Maori Gorilla

After sightings of the Maori Gorilla began to be frequently reported in various newspapers of the time—including The New Zealand Herald, The West Coast Times, The Auckland Star, and The Thames Advisor—a spectacular report emerged that the elusive creature had indeed been captured. In late September 1870, The Thames Advisor published an article—immediately picked up by several other publications—in which it was reported that the creature had been caught with the help of tracking dogs in the swamps near Porter's Bay. The article's author famously claimed that the animal had been captured and its hands and feet bound. The article's description is somewhat racist, but it describes the creature thusly:

"This Maori gorilla has a head somewhat similar to that of the natives, but with two protruding tusks, one on each side. On the top of the head is a tuft of hair. The body is dark like that of a Maori, covered with hair on the arms and legs. It grunts like a pig. We were informed that the creature would be put on public display, and we must say that we would like to see it."

That sounds exciting enough, but then things started to get a bit strange. The Auckland Star newspaper, in its September 30, 1870, issue, published a short article stating that the captured creature was supposedly neither a gorilla nor a primate at all, but an ordinary seal. The article reads:

"As some natives told us last night, the strange animal that was supposedly found in Porter's Bay across the river was simply a seal. We cannot say whether the person who first reported its capture had never seen such an animal before or whether he was simply imagining it, but what is certain is that the animal bears very little resemblance to the monster it was supposed to be."In my opinion, this is very strange, as there's very little chance that someone—whether familiar with seals or not—would mistake a seal for some kind of primate. Indeed, the details of the first report—such as the mention of arms and legs—seem very different from a seal, and it also seems unlikely that a seal would have triggered a series of sightings of a gorilla-like creature, which, moreover, was known to the Maori of the region. Especially considering that the animal was supposedly captured, wouldn't someone have realized it was a seal before it was described as something else? How could this mysterious creature have changed its reported appearance from a gorilla-like creature with tusks to a regular seal? Was the original report so dramatically fabricated? Or are both reports fictitious? Or is something else at play? Is there a chance that someone might have tried to conceal the find by passing it off as a seal, or that there was a mistake?

More clues are provided by a subsequent article in "The Thames Advisor," which returns to the first story, but does so in a report that completely contradicts the seal report, as well as its own previously published story, making the whole affair even stranger and more puzzling than it already was. In an article in "The Thames Advisor," summarized on October 1, 1870, in "The New Zealand Herald"—just a day after it was reported that the Maori Gorilla was nothing more than a seal—it was reported that two men went to view the captured creature in the hope of purchasing it for exhibition, but what they found left them perplexed—for it was neither gorilla nor seal, but a man! The article begins strangely enough, stating:We are sorry to disappoint our readers, especially those interested in natural history, but it appears that the Maori gorilla is not a gorilla at all - in fact, the Maori gorilla turned out to be an old woman."