The Gorilla Hunters

The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa follows the adventure of three young men in "darkest Africa." Ralph Rover is living on his father's inheritance on England's west coast and occupying himself as a naturalist. He gets visited by his old friend Peterkin Gay, whose "weather-beaten though ruddy countenance" he does not recognize. Peterkin has hunted and killed every animal on Earth except for the gorilla and now comes to Ralph to entice him on a new adventure. The two are joined by the third friend, Jack Martin, and they leave for Africa.

The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) is a boys' adventure novel[1] by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. A sequel to his hugely successful 1858 novel The Coral Island and set in "darkest Africa,"[2] its main characters are the earlier novel's three boys: Ralph, Peterkin and Jack. The book's themes are similar to those of The Coral Island, in which the boys testify to the positive influence of missionary work among the natives. Central in the novel is the hunt for gorillas, an animal until recently unknown to the Western world, which came to play an important role in contemporary debates on evolution and the relation between white Westerners and Africans

This was one of the first books that the prolific author Ballantyne wrote. After he had come back from his early work in Canada with the Hudson Bay Company, and written his three books in that setting, he wrote an adventure story, "The Coral Island", about three boys who find themselves cast away on a coral island in the Pacific. That book was extremely popular, and was certainly in print for over a hundred years. This book has the same three boys, now grown into young men, as the principal characters. One day the idea comes to one of them, that it would be interesting to go to Africa, hire a guide, equip themselves with a goodly supply of shot and gunpowder, and then go and kill as many gorillas as they can. Rather pointless, you might think. But the tenuous scientific reason they had was that one of the three would keep a note-book in which he would put down as much as he could about the sizes of the gorillas, and other observations about them. To see the point of this you will need to know that gorillas had only very recently been discovered when the book was written.

The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) is a boys' adventure novel by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. A sequel to his hugely successful 1858 novel The Coral Island and set in "darkest Africa", its main characters are the earlier novel's three boys: Ralph, Peterkin and Jack. The book's themes are similar to those of The Coral Island, in which the boys testify to the positive influence of missionary work among the natives. Central in the novel is the hunt for gorillas, an animal until recently unknown to the Western world, which came to play an important role in contemporary debates on evolution and the relation between white Westerners and Africans.Hunting gorillas is taboo today, but in Ballantyne's day was not. The author acknowledges within the scope of the story the hypocracy of killing in order to study nature. This classic hunting story stands as an account of an exciting African adventure, anyway.The gorilla, knowledge of which was first spread in Europe in 1847, was responsible for further speculation in England about the evolutionary status of humans. In fact, many exploratory accounts by Westerners, as was argued by Jennifer Dickenson, "are permeated with 'gothic tropes-boundary transgressions, dark doubles, haunting pasts, and threats of regression-in order to play upon Victorian anxieties about the origins of man' in the aftermath of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species" (quoted in Giles-Vernick and Rupp). The arrival in England of Paul Du Chaillu, an anthropologist who had observed and studied gorillas in West Africa, prompted great public interest in the relation between gorillas and humans. Ballantyne was so "stimulated" by Du Chaillu's work (his direct inspiration) that he published two novels in 1861 dealing with gorillas, The Red Eric and The Gorilla Hunters. The idea of an imaginary double consisting of gorilla and hunter most likely resulted from the work of American missionary and naturalist Thomas S. Savage, who was the first (with Jeffries Wyman) to name the animal, in 1847, and explicitly set it in opposition to the hunter:They are exceedingly ferocious, and always offensive in their habits, never running from man as does the Chimpanzee ... The hunter awaits his approach with his gun extended; if his aim is not sure he permits the animal to grasp the barrel, and as he carries it to his mouth (which is his habit) he fires; should the gun fail to go off, the barrel (that of an ordinary musket, which is thin) is crushed between his teeth, and the encounter soon proves fatal to the hunter.It was this image of the gorilla that became "a staple of adventure fiction", including Du Chaillu's works and Ballantyne's The Gorilla Hunters.[9] As John Miller argues, the figures of the hunter and the gorilla occur in a kind of doubling prevalent in Victorian primatology, and especially The Gorilla Hunters: "this complex relation perhaps most forcefully articulates post-Darwinian anxieties about the fixity of species and the meaning and status of humanity".Ballantyne already made some errors in his descriptions of nature in The Coral Island, and had apparently resolved whenever possible to write only about things of which he had personal experience.[10] Still, his gorillas are portrayed as dangerous man-eaters, snapping "great branches" in two while pursued by hunters; as a gorilla nutritionist said "that [Ballantyne's] fictional gorilla likely would have been peacefully nibbling on the branches' leaves". Ballantyne's gorilla, on the contrary, is a "man monkey ... a very unnatural monster".

Three boys, fifteen-year-old Ralph Rover (the narrator), eighteen-year-old Jack Martin and fourteen-year-old Peterkin Gay, are the sole survivors of a shipwreck on the coral reef of a large but uninhabited Polynesian island. At first their life on the island is idyllic; food, in the shape of fruits, fish and wild pigs, is plentiful, and using their only possessions; a broken telescope, an iron-bound oar and a small axe, they fashion a shelter and even construct a small boat. Their first contact with other people comes after several months when they observe two large outrigger canoes land on the beach. The two groups are engaged in battle and the three boys intervene to successfully defeat the attacking party, earning the gratitude of the chief Tararo. The Polynesians leave and the three boys are alone once more. Then more unwelcome visitors arrive in the shape of pirates, who make a living trading, or stealing, sandalwood. The three boys conceal themselves in a hidden cave, but Ralph is captured when he sets out to see if the pirates have left, and is taken aboard the pirate schooner. Ralph strikes up an unexpected friendship with one of the pirates, "Bloody Bill", and when they call at an island to trade for more wood he meets Tararo again. On the island he sees all facets of island life, including the popular sport of surfing, as well as the practice of infanticide and cannibalism. Rising tension leads to an attack by the inhabitants on the pirates, leaving only Ralph alive and Bloody Bill mortally wounded. However they manage to make their escape in the schooner. After Bill dies, making a death-bed repentance for his evil life, Ralph manages to sail back to the Coral Island to be re-united with his friends.

From the author of "The Coral Island" comes "The Gorilla Hunters" -- A Tale of the Wilds of Africa.