FINALE
THE voyage home is not the easiest part of a collecting trip, though one might be inclined to think so. It was fourteen days of extremely hard work for us, but our reward was that we lost only two specimens: one was a bird that had been unwell when we came on the ship, and so its death was no surprise; the second loss was a mongoose which somehow escaped from its cage and, for no apparent reason, walked straight through the rails and into the sea before I could grab it.
I have heard it said that all you have to do is to slip a pound to a member of the crew and then more or less forget your collection until you dock. But even supposing you were to find a member of the crew with that amount of time on his hands (which is unlikely), you would have none of your rarest and most delicate specimens left alive when you arrived, for the man, with all the goodwill in the world, would not know how to look after them. No, I’m afraid it’s not as easy as that. You have to crawl out of your bunk at some unearthly hour of the morning to start the first feed, and from then on there is not a moment of the day that you have free.
Sue was my great problem on the voyage: while in camp she had spent all day sprawled on my bed, getting plenty of fresh air and sunshine. I did not want to keep her closed up in her little wooden cage all the time, yet I was afraid to let her lie on deck for she had just started to crawl, and I did not want her to follow the mongoose through the rails and into the Atlantic. So I had a conference with the chief steward and explained my problem. After some thought he disappeared and returned shortly afterwards carrying a large babies’ play-pen. Apparently some lady travelling with her child had left it on board, and I blessed her for this kind if unintentional action. It was duly erected on deck in a nice sheltered position, filled with blankets, and Sue placed within. She thought it was grand fun, and after a few days could stand upright by holding on to the top bar. True, she fell heavily on to her ample bottom each time the ship roiled, but she could stand upright for a few seconds at a time, and she felt this was quite an achievement. There was also a delightful arrangement let into the side of the pen: several rows of coloured beads that slid up and down on wire. Sue thought these were marvellous, and would spend hours shooting them up and down, or sucking them hopefully.
The crew, of course, were captivated by her, and they spent all their spare time standing round the play-pen talking to her, or tickling her fat tummy. It was quite ludicrous to see great hairy stokers (who looked as though they had not a pennyweight of sentimentalism in their make-up) leaning over the play-pen and talking baby-talk to a thumb-sucking chimpanzee, reclining at ease on a soft bed of blankets. The day that Sue walked three steps, clutching wildly at the sides of the pen for support, four or five members of the crew, who happened to have been present at this earth-shaking event, came dashing round to tell me about it, as excited as though Sue had been their own joint offspring. I am quite sure that, had I wanted it, I could have had the entire engine-room staff knitting tiny garments for her, such was her hold on them.
The other animals got their fair share of attention as well. Should one of the monkeys develop a cold or a cough the news of this catastrophe would spread through the ship in record time, and soon various members of the crew would be coming up to me with handfuls of sugar or other titbits “for the sick one, mate”. The cook and his various assistants always saved the more choice left-oven for their special favourites, and high on this list was, of course, George. He took all this spoiling as a matter of course, and would sit in his cage with a regal expression on his face, accepting whatever was pushed through the bars with a fine air of condescension. Only once during the voyage did he misbehave himself. Sparks, the radio operator, was one of those who always came and talked to George and, so he might better see the baboon in the dim interior of its cage, he would don a massive pair of horn-rimmed glasses. George was captivated by these, and waited his chance to investigate them further. One day Sparks bent too close to the cage and in a second George had reached out and whipped the coveted glasses into his cage. It took me a long time to get him to give them up again, but he had handled them so carefully that when he did return them they were fortunately unbroken.
We were lucky with the weather on the homeward voyage, for it remained calm and fine until we reached the outskirts of the Bay of Biscay; here the sea was leaden and heaving, and a fine cold drizzle fell, so we would have known, without being told, that we were approaching England. From our point of view these last few days were the worst, for the temperature dropped and a wild cold wind sprang up and whistled among our cages, making the specimens shiver. If a monkey caught a chill now there was little chance of it recovering. Blankets and tarpaulins were draped over the cage fronts, and the monkeys had hot milk each morning, and again at night. The ship rolled her way round Land’s End, the lighthouse blinking encouragingly at us as we gave the midnight feed, and then up the Irish Sea. Then, one dank grey morning we could see the gilded misshapen birds that perch on the top of the Unilever buildings, and we knew that we had reached Liverpool. Our voyage, with all its worries and troubles, was over. Soon would come the greatest joy of alclass="underline" to see our specimens come out of their cramped cages and stretch themselves after so many months of close confinement.
Unloading your animals from a ship is always a trying business, but at last all the cages were stacked on the docks, and we could start loading them into the zoo vans. The Angwantibos, busy trotting through the branches in their cages, were destined for London Zoo; George, grinning through the bars of his cage, and Sue, still practising press-ups in spite of the noise and confusion, together with the Drills, the Black-legged Mongoose and many of John’s birds, were all going to live down at Paignton Zoo, in Devon. The Guenons were to take up residence in the new monkey house at Chester Zoo, and the rest of the creatures were to be distributed between the zoos at Manchester and Bristol.
Eventually, the last cage was stowed away, and the vans bumped their way across the docks through the fine, drifting rain, carrying the animals away to a new life, and carrying us towards the preparations for a new trip.
INDEX
ANGWANTIBO (Arctocebus calabarensis)
ANT, Driver (Dorylus sp.)
BAT, Fruit (Rousettus angolensis)
BULBUL, Gaboon (Pycnonotus barbatus gabonensis)
CHAT, Blue-shouldered Robin (Cossypha cyanocampter) CHAMELEON, Flap-necked (Chamaeleon cristatus)
Horned ( Chamaeleon oweni)
Pygmy (Rhampholeon spectrum)
CHIMPANZEE (Anthropopithecus troglodytes satyrus)
CICADA (Cicadidae sp.)
CIVET (Civettictis c. civetta)
COUCAL, Black-throated (Centropus l. leucogaster)
CRAKE, Black (Limnocorax flavirostra)
CROCODILE, Broad-fronted (Osteolaemus tetraspis)
DARTER, African (Anhinga rufa)
DOVE, Senegal Blue-spotted (Turtur afer)