January 8, 2022 • 33 mins
This 2014 episode discusses Jules Verreaux and his two brothers, who collected an impressive array of flora and fauna specimens from around the world for placement with museums and collectors. They also did some really unsavory things that had long-term ramifications.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since Jules Verreaux came up in our episode
on the Platypus, we thought we would bring our Verreaux
Brothers episode back into people's feeds. The Verreaux Brothers and
their taxidermy tableaus have also come up on Unearthed, including
the tableau now known as Lion Attacking and Dromedary. When
we recorded this, it was believed that this tableau did
(00:23):
not include any real human remains, but as we discussed
in Unearthed in Surprize, it actually does. This tableau was
also covered up for a time in and it came
back on full display in July of One of the
Verreau brothers most horrifying actions which we talked about in
this episode was stealing the body of a man who
(00:46):
was believed to be from Botswana and then using that
body to create a taxidermy display. After this episode came out,
we got a message from listener Tina, who grew up
in Botswana and let us know that a person from
Botswana is called a mots Wanna. Cina also noted the
pronunciation of the city Habrone, and there continues to be
(01:07):
debates about where this person was really from. There are
articles from as recently as twenty nineteen, suggesting that he
may really have been from close to Cape Town, South Africa,
rather than from Botswana, so the mysteries continue. This episode
originally came out on November Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:30):
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly Frying and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. So sometimes we will pick a topic
because it seems interesting in light, Like we've had a
lot of heavy stuff. So you and I have both
been pretty open that we're looking at just some less intense, troublesome,
(01:54):
fair les horrifying. Yeah. Uh. And then while you're doing
the research on that thing that seems like it would
just be cool and fascinating, you discover a whole other
story that you didn't know was there. This is one
of those cases. Uh. So for context, it'll sound like
I'm going off on a crazy tangent, but it's Jermaine.
One of my favorite animals of all time, like in
the world, is the verro sifaka. And this is uh
(02:17):
an animal you've probably seen footage of. There are members
of the Lemur family uh Indre Day and their native
dramatic gascar. So even if you don't recognize your name,
you have probably seen footage of them. Um. They sometimes
versions of them show up on children's shows and in
cartoons because they're so incredibly cute. They're mostly white, and
they have kind of rust brown bellies and these dark
(02:38):
chocolate colored faces and these big eyes, and they're so cute.
There are a million videos of them on YouTube hopping
around because they sometimes will travel on the ground upright
in kind of a crazy jumping motion, and people like
to set it to music. It's adorable. We'll try to
include a link to at least one of those in
the show notes. So I thought, hey, you know, it
would be really cool we should talk about Jules Verreau,
(03:00):
who is the naturalist for whom these charming animals were named.
And then the research got a little bit dark but
also kind of interesting and exciting, even though some of
the subject matter is troubling, and it's not that the
dark parts are also the exciting parts. There's a largely
two different parts. There's a lot of different elements to
(03:21):
the story, and it really involves an entire family and
sort of their family business. Uh, it's involves botany and
taxidermy and grave robbing and the Paris exposition and kind
of a lot of different things that we've talked about
on the show before in different episodes, but this really
kind of stacks a number of them together and it's
(03:42):
kind of fascinating in that regard. So that is the
scoop about Jules Verreaux and sort of how we got
to some you'll see it's about halfway through we get
to kind of the really thing that might make your
if you feel a little unease about some of the
things that they did in the name of exploration and
uh science, but also kind of sensationalist tourism kind of attractions.
(04:11):
So normally we would start an episode that revolves around
the actions of people like this by talking about the
early lives of those people. But this is kind of
tricky in this case because even though there was some
fame and notoriety to the family, the accounts of like
what their childhood with the family, the patriarch and then
his children who really become the prime point of the story,
(04:33):
like what their home life and their childhoods were like,
it's pretty sparse and there's a lot of really contradictory stories.
So it's sort of this happens a lot with much
older history, where it's sort of like and suddenly there
was a mathematician. Yeah, this seems recent enough that I'm like,
there should be more stuff. But I think part of
it is that because there is a lot of exploring
(04:55):
that happened, and at one point there was a ship
that sank, was things like I'm wondering if documents got
lost or journals got lost along the way. So that's
the scoop. So in eighteen oh three, taxidermist Jacques Philippe
Verreaux opened Maison Varreau, which was a taxidermy house. So
Maison Varreau provided taxidermy specimens to museums and collectors, and
(05:20):
this was the foremost supplier of natural exhibit pieces, and
work from the Verreau family business is still on display
in museums throughout the world. Actually, now I'm wondering if
there were any at the I went to a very
odd museum a couple of weekends ago that was full
of really old taxidermy specimens, and now I wish I
had made note of who had prepared them all. It's
(05:42):
very possible. There are like a lot of big name
museums that still have their pieces, and one of them
were gonna talk about at length a little bit later.
But I suspect because we're talking about huge volume that
these guys were doing in terms of the specimens they prepared,
and uh there, I'm sure some of that has trickled
out into much smaller, uh and sort of less flagship
(06:06):
museums that are a little bit more specialized. But so
jacqu Philippe and his wife Josephine had three sons. So
there was Jules Pierre, who was born in eighteen o seven,
Jean Baptiste Eduard, who went by Edwards throughout his life.
In eighteen ten, and their youngest son was Joseph Alexey,
and he went by Alexey. When their oldest son, Jules
(06:26):
was eleven or maybe twelve, because he accounts very a
little bit, he traveled with his uncle, naturalist Pierre de
la Land to South Africa. Jules was in South Africa
until he was thirteen, and when the two of them
came back, they brought more than a hundred and thirty
thousand specimens home with them. This number was mostly made
up of plant specimens, but they were also almost three
(06:47):
hundred mammals more than two thousand birds and several hundred
fish and reptiles. And then also in their collection were
a number of human skulls and full skeletons which had
been exhumed from their burial spots in Cape Town. And
one of the larger specimens that they brought back was
the skeleton of a hippopotamus, which I don't think had
(07:08):
ever been uh collected before, and that went on display
at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Once he was
back in Paris, Jewels studied anatomy and taxidermy, and he
had this natural proclivity for preserving biological sample. He very
uh almost effortlessly sort of fell in line with the
(07:29):
family business, like he was just really naturally extremely good
at at mounting specimens. And in so Jewels had been
studying for a while his uncle Pierre died. That was
the uncle that he had traveled to Cape Town originally with,
and so Juels actually returned to Cape Town after Pierre's death,
and eventually while he was working there, he helped to
establish and become curator of the South African Museum, and
(07:52):
that was a post that he officially began in eighteen
twenty nine. Although the wheels were turning on getting it
set up before that, and he also the whole time
he was there, Can tinued to collect samples of both
flora and fauna. During this second collection phase, it just
became glaringly obvious that he was going to need help,
so he sent for his brother, Edward, the second son
(08:12):
of Maizomboro, made this journey to Cape Town in eighteen thirty. Yes,
so that was just the year after Jules became Jules
assumed his post at the South African Museum. And during
this time there's also some interesting it's almost like a
side note in a lot of the the accounts you read, Uh,
he became interested in seeking out sort of mythological creatures
(08:34):
to see if they had any basis in reality. So
he was actually searching for a unicorn during this time,
and also an elephant bird, which was apparently extinct. It
was also during this time that the Bureaux brothers came
into possession of an item that would just be extremely
controversial and I would say justifiably so long after the
(08:54):
two of them were gone. But before we get into
this sort of grim bit of taxidermy, do you want
to pause and have a word from a sponsor, so
we don't interrupt sort of the dark weirdness with let's
do okay, okay. So before the break, Edward had traveled
(09:19):
to South Africa to assist his older brother Jewels in
the collection of specimens, both for the museum, where Jewels
was a curator and for a return to Paris to
be sold to collectors as part of the ongoing family
high end taxidermy business. And while the search for a
unicorn or some other mythical animal didn't pan out, they
did get their hands on a human specimen and this
(09:41):
particular piece actually involved a grave robbing um what is
believed possibly this isn't a hunder percent confirmed, and we'll
talk about this later to be a native Botswana man
was taken from his resting place, preserved and mounted, and
in a letter to Paris Museum director George Cuvier, Jules wrote, quote,
an object which is not the least interesting in our
(10:03):
collection is a stuffed Bushwana. So it's a little bit
of a wiggly a way to say Botswana, which is
very well preserved, and which was about to cause my
death because in order to get it I was obliged
to disenter it at night in places guarded by his fellows.
Really French guy. Yeah, it's uh, there's one account and
(10:26):
we'll talk about, like I said, this particular specimen more
because his history reaches quite far through history. Um, there
was one particular piece of research I was doing. They
were like, you can almost kind of like excuse it
a little as just contextualized in the time. But even so,
I think what's telling is that the museum did not
(10:48):
want it, but they were like, no, thank you. Uh,
they said, we would not like to purchase this piece
from you. Yeah, so it went on display at Maison
Varrow because they had it. It was already shipped. Upsetting.
It is upsetting well, and I think the reason that
there are a lot of things that we talked about
(11:08):
that happened in the past would definitely be inexcusable today.
And like there's some degree at the time, right, attitudes
are very different. It's been really long established that like
burying of the dead is a pretty sacrisanct thing across cultures,
(11:30):
and that's where I kind of go, guys, you should
have known better. Yeah, well, especially when he talks about
how he had to like sneakily do it like he's guarded. Yeah,
surely there was a question mark in your head, like
is this the right thing to do? And I don't
We don't know, unfortunately, if he was just so driven
by this spirit of collection and you know, cataloging the
(11:53):
world of all of its various types of creatures, or
if he was just kind of weasily and us wanted
to sell it off for money, Like, it's not really clear,
but it certainly seems like there had to have. You
would hope there was a moment of moral debate in
his head at least that The following piece appeared in
the Parisian periodical La Constitutional. And this is a translation
(12:17):
that runs a little long, but we wanted to include
all of it because it's a really good indicator of
the cultural attitude at the time toward Native Africans. Yeah,
and this appeared in November of one So bear with me,
I'm going to read the whole thing. Two young people, monsieur,
the Varreaux brothers have recently arrived from a voyage to
the ends of Africa, to the land of the Cape
(12:39):
of Good Hope. One of these interesting naturalists is barely
eighteen years old, but he has already spent twenty months
in the wild country north of the land of the
Hot and Tots, between the latitudes of Natal and the
top of Saint Helena Bay. How can one possibly imagine
what deprivations he had to endure. Our young compatriots had
to face the dangers of living in the midst of
(13:00):
natives in this zone of Africa, who are ferocious as
well as black, as well as the fawn colored wild
animals among which they live, about which we do not
need to tell. We want to speak only about the
triumphs of their collecting, and do not know which to
admire more They're intrepidity or their perseverance. Humans, quadrupeds, birds, fish, plants,
(13:20):
mineral shells. All of these they have studied. They're hunting
has given them tigers, lions, hyenas, and admirable lubal, a
crimson antelope of rare elegance, a host of other small
members of the same family, two giraffes, monkeys, long pitchforks,
very curious rats, ostriches, birds of prey which have never
been described before, A great quantity of other birds of
(13:43):
all sizes, colors and species. They also have a collection
of birds nests which could be the object of a
charming descriptive essay. Roots like onions and other plants of
remarkable shape and extraordinary size, snakes, a cashelo, and a
crocodile of a type previously unknown, but their greatest curiosity
is an individual of the nation of the Bejuanas. This
(14:05):
man is preserved by the means by which naturalists prepare
their specimens and reconstitute their form, and, so to speak,
their inert life. He is of small stature, black of skin,
his head covered by short, wooly and curly hair, armed
with arrows and a lance, clothes in antelope skin, with
a bag made of bush pig, full of small glass beads, seeds,
(14:27):
and of small bones. Another thing that we are rather
embarrassed to find a suitable to term to characterize is
the very special accessory of modest clothing worn by the
best Juanas, which we find most striking. Monsieur Verro have
deposited their scientific riches at the stores of Monsieur de
Lasserre rue Salfiac number three. They are generously put on
(14:50):
display for the public without charge. It would be well
of the Gardin de Pilante, which is the botanical gardens
took this opportunity to extend its collections already so beautiful,
to become even more desirable, and to use the skills
which they did not already possess of Monsieur Verrot with
the time, the talent, and the energy necessary to go
out Africa to catch nature in the act. It's so
(15:14):
crazy of this weird grossness. It really, well you say
weird grossness, Like this part turns my stomach where they're
talking about this part that it's a man. Isn't it
great that they did this? You guys. It's such a bizarre,
uh like way to sell it to my mind, you know,
like my sensibilities are very like troubled that they're like,
(15:39):
what we really want to talk about is how amazing
these two guys are. Yeah, and then they talk about
the specimen of the Botswan and with such delight and
right like, oh, it's the neatest thing, And I'm like,
that's a person. So listeners, sometimes this is what happened
(16:00):
when we just want to talk about adorable lemurs, as
we find horrifying things instead. So the middle brother, Edward
brought this human display and an assortment of other samples
to Paris in eighteen thirty one, and a lot of
them were delivered into the hands of museums that were
really eager to expand their collections. So we're gonna come
back to this particular piece of taxidermy in a bit,
(16:22):
because the story of this mounted human specimen reaches all
the way up to very recent history. But as for
the Verreaux brothers themselves, when Edward returned to South Africa
the following year, so that would be thirty two, he
also brought their third brother, Alexei, with him. It's believed
that Alexei never left Africa after his arrival and lived
(16:43):
out the rest of his life there, assisting with jules
collection efforts. Jules and Edwards seemed to have done some traveling,
although there's no definitive record on exactly where they went,
and the list includes usually places like the Philippines in China,
it does appear that it point in late eighteen thirties,
a shipment of their specimens was lost on its way
(17:04):
to Paris when the whole ship that was carrying the
collection sank. Yeah, that's usually if you look at different accounts,
that's usually consistent. Uh. And then getting into the eighteen forties.
It's consistent. But during that period of the eighteen thirties,
particularly the early half, there will be accounts of them
being in two different places at the same time, in
(17:26):
different like you know, journals and accounts that other people
have given. We will say, oh, they were in China then,
and it's some other one says it's like, it doesn't
even acknowledge that one exists. They may not have known that,
but it's like, oh, and then they were here in
this part of the world, and they could not have
been in both of those places. So it is a
little bit hard to actually track their movements. In eighteen
forty two, Jules Verreaux made his way to Australia and
(17:50):
he wanted to expand his preserved sample of offerings to
include more specimens from outside of Africa. He explored New
South Wales and Tasmania and he gathered all kinds of botanicals, insects,
birds and mammals, and again he gained some the possession
of some human remains. Yeah, they you know have It
(18:11):
comes up periodically that they had multiple samples of human remains.
It it's usually believed by most people. I think that
they really only did the one mounting of a human
and that the rest were sort of like bones that
have been discovered along the way. They may have. We
talked about them disentering some bodies in South Africa, uh,
(18:32):
some of the skeletons, but just for context, there was
just the one taxidermy human that we know of. One
too many, it is, but I just want to make
that clear that this wasn't like a They weren't making
a career of taxidermyng people. So, after five years of
exploring Australia, Jewels returned to Paris and for several years
(18:53):
he worked on organizing and naming the collection, both the
new things that he had brought as well as you know,
sort of placing them in contact with other specimens that
he had collected through the years. He was eventually employed
as an assistant naturalist at the Paris Museum of Natural History,
and that started in eighteen sixty two, so it had
been more than a decade that he had been kind
of working on classifications and and descriptive catalogs of all
(19:17):
of his various pieces that he had gathered throughout the world.
Jules had continued to work on his taxidermy throughout his
whole life in his travels, but it's in the late
eighteen sixties that he made one of his most famous
mounted tableau, and it was entitled Arab Courier Attacked by Lions.
In this display, a mannequin outfitted in the black cape
(19:37):
that was typical of the Arab and our address of
North Africa is featured in the fictional moment that he's
pulled off of the camel he's riding by two Barbary lions.
An Arab courier won the Gold Medal for Excellence at
the Paris Exposition in eighteen sixty seven, and during the
seven months it was on display there, more than fifteen
(19:58):
million spectators came just to see it. Uh. It was
a really dramatic shift from most of the taxidermy that
had come before it, and certainly different than almost anyone
had seen before, because prior to that, it was pretty
common even if you were setting up a scene of
taxidermy that it would kind of just be multiple mounts
kind of in a line. But this is the first
(20:18):
time that it really was sort of an action scene
that depicted like an event happening. After the Paris Exposition closed,
the American Museum of Natural History bought Burrows display and
it wasn't available for public viewing for some time. Once
museum officials saw the piece in person, they thought it
was a little too ghost to be part of their collection,
(20:39):
so they kept just kept it in storage for thirty years. Yeah,
basically was in a warehouse in New York for all
that time. Eventually, though, in it was sold. It was
sold to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was
fairly new at the time, for the tidy sum of
fifty dollars, and it eventually became a prominent part of
the collection there. There is one story that it they
(21:03):
were going to be charged. I think it's forty five
dollars for them to actually transport it from its storage
place to the museum, and I think that ruffled some feathers,
like we just paid fifty dollars for this, and we
gotta pay another fifty just to get it here. Uh.
But it did eventually make its way to the collection.
And while there have been rumors throughout the years that
the man on the camel was an actual human, it
(21:25):
is not. And that's one of those things that has
been debated. There was a restoration point where it was
worked on because there had been, you know, some degradation
of the the specimen. But even so, I think most people,
in most museum curators that have been involved with it,
I don't think it was ever an actual human, but
because of the precedent of the Botswanan man, they there
(21:45):
have always been some suspicions. And as a side note,
Barbary lions went extinct not long after the Verreaux assembled
this tableau, So if you're interested in seeing Arab courier
attacked by lions, it's still on display at the Carnegie Museum.
The museum modeled a snow globe after it in two
thousand and nine. Yeah, they started like an interesting program
(22:09):
where they were doing snow globes of some of their
most interesting and famous pieces, and that was the one
that kicked off the collection. So I have never seen
one of the snow globes and how it actually turned out,
but it's kind of fascinating. I had this brief moment
where I was like, I want one. I should start
a snow globe collection, and then immediately where are you
going to put a snow loocalections, That's the problem always uh. So,
(22:31):
both Edward and Alexei died in eighteen sixty eight and
in eighteen seventies, so that was right after this big
sort of triumph at the Paris Exposition of Jules's Peace.
And in eighteen seventy Jules Verreaux left France as the
franc Oppression more began and he fled to England and
he lived there for three years before he died. And
(22:52):
when he had sold the Arab courier piece to the
American Museum of Natural History, he sold with it to
them the vast majority of the collection of Maison Vaux.
And there's been some speculation that he actually knew his
health was already pretty dicey at that point and he
wanted to make sure that collection went somewhere and somewhere
(23:13):
that was a museum that would understand what exactly they
were getting, because it's been discussed by some historians that
he probably was already pretty sick from the ongoing exposure
to chemicals used in taxidermy that he had basically been
doing since he was a child. So, uh, he was
not in great health at that point. Despite some claims
(23:36):
that there was a child born out of wedlock, when
Jules was still very young. This was the end of
the Verreaux brothers liege. And while there are a number
of species that bear the Verreaux name as a consequence
of all the exploration and collecting that Jules and Edward
did and that Alexei assisted them with, there has also
been some confusion about certain species based on some incorrect
(23:57):
labeling that Jules is believed to have done to some
of their collected pieces. And there's been some speculation that
he may have purposely mislabeled some specimens uh and the
locations where they had been found to make them appear
more exotic and therefore more valuable to museums and collectors.
We don't know whether or not that was the case,
but regardless of the cause of this labeling UH sloppiness,
(24:21):
those poorly cataloged items kind of did a bit of
a disservice to science. There have been a couple of
points of confusion over the years. Was like, wait, this
animal isn't really native to this place, like uh, And
eventually they realized like, no, this is just wrong. Yeah. Well,
and I want to point out that that poor or
inaccurate labor labeling is like not unique to these guys. No,
(24:42):
not at all. There are frequently stories that will come
across our radar, which is like a museum found something
really stunning in their collection that they didn't know they had.
And yeah, a lot of times people are ready to
go whoever made that mistakes should be fired. And I'm
kind of like that guy made that mistake in about
nineteen twelve. Well moreover, I mean, I uh, not that
it excuses it, but when you're bringing back hundreds of
(25:06):
thousands of things at a time, I could imagine it
would be easy to lose track of something, or you know,
even if you're attempting to be meticulous, you could just
write down the wrong note in your book as you
go to keep track of uh. And I promised we
would return back to the taxidermy man, and we will,
but first we're going to have a word from a sponsor.
(25:29):
If that's cool with Tracy. I think we should have
a break before we get to this scene. So back
to our story and to the part that I promised
we would come back to you. You're probably wondering what
happened to that taxidermy man from Botswana. Uh. Well, in
(25:52):
the eighteen eighties, a Spanish taxidermist and veterinarian named Frances Darter.
It's probably pronounced differently, but usually uh said that way
when people are just discussing it in the sources. I
looked at purchased the piece, uh, And originally he was
gonna he put it on display at the Spanish Exposition,
and then after he passed, it landed in the Darter
(26:14):
Museum of Natural History, which is in Spain. So this
exhibit was simply labeled El Negro and it drew crowds
for years and not just a few years. Years. The
most shocking part of this story lies in the fact
that this tax that are made human being was on
display until the late nineteen nineties. Yeah, nin nineties, so
(26:41):
a very long time to be standing there. I think
the part that really gets me is that this was
not a person like I could almost see a taxidermy
to human being on display if that had been their wish,
Like they're certainly people that have donated their bodies, and
I get this is like a grave robbed situation. And
then this person just stayed on display forever, which is troubling. Uh.
(27:04):
So in the museum was asked if they would consent
to return the body to Botswana to be respectfully put
to rest at last, after being an African novelty for
Europeans on display for more than a hundred and fifty years.
And initially the museum refused. If this were happening today,
the internet would jump all over. So, writing for The
(27:27):
New York Times in two thousand, Rachel Swarns stated the
significance of the display piece and here's a quote to Africans,
he was a symbol of racism lingering from the turn
of the century when blacks were paraded as freaks in
the vaudeville shows and natural history museums of Europe and America. Yeah,
he was certainly not the only instance of this happening. Uh,
(27:49):
But this really became a case where people thought, like
this is correctable, like we can at least make this
a better situation. And so the Spanish government and the
organization and of African community really worked in collaboration to
try to convince the Darter Museum to just acquiesce to
this request and finally let Elne grow go home. Curators
(28:09):
at the museum it seemed like they almost based on
what I've read, I mean, I haven't seen interviews with
these people are seen their firsthand accounts, but the way
it reads, it sounds almost like they were just kind
of briskly that they were hurt that they had been
called racists, and so is that really tricky thing where
they were like, no, we're really respectful about this display,
(28:31):
and we put it in context. Uh, you know, we
talked about the history and the nature of exploration and
specimen collection in the early eighteen hundreds, and but eventually
they kind of saw the error of that whole logic loop,
and so they did give into this request and the
body was finally released. A medical examination was performed on
a preserved body, and it's believed that elniegrow died of
(28:55):
a lung infection at the age of about twenty seven
and eight. Dater X exhibition brochure claims that the Verreau
Whethers attended the man's funeral and then stole his body
later that night, although there's no way to verify these claims. Yeah,
we don't know if that was written to be like
a sensational museum card or if that's the actual case.
(29:15):
It certainly does line up a little bit with Jules
Verreaux's letter to the Parisian uh museum head where he
kind of says, like we had to sneakily get this
while his body was being guarded, but we don't really
have a solid exact timeline of how that all played out. Well,
and then like, in my mind, if that part is true,
(29:35):
if that's really what they did, like that makes it
even worse. Yes, exactly, because like there are lots of
times in history where where people of one group have
sort of felt like people of another group were not
human beings. That doesn't make it okay. I'm not saying
that's okay or that that justifies anything. But if you
have just literally watched somebody have a funeral for their
(29:57):
fallen kinsman and then you go and steal his body,
like there is no way that you're justifying to yourself
that that that was not a human being, right, it
just becomes really reprehensible at that point. It's like it
was represensible already, and but now it's like fifty times
more than it already was. Exactly, It's really it's just yeah.
Uh So, while it was never confirmed either whether or
(30:20):
not the man had originally been from Botswana, he was
returned there in two thousand to be reinterred, and he
was buried in a state funeral in Gabarone after several
days of visitation, during which huge crowds of people turned
out just to pay their respects to this unknown man.
At the funeral, Foreign Minister Lieutenant General mom Patti Murafe
said in his speech today, a hundred and seventy years later,
(30:43):
we're gathered here not only to re enter the body
in African soil, where it likely belongs, but also to
cleanse that act of desecration, restore the dignity of a
common ancestor, to appease the spirits of Africa, and above all,
to correct or wrong, which has no statute of limitations.
So I thought it was going to be about cute lemurs,
(31:04):
and it was about something, and then it became different,
which is really sort of a more important story. It's
not sort of. It really is a more important story
to tell. It just wasn't what I thought I was
getting into at the beginning. But I'm glad that that
came to light as I was researching, because I remember
the oh I got to do something on the Robe brothers,
their taxidermists. They discovered all these animals whoa they did
horrible things. WHOA. You and I have these conversations sometimes
(31:28):
while you're researching at your desk and I'm researching at
my desk, and we have these instant message things where
like one of us is expressing horror or delight or
surprise or whatever, and I like, I got this. I
think it was I am and I am from you.
You were like this turned out really really upsetting. I
(31:50):
didn't think this was happening. But again, like I said,
that's an important story to tell. And you know, we
were certainly around when all of this was happening in
the late but I don't really remember seeing anything about it.
Well I don't remember, which could just be me. I
wasn't tuned into it, but yeah, and I think I
(32:11):
probably I don't know if I heard specifically about it
or not. Like there has been enough in the last
few decades, uh, controversy and debate about repatriation of various
artifacts and things, um that it's like I don't know
if among hearing about those stories, I also heard about
this one or not. It definitely I don't remember specifically
(32:33):
hearing about it. Yeah, I did not stick out of
my mind. Uh, But how's the Scoop, Hey so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook ur L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
(32:56):
current email address is History podcast at i hear radio
dot com. Our old house stuff works, email at us
no longer works, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
(33:20):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. Since Jules Verreaux came up in our episode
on the Platypus, we thought we would bring our Verreaux
Brothers episode back into people's feeds. The Verreaux Brothers and
their taxidermy tableaus have also come up on Unearthed, including
the tableau now known as Lion Attacking and Dromedary. When
we recorded this, it was believed that this tableau did
(00:23):
not include any real human remains, but as we discussed
in Unearthed in Surprize, it actually does. This tableau was
also covered up for a time in and it came
back on full display in July of One of the
Verreau brothers most horrifying actions which we talked about in
this episode was stealing the body of a man who
(00:46):
was believed to be from Botswana and then using that
body to create a taxidermy display. After this episode came out,
we got a message from listener Tina, who grew up
in Botswana and let us know that a person from
Botswana is called a mots Wanna. Cina also noted the
pronunciation of the city Habrone, and there continues to be
(01:07):
debates about where this person was really from. There are
articles from as recently as twenty nineteen, suggesting that he
may really have been from close to Cape Town, South Africa,
rather than from Botswana, so the mysteries continue. This episode
originally came out on November Welcome to Stuff You Missed
(01:30):
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly Frying and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. So sometimes we will pick a topic
because it seems interesting in light, Like we've had a
lot of heavy stuff. So you and I have both
been pretty open that we're looking at just some less intense, troublesome,
(01:54):
fair les horrifying. Yeah. Uh. And then while you're doing
the research on that thing that seems like it would
just be cool and fascinating, you discover a whole other
story that you didn't know was there. This is one
of those cases. Uh. So for context, it'll sound like
I'm going off on a crazy tangent, but it's Jermaine.
One of my favorite animals of all time, like in
the world, is the verro sifaka. And this is uh
(02:17):
an animal you've probably seen footage of. There are members
of the Lemur family uh Indre Day and their native
dramatic gascar. So even if you don't recognize your name,
you have probably seen footage of them. Um. They sometimes
versions of them show up on children's shows and in
cartoons because they're so incredibly cute. They're mostly white, and
they have kind of rust brown bellies and these dark
(02:38):
chocolate colored faces and these big eyes, and they're so cute.
There are a million videos of them on YouTube hopping
around because they sometimes will travel on the ground upright
in kind of a crazy jumping motion, and people like
to set it to music. It's adorable. We'll try to
include a link to at least one of those in
the show notes. So I thought, hey, you know, it
would be really cool we should talk about Jules Verreau,
(03:00):
who is the naturalist for whom these charming animals were named.
And then the research got a little bit dark but
also kind of interesting and exciting, even though some of
the subject matter is troubling, and it's not that the
dark parts are also the exciting parts. There's a largely
two different parts. There's a lot of different elements to
(03:21):
the story, and it really involves an entire family and
sort of their family business. Uh, it's involves botany and
taxidermy and grave robbing and the Paris exposition and kind
of a lot of different things that we've talked about
on the show before in different episodes, but this really
kind of stacks a number of them together and it's
(03:42):
kind of fascinating in that regard. So that is the
scoop about Jules Verreaux and sort of how we got
to some you'll see it's about halfway through we get
to kind of the really thing that might make your
if you feel a little unease about some of the
things that they did in the name of exploration and
uh science, but also kind of sensationalist tourism kind of attractions.
(04:11):
So normally we would start an episode that revolves around
the actions of people like this by talking about the
early lives of those people. But this is kind of
tricky in this case because even though there was some
fame and notoriety to the family, the accounts of like
what their childhood with the family, the patriarch and then
his children who really become the prime point of the story,
(04:33):
like what their home life and their childhoods were like,
it's pretty sparse and there's a lot of really contradictory stories.
So it's sort of this happens a lot with much
older history, where it's sort of like and suddenly there
was a mathematician. Yeah, this seems recent enough that I'm like,
there should be more stuff. But I think part of
it is that because there is a lot of exploring
(04:55):
that happened, and at one point there was a ship
that sank, was things like I'm wondering if documents got
lost or journals got lost along the way. So that's
the scoop. So in eighteen oh three, taxidermist Jacques Philippe
Verreaux opened Maison Varreau, which was a taxidermy house. So
Maison Varreau provided taxidermy specimens to museums and collectors, and
(05:20):
this was the foremost supplier of natural exhibit pieces, and
work from the Verreau family business is still on display
in museums throughout the world. Actually, now I'm wondering if
there were any at the I went to a very
odd museum a couple of weekends ago that was full
of really old taxidermy specimens, and now I wish I
had made note of who had prepared them all. It's
(05:42):
very possible. There are like a lot of big name
museums that still have their pieces, and one of them
were gonna talk about at length a little bit later.
But I suspect because we're talking about huge volume that
these guys were doing in terms of the specimens they prepared,
and uh there, I'm sure some of that has trickled
out into much smaller, uh and sort of less flagship
(06:06):
museums that are a little bit more specialized. But so
jacqu Philippe and his wife Josephine had three sons. So
there was Jules Pierre, who was born in eighteen o seven,
Jean Baptiste Eduard, who went by Edwards throughout his life.
In eighteen ten, and their youngest son was Joseph Alexey,
and he went by Alexey. When their oldest son, Jules
(06:26):
was eleven or maybe twelve, because he accounts very a
little bit, he traveled with his uncle, naturalist Pierre de
la Land to South Africa. Jules was in South Africa
until he was thirteen, and when the two of them
came back, they brought more than a hundred and thirty
thousand specimens home with them. This number was mostly made
up of plant specimens, but they were also almost three
(06:47):
hundred mammals more than two thousand birds and several hundred
fish and reptiles. And then also in their collection were
a number of human skulls and full skeletons which had
been exhumed from their burial spots in Cape Town. And
one of the larger specimens that they brought back was
the skeleton of a hippopotamus, which I don't think had
(07:08):
ever been uh collected before, and that went on display
at the Paris Museum of Natural History. Once he was
back in Paris, Jewels studied anatomy and taxidermy, and he
had this natural proclivity for preserving biological sample. He very
uh almost effortlessly sort of fell in line with the
(07:29):
family business, like he was just really naturally extremely good
at at mounting specimens. And in so Jewels had been
studying for a while his uncle Pierre died. That was
the uncle that he had traveled to Cape Town originally with,
and so Juels actually returned to Cape Town after Pierre's death,
and eventually while he was working there, he helped to
establish and become curator of the South African Museum, and
(07:52):
that was a post that he officially began in eighteen
twenty nine. Although the wheels were turning on getting it
set up before that, and he also the whole time
he was there, Can tinued to collect samples of both
flora and fauna. During this second collection phase, it just
became glaringly obvious that he was going to need help,
so he sent for his brother, Edward, the second son
(08:12):
of Maizomboro, made this journey to Cape Town in eighteen thirty. Yes,
so that was just the year after Jules became Jules
assumed his post at the South African Museum. And during
this time there's also some interesting it's almost like a
side note in a lot of the the accounts you read, Uh,
he became interested in seeking out sort of mythological creatures
(08:34):
to see if they had any basis in reality. So
he was actually searching for a unicorn during this time,
and also an elephant bird, which was apparently extinct. It
was also during this time that the Bureaux brothers came
into possession of an item that would just be extremely
controversial and I would say justifiably so long after the
(08:54):
two of them were gone. But before we get into
this sort of grim bit of taxidermy, do you want
to pause and have a word from a sponsor, so
we don't interrupt sort of the dark weirdness with let's
do okay, okay. So before the break, Edward had traveled
(09:19):
to South Africa to assist his older brother Jewels in
the collection of specimens, both for the museum, where Jewels
was a curator and for a return to Paris to
be sold to collectors as part of the ongoing family
high end taxidermy business. And while the search for a
unicorn or some other mythical animal didn't pan out, they
did get their hands on a human specimen and this
(09:41):
particular piece actually involved a grave robbing um what is
believed possibly this isn't a hunder percent confirmed, and we'll
talk about this later to be a native Botswana man
was taken from his resting place, preserved and mounted, and
in a letter to Paris Museum director George Cuvier, Jules wrote, quote,
an object which is not the least interesting in our
(10:03):
collection is a stuffed Bushwana. So it's a little bit
of a wiggly a way to say Botswana, which is
very well preserved, and which was about to cause my
death because in order to get it I was obliged
to disenter it at night in places guarded by his fellows.
Really French guy. Yeah, it's uh, there's one account and
(10:26):
we'll talk about, like I said, this particular specimen more
because his history reaches quite far through history. Um, there
was one particular piece of research I was doing. They
were like, you can almost kind of like excuse it
a little as just contextualized in the time. But even so,
I think what's telling is that the museum did not
(10:48):
want it, but they were like, no, thank you. Uh,
they said, we would not like to purchase this piece
from you. Yeah, so it went on display at Maison
Varrow because they had it. It was already shipped. Upsetting.
It is upsetting well, and I think the reason that
there are a lot of things that we talked about
(11:08):
that happened in the past would definitely be inexcusable today.
And like there's some degree at the time, right, attitudes
are very different. It's been really long established that like
burying of the dead is a pretty sacrisanct thing across cultures,
(11:30):
and that's where I kind of go, guys, you should
have known better. Yeah, well, especially when he talks about
how he had to like sneakily do it like he's guarded. Yeah,
surely there was a question mark in your head, like
is this the right thing to do? And I don't
We don't know, unfortunately, if he was just so driven
by this spirit of collection and you know, cataloging the
(11:53):
world of all of its various types of creatures, or
if he was just kind of weasily and us wanted
to sell it off for money, Like, it's not really clear,
but it certainly seems like there had to have. You
would hope there was a moment of moral debate in
his head at least that The following piece appeared in
the Parisian periodical La Constitutional. And this is a translation
(12:17):
that runs a little long, but we wanted to include
all of it because it's a really good indicator of
the cultural attitude at the time toward Native Africans. Yeah,
and this appeared in November of one So bear with me,
I'm going to read the whole thing. Two young people, monsieur,
the Varreaux brothers have recently arrived from a voyage to
the ends of Africa, to the land of the Cape
(12:39):
of Good Hope. One of these interesting naturalists is barely
eighteen years old, but he has already spent twenty months
in the wild country north of the land of the
Hot and Tots, between the latitudes of Natal and the
top of Saint Helena Bay. How can one possibly imagine
what deprivations he had to endure. Our young compatriots had
to face the dangers of living in the midst of
(13:00):
natives in this zone of Africa, who are ferocious as
well as black, as well as the fawn colored wild
animals among which they live, about which we do not
need to tell. We want to speak only about the
triumphs of their collecting, and do not know which to
admire more They're intrepidity or their perseverance. Humans, quadrupeds, birds, fish, plants,
(13:20):
mineral shells. All of these they have studied. They're hunting
has given them tigers, lions, hyenas, and admirable lubal, a
crimson antelope of rare elegance, a host of other small
members of the same family, two giraffes, monkeys, long pitchforks,
very curious rats, ostriches, birds of prey which have never
been described before, A great quantity of other birds of
(13:43):
all sizes, colors and species. They also have a collection
of birds nests which could be the object of a
charming descriptive essay. Roots like onions and other plants of
remarkable shape and extraordinary size, snakes, a cashelo, and a
crocodile of a type previously unknown, but their greatest curiosity
is an individual of the nation of the Bejuanas. This
(14:05):
man is preserved by the means by which naturalists prepare
their specimens and reconstitute their form, and, so to speak,
their inert life. He is of small stature, black of skin,
his head covered by short, wooly and curly hair, armed
with arrows and a lance, clothes in antelope skin, with
a bag made of bush pig, full of small glass beads, seeds,
(14:27):
and of small bones. Another thing that we are rather
embarrassed to find a suitable to term to characterize is
the very special accessory of modest clothing worn by the
best Juanas, which we find most striking. Monsieur Verro have
deposited their scientific riches at the stores of Monsieur de
Lasserre rue Salfiac number three. They are generously put on
(14:50):
display for the public without charge. It would be well
of the Gardin de Pilante, which is the botanical gardens
took this opportunity to extend its collections already so beautiful,
to become even more desirable, and to use the skills
which they did not already possess of Monsieur Verrot with
the time, the talent, and the energy necessary to go
out Africa to catch nature in the act. It's so
(15:14):
crazy of this weird grossness. It really, well you say
weird grossness, Like this part turns my stomach where they're
talking about this part that it's a man. Isn't it
great that they did this? You guys. It's such a bizarre,
uh like way to sell it to my mind, you know,
like my sensibilities are very like troubled that they're like,
(15:39):
what we really want to talk about is how amazing
these two guys are. Yeah, and then they talk about
the specimen of the Botswan and with such delight and
right like, oh, it's the neatest thing, And I'm like,
that's a person. So listeners, sometimes this is what happened
(16:00):
when we just want to talk about adorable lemurs, as
we find horrifying things instead. So the middle brother, Edward
brought this human display and an assortment of other samples
to Paris in eighteen thirty one, and a lot of
them were delivered into the hands of museums that were
really eager to expand their collections. So we're gonna come
back to this particular piece of taxidermy in a bit,
(16:22):
because the story of this mounted human specimen reaches all
the way up to very recent history. But as for
the Verreaux brothers themselves, when Edward returned to South Africa
the following year, so that would be thirty two, he
also brought their third brother, Alexei, with him. It's believed
that Alexei never left Africa after his arrival and lived
(16:43):
out the rest of his life there, assisting with jules
collection efforts. Jules and Edwards seemed to have done some traveling,
although there's no definitive record on exactly where they went,
and the list includes usually places like the Philippines in China,
it does appear that it point in late eighteen thirties,
a shipment of their specimens was lost on its way
(17:04):
to Paris when the whole ship that was carrying the
collection sank. Yeah, that's usually if you look at different accounts,
that's usually consistent. Uh. And then getting into the eighteen forties.
It's consistent. But during that period of the eighteen thirties,
particularly the early half, there will be accounts of them
being in two different places at the same time, in
(17:26):
different like you know, journals and accounts that other people
have given. We will say, oh, they were in China then,
and it's some other one says it's like, it doesn't
even acknowledge that one exists. They may not have known that,
but it's like, oh, and then they were here in
this part of the world, and they could not have
been in both of those places. So it is a
little bit hard to actually track their movements. In eighteen
forty two, Jules Verreaux made his way to Australia and
(17:50):
he wanted to expand his preserved sample of offerings to
include more specimens from outside of Africa. He explored New
South Wales and Tasmania and he gathered all kinds of botanicals, insects,
birds and mammals, and again he gained some the possession
of some human remains. Yeah, they you know have It
(18:11):
comes up periodically that they had multiple samples of human remains.
It it's usually believed by most people. I think that
they really only did the one mounting of a human
and that the rest were sort of like bones that
have been discovered along the way. They may have. We
talked about them disentering some bodies in South Africa, uh,
(18:32):
some of the skeletons, but just for context, there was
just the one taxidermy human that we know of. One
too many, it is, but I just want to make
that clear that this wasn't like a They weren't making
a career of taxidermyng people. So, after five years of
exploring Australia, Jewels returned to Paris and for several years
(18:53):
he worked on organizing and naming the collection, both the
new things that he had brought as well as you know,
sort of placing them in contact with other specimens that
he had collected through the years. He was eventually employed
as an assistant naturalist at the Paris Museum of Natural History,
and that started in eighteen sixty two, so it had
been more than a decade that he had been kind
of working on classifications and and descriptive catalogs of all
(19:17):
of his various pieces that he had gathered throughout the world.
Jules had continued to work on his taxidermy throughout his
whole life in his travels, but it's in the late
eighteen sixties that he made one of his most famous
mounted tableau, and it was entitled Arab Courier Attacked by Lions.
In this display, a mannequin outfitted in the black cape
(19:37):
that was typical of the Arab and our address of
North Africa is featured in the fictional moment that he's
pulled off of the camel he's riding by two Barbary lions.
An Arab courier won the Gold Medal for Excellence at
the Paris Exposition in eighteen sixty seven, and during the
seven months it was on display there, more than fifteen
(19:58):
million spectators came just to see it. Uh. It was
a really dramatic shift from most of the taxidermy that
had come before it, and certainly different than almost anyone
had seen before, because prior to that, it was pretty
common even if you were setting up a scene of
taxidermy that it would kind of just be multiple mounts
kind of in a line. But this is the first
(20:18):
time that it really was sort of an action scene
that depicted like an event happening. After the Paris Exposition closed,
the American Museum of Natural History bought Burrows display and
it wasn't available for public viewing for some time. Once
museum officials saw the piece in person, they thought it
was a little too ghost to be part of their collection,
(20:39):
so they kept just kept it in storage for thirty years. Yeah,
basically was in a warehouse in New York for all
that time. Eventually, though, in it was sold. It was
sold to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was
fairly new at the time, for the tidy sum of
fifty dollars, and it eventually became a prominent part of
the collection there. There is one story that it they
(21:03):
were going to be charged. I think it's forty five
dollars for them to actually transport it from its storage
place to the museum, and I think that ruffled some feathers,
like we just paid fifty dollars for this, and we
gotta pay another fifty just to get it here. Uh.
But it did eventually make its way to the collection.
And while there have been rumors throughout the years that
the man on the camel was an actual human, it
(21:25):
is not. And that's one of those things that has
been debated. There was a restoration point where it was
worked on because there had been, you know, some degradation
of the the specimen. But even so, I think most people,
in most museum curators that have been involved with it,
I don't think it was ever an actual human, but
because of the precedent of the Botswanan man, they there
(21:45):
have always been some suspicions. And as a side note,
Barbary lions went extinct not long after the Verreaux assembled
this tableau, So if you're interested in seeing Arab courier
attacked by lions, it's still on display at the Carnegie Museum.
The museum modeled a snow globe after it in two
thousand and nine. Yeah, they started like an interesting program
(22:09):
where they were doing snow globes of some of their
most interesting and famous pieces, and that was the one
that kicked off the collection. So I have never seen
one of the snow globes and how it actually turned out,
but it's kind of fascinating. I had this brief moment
where I was like, I want one. I should start
a snow globe collection, and then immediately where are you
going to put a snow loocalections, That's the problem always uh. So,
(22:31):
both Edward and Alexei died in eighteen sixty eight and
in eighteen seventies, so that was right after this big
sort of triumph at the Paris Exposition of Jules's Peace.
And in eighteen seventy Jules Verreaux left France as the
franc Oppression more began and he fled to England and
he lived there for three years before he died. And
(22:52):
when he had sold the Arab courier piece to the
American Museum of Natural History, he sold with it to
them the vast majority of the collection of Maison Vaux.
And there's been some speculation that he actually knew his
health was already pretty dicey at that point and he
wanted to make sure that collection went somewhere and somewhere
(23:13):
that was a museum that would understand what exactly they
were getting, because it's been discussed by some historians that
he probably was already pretty sick from the ongoing exposure
to chemicals used in taxidermy that he had basically been
doing since he was a child. So, uh, he was
not in great health at that point. Despite some claims
(23:36):
that there was a child born out of wedlock, when
Jules was still very young. This was the end of
the Verreaux brothers liege. And while there are a number
of species that bear the Verreaux name as a consequence
of all the exploration and collecting that Jules and Edward
did and that Alexei assisted them with, there has also
been some confusion about certain species based on some incorrect
(23:57):
labeling that Jules is believed to have done to some
of their collected pieces. And there's been some speculation that
he may have purposely mislabeled some specimens uh and the
locations where they had been found to make them appear
more exotic and therefore more valuable to museums and collectors.
We don't know whether or not that was the case,
but regardless of the cause of this labeling UH sloppiness,
(24:21):
those poorly cataloged items kind of did a bit of
a disservice to science. There have been a couple of
points of confusion over the years. Was like, wait, this
animal isn't really native to this place, like uh, And
eventually they realized like, no, this is just wrong. Yeah. Well,
and I want to point out that that poor or
inaccurate labor labeling is like not unique to these guys. No,
(24:42):
not at all. There are frequently stories that will come
across our radar, which is like a museum found something
really stunning in their collection that they didn't know they had.
And yeah, a lot of times people are ready to
go whoever made that mistakes should be fired. And I'm
kind of like that guy made that mistake in about
nineteen twelve. Well moreover, I mean, I uh, not that
it excuses it, but when you're bringing back hundreds of
(25:06):
thousands of things at a time, I could imagine it
would be easy to lose track of something, or you know,
even if you're attempting to be meticulous, you could just
write down the wrong note in your book as you
go to keep track of uh. And I promised we
would return back to the taxidermy man, and we will,
but first we're going to have a word from a sponsor.
(25:29):
If that's cool with Tracy. I think we should have
a break before we get to this scene. So back
to our story and to the part that I promised
we would come back to you. You're probably wondering what
happened to that taxidermy man from Botswana. Uh. Well, in
(25:52):
the eighteen eighties, a Spanish taxidermist and veterinarian named Frances Darter.
It's probably pronounced differently, but usually uh said that way
when people are just discussing it in the sources. I
looked at purchased the piece, uh, And originally he was
gonna he put it on display at the Spanish Exposition,
and then after he passed, it landed in the Darter
(26:14):
Museum of Natural History, which is in Spain. So this
exhibit was simply labeled El Negro and it drew crowds
for years and not just a few years. Years. The
most shocking part of this story lies in the fact
that this tax that are made human being was on
display until the late nineteen nineties. Yeah, nin nineties, so
(26:41):
a very long time to be standing there. I think
the part that really gets me is that this was
not a person like I could almost see a taxidermy
to human being on display if that had been their wish,
Like they're certainly people that have donated their bodies, and
I get this is like a grave robbed situation. And
then this person just stayed on display forever, which is troubling. Uh.
(27:04):
So in the museum was asked if they would consent
to return the body to Botswana to be respectfully put
to rest at last, after being an African novelty for
Europeans on display for more than a hundred and fifty years.
And initially the museum refused. If this were happening today,
the internet would jump all over. So, writing for The
(27:27):
New York Times in two thousand, Rachel Swarns stated the
significance of the display piece and here's a quote to Africans,
he was a symbol of racism lingering from the turn
of the century when blacks were paraded as freaks in
the vaudeville shows and natural history museums of Europe and America. Yeah,
he was certainly not the only instance of this happening. Uh,
(27:49):
But this really became a case where people thought, like
this is correctable, like we can at least make this
a better situation. And so the Spanish government and the
organization and of African community really worked in collaboration to
try to convince the Darter Museum to just acquiesce to
this request and finally let Elne grow go home. Curators
(28:09):
at the museum it seemed like they almost based on
what I've read, I mean, I haven't seen interviews with
these people are seen their firsthand accounts, but the way
it reads, it sounds almost like they were just kind
of briskly that they were hurt that they had been
called racists, and so is that really tricky thing where
they were like, no, we're really respectful about this display,
(28:31):
and we put it in context. Uh, you know, we
talked about the history and the nature of exploration and
specimen collection in the early eighteen hundreds, and but eventually
they kind of saw the error of that whole logic loop,
and so they did give into this request and the
body was finally released. A medical examination was performed on
a preserved body, and it's believed that elniegrow died of
(28:55):
a lung infection at the age of about twenty seven
and eight. Dater X exhibition brochure claims that the Verreau
Whethers attended the man's funeral and then stole his body
later that night, although there's no way to verify these claims. Yeah,
we don't know if that was written to be like
a sensational museum card or if that's the actual case.
(29:15):
It certainly does line up a little bit with Jules
Verreaux's letter to the Parisian uh museum head where he
kind of says, like we had to sneakily get this
while his body was being guarded, but we don't really
have a solid exact timeline of how that all played out. Well,
and then like, in my mind, if that part is true,
(29:35):
if that's really what they did, like that makes it
even worse. Yes, exactly, because like there are lots of
times in history where where people of one group have
sort of felt like people of another group were not
human beings. That doesn't make it okay. I'm not saying
that's okay or that that justifies anything. But if you
have just literally watched somebody have a funeral for their
(29:57):
fallen kinsman and then you go and steal his body,
like there is no way that you're justifying to yourself
that that that was not a human being, right, it
just becomes really reprehensible at that point. It's like it
was represensible already, and but now it's like fifty times
more than it already was. Exactly, It's really it's just yeah.
Uh So, while it was never confirmed either whether or
(30:20):
not the man had originally been from Botswana, he was
returned there in two thousand to be reinterred, and he
was buried in a state funeral in Gabarone after several
days of visitation, during which huge crowds of people turned
out just to pay their respects to this unknown man.
At the funeral, Foreign Minister Lieutenant General mom Patti Murafe
said in his speech today, a hundred and seventy years later,
(30:43):
we're gathered here not only to re enter the body
in African soil, where it likely belongs, but also to
cleanse that act of desecration, restore the dignity of a
common ancestor, to appease the spirits of Africa, and above all,
to correct or wrong, which has no statute of limitations.
So I thought it was going to be about cute lemurs,
(31:04):
and it was about something, and then it became different,
which is really sort of a more important story. It's
not sort of. It really is a more important story
to tell. It just wasn't what I thought I was
getting into at the beginning. But I'm glad that that
came to light as I was researching, because I remember
the oh I got to do something on the Robe brothers,
their taxidermists. They discovered all these animals whoa they did
horrible things. WHOA. You and I have these conversations sometimes
(31:28):
while you're researching at your desk and I'm researching at
my desk, and we have these instant message things where
like one of us is expressing horror or delight or
surprise or whatever, and I like, I got this. I
think it was I am and I am from you.
You were like this turned out really really upsetting. I
(31:50):
didn't think this was happening. But again, like I said,
that's an important story to tell. And you know, we
were certainly around when all of this was happening in
the late but I don't really remember seeing anything about it.
Well I don't remember, which could just be me. I
wasn't tuned into it, but yeah, and I think I
(32:11):
probably I don't know if I heard specifically about it
or not. Like there has been enough in the last
few decades, uh, controversy and debate about repatriation of various
artifacts and things, um that it's like I don't know
if among hearing about those stories, I also heard about
this one or not. It definitely I don't remember specifically
(32:33):
hearing about it. Yeah, I did not stick out of
my mind. Uh, But how's the Scoop, Hey so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook ur L or something similar over the
course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our
(32:56):
current email address is History podcast at i hear radio
dot com. Our old house stuff works, email at us
no longer works, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
(33:20):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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Tracy Wilson
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