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September 24 is World Gorilla Day. It is a day dedicated to the gorilla, our closest relative on Earth next only to the chimpanzee. World Gorilla Day is an opportunity for everyone to celebrate these amazing animals and to take actions to protect them, as per the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals.
For a long time, the gorilla has had an ‘image problem’ at least in the Western World. A lot of credit for this goes to Merian C Cooper’s 1933 movie King Kong. While the movie showed the gorilla as a fierce beast, in reality the species is among the most peaceable, much like its cousin the bonobo or the gracile chimpanzee.
The word gorilla was given by Thomas Staughton Savage, a US missionary stationed in Liberia, and naturalist Jeffries Wyman in 1847.
Liberia was born of an effort to settle former African American and Afro-Caribbean slaves as well as free-born black people in the Western Hemisphere back in West Africa, from where their ancestors had forcibly been taken to the New World. But the motives were far from altruistic or noble. It was feared that the growing population of free blacks would incite insurrections among slaves.
Savage acquired the skull and bones of what is known to science today as the Western Gorilla while he was in Liberia. These, he described in 1847 in Notice of the external character and habits of Troglodytes Gorilla, a new species of orang from the Gaboon river:
But who was Hanno? Thereby hangs a tale of what could have been one of the earliest voyages of exploration into the ‘unknown’. Or maybe not.
What we know about Hanno, a pretty common name among the men of the Phoenician-founded city of Carthage on the North African coast (modern-day Tunis), comes to us from a Periplus.
Jonathan Burgess, from the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto in Canada, in his essay The Periplus of Hanno: Dubious Historical Document, Fascinating Travel Text (part of Tenue est mendacium: Rethinking Fakes and Authorship in Classical, Late Antique, & Early Christian Works published in 2021) describes a Periplus as “a text that describes notable points on a route (landmarks, ports, etc.).”
The original version was written in Punic, the language of the Phoenicians of Carthage, a city that rivalled Rome in the ancient Mediterranean. This version is lost.
But we do have a Greek version, which is just 101 lines long and is divided into 18 sections.
For centuries, scholars and commentators have argued about the Periplus of Hanno. Is it an authentic historical text? Did the fantastic voyage described in it really happen? Is it the figment of someone’s imagination?
What scholars usually agree upon is that the text describes a voyage by an admiral named Hanno from Carthage who was mandated to colonise the West African coast. He set out with a fleet of 60 ships and 30,000 men!
The text then goes on to describe the adventures on the voyage, which turned into one of exploration instead of colonisation.
And it is in the last two sections of this version that we come across the word from which ‘gorilla’ would be derived.
The text ends abruptly after this.
In his translation, Schoff notes that, “The island enclosed within the bay called Horn of the South, it is now agreed by all commentators, is the modern Sherboro Sound in the British colony of Sierra Leone, about 7° 30' N.”
He adds that, “This identification of the places named in the text extends Hanno’s voyage about 29 degrees of latitude along the West African coast, or a total length outside of Gibraltar, following the direction of the shore line, of about 2600 miles.”
However, other scholars have extended the route of the voyage till at least Mount Cameroon. Some have even speculated that Hanno circumnavigated the entire African continent centuries before Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama.
Burgess raises a number of questions regarding the identity of the creatures described in Section 18 of the Periplus.
“Are the gorillai humans or anthropoids? Would anthropoids defend themselves with stones? If humans, could their “skins” or “hides” (δοραί) be displayed in a temple? Current knowledge of the ape perhaps allows one to think that the Carthaginians encountered gorillas. But the ancients were quite aware of anthropoids (Connors 2004), and the Carthaginians blithely assume that the natives are human.”
He then adds the most troubling questions of all: “If the gorillai of our text are apes or anthropoids, that would make their forcible capture, killing, and skinning (somewhat) less troubling. That the Carthaginians would not be able to distinguish exotic animals from native humans is enormously discomforting in our post-Darwinian age, or pseudo-Darwinian age.”
The final episode of the text, according to Burgess, confirms that the Periplus of Hanno “is more paradoxographical than historical”.
That is because the gorilla mentioned in it “are not real-world anthropoids or natives, but rather the typology of exotic beings located at the periphery of the Greco-Roman world, in this case outside the Pillars of Heracles”.
Burgess calls the Periplus of Hanno “just one element in a variegated cultural tradition about the expedition of Hanno. It seems probable that the expedition of Hanno, even if historical, eventually became legendary…”