Aldrovandi refers to Petrus Gonsalvus as the ‘man of the woods’ from the Canaries, and evidently believes that there were others like the Gonsalvus family there, a race of hairy people. There were not, of course. Petrus Gonsalvus was merely a man who happened to have been born with a mutation that caused a layer of hair to grow over parts of his face and body where in most people it does not. Nothing is known about the ultimate fate of Petrus, his wife, or his son. We do know that Petrus’ daughter Tognina eventually married and bore several children who were as hairy as she.
Petrus Gonsalvus and his family were not the only hirsute people to have attracted royal curiosity. In 1826 John Crawfurd, British diplomat and naturalist, visited the Burmese capital of Ava to the north of Mandalay. On the throne was Bagydaw, scion of the Konbaungs, a family noted chiefly for the savagery of its dynastic struggles. (One of Bagydaw’s predecessors had celebrated his succession to the throne of Ava in 1782 by slaughtering his brothers, their families, and some hundreds of his subjects – most of whom he immolated on a single gigantic pyre.) The Kongbaungs were also expansionist, a policy that attracted the ire of the dominant regional power, the British government in India. After the First Anglo–Burmese war, a humiliating peace was imposed upon the Burmese. The treaty was carried to Ava by Crawfurd, who found in Bagydaw’s court a scene of medieval splendour complete with white elephants and human albinos. He also found Shwe-Maong.
‘We had heard much,’ wrote Crawfurd,
of a person said to be covered all over with hair, and who, it was insisted upon more resembled an ape than a human being; a description, however, which I am glad to say was by no means realised in his appearance…The whole forehead, the cheeks, the eyelids, the nose, including a portion of the inside, the chin – in short, the whole face, with the exception of the red portion of the lips, were covered with fine hair. On the forehead and cheeks this was about eight inches long; and on the nose and chin it was about four inches. In colour it was of a silvery grey; its texture was silky, lank, and straight. The posterior and interior surfaces of the ears, with the inside of the external ear, were completely covered with hair of the same description as that on the face, and about eight inches long: it was this chiefly which contributed to give his whole appearance at first sight an unnatural and almost inhuman aspect.
Shwe-Maong was a Lao, a hills-man who as a five-year-old had been sent as tribute to Bagydaw’s court by a local chieftain. Slightly built with mild brown eyes, he lived precariously, weaving baskets and playing the buffoon; as a boy he had been taught to imitate the monkeys that lived in the teak forests of the Burmese hinterland. When Shwe-Maong was in his early twenties, Bagydaw gave him a court beauty in marriage by whom he fathered four children, one of whom, a ‘stout and very fine’ girl named Maphoon, was also hairy. Born with hairy ears, by the time she was six months old the rest of her body was covered in fine grey down. When Crawfurd saw her she was two or three years old and her face was no longer visible. Thirty years after Crawfurd’s account Maphoon appears again in the record of another diplomatic mission to Ava sent to deal with the ever-fractious Kongbaungs. By then she was a mature woman who looked much like her father, long since dead. Silky hair flowed over her face, leaving only her eyes and lips exposed; her neck, breasts and arms were covered with a fine down, and she also had her father’s gentle manners. She had married – Bagydaw’s successor, perhaps out of intellectual curiosity, had offered a reward to any man who would have her – and was the mother of two boys, both of whom were hairy as well. One of them later married, and a photograph that dates from perhaps 1875 shows three generations of the family – Maphoon, her son, and his daughter – all identically hairy.
In 1885 the British finally conquered Upper Burma in the Third Anglo–Burmese War, and the palace at Ava was destroyed. Maphoon and her family fled into the forests where, some weeks later, they were found by an Italian army officer who persuaded them to travel to Europe. And it is there, in the summer of 1886, that we last hear of Shwe-Maong’s family, exhibiting themselves at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly and in Paris at the Folies Bergère.
THE TOPOGRAPHY OF HAIR
We are born with about five million hair follicles, and that is all we will ever have. The hair follicles are arranged in rows, adjacent follicles intercalated between each other in strict order. How does this regularity come about? If hair follicles were simply scattered randomly upon our scalps, each of us would have at least a few gaps in the thatch. The problem of how follicles come to be arranged with such precision is deep and difficult. It is the problem of how to make a regular pattern out of nothing.
The difficulty lies in the word ‘regular’. It is fairly easy to imagine how an organism can make unique parts – five different fingers, for example. It is merely a matter of having preprogrammed cells respond to a single gradient in the concentration of some molecule. Our fingers are, indeed, specified in just this way. But what if, instead of a hand with five unique fingers, one wished to make a hand with only two alternating finger-types, say, ring fingers and index fingers? A strange variety of hand that looked something like this: ring-index-ring-index-ring? No such hand has ever existed. But this, in essence, is the problem that our skins present. Out of bland embryonic uniformity the skin must somehow order itself into a lattice of regularly spaced hair follicles separated by bits of skin. Clearly, some subtle device is needed.
The exact form of that device is still quite obscure, but the logic of its workings is not. What is needed is a way of making hair follicles, but of not making them everywhere. A foetus begins to develop the first of its follicles around three months after conception. Five million hair follicles do not appear all at once: instead, they début on our brows, then spread like a rash, first to the rest of the head and face, then down the neck, throat and torso, across the hips and shoulders, and finally down arms and legs.
I like the simile of a rash, for it suggests the spread of some infectious change in the skin cells, a change that expands outwards from a small beginning. This change transforms the cells of the skin from a quiescent state to one capable of producing follicles. It probably happens cell by cell. Perhaps it begins with just one cell somewhere on the forehead which induces the same change in its neighbours, which then transform their neighbours, and so on and so on. No one knows what the nature of the change is, but it is possible to make some guesses.
Each hair follicle is a chimera, a hybrid, of two different tissues. So is skin itself. The skin that we see, that we touch, and that weathers the elements, is the epidermis, a stratified layer of cells that originate in the outermost germ layer of the embryo, the ectoderm. Underneath the epidermis is another, thicker, layer, the dermis, which comes from the mesoderm. Dermis and epidermis are intimate collaborators in the making of a hair follicle. Their relationship is of the nature of talkers holding a conversation, a molecular dialogue of signal and counter-signal.