We had been in the monsoon for several hours, and the air was littered with silver sparks—apparitions of heat from a glittering afternoon. Though the sun was low, iron decks could not be tread. In the rigging, he appeared nearly finished, limp and slouching, an arm hanging without energy, his back bent. We put potatoes in a dish on the forecastle. He descended slowly, finally touching deck lightly and ambling to the bows like a spider, all limbs brushing the planks. He ate his fill, and we threw the net over him. We had expected a ferocious struggle, but his posture and expression were so peaceful that I ordered the net removed. Sailors stood ready with pikes, but he stayed in place. Then I approached him and extended my hand as if to a child.
In imitation, he put out his arm, looking much less fearsome. Without a show of teeth, in his tired state, crouched on all fours to half our heights, he was no more frightening than a hound. I led him to the stern and back again while the crew cheered and laughed. Then the mate took him, and then the entire hierarchy of the ship, down to the cabin boys, who are smaller than he and seemed to interest him the most. By dark, he had strolled with every member of the crew and was miraculously tame. But I remembered his teeth, and had him chained to his little boat.
He was comfortable there, surrounded by fruit and water (which he ate and drank methodically) and sitting on a throne of sorts, with half a dozen courtiers eager to look in his eyes and hold his obliging wrist. Mine is not the only London post in which he will be mentioned. Those who can write are describing him with great zeal. I have seen some of these letters. He has been portrayed as a “mad baboon,” a “man-eating gorilla of horrible colors, muscled but as bright as a bird,” a “pygmy man set down on the sea by miracle and typhoon,” and as all manner of Latin names, each different from the others and incorrectly spelled.
Depending on the bend of the monsoon and whether it continues to run strongly, we will pass Ras Asir in three days. I thought of casting him off early but was implored to wait for the Cape. I relented, and in doing so was made to understand why those in command must stay by rules. I am sure, however, that my authority is not truly diminished, and when the ape is gone I will again tighten discipline.
I have already had the distress flag replaced by a green banner. It flies over the creature on his throne. Though in splendor, he is in chains and in three days’ time will be on the sea once more.
Yours & etc.,
SAMSON Low
28 August, 1909, 12° 4’ 39’ N,
50° 1′ 2″ E
North of Ras Asir
DEAR SIR:
A most alarming incident has occurred. I must report, though it is among the worst episodes of my command. This morning, I arose, expecting to put the ape over the side as we rounded Ras Asir at about eleven. (The winds have been consistently excellent and a northward breeze veering off the monsoon has propelled us as steadily as an engine.) Going out on deck, I discovered that his boat was nowhere to be seen. At first, I thought that the mate had already disposed of him, and was disappointed that we were far from the coast. Then, to my shock, I saw him sitting unmanacled atop the main cargo hatch.
I screamed at the mate, demanding to know what had happened to the throne (as it had come to be called). He replied that it had gone overboard during the twelve-to-four watch. I stormed below and got that watch out in a hurry. Though sleepy-eyed, they were terrified. I told them that if the guilty one did not come forth I would put them all in irons. My temper was short and I could have struck them down. Two young sailors, as frightened as if they were surrendering themselves to die, admitted that they had thrown it over. They said they did not want to see the ape put to drift.
They are in irons until we make Suez. Their names are Mulcahy and Esper, and their pay is docked until they are freed. As we rounded the Cape, cutting close in (for the waters there are deep), we could see that though the creature would have been immediately cast up on shore, the shore itself was barren and inhospitable, and surely he would have died there. My Admiralty chart does not detail the inland topography of this area and shows only a yellow tongue marked “Africa” thrusting into the Gulf of Aden.
I can throw him overboard now or later. I do not want to do it. I brought him on board in the first place. There is nothing with which to fashion another raft. We have many tons of wood below, but not a cubic foot of it is lighter than water. The wind is good and we are making for the Bab al-Mandab, where we will pass late tomorrow afternoon—after that, the frustrating run up the Red Sea to the Canal.
The mate suggests that we sell him to the Egyptians. But I am reluctant to make port with this in mind, as it would be a victory for the two in chains and in the eyes of many others. And we are not animal traders. If he leaves us at sea the effects of his presence will be invalidated, we will touch land with discipline restored, and I will have the option of destroying these letters, though everything here has been entered in short form in the log. I have ordered him not to be fed, but they cast him scraps. I must get back my proper hold on the ship.
Yours & etc.,
SAMSON Low
30 August, 1909, 15° 49′ 30″ N,
41° 5′ 32″ E
Red Sea off Massawa
DEAR SIR:
I have been felled by an attack of headaches. Never before has this happened. There is pressure in my skull enough to burst it. I cannot keep my balance; my eyes roam and I am drunk with pain. For the weary tack up the Red Sea I have entrusted the mate with temporary command, retiring to my cabin with the excuse of heat prostration. I have been in the Red Sea time and again but have never felt apprehension that death would follow its heat. We have always managed. To the east, the mountains of the Hijaz are so dry and forbidding that I have seen sailors look away in fright.
The ape has begun to suffer from the heat. He is listless and ignored. His novelty has worn off (with the heat as it is) and no one pays him any attention. He will not go belowdecks but spends most of the day under the canvas sun shield, chewing slowly, though there is nothing in his mouth. It is hot there—the light so white and uncompromising it sears the eyes. I have freed his champions from irons and restored their pay. By this act I have won over the crew and caused the factions to disappear. No one thinks about the ape. But I dare not risk a recurrence of bad feeling and have decided to cast him into the sea. Where we found him, a strong seaward current would have carried him to the open ocean. Here, at least, he can make the shore, although it is the most barren coast on earth. But who would have thought he might survive the typhoon? He has been living beyond his time. To be picked up and whirled at incomprehensible speed, carried for miles above the earth where no man has ever been, and thrown into the sea is a death sentence. If he survived that, perhaps he can survive Arabian desert.
His expression is neither sad nor fierce. He looks like an old man, neutral to the world. In the last two days he has become the target of provocation and physical blows. I have ordered this stopped, but a sailor will sometimes throw a nail or a piece of wood at him. We shall soon be rid of him.
Yesterday we came alongside another British ship, the Stonepool, of the Dutch Express Line. On seeing the ape, they were envious. What is it, their captain asked, amazed at its coloring. I replied that he was a Madagascar ape we had fished from the sea, and I offered him to them, saying he was as tame as a dog. At first, they wanted him. The crew cried out for his acceptance, but the captain demurred, shaking his head and looking into my eyes as if he were laughing at me. “Damn!” I said, and went below without even a salute at parting.
My head aches. I must stop. At first light tomorrow, I will toss him back.
Yours & etc.,
SAMSON Low
3 September, 1909
Suez
DEAR SIR:
The morning before last I went on deck at dawn. The ape was sitting on the main hatch, his eyes upon me from the moment I saw him. I walked over to him and extended my arm, which he would not take in his customary manner. I seized his wrist, which he
withdrew. However, as he did this I laid hold of the other wrist, and pulled him off the hatch. He did not bare his teeth. He began to scream. Awakened by this, most of the crew stood in the companionways or on deck, silently observing.
He was hard to drag, but I towed him to the rail. When I took his other arm to hoist him over, he bared his teeth with a frightening shriek. Everyone was again terrified. The teeth must be six inches long.
He came at me with those teeth, and I could do nothing but throttle him. With my hands on his throat, his arms were free. He grasped my side. I felt the pads of his hands against my ribs. I had to tolerate that awful sensation to keep hold of his throat. No man aboard came close. He shrieked and moaned. His eyes reddened. My response was to tighten my hold, to end the horror. I gripped so hard that my own teeth were bared and I made sounds similar to his. He put his hands around my neck as if to strangle me back, but I had already taken the inside position and, despite his great strength, lessened the power of his grip merely by lifting my arms against his. Nevertheless he choked me. But I had a great head start. We held this position for long minutes, sweating, until his arms dropped and his body convulsed. In rage, I threw him by the neck into the sea, where he quickly sank.
Some of the crew have begun to talk about him as if he were about to be canonized. Others see him as evil. I assembled them as the coasts began to close on Suez and the top of the sea was white and still. I made my views clear, for in years of command and in a life on the sea I have learned much. I felt confident of what I told them.
He is not a symbol. He stands neither for innocence nor for evil. There is no parable and no lesson in his coming and going. I was neither right nor wrong in bringing him aboard (though it was indeed incorrect) or in what I later did. We must get on with the ship’s business. He does not stand for a man or men. He stands for nothing. He was an ape, simian and lean, half sensible. He came on board, and now he is gone.
Yours & etc.,
SAMSON Low
Martin Bayer
By September, 1916, the hotels on Long Island’s eastern extremity were in dire straits. Southampton marked the limit of fashionability, because military camps, whalers, a few remaining Indians, and the thinness of the land projecting unescorted into open ocean kept most people from the one or two resorts near the Amagansett beaches. People had avoided the shore since the sinking of the Lusitania, for it was rumored that the Germans were going to use gas and germ warfare against the Atlantic Coast. Autumn was approaching, and all but the very rich and unemployed were pulled back to Manhattan and Brooklyn as if by electromagnetic force. The sea was cold and bright.
Mr. Bayer had seen a newspaper advertisement describing a hotel as splendid as a palace of Byzantium, overlooking a regal, breathtaking prospect of savage sea—with extraordinary conveniences, with a garden close of tall oaks and fireflies—offering ten days’ room and board to a family of four at a hundred and fifty dollars. He had forfeited a vacation that summer because business was booming and demanded full attention. It was especially delightful to know that by traveling in the off-season he could bank a hundred and fifty of the three hundred dollars budgeted for a holiday, during a time when he was making so much money anyway. Of course the hotel was a gamble, but one fine morning in Manhattan, when summer’s last colors were sharpened by a blast of fall air galloping down the Hudson from Canada, they set out in their automobile for ten days at Amagansett. The air was so clear and enlivening that they wondered why they were headed into the country just as the heat was finally dying.
When Mr. Bayer and Martin had lashed canvas over the suitcases and automotive-repair apparatus, Martin’s sixteen-year-old sister, Lydia, got in the front seat with an expression of determination and dread.
“Lydia!” said Mr. Bayer. “Ride in the back with your mother.”
“That’s right,” said Martin, pompously.
“Martin, you shut up. Lydia, in the back.”
“No,” she said. “I want to ride in the front.”
“Lydia, please come in the back,” said Mrs. Bayer. “The front is for Daddy and Martin, in case of a puncture.”
“No.” Every time she said “No,” the word got shorter.
“Lydia, Daddy says you’d better get in back or—”
“Shut up, Martin. Lydia, darling, get in back or we don’t go to Amagansett.”
“I don’t want to go to Amagansett,” she said. “We’ll be the only people there. Why can’t I ride in the front?”
“Martin rides in the front. He’s a boy.”
“But he’s only ten.”
“Ten and three-fifths,” said Martin.
“Lydia, Lydia,” said Mrs. Bayer. Then she leaned forward and touched her daughter’s cheek. Lydia was extremely beautiful, with a warm, gentle face. She stood up, got out, slammed the door, got in the back, slammed the door, and stared at the second floor of their house. Her reddened face and neck and incipient tears made her even more beautiful, and her mother embraced her while Martin and Mr. Bayer, nearly chuckling over their victory, climbed in the front and began the driving.
Martin was in charge of the emergency brake, the gasoline gauge, the water temperature, and cleaning the windshield—which he thought was a “winsheel.” In a breakdown, he was the warning dummy, rag carrier, and nut holder. Even though Lydia wanted these jobs, she would not have taken them had they been offered. But Martin was extremely proud of the responsibility, just as he was proud to stand with the mannequins in his father’s store window, looking grave, as he thought a young mercantile employee should when in public view. But he hated to wash dishes or take out the garbage, and would disappear after dinner as if composed of the rarest gas—better to be beaten up by the Irish ruffians who terrorized the Jews than to take out garbage. This was mainly because the Irish ruffians never did beat up the Jews. Instead, they described it in such convincing detail that the Jews ran home overbrimming with the living English—“He smashed my face, bashed my belly, and splintered my Jew bones”—and the memory of a fight that had really never been.
They drove at 23 m.p.h. down the avenues to the Brooklyn Bridge. Martin glanced in the windows of sepia-colored tenements full of stretching people new to morning. There was still some sense of wilderness left in the city, in the brown and the dust, in the freshness of the earth overturned in excavation, in the farmlike emerald beauty of the Park. Once, his father had awakened him at four in the morning just to walk in the streets. They wound through fresh squares and down empty boulevards into the commercial district, where, at five, the markets were feverishly active. Martin was in an airless daze, though on that unusually warm March morning the air was wet and mild. The last drunk was expelled from the most riotous bar with a thunderclap and he wheeled through the doors and hit the sidewalk, rolling about like a ball bearing. Martin thought the ladies of the night were early-rising shopgirls and devoted nurses. Father and son passed countless gleaming fish on ice-covered tables, barrels of herring, vegetables still fresh and spotted with earth from Hudson Valley farms. They went into a workmen’s cafe. It was the only time Martin had ever drunk coffee. The proprietor put so much extra milk in it that he had to charge Mr. Bayer another nickel, but Martin didn’t know, and, despite his size, tried to blend with the crowd by pretending that he was a grown man.
They drove at 23 m.p.h. because their mechanic had told them that if they didn’t the engine would burn out. Martin liked the way the engine sounded, rolling over and around itself like a player piano. The sound of machines was like the rising of the sun on a winter morning, full of promise, relief, and lightheartedness. Martin liked so many things that he could not open his eyes without a pleasant inrush. And he was prone to fits of laughter. Once, they had dressed him up and taken him to a concert hall near the Park. Martin thought it was wonderful—the airy echoing ballroom, a view of dark-green citified trees, a mixture of expensive perfumes, and miles of silver trays with a thousand pounds of what Martin termed “complexly baked sculpture cookies
.” After eating thirty or forty of these and quenching his thirst with four or five cups of champagne punch, Martin thought the world was a paradise. He took his seat while the musicians tuned their instruments. He was just beginning to fall asleep when an enormous fat woman suddenly appeared from behind a curtain and began to scream and squeak. Her teeth stuck way out of her mouth, and after the especially long and voluminous squeaks, she looked proud and delighted. At first, Martin was dumbfounded. Then he began to giggle, keeping it down until the muscles in his throat and abdomen felt as if they were sweating fire. The pain and tension were such that he started to get serious, when Lydia, afraid of being deathly embarrassed, decided to inflict a minor torture on him to stop the oncoming explosion. This she did by reaching from behind and driving her fingers into his ribs. Overflowing, caught by surprise, and got from behind, Martin shrieked with such force that people all around him jumped in their seats. A storm of laughter then issued from him. Unable to catch his breath, he rolled on the floor in such enviable enjoyment that the rest of the hall found it wonderfully amusing, even when Mr. Bayer swatted him and carried him, still doubled over, out the French doors into the greenery.
Recognizing her role in the disaster, and that it had cost Martin his allowance and several outings, Lydia took him to the aquarium. Of course he was delighted, but, as they tiptoed through the slimy galleries, he thought she was crazy. “How do you know they’re looking at you?” he asked.