"Oh, sir," he said, with genuine feeling, "he's gone, sir. Shortly
after you left the ship, poor Idzky took to taking rather much liquor,
and that don't do for any of us, you know, sir; I think it was that, for
I never had the heart to pat him on allowance; and he went raving mad,
had regular fits of delirium, and did nothing at all but run round his
cage and bark, and wouldn't look at anything in the way of food. Well,
one day I was coming off the forenoon watch, when, what should I see but
a double line of them `P' ants working in and out of the little place:
twenty or so were carrying a wing, and a dozen a leg, and half a score
running off with a feeler, just like men carrying a stowed mainsail; and
that, says I, is poor Idzky's funeral; and so it was, and I didn't
disturb them. Poor Idzky!"
Peter was a pet mongoose of mine, a kindly, cosy little fellow, who
slept around my neck at night, and kept me clear of cockroaches, as well
as my implacable enemies, the rats. I was good to Peter, and fed him
well, and used to take him on shore at the Cape, among the snakes. The
snakes were for Peter to fight; and the way my wary wee friend dodged
and closed with, and finally throttled and killed a cobra was a caution
to that subtlest of all the beasts of the field. The presiding Malay
used to clap his brown hands with joy as he exclaimed--"Ah! sauve good
mongoose, sar, proper mongoose to kill de snake."
"You don't object, do you," I modestly asked my captain one day, while
strolling on the quarter-deck after tiffin--"you don't object, I hope,
to the somewhat curious pets I at times bring on board?"
"Object?" he replied. "Well, no; not as a rule. Of course you know I
don't like your snakes to get gliding all over the ship, as they were
the other day. But, doctor, what's the good of my objecting? If any
one were to let that awful beast in the box yonder loose--"
"Don't think of it, captain," I interrupted; "he'd be the death of
somebody, to a dead certainty."
"No; I'm not such a fool," he continued. "But if I shot him, why, in a
few days you'd be billeting a boar-constrictor or an alligator on me,
and telling me it was for the good of science and the service."
The awful beast in the box was the most splendid and graceful specimen
of the monitor lizard I have ever seen. Fully five feet long from tip
to tail, he swelled and tapered in the most perfect lines of beauty.
Smooth, though scaly, and inky black, tartaned all over with transverse
rows of bright yellow spots, with eyes that shone like wildfire, and
teeth like quartz, with his forked tongue continually flashing out from
his bright-red mouth, he had a wild, weird loveliness that was most
uncanny. Mephistopheles, as the captain not inaptly called him, knew
me, however, and took his cockroaches from my hand, although perfectly
frantic when any one else went near him. If a piece of wood, however
hard, were dropped into his cage, it was instantly torn in pieces; and
if he seized the end of a rope, he might quit partnership with his head
or teeth, but never with the rope.
One day, greatly to my horror, the steward entered the wardroom, pale
with fear, and reported: "Mephistopheles escaped, sir, and yaffling
[rending] the men." I rushed on deck. The animal had indeed escaped.
He had torn his cage into splinters, and declared war against all hands.
Making for the fore hatchway, he had seized a man by the jacket skirts,
going down the ladder. The man got out of the garment without delay,
and fled faster than any British sailor ought to have done. On the
lower deck he chased the cook from the coppers, and the carpenter from
his bench. A circle of Kroomen were sitting mending a foresail;
Mephistopheles suddenly appeared in their midst. The niggers
unanimously threw up their toes, individually turned somersaults
backwards, and sought the four winds of heaven. These routed, my pet
turned his attention to Peepie. Peepie was a little Arab slave-lass.
She was squatting by a calabash, singing low to herself, and eating
rice. He seized her cummerbund, or waist garment. But Peepie wriggled
clear--natural--and ran on deck, the innocent, like the "funny little
maiden" in Hans Breitmann. On the cummerbund Mephistopheles spent the
remainder of his fury, and the rest of his life; for not knowing what
might happen next, I sent for a fowling-piece, and the plucky fellow
succumbed to the force of circumstances and a pipeful of buck-shot. I
have him yonder on the sideboard, in body and in spirit (gin),
bottle-mates with a sandsnake, three centipedes, and a tarantula.
With monkeys, baboons, apes, and all of that ilk, navy ships, when
homeward bound, are ofttimes crowded. Of our little crew of seventy, I
think nearly every man had one, and some two, such pets, although fully
one-half died of chest-disease as soon as the ship came into colder
latitudes. These monkeys made the little craft very lively indeed, and
were a never-ending source of amusement and merriment to all hands. I
don't like monkeys, however. They "are so near, and yet so far," as
respects humanity. I went shooting them once--a cruel sport, and more
cowardly even than elephant-hunting in Ceylon--and when I broke the
wrist of one, instead of hobbling off, as it ought to have done, it came
howling piteously towards me, shaking and showing me the bleeding limb.
The little wretch preached me a sermon anent cruelty to animals that I
shall not forget till the day I die.
We had a sweet-faced, delicate, wee marmoset, not taller, when on end,
than a quart bottle--Bobie the sailors called him; and we had also a
larger ape, Hunks by name, of what our Scotch engineer called the
"ill-gettit breed"; and that was a mild way of putting it. This brute
was never out of mischief. He stole the men's tobacco, smashed their
pipes, spilled their soup, and ran aloft with their caps, which he
minutely inspected and threw overboard afterwards. He was always on the
black list; in fact, when rubbing his back after one thrashing, he was
wondering all the time what mischief he could do next. Bobie was
arrayed in a neatly fitting sailor-costume, cap and all complete; and so
attired, of course could not escape the persecutions of the ape. Hunks,
after contenting himself with cockroaches, would fill his mouth; then
holding out his hand with one to Bobie, "Hae, hae, hae," he would cry,
then seize the little innocent, and escape into the rigging with him.
Taking his seat in the maintop, Hunks first and foremost emptied his
mouth, cramming the contents down his captive's throat. He next got out
on to the stays for exercise, and used Bobie as a species of dumb-bell,
swinging him by the tail, hanging him by a foot, by an ear, by the nose,
etc, and threatening to throw him overboard if any sailor attempted a
rescue. Last of all, he threw him at the nearest sailor.
On board the _Orestes_ was a large ape as big as a man. He was a most
unhappy ape. There wasn't a bit of humour in his whole corporation.
"He had a silent sorrow" somewhere, "a grief he'd ne'er impart."
Whenever you spoke to him, he seized and wrung your hand in the most
pathetic manner, and drew you towards him. His other arm was thrown
across his chest, while he shook his head, and gazed in your face with
such a woe-begone countenance, that the very smile froze on your lips;
and as you couldn't laugh out of politeness, you felt very awkward. For
anything I know, this melancholy ape may be still alive.
Deer are common pets in some ships. We had a fine large buck in the old
_Semiramie_. A romping, rollicking rascal, in truth a very satyr, who
never wanted a quid of tobacco in his mouth, nor refused rum and milk.
Whenever the steward came up to announce dinner, he bolted below at
once; and we were generally down just in time to find him dancing among
the dishes, after eating all the potatoes.
I once went into my cabin and found two Liliputian deer in my bed. It
was our engineer who had placed them there. We were lying off Lamoo,
and he had brought them from shore.
"Ye'll just be a faither to the lammies, doctor," he said, "for I'm no
on vera guid terms wi' the skipper."
They were exactly the size of an Italian greyhound, perfectly formed,
and exceedingly graceful. They were too tender, poor things, for life
on shipboard, and did not live long.
In the stormy latitudes of the Cape, the sailors used to amuse
themselves by catching Cape pigeons, thus: a little bit of wood floated
astern attached by a string, a few pieces of fat thrown into the water,
and the birds, flying tack and half-tack towards them, came athwart the
line, by a dexterous movement of which they entangled their wings, and
landed them on board. They caught albatrosses in the same fashion, and
nothing untoward occurred.
I had for many months a gentle, loving pet in the shape of a snow-white
dove. I had bought him that I might make feather-flowers from his
plumage; but the boy brought him off alive, and I never had the heart to
kill him. So he lived in a leathern hat-box, and daily took his perch
on my shoulder at meal-times [see page 178].
It was my lot once upon a time to be down with fever in India. The room
in which I lay was the upper flat of an antiquated building, in a rather
lonely part of the suburbs of a town. It had three windows, close to
which grew a large banyan-tree, beneath the shade of whose branches the
crew of a line-of-battle ship might have hung their hammocks with
comfort. The tree was inhabited by a colony of crows; we stood--the
crows and I--in the relation of over-the-way to each other. Now, of all
birds that fly, the Indian crow most bear the palm for audacity. Living
by his wits, he is ever on the best of terms with himself, and his
impudence leads him to dare anything. Whenever, by any chance, Pandoo,
my attendant, left the room, these black gentry paid me a visit.
Hopping in by the score, and regarding me no more than the bed-post,
they commenced a minute inspection of everything in the room, trying to
destroy everything that could not be eaten or carried away. They rent
the towels, drilled holes in my uniform, stole the buttons from my coat,
and smashed my bottles. One used to sit on a screen close by my bed
every day, and scan my face with his evil eye, saying as plainly as
could be--"You're getting thinner and beautifully less; in a day or two,
you won't be able to lift a hand; then I'll have the pleasure of picking
out your two eyes."
Amid such doings, my servant would generally come to my relief, perhaps
to find such a scene as this: Two or three pairs of hostile crows with
their feathers standing up around their necks, engaged in deadly combat
on the floor over a silver spoon or a tooth-brush; half a dozen perched
upon every available chair; an unfortunate lizard with a crow at each
end of it, getting whirled wildly round the room, each crow thinking he
had the best right to it; crows everywhere, hopping about on the table,
and drinking from the bath; crows perched on the window-sill, and more
crows about to come, and each crow doing all in his power to make the
greatest possible noise. The faithful Pandoo would take all this in at
a glance; then would ensue a helter-skelter retreat, and the windows be
darkened by the black wings of the flying crows, then silence for a
moment, only broken by some apologetic remark from Pandoo.
When at length happy days of convalescence came round, and I was able to
get up and even eat my meals at table, I found my friends the crows a
little more civil and respectful. The thought occurred to me to make
friends with them; I consequently began a regular system of feeding them
after every meal-time. One old crow I caught, and chained to a chair
with a fiddle-string. He was a funny old fellow, with one club-foot.
He never refused his food from the very day of his captivity, and I soon
taught him a few tricks. One was to lie on his back when so placed for
any length of time till set on his legs again. This was called turning
the turtle. But one day this bird of freedom hopped away, fiddle-string
and all, and a whole fortnight elapsed before I saw him again. I was
just beginning to put faith in a belief common in India--namely, that a
crow or any other bird, that has been for any time living with human
beings, is put to instant death the moment he returns to the bosom of
his family; when one day, while engaged breakfasting some forty crows,
my club-footed pet reappeared, and actually picked the bit from my hand,
and ever after, until I left, he came regularly thrice a day to be fed.
The other crows came with surprising exactness at meal-times; first one
would alight on the shutter outside the window, and peep in, as if to
ascertain how nearly done I happened to be, then fly away for five or
ten minutes, when he would return, and have another keek. As soon,
however, as I approached the window, and raised my arm, I was saluted
with a chorus of cawing from the banyan-tree; then down they swooped in
dozens; and it was no very easy task to fill so many mouths, although
the loaves were Government ones.
These pets had a deadly enemy in a brown raven--the Brahma kite; swifter
than arrow from bow he descended, describing the arc of a great circle,
and carrying off in his flight the largest lamp of bread he could spy.
He, for one, never stopped to bless the hand of the giver; but the
crows, I know, were not ungrateful. Club-foot used to perch beside me
on a chair, and pick his morsels from the floor, always premising that
two windows at least must be open. As to the others, their persecutions
ended; they never appeared except when called upon. The last act of
their aggression was to devour a very fine specimen of praying mantis I
had confined in a quinine bottle. The first day the paper cover had
been torn off, and the mantis had only escaped by keeping close at the
bottom; next day, the cover was again broken, and the bottle itself
capsized; the poor mantis had prayed in vain for once. Club-foot, I
think, must have stopped all day in the banyan-tree, for I never went to
the window to call him without his appearing at once with a joyful caw;
this feat I used often to exhibit to my shipmates who came to visit me
during my illness.
One thing about talking-birds I don't remember ever to have seen
noticed--namely, the habit some birds have of talking in their sleep.
And, just as a human being will often converse in his dream in a
long-forgotten language, so birds will often at night be heard repeating
words or phrases they never could remember in their waking moments. A
starling of mine often roused me at night by calling out my dog's name
in loud, distinct tones, although by day his attempts to do so were
quite ineffectual. So with a venerable parrot we had on board the saucy
_Skipjack_. Polly was a quiet bird in daylight, and much given to
serious thought; but at times, in the stillness of the middle watch at
sea, would startle the sailors from their slumbers by crying out: "Deen,
deen--kill, kill, kill!" in quite an alarming manner. Polly had been
all through the Indian mutiny, and was shut up in Delhi during the sad
siege, so her dreams were not very enviable.
Do parrots know what they say? At times I think they do. Our parson on
board the old _Rumbler_ had no more attentive listener to the Sabbath
morning service than wardroom Polly; but there were times when Polly
made responses when silence would have been more judicious. There was
an amount of humour which it is impossible to describe, in the sly way
she one day looked the parson in the face, as he had just finished a
burst of eloquence both impassioned and impressive, and uttered one of
her impertinent remarks. For some months, she was denied access to
church because she had once forgotten herself so far as to draw corks
during the sermon--this being considered "highly mutinous and
insubordinate conduct." But she regained her privilege. Poor Poll!
I'll never forget the solemn manner in which she shut her eyes one day
at the close of the service, as if still musing on the words of the
sermon, on the mutability of all things created, and remarked: "Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity, says--says:" she could say no more--the rest
stuck in her throat, and we were left to ponder on her unfortunate loss
of memory in uttering the admonitory sentiment.