Well, the sailors made a great pet of this immense monkey, who proved a very inoffensive, gentle, well-tamed creature, abounding1 in such tricks as a rough forecastle would educate a monkey in. The Jacks2 tried him with a pipe of tobacco, and he was observed to take several whiffs with an air of great relish3, though he put the pipe down long before the bowl was empty. Once, seeing a man shaving, he imitated the fellow to such perfection as to show that he had been taught to feign4 to handle a razor; whereupon the carpenter shaped a piece of wood to resemble a razor, with which the monkey, whenever he was asked, would shave himself, pretending to lather5 his beard, after, with his own hands, putting a little bit of canvas under his chin. The sailors also discovered that the creature could play the fiddle6—that is to say, if you put two sticks in his hand and told him to fiddle, he would adjust one of them to his shoulder, and saw away with[244] the other, making the most horrible faces the while, as though ravished by the exquisite8 sounds he was producing.
Again and again would I stand watching him till the tears flowed from my eyes. The sailors called him Old Jacob, dimly conceiving that was a good name for anything with a white beard. But alas9! the ocean had marked him for her own, and poor Old Jacob did not live to see land again. His death was very tragical10, and the manner in which I was startled by it leaves the incident, to this moment, very clear in my memory.
We had run out of the north-east trades, and were sweeping11 along over a high sea before a strong breeze of wind. We had met with a bothersome spell of baffling weather north of the equator, and the captain was now “cracking on,” as the term goes, to make up for lost time, carrying a main-royal, when, at an earlier season, he would have been satisfied with a furled topgallant sail, and through it the Lady Violet was thundering with foam12 to the hawse-pipe, the weather-clew of her mainsail up, and the foretop-mast staysail and jibs flapping and banging in the air over the forecastle, where they were becalmed by the forecourse and topsail.
There was a sailor at work on the rigging low down on the fore-shrouds. I had been watching him for some minutes, observing the carelessness[247] of his pose as he stood poised13 on a ratline, whilst I thought how utterly14 hopeless would be the look-out of a man who should fall overboard into the white smother16 roaring alongside; and I turned my back to walk aft, when I heard a loud cry of “Man overboard!”
I looked; the fellow I had been watching had disappeared! I rushed to the side and saw poor Old Jacob skimming along astern! He had his spectacles and his cap on, and he was swimming like a man, striking out with vigour17. He swept to the height of a sea, and his poor white-whiskered face most tragically18 comical with its spectacles stood out clear as a cameo for a breath, ere it vanished in the hollow. It then disappeared for good.
I glanced forward again and perceived the man whom I thought had fallen into the sea climbing out of the forechains to the part of the rigging where he had been at work.
The mate, coming forward, cried, “Who was it that sang out man overboard?”
“I did, sir,” answered the sailor.
“Step aft!” said the mate.
The fellow dropped on to the deck and approached the officer.
“What do you mean,” cried the mate in a passion, “by raising over a monkey such an alarm as man overboard?”
[248]
“I thought it was a man, sir,” answered the sailor. “I had caught sight of him on the jibboom, and believed it was Bill Heenan.”
“What!” shouted the mate, “with those spectacles on?”
“I didn’t notice the spectacles, sir,” said the man; “I see a figure out on the jibboom, and whilst I was looking the jib-sheet chucked him overboard, and that’s why I sung out.”
The mate stared hard at the man, but seemed to think he was telling the truth, on which he told him to go forward and get on with his work, biting his underlip to conceal19 an expression of laughter, as he walked towards the wheel.
That evening, in the second dog-watch, there was a fight between the sailor, whose name was Jim Honeyball, and Bill Heenan. Bill had heard that Jim had mistaken him for Old Jacob, and had told the mate so; and thereupon challenged him to stand up like a man. There was a deal of pummeling, much rolling about, encouraging cheers from the sailors, and “language,” as it is called, on the part of the combatants; but neither was much hurt.
Such was the end of the poor monkey; yet he seemed to have found a successor in Bill Heenan, for, to the end of the voyage, the Irishman was always called Old Jacob.
We were talking in the midshipmen’s berth20 over[249] the loss of the monkey, when Poole, the long midshipman, who was in my watch, spun21 us the following yarn:—“I made my first voyage,” said he, “in a ship called the Sweepstakes, to Madras, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. On our way home we brought up off Singapore for a day on some business of cargo22, of which I forget the nature. I was standing23 at the gangway, my duty as midshipman being to keep the ship’s side clear of loafers, when I saw a large boat heading for us. She was like one of those surf-boats you see at Madras. There were five fellows rowing her, and one chap steered25 with a long oar15. They were all darkies, naked to the waist. I was struck by the manner in which one of them, as the boat approached, looked over the shoulder at our ship. The others kept their eyes on their oars26 or gazed over the stern; but this chap stared continuously behind him as the boat advanced; by which I mean that he looked ahead, for of course a fellow rows with his back upon the bow of a boat. They came alongside, and I found that the men had a great number of monkeys to sell. I looked hard at the fellow whose chin had been upon his shoulder as he rowed, and was wondering what on earth sort of native he was, when, on a sudden, I caught sight of his tail! He was a huge ape, of the size of a man—at all events, of the size of his shipmates. He so much resembled the others at a little distance that there[250] was nothing wonderful in my not having distinguished27 him quickly. He had pulled his oar with fine precision, keeping time like one of the University Eight, and there had been nothing odd about him at all, saving his manner of looking over his shoulder. The others held up monkeys to show us, and, I tell you, I burst into a roar of laughter when I saw this great ape pick up a bit of a marmozette and flourish it up at me as if he would have me buy. In a very little while the ship was full of monkeys. Almost every man amongst us bought one. I chose a pretty little creature that slept in the clews of my hammock all the way home; but he grew so tall and quarrelsome that my mother, when I was absent last year, gave him away to an old gentleman, who shortly afterwards, in the most mysterious manner, disappeared, together with the monkey.”
“Where wath the mythtery?” asked Kennet.
“Well,” said Poole, “the notion was that the monkey had eaten up the old gentleman, dressed himself up in his clothes, and gone to London to consult a solicitor28, with a view of contesting the old man’s will, as being next of kin7.”
We were gradually now drawing near home. The English Channel was no longer so far off but that we could think of it as something within reach of us. All my clothes had shrunk upon me, whence I might know that I had grown much[251] taller and broader than I was when I left England. My face was dark with weather, the palms of my hands hard as horn with pulling and hauling. I had the deep-sea rolling gait that is peculiar29 to sailors, and, indeed, I had been transformed during the months I had been away into as thorough a little “shellback” as was ever made of a boy by old ocean. I was wonderfully hearty30 besides—............