I lay down in their midst, and it was interesting to observe how readily they then availed themselves of the camp fire, and of man, conscious of the protection they
afforded from prowling carnivora, whose cries and roars, now distant, now near, continually broke upon the stillness.”

From his observation of these beasts, he formed a whole theory of “gregarious and slavish instincts” which he later—with due demurrers and qualifications—applied to men. The slavish aptitudes in man, he said, “are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation.”

He was a noticing and curious man and a good animal psychologist. He respected the oxen. “The better I understood them, the more complex and worthy of study did their minds appear to be. But I am now concerned only with their blind gregarious instincts, which are conspicuously distinct from the ordinary social desires. In the latter they are deficient; thus they are not amiable to one another, but show on the whole more expressions of spite and disgust than of forbearance or fondness.”

He notes the solitude of the creatures embedded in the mass of other creatures.

“They do not suffer from an ennui, which society can remove, because their coarse feeding and their ruminant habits make them somewhat stolid. Neither can they love society, as monkeys do, for the opportunities it affords of a fuller and more varied life, because they remain self-absorbed in the middle of their herd, while the monkeys revel together in frolics, scrambles, fights, loves and chatterings.”

His respect for the creatures, which easily refers to their “minds” at a time when many thinkers believed the beasts
were no more than machines or automata, is reinforced by his imaginative participation in their emotions.

“Yet although the ox has so little affection for, or individual interest in, his fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary severance from his herd. If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again, and when he succeeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole body with the comfort of closest companionship. This passionate terror at segregation is a convenience to the herdsman …”

He was interested in those independent-minded oxen who grazed apart from the herd, and showed an unusual inquisitiveness and desire to experiment. These, he observed, could be trained to be ridden, or to be lead-oxen; they were not by any means the normal leaders of the herd from within the herd, in flight or simple change of grazing-place, but individuals, with minds of their own. With his usual statistical acuity he worked out that these individuals were about one in fifty, and that a herd could not cohere, or act together, if this proportion were exceeded. He believed, however, that in the case of human beings it might be possible to change whole societies by breeding out slavishness and mere gregariousness, the crowd instincts, in human beings. Human beings, he believed, had been cowed by religious persecution and domination of chieftains with powerful executives, ready to stamp out individual protests.

He hoped, with the aid of eugenics, for better. “A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous, self-reliant
men, knit to one another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense and elastic organisation.”

This is one metaphor drawn from a web, or from knitting. So is the converse metaphor for the coherence, or cohesion, of the herd.

“To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked.”

It is perhaps interesting, in view of the observations already made about FG's lack of interest in sex, that he points out that his terrified and craven wild animals consisted of “oxen and cows whose nature is no doubt shared by the bulls.” Why was he—the precise scientist—so bland about the bulls? Why did he not ask himself why there were none? It seems a simple question.

FG
BECAME FAMOUS
in his lifetime for his work on anthropometry and eugenics. That last word, since the dreadful events of the last war and before, has come to strike horror into the reading public, and that may be the reason why his extraordinary contributions to knowledge, on so many fronts, are forgotten. His inventions—identification by fingerprint, the weather balloon, the weather-map, the statistical bell-curve of standard deviation in populations, are not generally ascribed to him. Most of all, perhaps, his delicate researches into the nature of consciousness, of thought, of
reflection, of the slippage of unremarked mental processes, have disappeared into oblivion unjustly. His fearless eccentricity, his unquenchable curiosity, led to many delicious discoveries. Who else would have thought of measuring the “inclination” to each other of a couple placed side by side at dinner, by calibrating on wax the weight they put on the chair-legs nearest to each other? His capacity to watch himself, to stand outside himself, to make his own consciousness the field and mirror of his enquiries, may appear to have the same innocent charm. But it had its dangers.

He records, in his
Memories
, various such experiments. His first, made in his youth, was, he said, the result of a not uncommon youthful desire to “subjugate the body by the spirit.” He made the extraordinary decision to make all his involuntary processes subject to his will, which should “replace automatism by hastening or retarding automatic acts.” He nearly killed himself.

“Every breath was subjected to this process, with the result that the normal power of breathing was dangerously interfered with. It seemed as though I should suffocate if I ceased to will. I had a terrible half-hour; at length by slow and irregular steps the lost power returned. My dread was hardly fanciful, for heart-failure is the suspension of the automatic faculty of the heart to beat.”