Dinosaurs in the Attic (16 page)

Mary L. Jobe Akeley was a remarkable women, in some ways even more remarkable than her husband. To understand Mary's role during the rest of the expedition, let us step back in time a moment to look at her earlier life. In Mary Akeley's old house in Mystic, Connecticut, is a box of photographic portraits, taken of her before she married Carl Akeley. One photograph shows a tall, rather stout woman with a big hat, wearing an outfit of oversized bloomers, leading a group of girls in a vigorous round of calisthenics. Another depicts her in a similar pair of bloomers and high-button boots, walking stick in hand, ascending the slopes of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies. A third shows her on horseback, on a mountain trail, with the Selkirks of British Columbia in the background. There are photographs of her in blizzards, standing on mountain peaks, and struggling through roaring torrents. By the time she married Carl Akeley, she was already a famous explorer in her own right, and she never allowed her fame to be overshadowed by Akeley's. (Indeed, when she died in the early 1960s, many newspapers erroneously reported that the Museum's African Hall had been named after
her,
not her husband.)

Mary Jobe came out of the Midwest and attended Bryn Mawr and Columbia. While there, she accompanied a botanical expedition to British Columbia, and shortly afterward Mary herself led an expedition to map the headwaters of the Fraser River. On this expedition she climbed a previously unexplored peak in the northernmost Canadian Rockies, later named Mount Sir Alexander. She attempted a first ascent, but was driven back by avalanches and a blizzard. During the next several years she led seven expeditions to Canada, and the Canadian government christened a high peak in the Rockies "Mount Jobe" in her honor.

In 1916, believing that young girls needed strenuous physical exercise, she founded Camp Mystic for Girls, in Mystic, Connecticut. She ran the camp like a Marine drill sergeant, teaching her campers outdoor survival and the value of physical fitness, sports, and exercise.

In 1920 she was introduced to Carl Akeley, who was then married to Delia, his wife of seventeen years. Carl and Delia underwent an acrimonious divorce in 1923, and Carl and Mary married in 1924. He was sixty years old and she was thirty-eight.

After her husband's death in the Belgian Congo, Mary continued to explore and to write books about Carl and herself (one of which prompted Delia to threaten a libel suit). As she grew older she became a rather crabby and suspicious recluse, living on top of a hill in Mystic in a rambling house stuffed with elephant-foot wastebaskets, leopard skins, African carvings, stuffed animals, decorated gourds and pots, and other bric-a-brac. In 1966, at the age of eighty, she died in a convalescent home, with few close friends and no close family.

In 1977 the executors of her estate sent the Museum a couple of bulging cardboard boxes filled with yellowing folders, crumbling newspaper clippings, hand-tinted glass lantern slides, books, and a half-dozen journals tied in a bundle with a red silk ribbon. These were her field journals, recording in a dense, almost illegible hand the progress of her various expeditions.

The first of the journals date from about 1915. The last one of the batch contains a hasty scrawl on the inside cover:
"Kivu
High Camp on slopes of Mt. Mikeno—Nov. 14, 1926 et seq." This rare and extraordinary journal—whose existence was previously unsuspected—begins with their arrival at the R weru Camp on Mount Mikeno, where Carl tried to show Mary the view of Nyamlagira from the canyon rim. Entries continue through her husband's death and after. It is a remarkable narrative, a detailed account in which Mary recorded with dispassionate accuracy her husband's illness and death.

The volcano, Mary wrote, "we could see plainly almost every night as its fiery furnace of boiling lava illuminated the clouds & sky or as flame occasionally shot into the heavens....

"Often," Mary continued, "when looking out of my tent, it seemed as if I were standing on the brink of a gulf, the clouds were so dense—& as if the whole world were falling away from me. At such times I could hear the song of the thrush."

On November 11, Mary tells us, Carl had his first serious attack of nausea, which prevented their going to the canyon rim to photograph Nyamlagira. On the twelfth he felt better, but they decided to postpone moving up to their next camp until the weather cleared. He had another attack on the thirteenth, but felt somewhat better the following day. Carl was terribly anxious to reach the next camp, which lay on the saddle between the Karisimbi and Mikeno volcanoes, and so, on November 14, he ordered the expedition to break camp. Mary wrote:

He was only weak when he got dressed, but walked up the hill at a quick pace. There he got in the hammock. I walked first behind him & we often remarked about the beautiful forest. Once, he made the boys stop to show me a beautiful tiny nest of the sun-bird hung in a great banner of gray-beard moss. Again when we came to the big trees with the platforms of fern-hung green moss, he said, "Mary, do you see now where the fairies dance?"

Finally, when we got into the deepest, most beautiful forest, he said, "Now I am on my old trail...."

They continued up the trail—Carl carried in the hammock, Mary walking beside him—until they were about a quarter-mile from the Saddle Camp, when Carl said he was cold and would walk. The forest was dark and dismal, and the graybeard moss was dripping with water from the fog. At the camp, Carl sat down under the fly of the cook tent, ordered a charcoal brazier lit, and had a cup of tea. "He talked energetically to Derscheid about the gorillas there," Mary recorded.

That night, Mary didn't undress and visited Carl often in the night "when he was quiet." The next morning Carl was still feeling sick and couldn't keep down any food or drink.

I got Raddatz to sorting supplies & Leigh & Derscheid went up to look for the place where Bradley killed his gorilla. There was a heavy hailstorm. I kept Carl warm
8t
gave him hot water which was all he could take. I said to him in the A.M., "Well, I have got them all at work, if that is any consolation." He said, "It doesn't seem to matter now. But it will in the long run, I know." I asked him when the hailstorm came down if he wanted me to stay with him, if "he was afraid." He laughed a little laugh and said "No, honey, I'm not afraid. You go keep warm in your tent." That night Bill and I staid up. He seemed to sleep considerably & was quiet.

When Raddatz asked him how he felt the morning of the seventeenth he said, "Quite comfortable." But soon after he had three intestinal hemorrhages in quick succession. When I tried to give him nourishment he was unable to take it but suggested chlorodyne to stop the hemorrhage, which I gave him. He said, "I've never taken it myself but I have used it with good results." So I gave it to him according to directions & at 9 it apparently made him feel better. He said, "If I had some means for intestinal feeding it might do some good." Then after the last hemorrhage he said "I can stand about one more."

But from 9 to 11:30 he seemed quite comfortable tho very weak. Derscheid who felt his pulse suggested caffeine hypodermic. I said to him, "Dear, can the doctor give you a little tonic hypodermically" and he said "Yes." We gave it to him & he seemed to rest afterwards. Finally at 12:30 his bowels began to move again. Bill heard him stir, trying to get up. He put him back in bed. "I fixed a cloth for him."

After a little while another hemorrhage came. I took care of him, washing him & putting a pad of soft cotton & a soft [illegible] and said "If anymore comes you are all taken care of." He had looked to see what had passed from him & then he lay back on his pillows. "I can't lie on my left side or back anymore," he said. In a few minutes he turned on his back and began to breathe spasmodically. I propped him up on extra pillows & put pillows under each arm. His eyes seemed looking far up to Karasimbi [illegible]. In about half an hour his heavy breathing stopped & he seemed to breathe quietly and turned over on his right side. I could still feel his pulse, faintly in his wrist but more pronounced in his neck. Derscheid gave him some more caffeine believing he was only in a stupor. But as he never reacted to it, his soul must have passed in those moments of rest following his heavy breathing. It was not, however, until 2:30 that we could believe that he had gone.

Carl Akeley was dead. They kept his body in the camp until November 21, while several dozen of the porters, working in twelve-hour shifts around the clock, excavated a tomb in the soft lava rock on a high point above their tents. Raddatz embalmed the body, and told Mary that there was scarcely any blood left in Akeley's veins. He also made a coffin of heavy native mahogany, which they lined with tin cut from galvanized containers. Mary quilted the inside with the soft gray blanket that Carl had bought her for their wedding trip. Inside the coffin she placed her wedding ring, engraved, "Mary and Carl, October 28, 1924," along with his glasses, his soft eiderdown pillows, "and the warm Jaeger blanket we had so often slept in."

Surrounding the burial plot they built an eight-foot-high stockade topped with sharpened spikes to keep out scavengers. On the right-hand side of the plot, Mary directed that a space be left for her ashes. "I want to be cremated," she wrote, "and have my ashes repose beside his loved body. There is a space left on his right side for me...." (Her wish, for some reason, was never fulfilled, and she is buried in Ohio.) Before the coffin was lowered, they gave a short reading and a simple service. "I staid with him," Mary wrote, "for a few moments after the others had gone." As they carried him to the tomb, the sun broke through the clouds, "revealing what he had always said was the 'most beautiful spot in the whole world.' He had often said 'I want to die in harness and I want to be buried in Africa.'"

Finally the question had to be faced: what should be done with the expedition? Mary stated that it would continue, with her as leader. She told the party—most emphatically—that Carl would have expected her to complete the work for his gorilla group. She felt that the diorama would be a kind of memorial to her husband, and that it would be made as perfect and as beautiful as possible. The other expedition members, who had been ready to head straight down the mountain and out of the jungle, came around to her point of view. They asked her what they should now do. First, Mary decided, they had to locate the spot that Carl had chosen as the background of the Gorilla Group, the spot where Bradley had shot a large gorilla in 1921 (the male gorilla beating its chest in the diorama). The place was a spectacular break in the forest just above a massive, centuries-old cusso tree about a mile from the camp. With the help of a photograph Carl had given her, Mary located it without difficulty, and they set to work. Leigh began work, painting studies for the spectacular background that visitors can see today in the diorama. Mary and Raddatz began making the detailed collections and studies necessary for Museum preparators back in New York to duplicate the site in exact detail. They catalogued every variety of plant growing at the spot—over fifty species. From these they selected the thirty or so dominant ones, collected at least one fine specimen of each, and preserved them in jars of formalin. Since plants become soft in formalin, Raddatz also took more than two hundred plaster casts of leaves and stems to help the Museum preparators make identical copies.

Mary took hundreds of detailed photographs, including stereoscopic shots of each plant and panoramic shots using a special camera. She selected two large trees that were to be replicated in the diorama, and photographed them from every angle. (Such photography necessitated cutting large swaths in the forest in order to obtain the right angle at a reasonable distance.) Raddatz stripped bark and moss off trees, and gathered everything he could find at the site, including dirt samples, broken twigs, dead moss, and leaves from the forest floor. The weather was bitterly cold and they were drenched daily by freezing rain, sleet, and hail. At night the temperatures would drop to freezing, and gale winds would sweep up the mountain, bellying out their tents.

All members of the expedition were pushed to their limits during these six weeks. Many of the porters became ill and had to return to Rutshuru, and replacements could not be found. Provisions ran low. Everything was wet. There was the constant danger that the African bearers would desert in the middle of the night, as they were clearly unhappy with the entire situation. Mary worked feverishly, trying to complete the work before things fell apart.

At last, on December 19, work was finished, and the group made its weary way down the mountain and back to the comparative civilization of Kenya.

In 1936—ten years after Akeley's death—the Akeley Hall of African Mammals opened in the Museum. Museum preparators created the habitat groups using Akeley's revolutionary new method of taxidermy. Instead of stuffing animal skins with straw or excelsior—which resulted in a lumpy, insect-infested animal—Akeley had invented a different approach. First he mounted the skeleton in the desired pose. Then, using the bones as a guide, he laid on each muscle and tendon in clay, until the body of the animal appeared as it would if it had no skin. Finally—when every muscle, tendon, and engorged vein was in its proper place—Akeley would fit the skin over a cast of the sculpture, molding it to the details of the animal's musculature. Details such as saliva around the animal's mouth or a glass eye were added last. This method of Akeley's revolutionized the science of taxidermy. While in the past taxidermy had required little knowledge, now the taxidermist had to be an expert anatomist and sculptor.

The foregrounds were built up using a combination of artificial and real elements. Twigs, thin branches, mosses, and tree bark were actually collected at the site and used in the diorama. Preparators modeled the more perishable things—flowers, leaves, fleshy plants, and berries—in wax or paper. The dirt was often real, having been carried thousands of miles from the actual site. Boulders, tree trunks, and other heavy items were replicated, often using molds taken of their originals.