The Book of the Dead (36 page)

In this grotesque atmosphere, where even her only child’s nurse was thrown into prison and tortured for attempting to poison her mistress (Jiang had succumbed to a nasty bout of diarrhea), the role of her pet monkey is clear. It was absolutely loyal, never answered back, and yet was capable of capricious acts of violence. Like Mrs. Coulter’s sinister golden monkey demon in Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
trilogy, Jiang’s monkey was her constant companion, dressed in silk and fed the finest food. She took particular pleasure in setting it on people as they strolled through her orchid garden in Canton, laughing at their discomfort as it leaped onto their heads and shoulders and savagely punishing anyone who didn’t make a fuss of the beast. Men, she once remarked, contributed nothing more to history than “a drop of sperm.” Monkeys seemed preferable by far as companions.

For all her delusions of grandeur, it seems unlikely that Mao ever seriously considered this spoiled borderline psychotic as his successor. He had used her remorselessly to engineer a culture of fear, but toward the end of his life, she was reduced to asking his girlfriends to put in a good word for her. Within weeks of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Madame Mao and the rest of the Gang of Four were arrested in a bloodless coup. Her trial in 1980 was televised each night and attracted huge audiences. She was convicted of “counter revolutionary crimes” and sentenced to death, although this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Jiang hanged herself in a hospital bathroom in 1991.

Her passing went unmourned: Even her daughter refused to write to the authorities to request her release (this occasioned one of Jiang’s last outbursts, throwing a watermelon on the ground and accusing her daughter of being “heartless”). As the living personification of the brutal persecutions and mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, almost no one in China has ever been more despised. Mao himself captured her self-inflicted isolation: “Few people suit her taste—only one: she herself.” The fate of her monkey is not recorded.

The high-water mark for the monkey as domestic pet was reached in Victorian England. The spoils of empire included a regular stream of outlandish wildlife arriving to swell the households of the moneyed classes, and monkeys, despite (or maybe because of) Darwin’s efforts, became must-have accessories. Arthur Henry Patterson’s 1888
Notes on Pet Monkeys and How to Manage Them
captures the mood:

Where a fancier is not addicted to balancing the matter of pet-purchase and pet-keeping upon the snap of his purse, a series of monkeys, in a properly-arranged domicile, not only affords himself considerable interest and entertainment, but gives unlimited fun to a large circle of ever-ready-to-be-amused acquaintances.

One of the most complete accounts of monkey stewardship is to be found in the work of
Frank Buckland
(1826–80), the David Attenborough of the mid-nineteenth century. He was the son of William Buckland (1784–1856), dean of Westminster, the man who made geology and paleontology respectable academic
disciplines and was the first to describe a dinosaur, twenty years before the word “dinosaur” itself was coined. (Buckland called his find “the Great Fossil Lizard of Stonesfield.”)

The Bucklands’ domestic arrangements were idiosyncratic even by Victorian standards. Part museum, part zoological garden, live and dead animals jostled for space with geological samples. Owls and jackdaws flew free, snakes and toads were scattered through the rooms in cages, and the children were allowed to ride their ponies inside the house. Raised in this atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that young Frank decided his vocation was to become “a high priest of nature and a benefactor of mankind.” Even at the age of four, asked to identify an ancient fossil by his father, he piped up at once: “They are the vertebway of an icthyosawus.” At his university, he impressed his peers by climbing into the fountain of Christ Church, Oxford, and by riding astride first a large turtle and then an ailing crocodile.

Both of these were destined for the table. Zoophagy, the eating of unusual animals, was another passion Frank Buckland shared with his father. The dean set the bar high; he claimed to have eaten through the whole of creation from mouse to bison. Hedgehog, rat, puppy, potted ostrich, tortoise, and pickled horse tongue were regulars on the menu at home, with roast or battered mouse a house speciality. John Ruskin was an eager dinner guest:

I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice; and remembered, with delight, being waited upon one hot summer morning by two graceful and polite little Carolina lizards, who kept off the flies.

Buckland senior confessed himself gastronomically defeated on only two occasions—by boiled mole and a ragout of bluebottles.
Young Frank pushed it even further, making pies from rhinos (“like very tough beef”), frying earwigs (“horribly bitter”), stewing the head of a porpoise (“like broiled lamp wick”), and consuming chops from a panther that had been buried for several days (“not very good”). He did favorably surprise guests, though, with his accidentally roasted giraffe (the happy result of a zoo fire), raw sea slugs, and kangaroo ham (at least, until he told his guests what they were eating). There was a serious purpose to his hobby. In 1859, Frank founded the Society for the Acclimatization of Animals to the United Kingdom, which set out to import exotic species as alternative, high-yielding food sources. We owe the contemporary fashion for farming ostrich, water buffalo, and bison to Frank Buckland’s manic enthusiasm.

The most bizarre comestible that ever found its way into a Buckland stomach was the heart of Louis XIV. Although the consumption of this withered and leathery object is often attributed to Frank, the only firsthand account occurs in the autobiography of the English raconteur and travel writer Augustus Hare (1834–1903). He makes it clear that William was the one guilty of royal cardiophagy:

Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, while looking at it, exclaimed, “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,” and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.

Not that this proves it actually happened, and certainly the various colorful embroideries to the tale—that it was sautéed and roasted; that it was served with a side helping of French beans;
that Buckland considered its flavor would have been improved with a gravy made from marmoset’s blood; that he ate it for Christmas dinner—really don’t stand up to scrutiny. But the incident may explain Charles Darwin’s “strong prejudice” toward the older Buckland. He disliked his “coarse joking manner” and “undignified buffoonery.” The Bucklands, in turn, both rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, maintaining a creationist line despite having been personally responsible for putting back the geological age of the earth by millions of years.

Eccentricity and good humor characterized the son’s life every bit as much as his father’s. Frank shared his rooms at Christ Church with marmots; guinea pigs; a chameleon; several snakes; a jackal; an eagle; his monkey, Jacko; and a bear called Tiglath-Pileser, named after an ancient Assyrian king. After the bear made several appearances in a scholar’s cap and gown at college drinks parties, the dean of Christ Church gave Frank the ultimatum to remove either “Tig” or himself from the college. The bear was duly rusticated; the expulsion of Jacko and the increasingly bad-tempered eagle followed in quick succession.

Frank graduated in medicine and in 1854 became assistant surgeon to the 2nd Life Guards. He served with the regiment for ten years but failed to gain promotion, probably because his real interests lay elsewhere, writing racy, readable accounts of his adventures for
The Field
magazine. The many reminiscences of Frank at this time make him seem thoroughly likable: He was a 4½-foot-tall, barrel-chested, cigar-smoking, ginger-haired ball of energy, the self-appointed curator of all that was odd, grotesque, or inexplicable. He was also a walking zoo. Wherever he appeared, he might be expected to produce a writhing ball of slow worms from inside his coat or a matchbox full of baby toads.
Once, arriving at Southampton docks, he was charged five shillings for trying to smuggle his monkey onto a train. The clerk insisted on treating it as a dog, and issued it with a dog ticket. Buckland rallied by producing a tortoise from his pocket. “Perhaps you’ll call that a dog, too?” he asked. “No,” said the clerk, “we make no charge for them, they’re insects.”

As well as curiosities of natural history, Frank wrote up reports of mummies preserved in guano, fossilized mermaids, singing Siamese twins, unnaturally fat babies, impossibly tiny babies, the “Human Frog” (who could smoke underwater), and the man who walked on his head. His journalism is marked by a very un-Victorian sense of sympathy for his subjects. Observing the poor mummified corpse of Julia Pastrana, the Mexican bearded lady, he wrote:

Her features were simply hideous on account of the profusion of hair growing on her forehead, and her black beard; but her figure was exceedingly good and graceful, and her tiny foot and well-turned ankle
, bien chaussée,
perfection itself.

Unlike his father the dean, Frank Buckland can’t be counted a great scientist, but he was certainly a great popularizer of science: In his endless enthusiasm for the new and hitherto unnoticed he often reads like a one-man
Fortean Times.

In 1867 his life changed. A Royal Commission appointed him inspector of salmon fisheries. This was a proper grown-up job, and within a very short time, Buckland had made himself into the UK’s “Mr. Salmon,” mastering all the intricacies of his subject, pioneering new techniques and technology for fish hatcheries, and using his great charm and energy to lead the first nationwide campaign against river pollution. He wasn’t exactly an ecologist,
but he did commission firsthand research into the effect of ocean temperatures on the shoaling of fish and the importance of net mesh size in keeping fish stocks at optimum levels. He was also single-handedly responsible for the stocking of the rivers and lakes of India, Australia, and New Zealand with salmon and trout. This proved a rather more successful venture than his earlier scheme to manufacture shoes and gloves from the skin of rats.

Home life for the Bucklands always involved at least two monkeys. Frank’s study, where the monkeys lived, was called the Monkey Room and no writer has better captured the topsy-turvy madness of keeping them as pets. He considered them much superior to all other animals in terms of intelligence: “almost fit to go up for a competitive examination,” as he put it. The monkeys graced all the Bucklands’ social occasions, with outfits to match: Frank particularly liked them in green velvet dresses, trimmed with gold lace. He described them as sometimes having the appearance of well-behaved children (his only child, Frank junior, died at age five); sometimes like snoozing club bores (they loved a fire and had a taste for port and grog—one of them even smoked a pipe); but mostly they were the source of barely containable chaos. He describes his favorite pair, Tiny and “the Hag”—West African guenon monkeys—launching themselves around the house “with the velocity of a swallow.” The Hag took an irrational dislike to Mrs. Buckland’s sister and “very nearly had the dress off her back.” Food was stolen, visitors tweaked, ornaments shattered, other pets terrorized. Given ten minutes in a bedroom by themselves, wrote Frank, “the bill will rival that for the Abyssinian expedition.” Their vast cheek pouches swelled with booty (Frank estimated that the Hag could secrete twenty pieces of candy in each pouch). One afternoon he
got them to disgorge “a steel thimble, my own gold finger ring, a pair of pearl sleeve links, a farthing, a button, a shilling and a bit of sweet-stuff.”

But Buckland was not averse to a little anarchy:

Although my monkeys do considerable mischief, yet I let them do it. I am amply rewarded by their funny and affectionate ways … nothing whatever would induce me to part with them. My monkeys love me, and I love my monkeys.

With the Hag, in particular, he developed a close understanding. “I could tell from her look what she wanted; and I am pretty sure she could read my thoughts in her own way.” There are, as he said, “monkeys and monkeys; no two are alike.” She was his constant companion for twelve years and “if ever an animal thought, it was the old Hag.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Buckland didn’t sentimentalize his relationship with animals; after all, this was the same man who had enjoyed roasting field mice while still a schoolboy. But he had a close affinity for monkeys that bordered on the inspirational: “Many an idea I have had looking into the dear Hag’s brilliant eyes.” Perhaps this explains why, given all the roasted, boiled, stewed, and puréed animals he had consumed over the years, there is no record of Frank Buckland ever eating a monkey.