190 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
tion was to be a gorilla expedition. I received a 
letter from an Englishman, Mr. C. D. Foster, who had 
shot a male and female gorilla and caught a baby in 
the country I had in mind. That led us to base our 
plans on gorillas alone, and it was a gorilla expedition, 
although Miss Miller killed an elephant the first time 
she shot at anything in Africa and both she and Mrs. 
Bradley killed lions. 
To me the gorilla made a much more interesting 
quarry than lions, elephants, or any of the other 
African game, for the gorilla is still comparatively 
little known. Not many people have shot gorillas 
and almost none have studied them in their native 
habitat. The gorilla is one of the most remarkable 
and least known large animals in the world, and 
when is added to that the fact that he is the nearest 
to man of any other member of the animal kingdom, 
a gorilla expedition acquires a tremendous fascina- 
tion. 
An Englishman named Battell—a captive of the 
Portuguese of Angola—in 1590 described an animal 
which in all probability was the gorilla. Vague 
stories from other sources appeared in travellers’ ac- 
counts, but no real description of the gorilla came to 
Europe or America until December, 1847, when Dr. 
Thomas S. Savage, a missionary, published a paper 
in the Boston Yournal of Natural History. Doctor 
Savage was detained in April of that year at a mission 
on the Gaboon River in West Africa and there made 
his discovery. He did not see a live gorilla himself, 
but from skulls and information brought him by 
