For three hours I fought with death. What agony I suffered! Every time I endeavoured to hook myself on as it were to the branches of coral which projected above the waves, I was driven back by the surf: and my gory hands let go of their painful support. My strength failed me; I had scarcely sufficient left to seize the rope attached to the buoy. I had lost all energy, and almost the desire for existence, when a last wave enveloped me, and carried me with my buoy to the bottom of the sea. I felt myself getting weaker and weaker, then I became cold, and recollect nothing more.
When I re-opened my eyes I found myself lying extended on a shore covered with sea-weed and marine plants. I fancied too that trees were not far distant. My astonishment was that of a person waking from a trance—I hadn’t strength enough to rise. The storm no longer raged. The sun, which appeared to my still weak sight to have attained a certain height in the heavens, spread a general glow around, and the sand grew warm beneath my touch. By degrees the sensation of life returned to me. I sought for myself, I asked myself if it were really I, and whereabouts I was; I saw for certainty that there were trees—in fact a forest at some little distance off. My lethargy passed away like a fleeting cloud, and I endeavoured to rise and walk a few steps; but my legs bent under me. Nevertheless I held myself upright. The sun, which had risen still higher in the heavens, now shone down almost perpendicularly on the ground. The heat diffused throughout the air was so intense that I fell faint and exhausted at the foot of a palm-tree whose cool and refreshing shade served to revive me.
Gradually my eyes grew heavy, and I fell fast asleep. I do not know how long I remained plunged in this second and more refreshing lethargy; but when I awoke, I judged by the position of the sun that it was afternoon. From the degree of comfort which I felt, I concluded that I must have slept altogether something like eight hours. I can, however, say nothing positive on this score, my watch having stopped from the various shocks my whole body had received since the preceding evening.
In order to dissipate the heaviness which held possession of my senses after this prolonged sleep, I rose and took a few rapid steps straight before me. I had scarcely proceeded twenty yards in a direction immediately opposite to the sea, when I caught sight of something like a human form at the end of a long avenue of trees. Naturally enough, my first impression was that this must be some inhabitant of the island on which I had been cast by my unlucky shipwreck. I was already rejoicing at the discovery, though, I must confess, not without a certain amount of inquietude as to the possible nature of the companion whom fortune had sent me. I walked straight in the direction in which I had first seen him; but, to my intense surprise, after the lapse of five or six minutes, I failed in encountering him, or even in discovering what had become of him. Had my eyes deceived me? Had the numerous mirages of the sun assisted to produce some kind of hallucination? I knew not how to explain the affair, which left upon me a certain disagreeable impression. Nevertheless I continued to walk on.
I had proceeded no very great distance, when all at once another view opened to my sight; and, to my intense satisfaction, I again saw the figure which I had observed a few minutes previously. Ah! how truly happy I felt at this second discovery! I could manage to distinguish him far more clearly than I had done before, although the distance between us was very much greater. I watched him with the utmost attention, and was surprised to find how excessively quick and lively all his movements were. He was continually disappearing and appearing again, passing as quick as lightning from one point to another. After a time I felt convinced that he had seen me, and that he was afraid. I thereupon advanced towards him with increased boldness, and had just arrived at the spot where I had last seen him, when something—indefinable at the first glance, a kind of hairy and sinewy form, uttering noisy, guttural, and savage cries, which were taken up and repeated by the many echoes around—suddenly descended from the top of a tree, almost at my very feet. It was an ape. With one bound he mounted the tree again, then sprang down, and ended by placing himself immediately in my path, as though to prevent me from proceeding.
This pretension on his part was not at all to my mind; I therefore broke off the first branch of a tree which I could manage to reach with my hand—it was, I believe, a small stick of cane—and threatened the animal with it. My action evidently displeased him. At a second cry, which he uttered as a call, judge of my consternation to see rushing from the four points of the compass, through the openings in the forest, clouds upon clouds of apes, of all forms, colours, and sizes, who in an instant, clambering up the trees, rolling themselves among the branches like squirrels, or taking possession of the ground about me, proceeded to regard me with quick and menacing glances, and to overwhelm me with hissing cries, and gnashings of the teeth, so fierce, so noisy, so positively deafening, that I became quite dizzy and bewildered. I was compelled to clap my hands over my ears, so as not to lose all sense of consciousness in the midst of this infernal commotion. Nothing like it, I believe, had ever been heard before in the forests of Oceania.
Clouds upon clouds of apes, of all forms, colours, and sizes, clambering up the trees, rolling themselves among the branches like squirrels, or taking possession of the ground about me.—[Page 30.]
My Macao experience with regard to apes was not lost upon me at this supreme moment. In spite of my trouble, and of the danger with which I was menaced, I managed to recognise, without difficulty, the different kinds of apes in which I had formerly dealt. I noticed the duks, with their long tails, smooth faces, black feet, and red ears; the wanderoos, such troublesome fellows that they are obliged to be kept in iron cages; lowandos, with hairless flesh-coloured faces, and all the rest of their bodies as black as their noses, possessing long claws, and having on their heads large wigs of grisly, bushy, compact hair. I saw monkeys with purple faces, and with violet hands, trailing behind them tails terminating in white tufts of hair; capuchins, covered with a flowing down of a yellowish black tint, which serves them for a kind of hood; monas, with white bellies and wide open eyes surrounded with circles, black as their feet, hands, and wrists; then coaïtas, or spider monkeys, with tails that they can turn to much the same purposes as the elephant does his proboscis; then black-crested simpias; then ourang-outangs; then hundreds of mangabeys, monkeys with long tails, and known as apes of Madagascar. I recognised them by their naked eyelids, their striking whiteness, their long grey muzzles, and their eyebrows of coarse and bushy hair. In the same way I recognised the gloomy macaques, the turbulent pinches, the malbroncks, and the pig-tailed macaques, which gambolled, frolicked, danced, kicked, stamped, capered, and wheeled about on every side. Hundreds and hundreds more pressed forward to catch sight of me, but they were too far off for me to distinguish them, as I had done those of whom I have just spoken.
Knowing by experience the thoroughly wicked nature of these animals when congregated together, I resolved to beat a retreat. I was, however, too late. On all sides of me were closely-packed ranks of apes, some of whom seemed possessed of such strength, that any attempt at flight would have been a grave imprudence on my part. I remained, therefore, perfectly still, but not without some little anxiety. Suddenly, all these apes which encircled me round about, commenced to sway to and fro, making at the same time the most hostile demonstrations, although I no longer held in my hand the unlucky cane branch, the original cause of their furious irritation. That I might bear with patience this opposition, which I was most anxious not to increase (thinking that if I were permitted to proceed towards the interior of the island, some inhabitant, friend or enemy, civilised or savage, might rescue me from these insulting occupants of the woods), I amused myself by recalling to mind the wearisomeness of the dull tints which overpower the traveller on his arrival in the first commercial, and the most densely-populated city in the world, that “province covered with houses” called London, the thousand custom-house officers—honourable persons enough, whom I should be very sorry to compare with apes, though they are also at times equally tyrannical—that one meets with on landing. I turned from one reminiscence of the kind to another, until I found myself recalling how on a particular day, on my arrival at Calcutta, the officers at the custom-house pierced with their iron gauge-rod a packet of twenty Cashmere shawls, which were completely spoiled; but on which, nevertheless, I was required to pay duty.