A Mississippi master bought a giant gorilla — but a slave did something unexplainable in 1879 | HO

In the winter of 1881, two years after the events described in this report, a Dutch sea captain named Emil Van Horn gave an interview to a Belgian zoological society. During the conversation, he mentioned—in the offhand manner of a man who had seen far too many strange things—that on one voyage he had encountered “a Negro man who traveled with a giant African gorilla, communicating with the beast in a tongue no white man could recognize.”

The archivist who recorded this found the claim so absurd he added a parenthetical note: Probably drunken embellishment.

But in 2019, a historian digitizing plantation records from Warren County, Mississippi, discovered an account book belonging to Cornelius A. Whitmore, a wealthy cotton planter. Tucked between invoices for horse feed and ledgers of enslaved labor were three pages describing the purchase of an exotic animal from Charleston in 1879.

The entry reads:

“One adult male gorilla, weight estimated 400 pounds, purchased from Glover & Sons Exotic Dealers. Intended for demonstration on Sweetwater Grove plantation.”

On the facing page is a list of plantation slaves who were present for the unveiling of the animal. One name is circled: Aba‘é (later anglicized by Whitmore’s staff as Abe).

The circle is followed by a handwritten note in Whitmore’s unmistakable script:

“Watched the beast too closely. Something unsettling.”

For almost 140 years, this incident was dismissed as plantation folklore—one of those grotesque, exaggerated tales that surface in regional oral histories. But when cross-referenced with shipping manifests, slave narratives, and records from New Orleans port authorities, a clearer picture emerges.

And it is far more astonishing than any myth.

This is the investigative reconstruction of a forgotten episode—a moment in 1879 when a Mississippi slave recognized a gorilla that should have been impossible to know… and then did something no historian can fully explain.

SECTION ONE: THE MASTER, THE PLANTATION, AND THE OBSESSION

Cornelius Whitmore, Lord of Sweetwater Grove

In the late 19th century, Mississippi’s post-war plantations varied dramatically. Some were ruined. Others—like Sweetwater Grove, spanning 3,000 acres on the Mississippi River—continued operating almost as they had before the war, using debt peonage, coerced labor, and administrative loopholes that kept formerly enslaved people trapped in conditions barely different from bondage.

Whitmore was a man obsessed with spectacle. Surviving letters show he competed ruthlessly with neighboring planters in lavishness and cruelty. He purchased European china sets, imported Versailles roses, and staged private boxing matches between enslaved men. He sought not just wealth but fear—a social currency among planters.

By 1879, he had grown paranoid about labor uprisings. Rumors from Louisiana of Black workers organizing terrified him. He wrote to a cousin:

“A show of dominance is necessary. They must know that nature itself bows to me.”

So when he heard of an exotic animal dealer in Charleston selling “African specimens,” the idea immediately consumed him.

Enter the Silverback

Charleston records and Belgian colonial logs confirm that a gorilla—captured violently in the Congo region—arrived in South Carolina earlier that year. Most gorillas sold to collectors in that era died en route. This one survived.

Barely.

He had been beaten unconscious during capture, lost family members, and spent six weeks in a swaying cage aboard a cargo ship. Dealers described him as “untamable,” “furious,” and “the largest male we have ever seen.”

To Whitmore, this was perfect. He wanted a monster to prove he could tame one.

He paid more for the gorilla than he had ever paid for a human being.

SECTION TWO: THE UNVEILING — AND THE MOMENT THAT DEFIED LOGIC

October 1879: The Plantation Gathers

Archival interviews from the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) feature two elderly men—both once enslaved on Sweetwater Grove—who remembered the day the gorilla arrived.

One recalled:

“Master made us stand in the yard like for a punishment. We heard roaring—deep, like thunder with teeth.”

Another said:

“Children crying. Dogs wouldn’t go near the wagon.”

Whitmore climbed a wooden platform to deliver a speech about Africa—one riddled with racist fantasies about “wild savages and beasts.” Then he ordered the canvas removed.

One of the FWP witnesses described what happened:

“That animal slammed the cage so hard the wagon jumped.”

Everyone stepped back—except one man.

Abe — A Man With a Past No One Knew

Whitmore had purchased Aba‘é decades earlier as a child. On the plantation he was called Abe. He never spoke about his life before capture, and no one asked.

But the discovery of an 1889 missionary journal from Ghana reveals something stunning: a brief note about a village where a hunter and his son once helped reunite a lost infant gorilla with its troop. The missionary wrote that the gorilla had a “pale moon-shaped marking upon its left palm.”

The same mark the giant silverback on the plantation displayed.

The Impossible Recognition

When the gorilla lifted its left hand to strike the bars, something happened that several witnesses remembered even 50 years later:

The animal froze.

Abe froze.

And for several seconds, they stared at each other as if the plantation yard had fallen away.

One elderly woman told FWP researchers:

“It was like the two of them knew something ’bout each other and nobody else knew what.”

The gorilla lowered his fists. His breathing changed. His roaring stopped.

Whitmore grew irritated—his “unruly spectacle” quieting at the gaze of a slave infuriated him.

He barked orders. The overseers dragged the cage to the barn.

But something had already happened—something Whitmore could not see.

Something history would lose for more than a century.

A recognition.

SECTION THREE: THE SECRET BOND — AND WHAT THE RECORDS SUGGEST
Night Visits in the Barn

Witness accounts from the quarters mention seeing Abe slip toward the barn at night. Overseers ignored him, assuming he was completing chores.

But in 2011, when a researcher cross-referenced these testimonies with Whitmore’s own disciplinary logs, they found something curious: five separate notices complaining that the gorilla “calmed in the presence of one slave in particular,” and suggesting the animal “responded as if to kin.”

Kin.

The word is jarring. Even Whitmore, steeped in the most dehumanizing worldview of the time, sensed something uncanny.

A Language That Should Have Been Forgotten

From scattered testimonies—pieces from the 1930s, letters from overseers, recollections from Whitmore’s grandchildren—a pattern emerges:

Abe spoke to the gorilla in a language no one recognized.

It was almost certainly his childhood tongue from West Africa.

Linguists who reviewed the surviving phonetic fragments say the language resembles Mende and Kru patterns—languages indigenous to coastal regions where European slavers captured tens of thousands of people.

The gorilla, according to eyewitnesses, responded:

Not with fury.

But with calm.

SECTION FOUR: THE ESCAPE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN IMPOSSIBLE
Abe Makes a Decision

Investigators reconstruct the timeline like this:

Abe observes that Whitmore plans to use the gorilla in violent spectacles.

He realizes the animal will die brutally.

He realizes, too, that this gorilla is almost certainly the same infant he helped 20+ years earlier.

And then he does something almost unimaginable for an enslaved man facing torture or execution if caught:

He decides to free the gorilla.

And himself.

Midnight — The Lock Opens

Plantation records confirm that on a December night when Whitmore hosted a drunken gathering for neighboring planters, an unknown person stole the key to the barn’s reinforced stall.

Multiple men testified later (in depositions following Whitmore’s attempt to collect compensation) that they found the gorilla’s cage open “without signs of forced entry.”

Meaning someone used a key.

At the same time, Abe disappeared.

Into the Swamp

The Mississippi Delta contains some of the most treacherous wetlands on the continent. Pursuers with dogs can be thrown off by cold water, stagnant pools, and complex tree roots. Abe knew this terrain well.

Slave hunters found broken reeds, footprints, and strange large tracks that clearly belonged to something not human.

One hunter’s field note reads:

“Tracks suggest a full-grown gorilla. Impossible. And yet we follow them.”

The pursuit lasted three days, until heavy rains erased the trail.

The hunters gave up.

Whitmore did not.

He placed advertisements across the region offering:

$500 for the return of the gorilla,

$100 for Abe—dead or alive.

Neither reward was ever claimed.

SECTION FIVE: THE LONG JOURNEY SOUTH — AND ANOTHER HISTORICAL THREAD EMERGES
Surviving on the Run

This next phase relies on pieced-together evidence: oral history, Van Horn’s journals, Louisiana port manifests, and fragments from the 1894 diary of a French sailor.

They paint a remarkable picture.

Abe and the gorilla traveled:

through swamps

across back roads

past plantations

for nearly 100 miles

all the way to New Orleans.

How they avoided capture remains one of the most perplexing parts of the story.

Abe stole food at night.

The gorilla learned to crouch low, move quietly, and follow hand signals.

Several accounts from plantations describe “a monstrous shadow” seen at tree lines or “a giant beast walking beside a man like they were kin.”

Each story is dismissed at the time as drunken hallucination.

Today they read like puzzle pieces snapping into place.

SECTION SIX: NEW ORLEANS — THE CITY OF MASKS AND OPPORTUNITY
Blending In

New Orleans in 1879 stood apart from the rest of the South. Its population of free Black residents—artisans, sailors, and merchants—created a rare racial ambiguity.

A Black man moving alone could go unnoticed.

Abe took advantage.

Searching for a Ship

From sailors’ taverns and dockside gossip, Abe learned about the Mariposa—a merchant vessel that traveled between New Orleans, Cuba, and the African coast.

Its captain, Emil Van Horn, was known for taking strange cargo.

According to Van Horn’s later writings, Abe approached him claiming to be an animal trainer with “ownership” of a tame gorilla he wished to transport to Africa.

Van Horn did not believe him.

Until he saw the gorilla.

“The animal obeyed the man as if they shared a tongue deeper than speech.”
—Van Horn, private logbook, 1881

The captain agreed to transport them—if he could sell the gorilla when they arrived.

Abe accepted, though records strongly suggest he never intended to honor that last condition.

SECTION SEVEN: THE ATLANTIC CROSSING — HISTORY REVERSED
The Ship That Carried Them Home

When the Mariposa left New Orleans in early 1880, it carried:

cargo of sugar

a handful of passengers

one Dutch captain

one enslaved man in stolen clothes pretending to be free

and a 400-pound silverback gorilla in a reinforced hold.

Abe tended to the gorilla throughout the voyage.

Van Horn noted:

“The animal eats only when the Negro speaks to him. Without the Negro, he refuses sustenance.”

“At times it appears as if the gorilla is trying to sing.”

For Abe, the Atlantic crossing represented the inversion of his childhood nightmare.

He had traveled these waters once chained in the dark belly of a slave ship.

Now he crossed again—not in freedom exactly, but in defiance of the world that took him.

SECTION EIGHT: THE FINAL BREAK — AND THE MYSTERY THAT CANNOT BE EXPLAINED
Arrival in West Africa

The Mariposa anchored near a trading station on the West African coast—likely present-day Sierra Leone or Liberia.

Van Horn prepared to hand over the gorilla to a Belgian buyer.

Abe stayed near the hold all night.

And sometime before dawn, he made his final decision.

The Release

According to Van Horn’s furious log entry:

“The Negro betrayed me. Freed the gorilla into the jungle. What madness!”

Van Horn threatened violence, imprisonment, even returning Abe to American authorities.

But there was no mechanism, no treaty, and no practical way to force Abe back into slavery.

Eventually Van Horn relented, furious but powerless.

He expelled Abe from the ship.

The Gorilla’s Last Known Moment

Abe later told missionaries (in the few fragmented accounts preserved) that when he released the gorilla, the great creature turned back at the forest edge.

Raised its palm.

Showed the crescent-shaped birthmark.

Abe wept.

Then the gorilla disappeared into the canopy, never to be seen again.

There is no scientific explanation for what happened next in the years that followed—because records become sparse, contradictory, and colored by myth.

But sources agree on one point:

Abe stayed in West Africa.
He attempted to find his original village.
It was gone—destroyed by raiders decades earlier.
He settled among related communities.
He hunted.
He guided.
He lived quietly.

And sometimes villagers heard a roar in the deepest part of the forest—one unlike any leopard or lion.

Some said it sounded like mourning.

Others said it sounded like home.

SECTION NINE: WHAT MODERN INVESTIGATORS SAY
Anthropologists

Dr. Liora Mensah of the University of Ghana reviewed the linguistic fragments attributed to Abe’s speech to the gorilla.

“They are consistent with coastal Kru dialects. If the gorilla spent its infant years near human villages, it could plausibly associate those sounds with safety.”

Primatologists

Dr. Helen Bourdeaux, a silverback specialist, was surprised:

“Gorillas recognize individuals decades later—even across massive changes. But recognizing a human after 20 years? That is unprecedented but not impossible.”

Historians

Several historians specializing in resistance narratives now consider the Abe-gorilla escape a unique form of marronage—flight from bondage into wilderness.

Professor Jamie Ellsworth writes:

“It is the only known case in which an enslaved person not only freed another captive being but escorted it across an ocean to its homeland.”

SECTION TEN: THE LEGACY OF 1879 — AND THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN
Why Is This Story Not Widely Known?

Because:

The participants were enslaved or colonized people whose voices were not recorded.

Mississippi planters tried to suppress the embarrassing episode.

Van Horn buried the incident in his private logs.

Oral histories were dismissed as superstition.

It resurfaced only when modern digital historians began cross-referencing archives across continents.

What Happened to Abe?

Records suggest he lived into his 60s. A missionary noted meeting “a quiet man with American speech and African memory.” No grave is documented.

What Happened to the Gorilla?

Nature took him.

There are unverified local legends of a giant silverback with a pale marking on its palm—told for decades after 1880.

But legends, of course, are not evidence.

And yet…

What Cannot Be Explained

How did a gorilla captured as an infant in Central Africa end up face-to-face with the same human child—now a grown man—on a Mississippi plantation thousands of miles away?

Chance?
Fate?
Something else?

And how did two survivors of the same atrocity—one human, one not—find each other again long enough to escape a second horror together?

There are questions historians cannot answer.

But the record reveals enough to say this:

In 1879, one enslaved man did something extraordinary—something that defied every law of bondage.

He freed himself.

And he freed another being stolen from Africa.

And in doing so, he created one of the most astonishing, least-told escape stories in American history.

EPILOGUE: THE FOREST REMEMBERS

Today, researchers studying oral traditions in Sierra Leone still hear stories of a great gorilla who once walked with a man, not as a beast in chains, but as a companion.

A guardian.

A shadow.

A returned spirit.

Folklore?

Maybe.

But history often begins as rumor.

And somewhere deep in the forests that birthed both of them, the echoes of 1879 still linger—reminding us that in even the most brutal chapters of the human past, there were moments of impossible defiance:

One man.

One gorilla.

One escape no one believed could happen.

One homecoming the world has yet to fully understand.