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Detailed map showing the route of Du Chaillu in Loango, issued by the Royal Geographical Society.
Paul Belloni du Chaillu (1831 - 1903) was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa.
Du Chaillu was sent in 1855 by the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia on an African expedition. He explored equatorial West Africa, gaining considerable knowledge of the delta of the Ogooué River and the estuary of the Gabon. During his travels from 1856 to 1859, he observed numerous gorillas, known to non-locals in prior centuries only from an unreliable report by Hanno the Navigator of Carthage in the 5th century BC and known to scientists in the preceding years only by a few skeletons. He brought back dead specimens and presented himself as the first white person to have seen them.
In his second expedition, from 1863 to 1865, he confirmed the existence of a pygmy people inhabiting the African forests. Du Chaillu sold his hunted gorillas to the Natural History Museum in London and his "cannibal skulls" to other European collections.
![[ World & Continents ] Typus Orbis Terrarum / Americae Sive Novi Orbis Nova Descriptio / Asiae Nova Descriptio / Africae Tabula Nova / Europae](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/99250.jpg)
