On the Gorilla Trail

In the Congo your worst fears are never realized. Something that you didn’t fear happens instead. –Mary Hastings Bradley Mary Hastings Bradley records the events of a 1921 safari with her husband, Herbert Bradley, five-year-old daughter, and her friend, the renowned sculptor and taxidermist Carl Akeley. Akeley was searching for gorilla specimens for the African Hall he was in the process of redesigning for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Well into the twentieth century, this largest of primates was more a figure of myth than of natural history.