The man among the monkeys; or, Ninety days in apeland To which are added: The philosopher and his monkeys, The professor and the crocodile, and other strange stories of men and animals

Origin of my family name of Marasquin.—Mistake in this respect on the part of my ambitious Grandfather.—My Ancestors’ profession honourable, but dangerous.—Mine the same.—A Tiger deprives me of my Father, whose Business I carry on.—My Fondness for Animals, and my skill in stuffing them.—The terrible Tricks which they play me.—The Malay Pirates more untamable than my Animals.—The English Stations founded to destroy them are devastated by Yellow Fever and something else.—Vice-Admiral Campbell visits my Menagerie.—The rare and curious Animals it contained.—Baboons and Chimpanzees.—Passions and rivalries.—An Ape as wicked as a Human Being.—My Mother perishes in the Flames.—I determine on a voyage to Oceania.—I charter a Chinese Junk, and find it manned by Pirates.—We encounter a fearful Tempest.

I was born at Macao, in China, and am descended from one of those brave adventurers who, under the leadership of the celebrated Vasco de Gama, boldly left Lisbon, towards the end of the fifteenth century, to conquer the Indies.

If I have good reason to congratulate myself on the accuracy of my pedigree, I have, nevertheless, no plausible grounds for believing that I am descended from one of those sons of noble families who were attached by the sole tie of glory to their illustrious chief. My grandfather, it is true, used sometimes to say that our name of Marasquin was a corruption of Marascarenhas, one of the greatest of names among those adventurous Portuguese who followed Vasco de Gama from the banks of the Tagus to the end of Asia; but I have always had serious doubts upon this score.

Moreover, my worthy grandfather himself, Nicholas Marasquin, was to my knowledge never anything more than an industrious trader, established at Macao. My father, Juan Perez Marasquin, was pretty much the same. To him I owe this testimony—that the extent of his ambition, during a lifetime, too short, alas! to my great regret, was simply to pass for an honest man, a good Christian, and a loyal bird-fancier.

This, then, was his profession; I do not blush for it, although certain persons, through ignorance, or actuated by jealousy, have sought to reduce it to the level of a licensed dealer in game and poultry.

Even without descending so low as this, it would still be very unfair to regard the bird-fancier’s profession—which, by the way, became in later years my own—as restricted to the mere sale of birds, such as we know it ordinarily to be followed in Europe. My father possessed in his vast menagerie one of the finest collections of which the Portuguese Indies could boast, for it comprised not merely birds, but all kinds of rare and curious animals. Sumatra, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, were all represented there by specimens of some of the strangest and most exquisitely formed creatures which inhabit in their native state the almost impenetrable forests of the eastern hemisphere. The profession of naturalist, when exercised on this scale, is really a very lucrative one, for the taste of the European colonists, and the almost insane passion of the Chinese, for these interesting products of nature, are matters of notoriety.

To his trade in living animals my father added the art and mystery of stuffing them when dead, which was not the least lucrative profession of the two. He had given me lessons in this learned and delicate art of restoring to defunct birds and quadrupeds not alone the precise forms but the very attitudes which they affected during lifetime. Thanks to the counsels of so excellent a demonstrator, I acquired a remarkable skill in taxidermy; and you will find further on, if you read through this account of my adventures, that I was indebted to this useful and beautiful science for my escape from the tragical end which at one period menaced me.

Our house had prospered for more than a century at Macao. My father, on succeeding to the collection, added considerably to it, and thanks to the intelligent care of the good, economical, and devoted woman he espoused, he managed to raise his establishment to the very highest position in that particular branch of industry in which he was engaged.

But if this business yields, as I have already said, such rich rewards, on the other hand it is attended not only with difficulties, but with perils as well, as I have had only too many opportunities of proving. It is carried on under conditions of which most people are ignorant. It is not sufficient for a dealer in animals to purchase a bargain, and then to sell it again at a profit. It is requisite that he should go the length of procuring in a wild state those rarer kinds of animals which, when obtained, are certain to realise a good price. Hence the indispensable necessity of being at once both merchant and hunter, or rather of being first of all hunter before becoming merchant.

My father used to go himself to hunt most of the animals in which he dealt—a laborious kind of occupation, which I, in my turn, learnt to follow, whilst accompanying him on his expeditions—sometimes to the coast of China—sometimes to the jungles of the Isle of Hainan, so prolific in wild animals—sometimes as far as Japan, in spite of the obstacles and perils of a navigation bravely undertaken in barques of slender construction, spite of the Malay pirates—those veritable sharks, who swallow everything that crosses their path; and spite of the cruel punishments which used formerly to await those whom the Chinese and Japanese chanced to find trespassing on their sacred territories.

My father was in the habit of bringing back from those distant expeditions—and later I had the satisfaction of bringing back with him—panthers, tigers, boas, leopards, and, above all, innumerable varieties of apes. It was during one of our last hunting expeditions in the Island of Formosa that my father, assailed by a young tiger, which he was on the point of enveloping in a net so as to capture it alive, had half a shoulder and a portion of a thigh carried off by a blow of the brute’s paw. I had the gratification of defending him and protecting him from the further rage of the furious creature; and had, moreover, the satisfaction of carrying him back with me to Macao, though I had not the happiness of seeing him live. Badly tended by the doctors of the country, he languished for a couple of years with wounds which they did not know how to cicatrise, and died at length after undergoing the most frightful sufferings. Just before he drew his last breath in my arms, he begged of me not to continue in his profession. I promised him I would not; but as he had left me nothing else to live upon and to support my poor mother, and as, to speak frankly, I had no taste for any other kind of pursuit, I was compelled to break my promise. You will see from the tale which you are about to peruse the fearful punishment I brought upon myself by so doing.

I stuck, then, to my father’s business, and, in order to prove to the valuable connection acquired by long years of good and loyal management how anxious I was to carry it on with energy, I increased the number of my examples of rare animals, and sent afar experienced hunters charged to bring back with them, to the latitudes of the Indies, specimens hitherto unknown. Being satisfied by long experience that luxury dazzled the eye, and consequently attracted the attention of buyers, I set to work to renovate the interior of my bazaar. Bronze and gilding were had recourse to, to relieve the too apparent simplicity of my cages. An English cleanliness reigned throughout all parts of the establishment, which, in the evening, I lighted up with gas, a dazzling novelty in those days for Macao.

Here I ought to mention a singular trait in my character. I was remarkably fond of animals at first, by reason of my benevolent organisation; afterwards, as a natural result of the unremitting study which I had been obliged to make of their forms, features, movements, customs, manners, instincts, passions, and intelligence; their sympathies and antipathies; their caprices, maladies, and affinity, more or less expressed with man, with a thousand other attributes essentially belonging to their nature, which is perhaps still more obscure and mysterious than our own.

I had pushed my observations so far on those particular beings with whom it is now-a-days maintained we have a certain affinity, that I could easily recognise among them those whose instinctive dispositions corresponded in a measure with our own, and who would have become, for example, barristers, if any such profession as that of the Bar existed amongst apes, for they were always gesticulating, haranguing, and arguing. I recognised again such as would have been doctors, among those who were continually occupying themselves with the physical condition of their fellows, examining their tongues, their throats, and the inside of their eyes; others who would certainly have become comedians, for they were perpetually making grimaces, and playing and dancing from morning to night; others again who would have made first-rate astronomers, for they invariably arranged themselves so as to have the sun always shining on the tips of their noses. I recognised, moreover, with a similar infallibility, those who possessed a taste for commerce, apes who made a point of collecting together all the fruit and corn which fell from the negligent hands of their fellows, and of piling it up in a corner. In like manner I distinguished the misers, the spendthrifts, the madcaps, the bullies, the good fathers and mothers, the mothers given to flirting, and the incorrigibly bad sons; and particularly thieves of every shade, from the sharper moving in good society, who cheats at the card-table, to the more daring robber who takes to the highway. I should have said of the one, “Here is an ape who would loll in his carriage if he had only a white cravat;” of the other, that “he would be safe to be hung if he only happened to wear a coat.”

As apes are far more saleable animals when their natural talent for imitation is developed by the aid of education, I made a point of putting most of those in my collection through a course of instruction, the object of which was to render them more attractive and engaging in the eyes of intending purchasers. I taught them, for instance, to throw somersaults, to jump through hoops, to dance, to play the tambourine, to march, to fence, and to salute in approved military style. Many among them, I admit, were unwilling scholars, and chafed and fretted under the tuition they received; some so much so, indeed, that, as is commonly the case with members of the human family, they could only be persuaded to prosecute their studies by the lively fear of a little wholesome correction. All this, however, arose simply from their not knowing so well as I did what was really for their own advantage.

Spite of the many little tiffs which arose between us in our several capacities of master and scholars, I conceived, in my character of naturalist, painter, doctor, philosopher, and instructor, far more than in my character of merchant, a strong liking for my boarders. I succeeded, by my powers of penetration, in reading in their eyes their desires, wants, and thoughts, and almost ended by conversing with them. In this psychological study I should, without doubt, have attained a height unknown to the most skilful naturalists of our grand European museums, if the fatal accident through which my poor father lost his life had not all at once put an end to my passion for animals. After this unfortunate calamity it was impossible for me not to see in each animal of my collection an accomplice of the tiger which had deprived my parent of existence. This antipathy, day by day growing stronger, caused me at first to neglect the brutes, and afterwards to punish them with far more severity than I had hitherto been accustomed to exhibit towards them. They soon perceived this, since animals have stronger instincts perhaps than men, and thereupon they repaid me with hatred and spite for the rigour with which I ordinarily treated them. They became wicked and vindictive; and I, on my part, became only the more inflexible. A struggle commenced between us, which was carried to a point when I was no longer able to rule them except by threats and red-hot bars of iron.