When Lord Melville, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to my great surprise and delight, put into my hands a commission for a ship going to the South American station, a quarter of the world I had long desired to visit, my first thought was, “Where now shall I manage to find a merry rascal of a monkey?” Of course, I did not give audible expression to this thought in the First Lord’s room; but, on coming down-stairs, I had a talk about it in the hall with my friend, the late Mr. Nutland, the porter, who laughed, and said,—­

“Why, sir, you may buy a wilderness of monkeys at Exeter ’Change.”

“True! true!” and off I hurried in a Hackney coach.  Mr. Cross, not only agreed to spare me one of his choicest and funniest animals, but readily offered his help to convey him to the ship.  “Lord, sir!” said he, “there is not an animal in the whole world so wild or fierce that we can’t carry about as innocent as a lamb; only trust to me, sir, and your monkey shall be delivered on board your ship in Portsmouth Harbour as safely as if he were your best chronometer going down by mail in charge of the master.”  Accordingly he was in a famous condition for his breakfast next morning, when the waterman ferried him off from Common Hard to the hulk, on board which the officers had just assembled.  As the ship had been only two or three days in commission, few seamen had as yet entered; but shortly afterwards they came on board in sufficient numbers; and I have sometimes ascribed the facility with which we got the ship manned, not a little to the attractive agency of the diverting vagabond, recently come from town, the fame of whose tricks soon extended over Portsea; such as catching hold of the end of the sail-maker’s ball of twine, and paying the whole overboard, hand over hand, from a secure station in the rigging; or stealing the boatswain’s silver call, and letting it drop from the end of the cat-head; or his getting into one of the cabin ports and tearing up the captain’s letters, a trick at which even the stately skipper can only laugh.

One of our monkey’s grand amusements was to watch some one arranging his clothes bag.  After the stowage was completed, and everything put carefully away, he would steal round, untie the strings, and having opened the mouth of the bag draw forth in succession every article of dress, first smell it, then turn it over and over, and lastly fling it away on the wet deck.  It was amusing enough to observe, that all the while he was committing any piece of mischief he appeared not only to be under the fullest consciousness of guilt, but living in the perfect certainty that he was earning a good sound drubbing for his pains.  Still the pleasure of doing wrong was so strong and habitual within him, that he seemed utterly incapable of resisting the temptation.  While thus occupied, and alternately chattering with terror, and screaming with delight, till the enraged owner of the property burst in upon him, hardly more angry with Jacko than with his malicious messmates, who, instead of preventing, had rather encouraged the pillage.