Jules Lermina

To-ho and the Gold Destroyers Jules Lermina

During the bloody Dutch-Aceh War in Sumatra at the end of the 19th century, 10-year-old George Villiers is about to be sacrificed by a Malay witch doctor when he is rescued by To-Ho, the member of a peaceful tribe of ape-men who secretly live hidden in the jungle. George is then raised among the ape-men, and meets a reclusive scientist who has developed a compound, phoebium, which destroys gold, hoping to save the tribe from hordes of invading prospectors who threaten their isolation... Jules Lermina's To-Ho and the Gold Destroyers was first published in 1905 in Le Journal des Voyages. Its tribe of ape-men and the story of the human boy which they rescue and raise as their own predate Tarzan by seven years. This volume also includes over 20 original illustrations by Charles Clérice. Georges Dodds is the author of The Ape-Man his Kith and Kin, a collection of texts which prepared the advent of Tarzan of the Apes.