Brutish human beings | Whitman Archive

Whitman Archive Title: Brutish human beings

Whitman Archive ID: uva.00085

Repository ID: #3829-i

Repository: Catalog of the Walt Whitman Literary Manuscripts at the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

Box: 1

Folder: 12

Repository Title: Brutish human beings - wild men - the 'koboo'

Date: 1857-1859

Genre: prose, poetry

Physical Description: 1 leaf, handwritten; printed

View Images: 1 | 2

Content: This manuscript contains notes by Whitman about what he calls "a very low kind of human beings," "wild men," the "koboo," apparently described to Whitman by Elias Pierson in June 1857. Pierson had been to China in the rebel army of Canton, and had seen the aboriginal "koboo" people, as reported in the manuscript, in the Ladrone islands, in the South China Sea off Canton. To reinforce the truthfulness of Pierson's stories about the "koboo," Whitman mentions the fact that Captain Walter Murray Gibson, who had also talked about the "koboo" people (possibly in the book Report, American Geographical and Statistical Society. Monthly Meeting. March, 1854. Captain Walter M. Gibson on the East Indian Archipelago: a Description of Its Wild Races of Men , published in 1854, and/or in The Prison of Weltevredin, and a Glance at the East Indian Archipelago , published in 1855), had affirmed that all his statements in the book were true and made in good faith. Since the term "koboo" is used by Whitman in "Song of Myself" (the term already appeared in the first published version of the poem, in the 1855 edition, and was retained in all the subsequent editions) and in "Salut au Monde!" (the term appeared in the first published version of the poem in the 1856 edition and was retained in all the subsequent editions), it is probable that Whitman first learned about the "koboo" by reading Gibson, and then heard again about them from Pierson. The manuscript also contains a clipping of a short newspaper column entitled "The Wild Men of Borneo," and a short comment on it.