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Source for JV's mot regarding "silent servants"/orangutans

From: thomas mccormick <tom_amity~at~hotmail.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 05:36:19 +0000
To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il

In L'Ile Mysterieuse there is the following incident: Cyrus Smith's
African-American servant Neb, who is in charge of taming the captured
orangutan Jupiter and training the latter as a houseboy, quips that Jup is
"my pupil and soon my equal." Pencroff replies "He's your better - he
doesn't talk!" This, as Bill Butcher remarks in a reference note, is one of
JV's many fairly racist jokes about silent servants being the best.

In the same note, Bill mentions JV's joke in Humbug to the effect that
African-Americans regard simians as "Negroes" who intelligently refrained
from talking so as to avoid being put to work. Bill further refers us to an
essentially identical joke "in [Hetzel's] Swiss Family Robinson".

According to Anne Russon, Birute Galdikas, and other primatologists
specializing in the study of orangutans, the people of Borneo have a
tradition to precisely that effect, in these terms: Orangutans are
quasi-humans who are capable of speech but have remained silent in order to
avoid being put to work. This is in fact a very ancient bit of Bornean lore.
So it seems obvious that this mot is not of African-American origin. Rather,
it was carried to the West by European scholars or explorers. Just in the
same way, the Europeans who are spoken of by JV and others as having
enslaved orangutans as domestic servants - assuming these accounts to be
accurate - must have found such a practice in existence in the East Indies,
and imitated it. (In addition to JV's statement that Buffon had such a
servant, there is the citation in Bill's notes of the geographer Rienzi. And
thanks to Rauf's diligence, I have a report from a 19th-century French
encyclopeida, claiming that certain other Europeans made orangutans into
servants.)

One would be interested in tracing these accounts to their sources, and
confirming or denying both the accounts themselves and the possibility of a
similar practice having some antiquity in the East Indies. So far I've drawn
a blank. Can anyone on this list suggest some leads?

Tom McCormick

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Received on Tue 28 Mar 2006 - 07:36:48 IST

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