‘How many have you picked up, Mr. Jenkinson!’ cried the mate.
‘Only eight, sir. I believe they were half dead with hunger and thirst, and had no strength to swim, for most of them had sunk before we could approach them.’
‘Hand the poor brutes up.’
Some of the Jacks jumped into the chains to receive the creatures, and they were passed over the rail on to the quarter-deck. Deeply as one might pity the unhappy brutes, it was impossible to look at them with a grave face. One of them was an ape with white whiskers like a frill, and a tuft of hair upon his brow that made the rest of his head look bald. He had lost an eye, but the other blinker was so full of human expression that I found myself shaking with laughter as I watched him. He sat on his hams like a Lascar, gazing up at us with his one eye with a wrinkled and grinning countenance of appeal grotesque beyond the wildest fancies of the caricaturist. There was one pretty little chap with red fur upon his breast like a waistcoat. Some of the creatures, on feeling the warm planks of the deck, lay down in the exact posture of human beings, reposing their heads upon their extended arms and closing their eyes.
‘Bo’sun,’ called Mr. Prance, ‘get those poor beasts forward and have water and food given them. Swing the topsail yard—lee main topsail braces.’
In a few minutes the quarter-deck was clear again, with an ordinary seaman swabbing the wet spaces left by the monkeys, and the ship quietly pushing forwards on her course.
CHAPTER IX
A SECRET BLOW
At sea, a very little thing goes a very long way, and you will suppose that this incident of the monkeys gave us plenty to talk about and to wonder at. At the dinner table that evening old Keeling favoured us with a long yarn about a French craft that capsized somewhere off the Scilly Islands with four men in her: how the air in her hold kept her buoyant; how the fellows climbed into the run and sat with their heads against the ship’s bottom; how one of them strove with might and main to knock a plank out, that he might see if help was about, in nowise suspecting that if he let the air escape the hull would sink; how, all unknown to the wretched imprisoned men, a smack fell in with the capsized craft and tried to tow her, but gave up after the line had parted two or three times; how she finally stranded upon one of the Scilly Isles; and how one of the inhabitants coming down to view the wreck, shot away as though the devil were in chase of him, on hearing the sound of voices inside.