Free The Hunt for the Golden Mole by Richard Girling

Cingalese, Patagonians, Hottentots and so forth’. They were soon worth more to him than elephants. ‘Towards the end of the seventies, especially in 1879, the animal trade itself was in an exceedingly bad way, so that the anthropological side of my business became more and more important.’ The high point came with his great Cingalese exhibition of 1884, when a travelling caravan of sixty-seven men, women and children with twenty-five elephants and many different breeds of cattle caused ‘a great sensation’ in Europe. ‘I travelled about with this show all over Germany and Austria, and made a very good thing out of it.’
    There was innocence as well as calculation in Hagenbeck’s thinking, and it may be wrong to convict him of anything worse than naivety, or of being a man of his time. As usual, ironies are not far to seek. Eighty-three years later, the zoologist Desmond Morris, a former curator of mammals at London Zoo, would famously write The Naked Ape , a uniquely unemotional review of humankind as an evolving natural species. It sold by the thousand, and made Morris a household name. As popularisers tend to do, he raised hackles in the scientific community, but his evolutionary approach to human behaviour caused no great offence to liberal opinion. Indeed, with its absence of value judgements it rather chimed with it. By contrast, we look back upon the scientific anthropology of Hagenbeck’s time with something close to revulsion.

    Human exhibits – a Greenland Eskimo and his family, displayed by Hagenbeck at his zoo
    The nineteenth century was the great age of discovery and classification, when specimens poured into zoos and museums. In London, the British Museum began its system of registeringnew specimens in 1837, and within a decade it was receiving more than a thousand mammals a year. To a greater or lesser extent, the same thing was going on all over the world. Everywhere, clarity struggled with confusion. Identical species might be given different names by different scientists, or similar names with different spellings, and multiple groups of similar species might be recorded under a single name. It was the age of the enthusiast, when amateur was still a term of approbation applied to men of intellectual curiosity. Despite Darwin (himself a Christian), scientific thought was still channelled through faith in God. The superintendent of the Natural History Museum, Richard Owen, rejected Darwin’s theories and fought with Darwin’s friend Thomas Huxley over what the museum should actually represent. Huxley believed it should be what it has since become, a specialist institution devoted to scientific study within which only a fraction of the collection could be exposed to public view. Owen believed it should be annexed to the Old Testament, setting out with all due wonder and humility the miraculous entirety of God’s divine Creation. Even then, the antique quaintness of Owen’s view opened him to ridicule in press and parliament, but until his retirement in 1883 the museum would kneel more readily to God than it did to Darwin.
    In a way it was of no consequence. Whether the inspiration came from God or from the genius of those created in his likeness, there was a hunger for natural science that gripped the imaginations of educated men and women. Throughout the civilised world and beyond, they came forth in multitudes. In England, bewhiskered physicians, learned doctors and reverend gentlemen toured the countryside measuring, classifying and, in later years, photographing everything they saw. Nothing lived that was not labelled, and the inquiry did not confineitself to beetles, orchids and finches. Like Hagenbeck, the inquiring gentlemen soon found themselves as fascinated by their own species as they were by any other. With callipers, rulers and weights they categorised examples of Homo sapiens with a zeal that stopped only just short of the specimen jar. They