“IT WAS A MONKEY.”
One could see that the poor beast was terribly weak. He would climb up on a thwart, then fall backwards, and, as his boat slipped past, he lay on his side looking up at us through his spectacles with the most woebegone, piteous, grinning face of appeal that ever monkey in this world assumed.
There was a sudden explosion of laughter from amongst us; no man could help himself. Indeed, the first sight of the boat had put some fancies of horrors to be disclosed into our heads, and the change, from our notion of beholding dead or dying human beings, into this apparition of a huge monkey in a smoking cap and spectacles, was so violent and ridiculous a surprise that it proved too much for the gravest amongst the crowd aft.
“Hands to the topsail braces!” bawled the captain; “lay the maintopsail to the mast. We must pick the poor brute up.”
The Lady Violet was brought to a stand. Five men in charge of the second mate sprang into a lee-quarter boat; the tackles were slacked away, and in a few minutes our boat was alongside the other, with two of the fellows handing out the monkey, that lay as quiet as a baby in their arms.
Everybody crowded on to the main-deck to get a view of the poor beast when the boat had brought him alongside. He had the look of an old man; and though you saw that the unhappy animal was suffering, his grimaces were so ugly, the appeal of his bloodshot eyes through his spectacles so ludicrously human-like, that he made you laugh the louder at him somehow or other for the very pity that he excited in you.
“Get him water and food, lads, some of you,” cried the second mate from the poop; “treat him as though he were mortal like yourselves. He’ll take all ye’ll give him and more than he ought to have; and we haven’t saved him to perish of a bust-up.”
He was carried to the forecastle followed by a crowd of sailors and steerage people, and I lost sight of him, though I hung about, boy-like, for a bit, hoping they would bring him forth presently. However, it seemed that after the seamen had given him a drink of water and a couple of biscuits to eat, they took off his cap and spectacles and put him into a hammock with a blanket up to his throat, where he lay like a human being, rolling a languishing eye round upon those who looked at him, until he fell asleep.
The name Dolphin, Boston, was painted in the stern-sheets of the boat in which the monkey was, and of course it was supposed, fore and aft, that that was the name of the wreck we had fallen in with. But I afterwards heard—when I had been home some months—that the hull we had seen founder was a large English barque called the Elijah Gorman, whilst the boat from which we had taken the monkey had belonged to the Yankee craft whose name was on her. How the boat happened to have been adrift, and how her sole occupant should have been a monkey, I never could get to hear, though my father made many inquiries, being much interested in my story of this little affair. The crew of the Elijah Gorman had been taken off by a steamer bound to England from a South American port; so full particulars concerning her loss had been published in the newspapers some time before we arrived in the Thames.