Du Chaillu, Paul Belloni
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
du sha-yu', Paul Belloni (1835-1903), a noted traveler and author. He was born at Paris and died at St. Petersburg. His father was a merchant in the French settlement on the Gabun, West Africa. Young Paul was educated at the Jesuit mission. While quite a young lad he delighted in excursions into the region surrounding his father's trading station. His great enjoyment was the study of natural history. At various times he stuffed 2,000 specimens of birds. In 1853 he came to this country. Later he became a naturalized citizen of the United States . The members of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences became so interested in his tales of the jungle and its inhabitants that he was provided with means to explore the unknown region lying on the equator. So Du Chaillu returned to Africa and spent four years traveling alone over 8,000 miles. On his return he published Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. It was a treasure of scientific information. His accounts of gorillas and dwarfs were received with suspicion; but subsequent explorations have confirmed the truth of Du Chaillu's statements. In 1863 he started on a second expedition, the results of which were published in A Journey to Ashangoland. Other books, written especially for young readers, are My Apingi Kingdom, The Country of the Dwarfs, Lost in the Jungle, Wild Life under the Equator, and Stories of the Gorilla Country. In 1881 appeared The Land of the Midnight Sun , the result of several years' travel and observation in northern Scandinavia and Lapland. A later work, The Viking Age, describes Norse antiquities discovered in mounds, cairns, and bogs of Scandinavia. He discloses a state of civilization much more advanced than European writers have hitherto conceded. He maintained that the Teutonic people that conquered England was not of Anglo-Saxon, but of Viking, that is to say, Scandinavian blood, akin to the Normans. See Gorilla ; Dwarf
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry states flatly that Du Chaillu was "born at Paris" in 1835; modern research on his origins concludes he was almost certainly born several years earlier, around 1831, most likely on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, and that he spent his career obscuring his parentage — quite possibly because his mother was of African or mixed descent, which would have destroyed his standing as a gentleman-explorer in the America and Britain of his day. The vindication Aiton's notes is real: the gorilla he described and the forest pygmies he reported both proved genuine, and he is credited as the first to bring a Westerner's sustained account of the western lowland gorilla home. His other big thesis has not survived. The argument of The Viking Age, that the Germanic conquerors of England were Scandinavian "Vikings" rather than Anglo-Saxons, is not accepted by historians, and the gorillas he shot in such numbers are now classed as critically endangered.
Written for this edition, 2026.