Du Chaillu Views

• Books

His date and place of birth are disputed. The year is given as either 1831 or 1835; the date when given is July 31. Accounts cite either Paris or New Orleans[1] as his likely place of birth, and his friend Edward Clodd mentioned New York as another claimed location but asserted that du Chaillu's true birthplace was the French island territory of Bourbon (Réunion).[2] A contemporary obituary cites a statement made by du Chaillu referring to the United States, my country by adoption, and ... France, my native land. [3]

A subsequent expedition, from 1863 to 1865, enabled him to confirm the accounts given by the ancients of a pygmy people inhabiting the African forests. Du Chaillu sold his hunted gorillas to the Natural History Museum in London and his cannibal skulls to other European collections. (A fine cased group shot by du Chaillu may be seen in Ipswich Museum in Suffolk, England.) Narratives of both expeditions were published, in 1861 and 1867 respectively, under the titles Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, with Accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the Chace of the Gorilla, Crocodile, and other Animals; and A Journey to Ashango-land, and further penetration into Equatorial Africa. While in Ashango Land in 1865, he was elected King of the Apingi tribe. A later narrative, The Country of the Dwarfs was published in 1872.

After some years residence in America, during which he wrote several books for the young founded upon his African adventures, du Chaillu turned his attention to northern Europe. After a visit to northern Norway in 1871, over the following five years, he made a study of customs and antiquities in Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Northern Finland. He published in 1881 The Land of the Midnight Sun (dedicated to his friend Robert Winthrop of New York), as a series of Summer and Winter Journeys, in two volumes.

Du Chaillu was a friend of Edward Clodd and was present at one of Clodd's Whitsun gatherings at Strafford House, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in company with John Rhys, Grant Allen, York Powell and Joseph Thomson. He was a member along with a variety of mostly literary figures in author J. M. Barrie's amateur cricket team, the Allahakbarries .