Paul Du Chaillu

Paul Belloni Du Chaillu ( born July 31, 1835 in Paris, † April 29, 1903 in Saint Petersburg ) was a French anthropologist and explorer.

Life

Du Chaillu was the son of a Parisian merchant who engaged in trade at the mouth of Gabon in West Africa. The son was temporarily raised by missionaries and was suitable fast knowledge of the land and people of those regions, the language of Mpongwe and Natural History Basics on. He undertook 1851 trips inland near the Gabon and then went to North America in 1855.

Du Chaillu was awarded by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia the order to extend its botanical and zoological investigations deeper into the interior of Africa. During his four -year-old walks, he was able to explore the Ogowe in its lower course and gain a valuable natural history yield, including some gorillas, which he - probably the first European to - got to face. His travelogue Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa ( London 1861, German Berlin 1862) attracted extraordinary attention. Since the veracity of his reports but was initially challenged, especially by George Robert Gray and Heinrich Barth, he undertook a second expedition in 1863.

As a result of the loss of astronomical instruments at the mouth of the Fernand- Vaz, he was stopped for a year and began his journey into the interior of only in October 1864. He visited the waterfalls of the opening into the Ogowe Ngunie and then came eastward through endless forests to the Aschango ( Abongo ) to beyond the 12th degree of longitude east of Greenwich. Here he met on his time legendary pygmies. In 1865 he was forced by the outbreak of an epidemic to return. During this trip you put Chaillu to a number of valuable provisions of locations and heights. He reported on his second trip to the Plant A journey to Ashango country and Further Penetration into Equatorial Africa ( London 1867).

The years 1871-1878 he spent in Sweden, Lapland and Northern Finland and reported it in The land of the midnight sun ( 2 vols, London 1900) and in the Land of the long night (London 1900).

Works

• Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. J. Murray, London 1861 online ( German Berlin 1862)
• My Apingi kingdom: with life in the great Sahara. London 1870
• The country of the dwarfs. London 1872
• World of the great forest. London 1902

Reception

• The American draftsman and printmaker Walton Ford describes in one of his large-scale works from the year 2009 (An Encounter with Du Chaillu ) the encounter of a gorilla with the researcher.