THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE
Page 17
However, in between tripping over courting couples and apologizing to them, shining the torch on them and hastily turning it off again, we managed to catch thirty-five toads.
So we returned home, hot and out of breath but in a much better frame of mind, leaving behind us a great many frightened toads and a number of indignant people of both sexes.
We saw Bob off the next day, and then Smith and I started the difficult job of preparing the collection for shipment when my ship left. I had decided to take the entire collection with me when I went, as this would leave Smith to make one or two short trips into the interior before starting a fresh collection. He had been confined to Georgetown during the whole of our stay in Guiana , maintaining the collection at the base, so I thought he thoroughly deserved a break.
We now had nearly five hundred specimens altogether. There were fish and frogs, toads, lizards, cayman and snakes.
There were birds from the turkey-sized curassows down to the minute and fragile hummingbirds with bumblebee-sized bodies.
There were fifty monkeys, the anteaters, armadillos and pacas, crab-eating raccoons, peccaries, mar gays and ocelots, sloths and uwaries. To crate up and ship such a formidable array of different creatures is no easy matter, and, as usual, one of your worst problems is food.
First you have to work out how much of everything you will want, and then you have to purchase it and get it on board the ship when she docks, making sure that the perishable stuff is carefully stowed away in the refrigerator. There were dozens of eggs, tins of dried milk, sacks of vegetables, corn and biscuit meal, crates of fresh fish packed in ice and pounds of raw meat. Then there was the fruit, which was a problem in itself. Such things as oranges can be bought by the sackful and need no special care to keep them in good condition, but the soft fruits are a very different matter.
You cannot start off on a voyage with fifty stems of ripe bananas, because by the time you are half-way to your destination you will find most of them have gone rotten. So you have to buy a quantity of ripe bananas, some just turning and some that are green and hard. Thus, as you use up one lot of fruit another lot has just ripened. Then there were some special items, the hummingbirds, for example, fed on a mixture that included such things as honey, Bovril, and Mellin's Food, so all these ingredients had to be purchased and put on board. Last, but not least, you had to have an adequate supply of clean, dry sawdust to spread in the cage bottoms after they had been cleaned every day.
The next job was the crating, for every creature must have a cage that is neither too big nor too small, a cage that will keep it cool in the tropics and warm when you reach colder latitudes. The anteaters gave us our biggest crating problem, and it was a long time before we managed to find two boxes big enough to contain them. But at last the hundred and fifty-odd crates had been nailed, screwed, sawed, and hammered into final perfection, ready for shipment.
The long voyage home with your animals is always the most worrying part of any collecting trip, and my return from Guiana was no exception. I had been offered a choice of accommodation on board ship in which to put the collection, and rather unwisely I chose one of the holds. This was a bad mistake, as I soon found out to my cost, for in the tropics the hold was as hot as an oven (even with the hatch open), and little or no breeze found its way down to relieve the sweltering heat. When we struck cold weather we did so very suddenly, the temperature dropping ten degrees in one night when we were off the Azores ; the hold promptly turned from something resembling a Turkish bath into a refrigerator. I was forced to keep the hatch closed owing to bad weather, and so the animals and birds had to live and feed by artificial light, a thing they did not take kindly to. Then came a very serious blow: my fruit supply was cut to a fraction by the sudden disintegration of some forty stems of bananas owing to the refrigerators going wrong. This combination of evils was responsible for the deaths of a number of lovely and valuable specimens, a thing which did not cheer me, for burials at sea are a thing that no collector likes. I had been expecting some losses, however, for these are inevitable in any collection; moreover I had been warned by some very experienced collectors that I would find the South American fauna more delicate and difficult to keep alive than animals from almost any other part of the world. I have heard this repudiated by some people (including one worthy who has never been to South America at all, let alone collected there), but on the whole I found the veteran collectors' opinions to be correct, But, in spite of the setbacks, the voyage had its amusing moments. There was the hatching of the pipa toads, as I have related, and there was the escape of a monkey who bit the ship's carpenter. Both these episodes were enlivening. Then I had a prolonged struggle to keep a couple of macaws in their cage, for, with their great beaks, they had nibbled the wood so that their cage front fell out. Each time I repaired it they would eat their way out again, so in the end I gave up and allowed them the run of the hold. They would wander up and down on the tops of the crates, talking to me in their gruff, rather embarrassed voices, or carrying on conversations with the other macaws in the cages. These conversations were very amusing as a rule, because they were restricted to one word. In Georgetown all macaws are called Robert, just as most parrots in England are called Poll or Polly. So when you buy a macaw in Guiana you can be certain that it will be able to say its own name, as well as deafen you with its screams. So the two macaws would amble across the cage tops, and occasionally one would stop and say "Robert?" in a pensive sort of way.
Another would reply "Robert!" in outraged tones, while a third would be muttering "Robert, Robert, Robert, Robert", to itself. So the conversation would go on, and I have never heard such a variety of expression put into one word as those macaws managed to put into the rather dull name of Robert.
But, for once, I was really glad to see the grey and gloomy docks of Liverpool looming up at the ship's sides. There was still a great deal to do, of course, unloading the collection and distributing the specimens to the various zoos, but I knew that the worst of the trip was over. Bob, looking very civilized, was waiting on the docks to meet me, and together we watched the unloading of the many cages. The last to go over the side were the two huge crates that housed the anteaters, revolving slowly in the net as the crane swung them on to the quay. Then, accompanied by Bob, I went down to my cabin to pack, feeling in better spirits than I had done for the past three weeks.
"Dear old England ," said Bob, as he sat on my bunk and watched me packing, "it's been raining ever since I landed, you know."
"I know," I said; " England is an Amerindian word meaning Land of Perpetual Downpour ."
I was bundling my clothes into a trunk when I felt something hard in the pocket of a pair of trousers. Hoping it might be money, I investigated. As I turned the pocket out three little green tickets fell out on to the floor of the cabin.
I picked them up and looked at them and then passed them silently to Bob. Across each one, in bold black letters, was written: Georgetown to Adventure First Class.
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Gerald Malcolm Durrell, THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE