The Gorilla Hunters (Ballantyne 1861)

I just finished reading The Gorilla Hunters: A Tale of the Wilds of Africa (1861) by R. M. Ballantyne. It was a sequel to Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), which I had previously read.

I want to write about it while the book is fresh in my mind, but this case is more difficult than usual. It was the cringiest book I have read in a long time. It illustrates, with painful clarity, some Victorian British attitudes towards Africans, and the N-word appears frequently. There are other issues, such as how women are viewed and how animals are needlessly killed, that are uncomfortable, but racism is foremost.

It is intended to be a children’s adventure story; a group of friends travel to Africa to hunt gorillas, which were famous at the time of writing because of the recent sightings in the 1850s reported by Paul Du Chaillu. He brought back some of their bodies to Europe in 1861 to back up his challenged claims that they existed. However, if your child reads it, be prepared to thoroughly discuss the issues that are contained within it. It could serve a role of illustrating Victorian views of Africa and Africans, perhaps paired with another book with a different perspective (perhaps Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe, but I have to admit that I have not yet read that book). In terms of simply reading a story for enjoyment, all other issues aside, it had its moments, but I honestly found it disappointing overall.

How I came across this book was very indirect. Years ago, I saw it, with the title visible, on a shelf in the background of a scene in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise and looked it up. I wondered if it might have been placed there as a hidden message in the show, but now I think it was just a bulk prop.

Links

• Wikipedia article on The Gorilla Hunters, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gorilla_Hunters
• Freely available text of The Gorilla Hunters online, https://archive.org/details/RM_Ballantyne_The_Gorilla_Hunters/RM_Ballantyne_The_Gorilla_Hunters/mode/2up
• Wikipedia article about the author of The Gorilla Hunters, R. M. Ballantyne, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._M._Ballantyne
• Wikipedia article about racism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
• Wikipedia article about gorillas, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla
• Wikipedia article about P. B. Du Chaillu who convinced Europeans that gorillas existed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Du_Chaillu
• An Amazon.com link to a physical book of The Gorilla Hunters, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1522932542/
• An example of a discussion of Victorian views of Africans; Brantlinger, P. (1985). Victorians and Africans: The genealogy of the myth of the dark continent. Critical Inquiry, 12(1), 166-203. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/448326
• Wikipedia article on Things Fall Apart, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Fall_Apart