The story of Dr Moreau’s gruesome attempts at creating humans from animals by vivisection is well known. Like most people I had always accepted the published account of his ‘scientific’ – if questionable – motives. But a few months ago, flicking through a set of Times newspapers from the 1930s, part of a research project I was engaged in, I came across an obituary containing the following paragraph:
By mischance my uncle Cedric was stranded for a week on the infamous island of Dr Moreau when the yacht he was sailing singlehanded across the Pacific drifted off course in a storm. What he found there horrified him, as he confided to his private journal. The colony, he wrote, was ‘a Sodom and Gomorrah of depravity’. Moreau, it seemed, was earcreating the Puma-woman ‘to revive his jaded sexual appetites’, while Montgomery was ‘openly sodomising his beast-servant M’ling’, an attention the creature clearly enjoyed. Even Prendick confessed to having ‘succumbed on occasions to the advances of the Wolf Women’, the general atmosphere of sexual licence no doubt having severely weakened his self-control. Prendick of course makes no mention of my uncle’s brief visit in his highly selective account of the island.
I immediately re-read Prendick’s narrative and was surprised to find veiled hints of the activities mentioned. The first specimens Moreau created, the ‘pioneers’ as Prendick calls them, were all female, a detail which I had not registered before, and tellingly Prendick speaks in his account of ‘the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them’.
Montgomery, as the reader will recall, was a medical student in London who had been forced to flee following an unspecified scandal when he lost his head ‘for ten minutes on a foggy night’ while drunk. What act could have been so disreputable that he was obliged to leave London under Moreau’s protection? Prendick writes of Montgomery: ‘He’s ashamed of it but I believe he half-likes some of these beasts.’ Later he describes him as having ‘a vicious sympathy with some of their ways’. M’ling, Prendick reports, ‘treated Montgomery with a strange tenderness and devotion…it loved nothing so much as to be near him’, and Montgomery describes M’ling as the ‘only thing that had ever really cared for him’. Clearly there was an unusual intimacy in their relationship.
The paragraph from the Times appeared in a short obituary of Cedric Williamson of San Francisco, a keen amateur yachtsman and a friend of Bernard Gilboy, the first man to cross the Pacific single-handedly. The nephew who published the account of his uncle’s life had long since died, but I was able to trace a great-grand niece. Disappointingly, she was unable to offer any help, having never heard of Williamson’s journal or of his meeting with Moreau.
Simon Collings
.