Читать книгу In Brightest Africa - Carl Ethan Akeley - Страница 6

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As a boy I lived on a farm near Clarendon, Orleans County, N. Y., and for some reason, about the time I was thirteen, I got interested in birds. I was out of place on the farm for I was much more interested in taxidermy than in farming. As a matter of fact, by the time I was sixteen I announced to the world that I was a taxidermist. I had borrowed a book which had originally cost a dollar, and from that book I learned taxidermy up to a point where I felt justified in having business cards printed stating that I did artistic taxidermy in all its branches. I even went so far as to take several lessons in painting from a lady who taught art in Clarendon, in order that I might paint realistic backgrounds behind the birds that I mounted. So far as I know, that was the first experiment of painted backgrounds used for mounted birds or animals. I believe that my first attempt in this direction is still in existence in Clarendon but I have been a little afraid to go to see it.

In the fall of the year in which I was nineteen, after the crops were in, I set out to get a wider field for my efforts. There was at that time in the neighbouring town of Brockport an Englishman named David Bruce, whose hobby was taxidermy. By calling he was a painter and interior decorator—a very skilful craftsman who did special work far and wide through the country. As a recreation he mounted birds and animals for sportsmen. His office was filled with birds in cases and he was surrounded with other evidences of his hobby.

To me it seemed that he led an ideal life, for he had a successful business and one that gave him enough spare time to indulge his fancies in taxidermy. It hadn't entered my head at the time that a man could make a living at anything as fascinating as taxidermy, so I felt that the best possible solution of the problem was that which Mr. Bruce had devised. I went to see if I could get a job with him in his decorating business in order that I might also be with him in his hobby. He was most kindly and cordial. I remember that he took me out and bought me an oyster stew and told me, while we were eating, that if I came with him he would teach me all his trade secrets in painting and decorating, which he had kept even from his workmen. It seemed to me that a glorious future was settled for me then and there. If I was not in the seventh heaven, I was at least in the fifth or sixth and going up, and then my prospects became so favourable as to become almost terrifying. Mr. Bruce, after having made me such alluring offers to come with him, said that he thought I ought to go to a much better place than his shop—a place where I might actually make a living at taxidermy. In Rochester there was a famous institution, Ward's Natural Science Establishment. At that time, and for years afterward, this establishment supplied the best museums in this country with nearly all their mounted specimens and also most of their other natural history collections. Professor Ward was the greatest authority on taxidermy of his day. It was to this place that Bruce suggested I should go. The step which he planned seemed a great venture to me, but I determined to try it. I went home from Brockport and told the family what Bruce had said and what I intended to do. I got up early next morning—I didn't have to wake up for I had hardly slept a wink—and walked three miles to the station to take the train to Rochester. When I reached there, I walked all over town before I found Ward's Natural Science Establishment and the more I walked the lower and lower my courage sank. The Establishment consisted of Professor Ward's house and several other buildings, the entrance to the place being an arch made of the jaws of a sperm whale. An apprentice approaching the studio of a Rembrandt or a Van Dyke couldn't have been more in awe than I was. I walked up and down the sidewalk in front of the Professor's house for a while until I finally gathered courage to ring the door-bell. I was admitted to an elaborately furnished room, and after a little while Professor Ward came in. It had been a long time since I had had breakfast, but he hadn't quite finished his, and this contrast seemed to increase my disadvantages in his presence. Moreover, Professor Ward was always very busy and very brusque and was a very fierce man. Not even when a leopard sprang on me in Africa have I had a worse moment than when this little man snapped out, "What do you want?"

The last vestige of my pride and assurance was centred on my business card, and without a word I handed him this evidence of my skill and art as a taxidermist. The card seemed to justify my belief in it, for the great man asked me when I could go to work and offered me the munificent sum of $3.50 a week. I discovered a boarding house where I could get a room and my meals for $4 a week and on this basis I began to learn the art of taxidermy and to run through my slender resources.

The art of taxidermy as practised at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in those days was very simple. To stuff a deer, for example, we treated the skin with salt, alum, and arsenical soap. Then the bones were wired and wrapped and put in his legs and he was hung, upside down, and the body stuffed with straw until it would hold no more If then we wished to thin the body at any point, we sewed through it with a long needle and drew it in. Now to do this, no knowledge of the animal's anatomy or of anything else about it was necessary. There was but little attempt to put the animals in natural attitudes; no attempt at grouping, and no accessories in the shape of trees or other surroundings. The profession I had chosen as the most satisfying and stimulating to a man's soul turned out at that time to have very little science and no art at all.

The reason for this was not so much that no one knew better. It was more the fact that no one would pay for better work. Professor Ward had to set a price on his work that the museums would pay, and at that time most museums were interested almost exclusively in the collection of purely scientific data and cared little for exhibitions that would appeal to the public. They preferred collections of birds' skins to bird groups, and collections of mammal data and skeletons to mammal groups. The museums then had no taxidermists of their own.

However, many of the prominent museum men of to-day had their early training at Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Soon after I went to Ward's another nineteen-year-old boy named William Morton Wheeler, now of the Bussey Institution at Harvard, turned up there. E. N. Gueret, now in charge of the Division of Osteology in the Field Museum of Natural History, George K. Cherrie, the South American explorer; the late J. William Critchley, who became the chief taxidermist in the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences; Henry L. Ward, director of the Kent Scientific Museum in Grand Rapids; H. C. Denslow, an artist formerly associated with several of the leading museums as bird taxidermist; William T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoölogical Park, and Frederick S. Webster, who was the first president of the Society of American Taxidermists, were all among the friends I made in those early days. A long list of others, not my contemporaries at that institution, but men with whom I have since been associated in museum work, might be added. Dr. Frederic A. Lucas had left Ward's shortly before my arrival to take up his duties at the Smithsonian Institution but I came to feel that I knew him very well through the stories and reminiscences of my companions. It was not until my return from my third expedition in 1911 that my delightful association with him as the director of the American Museum of Natural History was begun.

I have a theory that the first museum taxidermist came into existence in about this way: One of our dear old friends, some old-fashioned closet naturalist who knew animals only as dried skins and had been getting funds from some kind-hearted philanthropist, one day, under pressure from the philanthropist, who wanted something on exhibition to show his friends, sent around the corner and called in an upholsterer and said, "Here is the skin of an animal. Stuff this thing and make it look like a live animal." The upholsterer did it and kept on doing it until the scientist had a little more money. Given more work the upholsterer became ambitious and had an idea that these animals might be improved upon, so he began to do better work. But it took more time and cost more money so that he lost his job. Thus it has been that from the very people from whom we expected the most encouragement in the beginning of our efforts, we received the least.

I remember very well one time when an opportunity came to do something a little better. A zebra was brought into the Establishment. I had been studying anatomy and I had learned the names of all the muscles and all the bones. When I saw the zebra I realized that here was an opportunity to do something good and I asked to make a plaster cast of the body. I had to do it in my own time and worked from supper until breakfast time, following out a few special experiments of my own in the process. Nevertheless, the zebra was handed out to be mounted in the old way and my casts were thrown on the dump.

I stayed at this leading institution of taxidermy for four years and while I was there we stuffed animals for most of the museums in the country, for hunters and sportsmen, and various other kinds of people, including Barnum's circus. The animal we stuffed for Barnum's circus was the famous elephant Jumbo. We had to use a slightly different method for Jumbo, not only because of his size but because he had to be made rigid and strong enough to stand being carted around the country with the circus; for this old elephant served dead as well as alive to amuse and instruct the public. As a matter of fact, he is still at it, for his skin on the steel-and-wood frame we made for it at Ward's is at Tufts College and his skeleton is at the American Museum of Natural History.

Between the time that I first went to Ward's and my last job there, which was on Jumbo, there was an intermission which I spent in the taxidermy shop of John Wallace on North William Street in New York. I roomed in Brooklyn with Doctor Funk, of Funk & Wagnalls, and worked in the basement shop of Wallace's, and a more dreary six months I never had spent anywhere. So when Ward came after me to go back, saying that his having fired me was all a mistake due to erroneous reports that had been given him, I went, and stayed three years. During this time I got to know Professor Webster of Rochester University, who later became president of Union College, and he urged me to study to become a professor. In spite of the fact that my education had stopped early on account of a lack of funds, I set to work to prepare myself to go to the Sheffield Scientific School. But between working in the daytime and studying at night I broke down, and when examination time came I wasn't ready. However, my chances of further education, although delayed, seemed improved. At the time I was studying for the Sheffield Scientific School my friend, William Morton Wheeler, had left Ward's and was teaching in the High School in Milwaukee. He wrote and offered to tutor me if I would go out there. So I went to Milwaukee and got a job with the museum there, which was to give me food and lodging while I prepared for college. It did more than that, for it absorbed me so that I gave up all thought of abandoning taxidermy. I stayed eight years in Milwaukee, working in the museum and in a shop of my own.

Several things happened there which stimulated my interest in taxidermy. One of the directors had been to Lapland and had collected the skin of a reindeer, a Laplander's sled, and the driving paraphernalia, and he was anxious to have these shown in the museum. This material we turned into a group of a Laplander driving a reindeer over the snow. That was fairly successful, and we induced the museum to buy a set of skins of orang-outangs, which Charles F. Adams, another of my former colleagues at Ward's, had collected in Borneo. We arranged them in a group using some bare branches as accessories.

In making these groups we had had to abandon the old straw-rag-and-bone method of stuffing and create modelled manikins over which to stretch the skins. As soon as this point was reached several problems presented themselves, the solution of which meant an entirely new era in taxidermy. If a man was going to model a realistic manikin for an animal's skin, instead of stuffing the skin with straw, it was evident he would have to learn to model. Likewise it turned out that, even if a man knew how to model, he couldn't model an animal body sufficiently well for the skin to fit it unless he knew animal anatomy. And we found out also that making a manikin from a model was not as simple as it sounds, but that on the contrary it is about as difficult as casting in bronze, the difference being that the art of bronze casting has been developed through many years, while the art of making manikins had to be created comparatively quickly and by a very few people. We worked at these problems step by step in Milwaukee and made a good deal of progress.

The reindeer and orang-outang work encouraged me to suggest a series of groups of the fur-bearing animals of Wisconsin, the muskrat group to be the first of the series. This suggestion was more tolerated than encouraged when it was first made, but I went as far as I could go with my dream and before I left there I finished the muskrat group, as I did most of my early experiments, in spite of the opposition of the authorities. It was the old, old story of starting a thing and having to give it up because of lack of support. But my idea won eventually. It was only a short time until my friend Wheeler was made director of the museum and from then on there was full sympathy for the plan. This was an entering wedge, and since that time group after group has been added, until now that museum has a magnificent series.

Wheeler, who had encouraged me to go to Milwaukee, also was the cause of my leaving. One year, while he was director, he went to Europe, and while abroad had a talk with Sir William Flower of the British Museum, in which Flower intimated that he would like me to go there. So I planned to quit Milwaukee and to go to London. However, I didn't immediately get any farther than Chicago. I stopped there and happened to go into the Field Museum of Natural History. It was then housed in the old art gallery of the Columbian Exposition. Professor Daniel G. Eliot was its curator of zoölogy. He offered me some taxidermy contracts on the spot and I accepted. While I was doing them he suggested that I go with him on an expedition to Africa. We started in 1896.

When we got back from that trip I continued at the Field Museum as chief of the Department of Taxidermy. Before leaving Milwaukee I had been working on an idea of four deer groups, to be called the "Four Seasons," to show the animals in natural surroundings of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. I collected a good deal of the necessary material and put a lot of work on the project in my own shop, and finally reached a point where it became necessary for me to know whether the museum was going to want the groups or not. I approached the curator of zoölogy. He said that he would recommend the purchase of one of the four. Later I saw the president of the museum. After some discussion he asked why it was that the museum couldn't have the four groups. I gave him every assurance that it could. I spent four years on these four groups. It wouldn't take so long now but at that time we had not only to make the groups but also to perfect the methods of doing it at the same time. Four years is a long time to take on four deer groups, but the number of things in taxidermy we worked out in doing those groups made it a very full four years' work. In fact, the method finally used for mounting those deer groups is the method still in use.

Briefly, that method is this: For each animal a rough armature was made, on which a life-sized clay model was shaped just like a clay model made for casting in bronze except that to facilitate accuracy the skull and leg bones of the animal were used. This model was checked by measurements made of the dead animal in the field, by photographs, and frequently by anatomical casts made in the field. The final result was a model not only of the species but of the actual animal whose skin we were going to use. All this took a lot of time, study, and money, and it was quite a different thing from stuffing a skin with rags and straw. For a temporary effect the skin could be mounted on the clay model, but an animal so mounted would deteriorate. For permanent work it was necessary to devise some light, durable substance, which would not be affected by moisture, to take the place of the clay of the manikin. After a lot of experimentation I came to the conclusion that a papier-mâché manikin reënforced by wire cloth and coated with shellac would be tough, strong, durable, and impervious to moisture. It isn't possible to model papier-mâché with the hands as one moulds clay, so the problem resolved itself into making a plaster mould of the clay model and then using that to build the papier-mâché manikin. When a man wishes to make a bronze in a mould he can pour the melted metal into the mould and when it has cooled remove the mould. But you can't pour papier-mâché reënforced with wire cloth and if you put it into a plaster-of-paris mould it will stick. The solution of this difficulty struck me suddenly one day when I was riding into town to go to the museum.

"I've got it!" I exclaimed, to the amusement of my friends and the rest of the car full of people. As soon as I could get to my shop I tried it and it worked. It was to take the plaster moulds of the clay model and coat the inside of them with glue. On this glue I laid a sheet of muslin and worked it carefully and painstakingly into every undulation of the mould. On this went thin layers of papier-mâché with the wire cloth reënforcement likewise worked carefully into every undulation of the mould. Every layer of the papier-mâché composition was carefully covered with a coating of shellac so that each layer, as well as the whole, was entirely impervious to water. For animals the size of a deer two layers of reënforced composition give strength enough. For animals the size of an elephant four are sufficient and four layers are only about an eighth of an inch thick. When the final coat of shellac was well dried I immersed the whole thing in water. The water affected nothing but the thin coating of glue between the mould and the muslin. That melted and my muslin-covered, reënforced papier-mâché sections of the manikin came out of the plaster mould clean and perfect replicas of the original clay model. The four sections of the manikin were assembled with the necessary leg irons and wooden ribs and the whole was ready for the skin.

The combination of glue and muslin was the key to the whole problem. The manikin so made is an absolutely accurate reproduction of the clay model, even more accurate than bronze castings for there is no shrinkage. The manikin of a deer so constructed weighs less than thirty pounds, but it is strong enough to hold a man's weight. I have sat on the back of an antelope mounted in this manner and done it no harm. Moreover, it is entirely made of clean and durable materials. There is nothing to rot or shrink or to cause shrinkage or decay in the skin. Of the animal itself only the shells of the hoofs and horns, and the skin are used, and the skin is much more carefully cleaned and tanned than those of women's furs. An animal prepared in this way will last indefinitely. This was a long step from the methods we used at Ward's of filling a raw skin with greasy bones of the legs and skull and stuffing the body out with straw, excelsior, old rags, and the like.

I believe that there has not yet been devised a better method of taxidermy than that described here and its use has become almost universal. Although it does not take much time to tell about it, the mounting of an animal in this way is a long and tedious process. Moreover, it is hard work. Consequently, but few of the people using it do a thoroughly constructed manikin. In an attempt to save time and money cheaper processes are resorted to and many animals, mounted by methods that only approximate that which I have evolved, fail to show good results. When the method was first introduced at the American Museum of Natural History, the authorities objected to its expense, and to cut down the cost a light plaster cast, believed to be "just as good," was substituted for the manikin. Many specimens mounted in this manner have since been thrown on the dump heap.

I finally got the four deer groups finished and the Field Museum bought them at the price agreed upon. When I figured it out financially I found that I had come out even on my expenditures for labour and materials but for my own time and for profit there was nothing. However, I had the experience and the method and I felt that it was a pretty good four years' work.

In the old days at Ward's a taxidermist was a man who took an animal's skin from a hunter or collector and stuffed it or upholstered it. By the time I had finished the deer groups I had become pretty well convinced that a real taxidermist needed to know the technique of several quite different things.

First, he must be a field man who can collect his own specimens, for other people's measurements are never very satisfactory, and actual study of the animals in their own environment is necessary in making natural groups.

Second, he must know both animal anatomy and clay modelling in order to make his models.

Third, he should have something of the artistic sense to make his groups pleasing as well as accurate.

Fourth, he must know the technique of manikin making, the tanning of skins, and the making of accessories such as artificial leaves, branches, etc.

With all these different kinds of technique in taxidermy it is obvious that if a man attempts to do practically everything himself, as I did in the deer groups, taxidermy must be a very slow process—just as if a painter had to learn to make his own paint or a sculptor to cast his own bronzes or chisel his concepts out of granite or marble.

The proper care of the skins in the field is itself a subject of infinite ramifications. I remember, for instance, my experience in skinning the first elephant that I killed. I shot him in the early afternoon. I immediately set to work photographing and measuring him. That took about an hour, and then I set to the serious work of getting off his skin. I worked as rapidly as I could, wherever possible using the help of the fifty boys of my safari, and by strenuous efforts finished taking the skin off and salting it by breakfast time the next morning. And that was not quick enough. Before I got all the skin off the carcass some of it on the under side had begun to decompose and I lost a little of it. This was a particularly difficult beast to skin because he had fallen in a little hollow and after skinning the exposed side of him all the efforts of the fifty black boys to roll him over, out of the depression, so that we could easily get at the other side, failed. After I had had more practice, I was able to photograph, measure, and skin an elephant and have his hide salted in eight hours. But then the work on the skin was only begun. A green skin like this weighs a ton and a quarter and in places is as much as two and a half inches thick. There is about four days' work in thinning it. I have had thirty or forty black boys for days cutting at the inside of the skin in this thinning process or sharpening the knives with which they did the work.

When it is finally thinned down, thoroughly dried and salted, it presents another problem. Moisture will ruin it. Salt, the only available preservative, attracts moisture. It isn't possible to carry zinc-lined cases into the forests after elephants. I tried building thatched roofs over the skins but it was not a success. I speculated on many other plans but none appeared feasible. Finally Nature provided a solution for the difficulty.

There are, in the elephant country, many great swarms of bees. I set the natives to work collecting beeswax which is as impervious to moisture as shellac. I melted the wax and used it to coat unbleached cotton cloth, known in East Africa as Americana. In this water-tight, wax-covered cloth I wrapped my dried and salted rolls of skins and packed them on the porters' heads down to the railroad.

As a matter of fact, field conditions make it so difficult to care for skins properly that only a very small percentage ever reach a taxidermy shop in perfect condition.

Similarly the measurement of animals for taxidermy presents many difficulties. The size of a lion's leg, for instance, measured as it hangs limp after the animal's death is not accurate data for the leg with the muscles taut ready for action. Nor is an animal's body the same size with its lungs deflated in death as when the breath of life was in its body. All these things must be taken into account in using measurements or even casts to resurrect an animal true to its living appearance.

My work on the deer groups impressed me with the fact that taxidermy, if it was to be an art, must have skilled assistance as the other arts have. I began to dream of museums which would have artist-naturalists who would have the vision to plan groups and the skill to model them and who would be furnished with skilled assistance in the making of the manikins and accessories and in the mounting of the animals. And it seemed as if the dream were about to come true. About this time I had a conference with Dr. Herman Bumpus, then director of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He told me that he had then at the museum a young man named James Clark who could model but who did not know the technique of making manikins and mounting animals. The result of our talk was that Clark came out to my shop in Chicago and together we went through the whole process, mounting a doe which now stands in the American Museum. But the old museum trouble broke out again. It cost a lot to mount animals in the method which Clark brought back. So there was pressure to reduce the cost and, under this pressure, the methods, in the words of O. Henry, "were damaged by improvements." However, in the course of time it was demonstrated that while it often happens that an honest effort to make a thing better often makes it cheaper also, an effort merely to cheapen a thing very seldom makes it better.

In the meanwhile, in 1905, I went to Africa again, to collect zoölogical material for the Field Museum.

Again, in 1909, I went, this time for the American Museum of Natural History. I stayed two years, studying elephants, lions, and lion spearing. When I got back and set to work mounting the elephant group in the American Museum in New York, I discovered that with these hairless skins there was opportunity for a little simplification of the method used in the deer groups. It was possible actually to model the skin on the clay manikin, only in this case the clay manikin was for convenience in three pieces. A layer of plaster of paris was then laid on outside the skin to hold it firmly in shape. Then the clay removed from the inside was replaced with a layer of plaster. Thus every detail of the skin was held firmly in the matrix of plaster until it was thoroughly dried, when the plaster was removed from the inside and replaced with succeeding layers of wire cloth and shellaced papier-mâché, making the skin an integral part of the manikin. In other words, the skin functioned practically as does the muslin in the manikins made for haired animals. When this was done the plaster mould was taken off the outside and the clean, light, durable half-sections of elephants were put together.

When I got back from Africa in 1911 I was dreaming of a great African Hall which would combine all the advances that had been made in taxidermy and the arts of museum exhibition and at the same time would make a permanent record of the fast-disappearing wild life of that most interesting animal kingdom, Africa.