"When the people of the country travel through the woods, they
make fires in the night, and in the morning, when they are gone,
the Pongos will come and sit round it till it goes out, for they
do not possess sagacity enough to lay more wood on. They go in
bodies, and kill many negroes who travel in the woods. When
elephants happen to come and feed where they are, they will fall
on them, and so beat them with their clubbed fists (sticks?) that
they are forced to run away roaring. The grown Pongos are never
taken alive, owing to their strength, which is so great that ten
men cannot hold one of them. The young Pongos hang upon their
mother's belly, with their hands clasped about her. Many of the
young ones are taken by means of shooting the mothers with
poisoned arrows, and the young ones, hanging to their mothers,
are easily taken."
I have italicized the passages which show that the traditions
still preserved on the coast, about the Pongo and the Chimpanzee,
date from old. Surely M. du Chaillu does grave injustice to this
good old Briton, who was not a literary man, by declaring his
stories to be mere travellers' tales, "untrue of any of the great
apes of Africa.
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