The eighteenth century, as I have said, was not a good time for unicorns. The general attitude of the period is well expressed in Benjamin Martin’s once famous Philosophical Grammar: “The Scripture makes mention of the Dragon and the Unicorn, and most Naturalists have affirmed that there have been such creatures and have given Descriptions of them; but the Sight of these Creatures, or credible Relations of them having been so very rare, has occasioned many to believe there never were any such Animals in Nature; at least it has made the History of them very doubtful.”
John Bell of Antermony heard a “credible relation” in Tartary from a native hunter which is worth recording. This hunter said that “in the year 1713, being out a-hunting, he discovered the track of a stag, which he pursued. At overtaking the animal he was somewhat startled on observing it had only one horn, stuck in the middle of its forehead. Being near the village, he drove it home and showed it, to the great admiration of the spectators. He afterwards killed it and eat the flesh, and sold the horn to a comb-maker. I inquired carefully about the shape and size of this unicorn and was told it exactly resembled a stag. The horn was of a brownish colour, about one archeen or 28 inches long, and twisted from the root till within a finger’s length of the top, where it was divided like a fork into two points very sharp.”
Faith in the unicorn was at a low ebb in Europe when Anders Sparrmann published in 1783 his account of travels in South Africa. Without asserting that he had seen the animal, Sparrmann gave the impression that the unicorn was not uncommon near the Cape of Good Hope, basing his own belief upon the constant reports of natives and the observation of single horns that were shown to him. Half a dozen other travellers in South Africa during the next half-century reached the same conclusion. Thus Baron von Wurmb writes from the Cape in 1791 that he expects soon to see a unicorn, “which has just been discovered in the interior of Africa. A Boer saw a beast shaped like a horse and with one horn on its brow, ash-gray and with divided hoofs–his observation went no farther. A Hottentot has confirmed this report, and the people in these parts quite generally believe in the existence of the unicorn . . . . The future will decide. Various respectable natives have given their servants orders to bring in one of these beasts alive if possible, or else to shoot one, so that we shall soon see the question settled.” Cornelius de Jong, writing two years later from the same region, traces the quest for a South African unicorn to an elderly Dutchman of education and intelligence by the name of Cloete, who was offering three thousand forms to anyone who would bring him a live specimen. The offer was made hopefully, for Cloete and de Jong agreed that the evidence for the presence of the unicorn in the neighbourhood was convincing. Hottentots who could not possibly have heard the European legends about the animal described it exactly and even said that they had drawings of it in their caves and houses.
One of these drawings was seen and copied, a few years later, by the English traveller, Sir John Barrow, who was completely converted by it to a belief in the unicorn. His copy shows the head and neck of a creature with the general appearance of an antelope and with a single horn like that of the gemsbok rising, apparently, from the right side of the brow. This drawing was one of several thousands discovered by Sir John Barrow, all of them as realistic, he says, as the skill of the artists would permit. He makes it clear that in this instance there could be no possible confusion with the rhinoceros, which is also depicted in the South African caves, and he argues earnestly that the long tradition of the unicorn, taken together with what he has heard from the natives of Africa and with this drawing, should be sufficient to compel belief.
A man still better equipped than Barrow to judge this matter, Sir Francis Galton, was almost equally impressed by the evidence. “The Bushmen”, says he, “without any leading question or previous talk upon the subject, mentioned the unicorn. I cross-questioned them thoroughly, but they persisted in describing a one-horned animal, something like a gemsbok in shape and size, whose one horn was in the middle of its forehead and pointed forwards . . . . It will be strange indeed if, after all, the creature has a real existence. There are recent travellers in the north of tropical Africa who have heard of it there, and believe in it, and there is surely plenty of room to find something new in the vast belt of terra incognita that lies in this continent.”
Among the rather numerous believers in an African unicorn the names of David Livingstone and Dr. Andrew Smith should not be forgotten. The Athenum for December 22, 1860, reviewing The Romance of Natural History, by the father of Edmund Gosse, says that “the unicorn cannot be pronounced a fable, although our national representation of it may prove to be fanciful”, expressing belief in a South African species “which appears to occupy an intermediate rank between the massive rhinoceros and the lighter form of the horse”. Dr. William Balfour Baikie, the scientist and African traveller, writes in the same journal for August 16, 1862: “The constant belief of the natives of all the countries which I have hitherto visited have partly shaken my scepticism, and at present I simply hold that the non-existence of the unicorn is not proven. A skull of this animal is said to be preserved in the country of Bonu, through which I hope to pass in a few weeks, when I shall make every possible inquiry. Two among my informants have repeatedly declared that they have seen the bones of this animal, and each made a particular mention of the long, straight, or nearly straight, horn.”
These persistent rumours of unicorns in South Africa seem to have revived the belief, which had died down since the seventeenth century, that the animal was to be found in the northern parts of the continent. Dr. Eduard Ruppell was told by the natives of Kordofan, without any question or suggestion from him, that there was in their country a beast about as large as a horse and of the same shape, with reddish smooth hide, divided hoofs, and one long slender straight horn on its brow. Baron von Muller, travelling in the same district in 1848, was told by a native who had provided him with specimens of many other animals, about a beast called a’nasa which he described as resembling a donkey in shape and size but with a boar’s tail and a single movable horn. During his travels in Abyssinia A. von Katte heard repeatedly from soldiers drawn from all parts of the country “that the unicorn really exists in the wild valleys of the mountains. It is true that their reports are not entirely consistent, but neither are they contradictory. Those who assert that they have seen the animal give the same description of it that Pliny left us. They say, that is, that it has the hoofs of a horse and the same shape as a horse, that it is grey in colour and has a strong horn in the middle of its brow. Its size is that of a well-grown ass. They say also that it is very shy and therefore hard to approach. These people find great likeness between it and the unicorn shown on the English arms, but when I showed them a picture of the rhinoceros they said at once: ‘That is not it; that is another animal.’ . . . I am therefore strongly inclined to believe that the unicorn is really to be found in the high, inaccessible mountains of this country.”
The vast size and the mystery of the Dark Continent affected the imaginations of thoughtful and trained observers in the nineteenth century somewhat as America had affected the mind of Europe three hundred years before. “In a land like inner Africa”, wrote Joseph Russegger, “in which Nature puts forth the strangest forms of life, we may expect that the larger and unknown quadrupeds which we have thought long since extinct will be discovered. Is it not possible that even the unicorn may be found there? Arabs, Nubians, and Negroes told me often and much about this animal, which resembled, according to their descriptions, either an antelope or a wild ass. Their reports were too contradictory and contained too much nonsense for me to reproduce them, but everywhere one hears the refrain that the animal still exists . . . . To regard the unicorn as wholly fabulous and a product of fancy is an absurd and arbitrary position, and we do well to remember that if the elephant and giraffe and camel should once die out they too, on account of their strange forms, would be thought fabulous.”
The most interesting account of an African unicorn is that communicated to the Journal Asiatique by F. Fresnel in a letter written in April 1843 and published in March of the following year. Fresnel was a consular agent of France at Djeddah, and his remarks are based, not upon personal observation, but upon the testimony of several Arabs in whose honesty and intelligence he firmly believed. These men had often killed the animal in Dar-Bargou, north-west of Darfour, a district still almost unknown and at the time when the letter was written quite unexplored.
Fresnel’s description is very minute. He says that the unicorn is a pachyderm, but insists that it is not the rhinoceros. In appearance somewhat like a wild bull, it has the legs and feet of an elephant, a round and almost hairless body, a short tail, and a single horn one cubit long and movable at the animal’s will. This horn springs from between the eyes and not from the end of the nose like that of the rhinoceros. For two-thirds of its length it is of an ashen grey-colour, like the rest of the animal, but the upper third is a vivid scarlet. (One thinks of the splash of scarlet on the end of the horn described by Ctesias, and of the words of Solinus, “de splendore mirifico.”) When the unicorn is not disturbed he swings this horn to right and left as he walks, but he can fix it like a bayonet ready for action at a moment’s notice. Of vast strength and extremely fierce, he always charges at the first sight of a man, and he charges with intent to kill. He is never taken alive. Fresnel gives a minute account of the method of hunting the beast which one can hardly read without recalling the lion-capture story. One man on foot goes up to the unicorn’s lair while his fellows, on horseback and armed with lances, wait at a distance near a tree. As soon as the animal sees the man he plunges toward him, and the man turns and makes for the tree. The mounted hunters lance the beast from behind while he is running, and while he turns to face one after the other, until he drops from exhaustion.
Fresnel has perfect confidence in his sources of information. “There is nothing more animated and honest”, says he, “than the descriptions given by a Bedouin, just as there is nothing more false and obviously absurd than those given by the inhabitants of eastern cities or by travellers who are only merchants.” His informants had nothing to sell, they said nothing about the horn’s medicinal value, they had hunted this beast and killed it, they knew the rhinoceros well and said that this unicorn was quite different. Fresnel was therefore thoroughly convinced that the abou-karn of eastern French Soudan was the same creature as the Hebrew Re’em and the monoceros of Ctesias and the unicorn of Pliny. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson’s words with regard to Father Lobo: “He who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.”
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