- tion was to be a gorilla expedition. I received a
letter from an Englishman, Mr. C. D. Foster, who had shot a male and female gorilla and caught a baby in the country I had in mind. That led us to base our plans on gorillas alone, and it was a gorilla expedition, although Miss Miller killed an elephant the first time she shot at anything in Africa and both she and Mrs. Bradley killed lions.
To me the gorilla made a much more interesting quarry than lions, elephants, or any of the other African game, for the gorilla is still comparatively little known. Not many people have shot gorillas and almost none have studied them in their native habitat. The gorilla is one of the most remarkable and least known large animals in the world, and when is added to that the fact that he is the nearest to man of any other member of the animal kingdom, a gorilla expedition acquires a tremendous fascination.
An Englishman named Battell—a captive of the Portuguese of Angola—in 1590 described an animal which in all probability was the gorilla. Vague stories from other sources appeared in travellers' accounts, but no real description of the gorilla came to Europe or America until December, 1847, when Dr. Thomas S. Savage, a missionary, published a paper in the Boston Journal of Natural History. Doctor Savage was detained in April of that year at a mission on the Gaboon River in West Africa and there made his discovery. He did not see a live gorilla himself, but from skulls and information brought him by
