In Which the New Noah Sets Sail in His Ark

 

 

The time that the Collector dreads most on a trip is when it is necessary to pack up his great array of animals and transport them down to the coast and on to the ship for the long voyage back to England. First of all, you have to make sure that every cage is in good repair and every door secure. Then, make arrangements for the food supply needed on the ship, for you cannot board even the most well-conducted boat and expect the cook to cater for a hundred-odd animals.

Quite apart from such things as sacks of wheat, potatoes, cocoa yams, and other curious tropical vegetables, you have to have an enormous supply of fruit. It is quite useless to buy all this fruit when it is ripe, for after the first week of the voyage you would find that it had by then gone rotten and none would be left on which to feed your animals. So you have to divide your fruit into three sections – ripe, half ripe, and completely unripe. The unripe fruit, together with the meat and eggs, has to be stored in the ship’s refrigerator.

This will keep meat and eggs from going bad and also prevent the fruit from becoming ripe; so when you have used up your ripe fruit you fetch a fresh supply out of the refrigerator and lay it on deck in the sun where it ripens very quickly and can be fed to the animals. You have to work out your quantities of food very carefully. If too much is taken, you will find that a lot of it will go bad and will have to be thrown overboard. On the other hand, should you take too little, you will run out just as you reach a place like the Bay of Biscay where good food and plenty of it is essential if you want the animals to survive the sudden change in climate. So when you are sure that your caging is complete and food supplies adequate, you can then arrange for the lorries to transport you down country.

When I left West Africa I took with me three sacks of wheat and potatoes, two sacks of cocoa yams, two sacks of corn, fifty pineapples, two hundred oranges, fifty mangoes, and a hundred and fifty great stems of bananas, as well as such things as dried milk, malt and cod-liver oil, and so on. There were four hundred eggs, each of which had to be carefully tested in a bowl of water to make sure it was fresh before being thoroughly greased and packed in a boxful of straw. For the meat supply, there was a whole bullock and twenty live chickens. This, together with the hundred and fifty-odd cages and all the equipment, was quite a load and I had to hire three lorries and a small van to carry it all down to the coast, two hundred miles away.

I decided to travel by night for several reasons, most important of which was that it was coolest for the animals. If you travel by day, a choice has to be made between two things: putting a tarpaulin over the cages in the back of the lorry and having your animals almost suffocated to death, or else keeping the tarpaulins rolled back and having your animals almost scorched by the cloud of red dust that swirls up behind. So I traveled by night and found it by far the best method.

But you could get very little sleep when being bounced and jolted about in the front of a lorry, and knowing that as soon as dawn came you had to park by the side of the road and in the shade of the trees unload every single box and crate, and clean and feed all your creatures before you could get any proper sleep yourself. Then immediately night fell and it grew cool, and you could load up the lorries and start off once again. The roads in the Cameroons are so bad that we could not travel at more than twenty-five miles an hour, and so a journey which could have been done in England in one day took us three days to complete.

When I arrived at the coast, I found that the ship had not quite finished loading, which meant that we had to wait before we could take our animals on board, and as it was pouring with rain I decided to leave all the creatures in the lorry until we could do so. Just after I had made this decision, the storm clouds rolled away and the sun shone down on us fiercely, so I had to unload all the animals and carry their cages into the shade of some nearby trees. No sooner had I done this than the storm clouds descended once again and within a few minutes all the cages, the equipment, the food supplies, and myself, were drenched with icy rain. After getting aboard, I found every cage filled with sodden shivering animals, and I had to set to work to clean out the lot, replacing the wet sawdust with dry, and throwing handfuls of sawdust over the monkeys hoping to dry some of the moisture out of their fur so that they should not catch cold. I then made an extra large supply of hot milk and distributed it to every creature that could take it. Luckily, there were no ill effects from this ducking.

You find that after the first day at sea your animals’ appetites increase tremendously with the sea air, and the monkeys will, if you let them, eat four and five times as much as they normally do. You are supposed to know this before you start on your voyage and to make allowances for it when you are buying the food supplies. Of course, you cannot take such delicacies with you as grasshoppers and termites, but you can get cockroaches for the more delicate birds and animals by going down into the engine rooms in the evenings and chasing them in and out among the hot pipes. It was not long before the sailors on board ship became quite enthusiastic over this sport and soon we had no reason to go and collect these insects ourselves, for the people from the engine rooms would bring us a regular supply.

A sea voyage lasting two or three weeks can be very enjoyable, providing that your luggage does not include large quantities of extremely hungry animals. If it does, you will find that you have to work as hard, or harder, than any of the sailors on board ship. I had to be called at half-past five every morning to enable me to get through a lot of the cleaning before breakfast. Then, when I had finished breakfast, I started on the job of feeding the animals, and from then on there was actually not a moment of the day that I could call my own until the last pot of evening milk had been put into the monkeys’ cages. As the ship steamed closer and closer to England, the weather became colder and colder, and there were more precautions that had to be taken to ensure that my animals did not catch a chill. Hot milk became the rule every night and the cages had to be carefully covered with tarpaulins and blankets to keep out the cold wind. If there was a rough sea I had to make sure that all the cages were carefully secured to the rails, or else a bad accident might occur. I had forgotten to do this on the way back from West Africa, and late one night as I was giving the young monkeys the last bottle feed of the day, I noticed the ship was plunging up and down quite vigorously. Looking along my line of cages which were stacked against the rails, I decided that, when I had finished feeding the baby monkeys, I would have to rope them; otherwise, if the weather became worse during the night, they were liable to topple over. No sooner had I made this decision than the ship lurched sickeningly over a particularly big wave and my line of fifty cages toppled and crashed over on their faces on to the deck. I rushed along, lifting them upright and tying them back against the rails, and to my relief, found that none of the inmates was hurt in any way, although the monkeys were extremely indignant and chattered for a long time over the incident.

Sometimes you get other forms of excitement on board ship when you are traveling with your collection. Coming back from West Africa, my friend and I sailed on a ship whose captain, so people told us, was not at all keen on carrying animals. Naturally, when we heard this, we went out of our way to make as little fuss and trouble as possible, for an irritated captain is a man that no collector likes, as he can make life on board ship very difficult for you and your animals. Well, as usual, when you try to be on your best behavior for someone, something is sure to go wrong.

The very first morning, my friend threw a large basket of dirty sawdust that we had cleaned out of the cages over the rail into the sea. Unfortunately, he had not made sure which way the wind was blowing and so a huge swirling cloud of dust sailed up into the air and descended on to the bridge where the captain was standing. This, of course, was not a very good start in our efforts to keep on the right side of him. However, at breakfast, though he greeted us somewhat coldly, he gradually thawed out and, toward the middle of the meal, became quite amiable.

The captain was sitting on one side of the table and I was sitting opposite to him; behind was a series of portholes that looked out on to the hatch where we had all our cages stacked. “I don’t mind what you do, ” said the captain to me, “providing you don’t let any of your animals escape.” “Oh! we shan’t do that, ” and as I said it, I noticed something moving in the porthole just behind the captain’s back. To my horror, I saw that there was a large squirrel. It sat in the porthole and surveyed the dining saloon with a pleased expression. Then he sat up and started to wash his whiskers. The captain, meanwhile, continued his breakfast, unaware that there was a squirrel sitting within a yard or so of his neck. When the squirrel had finished washing his whiskers, he looked around him and decided that with so much food on the table the dining saloon would be a good place for him to investigate, so he peered around himself for a way down. He had just decided that the best way of reaching the delicacies which he could see, was to jump on to the captain’s shoulder and then on the table, when with a muttered “Excuse me, ” I got up, walked out of the dining room as nonchalantly as I could, and as soon as I was out of sight of the captain I sprinted hard up on to the deck. I arrived outside the porthole just as the squirrel was bunching himself to spring, and I managed to throw myself across the hatch and grab his big furry tail before he could launch himself on to the captain. I bundled him back into his cage, chattering indignantly, and then I sighed with relief.

When I returned to the dining room, I found luckily that the captain had not noticed anything and he did not know how close he had been to having a large squirrel land on his neck just as he was in the middle of his bacon and eggs.

As I say, because we wanted to be on our best behavior nothing seemed to go right. A few days later three large lizards escaped from their box and disappeared rapidly into some large coils of rope lying on the deck. As it was quite impossible to move all that stuff to catch them without the aid of half the ship’s company, we had to contain ourselves with making grabs at them every time they appeared. At last, after three days, we caught them all, but it was a nerve-racking time, as I was quite convinced that they would somehow or other find their way up on to the bridge and that the captain would see them.

We had only succeeded in getting the reptiles safely under lock and key, when a monkey escaped. She was a perfectly tame creature and normally would come to you if you called her, but on this occasion she was far too interested in exploring the ship to bother about us, and scarcely spared us a few glances even when we tried to lure her back into her cage with a large bunch of golden bananas, a bait which she usually could not resist. That day the ship was pitching and tossing a good deal, and if it had not been for this, I dread to think what would have happened, for the monkey scuttled up the ladder from the well deck on to the passenger deck. Luckily there was nobody about and I pursued her, calling in a hoarse whisper. Each time the ship rolled, she was thrown a bit off balance and I would gain a few feet, as I was more used to the movement than the little monkey. She reached the bottom of the staircase leading up to the captain’s cabin, and seeing how close I was, she hesitated for a minute and then turned and ran up the steps toward his half-opened cabin door. I flung myself up the stairs after her, but without much hope, and I could see her landing with a thump in the middle of the captain’s bed with the captain inside it. Fortunately just as she reached the top step the ship lurched sickeningly, and she fell back down three steps which gave me the chance I needed. I grabbed her long furry tail, hoisted her in the air and ran back down into the well deck as quickly as I could, for her screams of rage would be heard by the captain and bring him out of his cabin to see what was going on.

It was altogether a very trying trip and we were very pleased when eventually, one gray morning, with thin drizzle falling out of the sky, the ship drew into the docks at Liverpool. There on the quay side were the zoo vans, waiting to collect the specimens. Our collection was unloaded from the ship without any mishap and the animals distributed among the various directors, and we watched them with mixed feelings as they drove off through the rain to their new homes in the various zoos in England.

 

 

 

Part Two

 

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