TRAMPING IT TO CAGEDOM
All the romance about a circus isn’t confined to its sprawled tents,
its beauty and rhythm of performance, its life of the padroom and
dressing tents, its screaming calliope, bringing up the rear of the
parade. Nor does it always concern its people, romantic as their lives
may be. Oftentimes there is another angle, of which the public hears
little; even the sideshow lecturer doesn’t touch upon it. That angle
concerns the animals.
All because there are often animals with a past in the circus, which
have come to it by far different means than the customary ones. Beasts
that greet the little seaport towns of the coast countries with strange
yowlings and excitements, which only the circus people understand.
Those animals might not even recognize a jungle. But they recognize
the sea--often it means the happiest home they ever knew, a home to
which they went as babies, forgetting the natural habitat where they
had come into the world, and gaining their impressions of life from the
deck of a rolling vessel, with every member of the crew for a friend
and playmate. The next time, for instance, that you see one of the
great apes, and notice a strange, wistful expression in his eyes, don’t
fancy that he is grieving for his jungles. Rather, he may be longing
for the fo’c’stle of a tramp steamer wallowing in the great waves, the
phosphorescence of a tropical sea gleaming at the prow and wake, the
sailors sprawled about and this great ape a seaman also, counting it
all as his home and his happiness.
For the tiger, the lion and the other members of the cat tribe, for
most of the elephants and for practically all the ruminants or hay
eaters which find their way into the menagerie of a circus, there is
an organized business which provides the channels by which wild beasts
become the tamed, or at least, the occupants of zoölogical cages.
A business in itself, with branches in various parts of the world,
training quarters, shipping facilities and all the other necessities
for the capture and handling of anything from a secretary bird to a
rhinoceros; this form of enterprise, conducted principally by Hagenbeck
of Hamburg, forms the principal means of providing the hundreds upon
hundreds of wild animals which go to make up the zoölogical collections
of the country. But opposed to this is a different form of entry in
which the lines are not laid in such regular fashion, and by means
of which some of the greatest animal personalities of circusdom have
found their way to America--those off-course wanderers of the sea,
the West-coasters or tramp steamers which rarely touch port in America
without making an addition to this country’s menageries. This portion
of the cargo never appears on the records. It’s a sideline which has
yielded many a story of animal importation, and without which, in all
probability, some of the most widely known giant apes that ever have
been in captivity still might be wandering the jungles.
Apes, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, the gorilla, look upon bars
and cages in the same light that a human being views them. They mean
prison. It is only when a friendly relationship has been established,
and the beast knows that incarceration is not a form of punishment,
that close captivity is accepted. Therefore, these beasts cannot be
simply taken from the jungle, slapped into a cage, and brought to the
circus. More, they cannot endure the cold weather so often attendant
upon a landing upon the eastern coast. The result is that the Pacific
Coast is the natural landing point for these animals, and their means
of entrance in the majority of cases, the captain or first mate of a
tramp steamer, augmenting his earnings by bringing new specimens of
apedom to captivity. Where the tramps touch on foreign shores, there
the natives know that a jungle animal, and particularly one that can
be given the run of the ship, is a thing desired. With the result that
rarely does one of these tramps start, America bound, without an extra
passenger; which comes to know the ship as home, the sailors as friends
and the sea as a place to love. That memory lingers.
A number of years ago, I happened to walk into an unpretentious little
“bird store” in Portland, Oregon. A bell, attached to the door, jingled
in the rear, whence came the noise of a hammer, pounding against tin. A
voice sounded, guttural, yet kindly.
“See who it is, Bill.”
A cooing, squealing call responded. Then, while I gaped, there came
from behind the partition, walking sloppily erect, a great, bowlegged,
long-armed orang-outang, which trundled behind the counter, rested
one arm upon it, gazed at me for a moment, handed me a package of
birdseed from a shelf, then with excited cries and cooing ran behind
the partition again. A moment later, a grinning German, hammer still in
hand, came forth.
“He vould nott be happy unless he answered dot bell!” he announced.
Which was fine for Bill. But, as the store-owner confessed laughingly,
it was a little hard on the customers, especially those who didn’t
know that Bill was amiable and harmless. His response to my entrance
had been an extraordinarily tame affair; he usually jumped to the top
of the counter, slapped his hands excitedly as if in an effort to
understand what the customer wanted, then with a wild swoop descended
to the floor again, seized a paper sack, filled it with sunflower seed
and passed it forth. If the customer became frightened, the old bird
storekeeper was very, very sorry. But Bill must have his joke!
For Bill, to his old German master, was all but human. Before his bird
store days, the owner had sailed the seas as the captain of a tramp
freighter, and his ship never had been without a simian mascot. Then
he had taken to land and as a present, his former first mate, now
the Captain, had brought him, after nine months of wandering about
the ocean, this orang-outang. Bill had been one of the crew aboard
ship. Now he became one of the proprietors of the bird store, for he
was something more than an orang-outang to the owner of the little
“emporium”--he represented the life that the old skipper loved, and
if the customers didn’t like the association of the strange, grinning
creature, that was just too bad. The owner liked him and that was
enough.
So there they lived together, Bill and the Old Man, as he was known.
Several years went by. Then one day, the old first mate came for a
visit to his one time captain.
A scream sounded from the orang-outang. In the years which he had spent
in the bird store Bill had learned to walk erect, but now, with swift
jungle leaps, he ran toward the visitor, crawled up into his arms and
clung to him, cooing and chattering. During the hours of the visit, he
would not be separated, but at last the parting came.
“Stay there,” said the former first mate, “I’ll be back.”
They never met again. But those who knew the store told of a big
orang-outang who sat for hours each day, watching the boats of the
Columbia River which flowed behind the store; the whistle of a vessel,
signaling for a bridge upstream would cause him to leap with excitement
and hurry for the door that he might wait and wait until the ship had
gone downstream. But he did not grieve. Apparently it was enough to
watch the ships which represented the life whence he had come; he was
happy in merely looking at them, as was the old Captain. Persons who
knew the store told of the twain of them sitting on the steps together,
the old salt’s arms about the shoulders of the orang-outang, and both
of them looking out toward the river, where traveled the boats which
represented the life which both once had lived. Then the proprietor
died. The orang-outang went to a circus--and to a cage, away from his
visions of the sea. He died of grief within three months!
Strange, but the sea seems to have a fascination for
simians--sentimental for the most part; sometimes otherwise. One of the
money-making enterprises of tramp steamers which ply the West Coast
is the landing of rhesus monkeys from South America, brought to this
country in huge crates containing sometimes as high as fifty of the
small creatures. It is inevitable that now and then a seaman should
take a fancy to one of the monkeys and, taking him from the cage, make
a ship’s pet of him. Naturally, it is a gradual affair, the seaman
watching his charge until he has become familiar with his surroundings,
and devoid of fright. This little diversion, however, in one instance
led to tragedy.
The one simian which had gained the run of the ship evidently believed
the same sort of life would be good for the rest of his comrades. He
returned to the crate where, more by accident than anything else, he
managed to release the latch which held the crate door. A moment later,
the hold was swarming with monkeys.
This would have been all right, except for the intervention of another
ship’s mascot, a large bull dog, which happened into the hold about
that time, saw the strange occupants, and began an excited chase. The
monkeys moved for the deck, scampering across it and at last bringing
up, huddled and excited, upon a life raft. Then one of them glanced
below and saw the sea beneath, rushing past as the ship moved on its
journey.
He chattered and gesticulated. The others crowded about him, dazed,
hypnotized, it seemed, by the movement of the water. Evidently the
same fascination which attacks a person at the edge of a high roof
had come over these tiny animals. A moment more and with a weird cry,
one of the monkeys leaped--to his death in the sea. Then another, and
another and another--before the crew could rescue a single member of
the escaped band, every one of them had yielded to the strange power of
suggestion and had leaped into the ocean, there to struggle wildly for
a moment, then be lost in the swirling wake.
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.
In the first place, the West-Coasters travel for the most part, through
warm climates an essential to the health of the average “big monk.” But
above all things, there is association.
The great apes are usually purchased in their youth and taken aboard
merely as a speculation. An adult ape is worth more than a young one,
with the result that the chimpanzee or the orang-outang often becomes
an occupant of the ship for several years, becoming the mascot and
the friend of every man aboard. He runs the rigging and climbs the
masts, he loafs about the forecastle and dances in awkward fashion to
the playing of the accordion or the singing of the songs with which
the seamen pass their idle hours. He is the pest of the galley, the
comedian of the mess room; there have been cases known where the beasts
have been taught simple tasks, following the sailors about at their
duties and making ludicrous efforts to work also. It is a happy life
for these animals; through their imitative natures they learn tricks
and comicalities. Above all, they have health and strength, and when
full growth does come, the sea captain knows that he is going to gain
a heavy return on his investment. With the result that one day, a
ship’s mascot goes ashore, ambling past harbor officials who have seen
him take the same kind of a trip many times before. But this time he
doesn’t return and a circus begins to advertise an addition to its
menagerie.
Nor are the simians all which arrive in this fashion. The next time you
see a particularly expert boxing kangaroo, inquire into his past. In
all probability that “kang” learned his tricks while a laughing crew
lolled about the deck of a lumbering freighter for which he formed the
mascot and general humorist, while some particularly burly sailor
tried his best to outbox him, only to fail.
Outside this, the list of “regulars” which come to cagedom via
the tramp steamer, is small. There are other importations, it is
true--Little Hip, perhaps the most famous performing baby elephant
that ever came to this country, arrived via trampdom, the pet of every
sailor on the ship. Now and then members of the cat tribes are brought
in also--but this is not a good cargo. When there’s an animal aboard,
the sailor likes to be one in which he can exhibit friendliness, and
there’s little of the chummy spirit about the lion, the leopard and the
tiger. Then too, there is the matter of food; fresh meat in quantities
sufficient to feed a three or four hundred-pound cat animal, does not
abound upon the tramp steamer. But there are enough exceptions to prove
the rule; among them the case of “Nig,” a queer-shapen, mysterious
appearing black jaguar which is now a feature with the Ringling
Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, midnight hued, apparently the
most vicious beast in the whole menagerie, continually “fighting” his
trainer, Mabel Stark, yet subservient to her with a queer sort of
cat-love which amounts almost to worship. For it all there is a reason.
“Nig,” far in his past, was a ship mascot. In his cubhood days, when he
was no larger than a house cat, he appeared at a South American port in
the arms of a native who had found him in a swamp, saw in him a few
pieces of silver and hurried seaward. A tramp steamer lay in port, a
captain bargained grumpily for him and “Nig” went aboard, to play about
the decks, and to look upon this rolling, tossing ship as home.
The seamen amused themselves with him as one would fondle a housecat.
“Nig” was nothing more to them than a big black tabby, and the ship was
his to wander at will. But he grew steadily, to surprising proportions,
and there came the time when the captain, fearful that he might some
day lose his playfulness, began to look about for a purchaser.
The buyer appeared in the person of a South American circus owner
and “Nig” went forth to a cage, and to a new life which he did not
understand. All his days he had been free--why should he be caged now?
And because he was caged, he became fierce; because he was fierce, the
unknowing, unskilled menagerie men of the small circus regarded him as
a thing to be passed by or merely shunted to one side with a feeding
fork; to be cursed, and reviled as a hateful beast. Then a scout for
the big American circus saw him and purchased him. They put “Nig”
aboard a steamer, bound for America.
With that, “Nig” went wild. A ship to him meant freedom, the
association of friendly persons, playmates. He roared and bellowed and
tore at his shipping den. Night and day his heavy fore-legs lashed
and clawed, his big body pushed and bounded and leaped; gradually the
fastenings of the wooden shifting den began to weaken. The crew of the
ship became frightened. No one would go near him to feed him. And as
the days passed, “Nig” worked at his confines like a convict struggling
to escape from prison.
A wireless flashed into New York--for armed men to go to the docks
that they might be ready to kill him in case he broke loose during the
unloading process. But American circus men are different from those
of other countries. The armed men went, but with instructions to do
everything possible to save the beast’s life. His future trainer, Mabel
Stark, went also. A roomy cage was provided. Out from the hold came the
shifting den, weakened in its every fiber, while a loathsome appearing
black thing, his head already through a gaping aperture, strove at
escape. Down to the docks and a hasty transfer to the big cage. Then
the crooning voice of a woman:
“Hello Nig! There, Nig, old boy! You’re all right--you’re among
friends! Nice old Nig!”
Gradually the beast ceased to roar and bellow and leap. At last he came
to the bars, and the hand of a woman scratched at his head. The fierce
beast was dangerous no longer. All he had wanted was kindness and
companionship!