Jane Goodall, page 27
In fact her first couple of weeks at Gombe provided a surprisingly fruitful introduction to the apes, since chimpanzees living in the northern end of the reserve were excitedly grouping around their own fruitful discovery, an enormous msulula tree coming into season. The tree was located in the northernmost valley of the reserve, Mitumba Valley, and David Anstey had been told by the game scouts that they had heard chimp cries and seen nests in the area. Thus, early in the morning of July 17, Jane’s third full day at the reserve and first day officially watching chimps, she, Rashidi, and Adolf took the little aluminum boat north along the shore and beached it at the mouth of Mitumba stream, where they were met by the Mwamgongo subchief, Htwale, who asked Jane exactly where she intended to go for her chimpanzee study. When she pointed to the forest and the hills rising above it, he said that as a consequence of being ill he would not be able to accompany her that day. “Later,” Jane was eventually to recall, “I found out that he had expected that I would merely ride up and down the lake-shore in a boat, counting any chimpanzees I saw. The idea of clambering about in the mountains did not appeal to him at all, and I never saw him again.”
So now her minders were reduced to two, a more agreeable number, and according to the field journal entry for that day, they quickly “set off up the forested valley following the shallow, fast running stream” of Mitumba.
It was very beautiful and very cool, with thick vegetation, many wild oil palms, and yet easy to walk through. We saw two bush pig. They were on the track ahead of us, and only moved a little when we approached. We stopped to look up through the trees at them and they trotted unhurriedly away. I have only seen the tracks of bush pig previously. We saw many buffalo prints but no buffalo. At 8:30 we heard the cries of a party of chimps from the forested slopes to the North of the river. . . . Soon after this we saw several chimps feeding in a tree.
They located an ideal hillside observation point, far enough away that the chimps continued feeding undisturbed, high enough that Jane could peer into the tree through her binoculars and make out a few shadowy shapes, a boiling in the leaves, an arm or two.
There must have been about 10 animals, but as the tree in which they were feeding had thick foliage, and as the animals kept climbing down to the ground & then up again, it was hard to make an exact count. I could see no animal which could be classified as a young chimpanzee, though one or two were definitely much smaller than the large adults. Feeding was fairly intensive—on the whole the berries were picked off the branch by hand and then eaten. Occasionally the food was taken from the branch directly into the mouth.
After she had watched them for about twenty minutes, the entire group except for one climbed down out of the tree, and then another group—or was it the same one?—appeared and climbed into the tree and began feeding. The chimpanzees in the tree broke out into a chorus of hoots and screams regularly, six times during the first hour, and near the end of that time Jane was able to see three apes clearly. Then, at 9:45, the whole group descended from the tree and seemed to disappear into the underbrush. About ten minutes later, Jane and her two companions moved closer to the tree in order to get a sample of the berries.
This was a mistake as they were still in the lower trees nearby and we startled them. They did not go away for about 20 mins, however. We heard them moving about, cracking twigs, and I heard the low grunts which approximated to the sounds made by captive chimps when eating a looked-forward to meal, or some special delicacy. Only one animal did we see during this time—it climbed a low tree. But it was only possible to distinguish a dark object.
During that first week Jane pursued the chimpanzees from dawn to dark, spending two nights out in the forest in a sleeping bag (with Rashidi and Adolf warming themselves by a fire) in order to watch chimps as they woke up in the morning.
Large numbers of the chimps were climbing up an adjacent palm tree to get into the enormous crown of the msulula for its red-and-yellow berries, but Jane’s observations were inevitably limited by distance and obscured by leafy obstacles, and she confessed in an early journal entry to “a mood, a depression” that settled in. “How can I ever see any behavior? All I see is chimpanzees stuffing themselves with various types of food.” But then she consoled herself with the fact that already she had made “one or two pertinent observations as to their behaviour whilst feeding in the trees.” Although they were “remarkably agile in the branches,” in general the chimps seemed to move around very little while eating. It was very easy, Jane thought, “to look at the food tree, which I know bears 15 chimps, & yet see no movement for at least a minute.”
Also, she noted, they often hung on to a higher branch with a hand and arm while eating. One female that morning hung by a single arm for fifteen minutes, changed to the other arm, and hung by that for another ten minutes. Most of that time the female appeared to be watching her watchers and occasionally eating a bit of fruit. And other times the chimps would recline, leaning against a branch, for instance, and “propping themselves up on one elbow whilst lazily picking fruit & eating it with the other hand.”
Perhaps the most interesting observation Jane made during those first days at the msulula tree was that the chimps seemed to gather in a very confusing, almost random fashion. A certain number would clamber up the palm tree ladder into the msulula. Some of them would climb down again. One mixture of adults and juveniles, males and females, would start some thing. A second mixture would finish it. Some quite large groups would appear in the tree, but then very small groups might also appear—and sometimes only a single individual. Even more interesting—and confusing, perhaps—when the chimps were not in the tree but rather moving around somewhere in the green maze of the surrounding forest, they would sometimes call in hooting, screaming choruses, as if separate groups were keeping in touch with each other; Jane would sometimes hear multiple groups of chimps calling from all around. How unlike monkeys! The vervet monkeys of Lolui Island, for instance, traveled around in stable troops that remained consistent in number and structure. Jane also used the word troop to describe the strangely mixed and matched chimpanzee social units she was puzzling over that July, but those groups appeared to be structurally completely different from monkey troops. Her journal entry for the morning of July 20 gives some idea of how confusing the chimpanzee grouping system was:
There was no sign of movement until about 7:30 when 5 chimps climbed into the food tree and began feeding. They made no sound at all. They remained there for about an hour, and then left, one after the other, and mostly swung down the left side of the tree, only one using the palm ladder. After they had disappeared there was a chorus of hoots and calls, and these were repeated from 4 separate and distinct localities. During the next half hour there was a good deal of this calling between one troop and another. Usually only three troops were involved. These calls did not include screaming.
At about 9 am 3 chimps climbed into the tree. Two (one a male) left almost immediately and then 6 climbed up. Again many of them used branches to the left of the tree rather than the palm ladder. For ¾ hour these 7 fed quietly, with only one outburst of calls, including screams. Then at 9.45 they all climbed down and disappeared.
The msulula tree was soon stripped of its attractive berries, and by the end of July, Jane and her two assistants were scouring the reserve, looking for and generally failing to find an equivalent viewing opportunity, exploring in the process several of the streams to the south, to the north, in the middle. A journal entry for August 10 provides one example from that discouraging time:
At 2 pm I happened to see two chimps—miles and miles away. They were moving in a tree, but almost as I saw them they vanished. They were right at the top of the furthest away mountain. The wind had died down a little by now. At 2.30 pm heard chimps—over the top of this same mountain. Then again, even further away, and once more, so far that it was scarcely audible. As it would have taken well over an hour to get even to the top of the mountain, I abandoned the idea of going after them. It was 3.30 by then & we returned!
Adding to the frustration of trying to observe distant and obscure chimps was the more immediate problem of the field staff, Adolf and Rashidi. In a letter written in late July or early August, Vanne summarized the state of affairs for the family in England. “The chimps by the way are not being at all cooperative,” she began, “and Jane is rapidly becoming in a state. The country is so mountainous that they are almost impossible to find. It is dry too, so they cannot be tracked—add to that the fact that she has two people with her wherever she goes and you can imagine how frustrated she is—especially as they cannot seem to be able to get up early in the morning and she can outwalk them and outclimb them so well that she tires them to the point of open mutiny daily!”
Jane continued to walk and watch tirelessly from dawn until dark, and she wrote up the field journal every evening, finishing around 10:30. Even on Sunday, a day off for the men, she would write letters, collect specimens, and wander onto the beach or into the forest around her camp looking for chimps. Both Adolf and Rashidi, it should be said, were very able and skilled men—but Jane’s energy, stamina, and determination were simply very hard to match.
The journal tells this story more slowly. She was awake by five on July 18, for example, ready to leave by six, but no one had showed up at camp to meet her, so “I got very annoyed.” When Adolf finally appeared at ten minutes to seven, “I ticked him off.”
On the night of July 19, the three of them slept out near the msulula tree in Mitumba Valley. Jane ate a can of beans for dinner, and in the morning she may have eaten nothing—or perhaps she had one of her usual spare breakfasts: a piece of bread and a cup of coffee. She was content to continue watching chimps indefinitely, but by midmorning Rashidi began complaining that he was famished. “It transpired that Rashidi was dying from hunger,” she wrote, “and so, against my will, I thought I had better return to camp. I don’t want to be a slave driver! This is the trouble with having to be accompanied on my observations—people do need food and things & I must try to remember.”
Along with that considerate thought, Jane may have realized that for some people, getting up before dawn requires mechanical assistance. She gave her alarm clock to Adolf on the evening of July 20, and it worked well enough that on the morning of the twenty-first they set off at 6:45 according to plan. But that afternoon, while Jane was watching chimps, Adolf and Rashidi spent most of the afternoon sleeping after a long lunch. And when Adolf failed to appear by 8:45 on July 22, Jane decided she was “fed up” and left without him, climbing by herself up the Kakombe stream, which ran behind her tent.
On August 5, Rashidi demonstrated his “extraordinarily good eyes” by being able “to make out the progress of the animals up the opposite mountain.” But when they reached camp that evening, Rashidi “was too tired even to accompany me back to the tent. Oh, for someone who would walk.” And by August 6 both Adolf and Rashidi were too worn-out to function at all.
We continued for another mile but saw nothing. Adolf and Rashidi then had to rest. I got fed up & went on up the stream until it became very narrow. To give them their due the boys followed me.
We then returned. Rashidi kept saying he was tired & blundering along like an elephant. Saw nothing—not even a monkey. However, just as we got to the beach heard chimps calling—from Nyasanga Stream where we had been earlier. Rashidi collapsed. I told him he could return but he preferred not to. So I set off with Adolf. They were fairly high up in the mountains where it is very rocky. Adolf did not wish to go up the river again, so he & Rashidi lay down under a large mango [tree] & I set off alone. I went as far as I could, & I climbed up the mountain, but could not hear them. So, after listening for about ½ hour I decided to return. Would have liked to go further but the country was so precipitous I thought it was asking for trouble on my own. I MUST get a good boy who is willing to work—to get up early, walk all day if necessary, & stay out late.
Returned to the two slumbering beauties. Heard no chimps. Set off back along the beach. It was frantically exhausting. I’ve never known such a long 2 miles.
While Jane was preoccupied with disappearing chimpanzees and an exhausted field staff, Vanne was working on another problem, which was the attitude of the local fishermen and the Mwamgongo villagers living just outside the reserve. Louis Leakey had understood that Jane and Vanne would be living among people who might properly be suspicious of their motives and resentful of their presence, and he had advised Vanne, as she put it in a letter home, that “the surest way of making friends is to give them medicine.” Thus, he had made sure that their expedition’s cartons and cartons of supplies included substantial amounts of bandages, aspirin, cough medicine, Elastoplast, and Epsom salts.
Vanne made it known that she would provide simple medical attention for anyone who needed it, and some people brought in an old man with two deep ulcers in his leg, “the most ghastly livid swelling on his ankle that I have ever seen. The whole leg swollen to the knee, and the bad part, swollen to the size of a tangerine, and all red and yellow.” Vanne was afraid he might lose the foot and declared that he should go to the hospital at Kigoma, but the old man, already emaciated and very ill, was unwilling to make the trip. So Vanne washed and soaked the leg daily with hot water and antiseptic. The ulcers began to drain, and within three weeks the swelling had disappeared and the sores were clean and beginning to heal.
That was the clinic—quickly institutionalized with four poles and a circular thatched roof overhead. Soon after Vanne had treated the old man with the tropical ulcers on that first day, two more people arrived with wounds to be dressed. While she was doing that, she became aware of about twenty more patients lined up for treatment. On the clinic’s second day, thirty people arrived, wanting medicine for “coughs, colds, constipation, headaches, backaches and other ailments which I don’t understand and for which I dish out indiscrim[in]ate aspirins which seem to them like magic.”
A week later sixty clients lined up, including two men who appeared in clean white clothes, having walked several miles to request cough medicine for their babies. Vanne took on a volunteer assistant, one of Rashidi’s sons, named Jumanne, an eager and helpful eight-year-old who would mix the Epsom salts, pour the water for aspirin, cut up pieces of Elastoplast, and keep an eye out for anyone trying to move through the queue twice. Those ongoing morning clinics, as Jane has written, “not only cured many maladies but, most importantly, helped us to establish good relations with our new neighbors.”
As the summer progressed, the weather became increasingly hot and humid: “suffocating by 9 A.M.,” Vanne wrote home. She found her head and hair to be “permanently wet & hot,” and every day, in the hottest part of the afternoon when everyone else was taking a siesta, she would put on some loose cotton clothing, walk down to the stream, and sit in the water. “It’s very shallow & rustles over smooth stones, but it’s gloriously cool.”
But Vanne sometimes felt overwhelmed, by both the heat and her responsibilities. “There is always something happening,” she wrote. When she was not responding to a crisis at the clinic or, on occasion, entertaining surprise visitors, she was dutifully trying to gather specimens—insects and plants—or, less dutifully, poking at her typewriter. People coming up and down the lake for one reason or another would regularly stop by, and since communications with the outside world were very limited, these visits were often by necessity surprise events. David Anstey might show up in the Ki-bisi on wildlife business. Friends from Kigoma might drop in for a day. Or perhaps Father Guertz, “the White Father,” might be cruising up or down the lake in his speedboat on mission business and decide to pop in for a moment, as he did one afternoon in early September, accompanied by two nuns. The lake was too choppy to beach the boat, so they anchored offshore and waited to be fetched in a dugout canoe. The two nuns (one of them around eighty years old) “lifted their skirts & stepped nimbly from one rocking boat to the other, and were paddled ashore.” After hopping from the canoe onto the beach, they trod up the path to the tent for a brief treat of orange squash and biscuits before proceeding on their return journey to Kigoma. “I’ll never forget Father Guertz in a big bushhat, long khaki gown, & the two sisters with their coifs floating out in the breeze as they literally hurtled over the waters to disappear immediately round the distant headland,” Vanne wrote.
Sometimes surprise visitors were a pleasant diversion, but other times they were not. Vanne, in any case, was often distracted by the onerous chore of specimen-collecting. She had agreed to do it and felt obligated to keep at it routinely, but as the summer progressed and the hot weather expanded, her inspiration wilted. She expressed her frank opinion about the matter one day in a letter home:
I can’t find insects & I go up & down in the boiling heat trying to get just ONE for the box. As for plants—well they drive me MAD! I loathe collecting them now. Of all the dreary occupations a botanist’s must be one of the worst . . . You fold them neatly, & they jump out of the folders. You put the leaves flat . . . & by the time you’ve shut the folder, the leaves are all back to front again. You do them in the sun & die of heat. You wait till it’s cooler & just as you get them safely in the press, the wind blows & away go half the flimsy insides, out come the flowers!! You get berries & they bulge, you get a prize specimen & when you go to change the paper next day the press is alive with ANTS!
