Lions 'n' tigers 'n' everything

by Courtney Ryley Cooper

But the lure of the sea, as a general thing, is of a different sort. Whether it is the movement of the ship, the kindliness of the sailors, the association of human beings and the knowledge of freedom, little is known, for simians cannot speak our language. But the certainty remains that for the animal which has lived on shipboard as a mascot, the memory remains, pleasantly, appealingly. Several years ago, a circus was in Seattle, and the menagerie superintendent was approached by a townsman, offering for sale five red faced apes, a female with a baby, and three males, one adult, the other two half grown. They had been landed a week or so before by a tramp steamer, bought as a speculation by the man who now offered them, and who apparently knew little of animals or their care. The price was exorbitant and was refused. The owner persisted that they were unusual specimens, and that, if the superintendent would only look at them, he would be attracted sufficiently to pay the price. The superintendent agreed to a visit—then went back to the circus, grieving that he could not pay the price. For those apes were being mistreated.

They were incarcerated in an old, dirty barn, lightless, damp, chilly. The speculator, knowing nothing of simians, believed it necessary to beat them at every opportunity, and to this end, made his entrance to the barn, armed with a broom handle which he used to drive the unfortunate beasts before him. The superintendent was soft-hearted. He went to the owner and begged for the increase in price necessary—at last to receive it. Then, that night, he hurried for the shed in which the apes had suffered, only to be met by the surly announcement of the speculator that the beasts had slipped past him when he had gone forth to feed them that evening, and had escaped. It seemed that the episode had ended. But there was to be a sequel. Four weeks later, in San Francisco, a sea captain approached the superintendent.

“Want to buy five red faced apes cheap?” he asked.

The circus man nodded in assent and asked the price. The sea captain scratched his head.

“Darned if I know what they’re worth,” he announced. “Guess I can make it pretty reasonable though. They didn’t cost me anything. Just came down from Seattle with a load of lumber. Two days out one of my men notified me that there was a monkey down in the hold. I thought he’d been drinking too much and went down to see for myself. Then I decided that I’d been the one that was doing the drinking. There were five of ’em, scared to death! Three males and a mother and a baby—.” “What’s that?” The superintendent stared. “Let’s take a look at ’em!”

The captain led the way. Down at the ship, the superintendent found five apes, now tame and apparently happy in human association. The seaman waved a hand.

“Haven’t got the slightest idea where they came from. They must’ve stowed away with the lumber. Still, they’ve been used to people. Scared of us at first and huddled together and chattered. But when they saw that we weren’t going to hurt ’em, they came round all right and have been regular pets.”

The superintendent went forward to an examination—and an identification, by means of a scar on the right hip of the female. He asked the captain for his sailing date from Seattle, and found it to have been early on the morning following the escape of the five apes from the barn in which they had been cruelly imprisoned. After that the explanation was obvious.

The animals had been brought to this country on a tramp steamer upon which their associations had been happy ones. Like all simians they had come to love the sea, and naturally, with their liberation, they had turned toward the shipping docks by instinct. In the darkness, they had clambered aboard the first ship they found, which happened to be this coastwise freighter. With the result that the circus recovered its red faced apes, and a sea captain went back to his freighter announcing that romance wasn’t dead on the blamed old ocean after all!

In fact, romance is very much alive, as far as simians are concerned, for it is due to the tramp steamer that most of the big apes reach America alive. There is no more sensitive creature than the chimpanzee or the orang-outang. Grief, moodiness, sorrow—these things sap the life of a great ape as surely as any malignant disease; refusing food, water, the big simian that is captured and brought to America by the usual methods of caging, too often dies before it ever reaches the circus. But with the tramp steamer, all is different.