SYMHC Classics: The Verreaux Brothers

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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