“A Darwinian Schooner” was written by William L. Alden and first appeared in Pall Mall Magazine (Aug. 1893). Alden (1837-1908) was an American writer, critic, and diplomat.

In “A Darwinian Schooner” the crew of the Jane G. Mather, steaming five hundred miles east of Rio de Janeiro, discover a drifting, deserted schooner. A crew from the Mather, including the story's narrator, rows over to the ship to take command of it, and find that is overrun with large monkeys (“baboons was their correct rating, I believe”¹) but is absent of humans. The monkeys act in an unusual way when the ship is first boarded:

The monkeys were crowded together, watching us over the rail, but keeping as grave and quiet as a lot of man-of-war's men. On the quarter deck, all alone by himself, was an old, white-haired monkey, that we took to be the captain, as he afterwards proved to be. He was sitting on the skylight, and was a great sight too dignified to be seen watching us.²

Things take a turn for the stranger when the narrator speaks to the white-haired monkey:

“We came aboard to see if you wanted anything. If so be as you are the captain of this schooner, perhaps you'll tell me if you need a navigator, or a carpenter, or anything of the sort?”

The monkey didn't say a word, but he bowed as polite as if he was a Frenchman. Meanwhile the other monkeys had gathered in a circle around us, and were whining in a mournful sort of way.³

The problem, for the monkeys, is that they've had nothing to drink for days, and are “half dead of thirst.”⁴ The narrator knocks the bung out of a water cask, bringing much joy to the crew and even seeming to please the white-haired monkey.

The crew of the Mather takes over the schooner and begins sailing it, and initially everything is fine. But the monkeys quickly deduce that the Mather's crew intends to take the schooner to Rio de Janeiro and sell it as salvage. The monkeys begin conspiring against the human crew. The sailors on the schooner decide that either the monkeys threw the original crew of the schooner overboard and claimed the ship for themselves, or that the schooner was originally a slave ship and that the monkeys stole the ship while the crew was on shore drinking and gathering slaves. The white-haired monkey begins creeping around with a big knife, stealing bottles of rum, and consulting the nautical charts and log lines, all the while chattering to the other monkeys and acting as a captain does toward his men. The crew of the Mather talk to him, trying to keep the peace. They warn him not to make trouble but also come close to apologizing to him for stealing his command. But their words do no good. The monkeys riot, led by the white-haired captain. The monkeys kill one of the sailors, but the narrator shoots the white-haired baboon, and the narrator and his friend beat down the rebellion. The monkeys remain quiet until the ship reaches shore and then bolt for the woods.

“A Darwinian Schooner,” though amusing in its own right, should be viewed in light of the controversy over Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), a controversy that continued to rage outside the scientific community in 1893. (By then the scientific community and many educated civilians had accepted evolution as a fact). During the eighteenth century primates were primarily used symbolically in fiction, whether as Rousseauvian noble savages, as evil, lust-filled brutes, or parodically and satirically.⁵ During the first half of the nineteenth century primates “lost their symbolic weight and largely became just another plot element,”⁶ but after the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species primates regained the symbolism they had lost, and were used to comment, positively or negatively, on Darwin’s theories. “A Darwinian Schooner” is a part of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ movement in popular culture to make use of previously existing motifs and tropes–primates were certainly common in popular literature in the 1890s and the first half of the twentieth century–but it is also a commentary on Darwin, showing how, in the case of the baboons that seized the schooner, Darwin’s theories of evolving species are correct.

“A Darwinian Schooner” should also be viewed in the context of the “animals revolt” trope which appears in everything from The Rebellion of the Beasts to Pierre Bouille’s The Planet of the Apes (original: La Planète des singes, 1963) and the various movies made from it to Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971). It’s possible that Alden had read Hunt before writing “A Darwinian Schooner,” but more likely is that Alden was responding to and hoping to capitalize on a minor recurring trope in nineteenth-century speculative fiction, as well as on the evolution controversy. In a larger sense, in “The Darwinian Schooner” Alden exploited the already-present English fin-de-siècle unease to present a new kind of external threat to the white patriarchy and environmental hegemony: animals, in this case unnaturally intelligent primates, mastering the tools of mankind and using them to declare independence and then revolt against human dominance of the animal kingdom.

Print: W.L. Alden, “The Darwinian Schooner,” in Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Stories. London: Arcturus Publishing, 2018.

¹ William L. Alden, “A Darwinian Schooner,” Pall Mall Magazine (Aug. 1893): 545.

² Alden, “A Darwinian Schooner,” 545.

³ Alden, “A Darwinian Schooner,” 545.

⁴ Alden, “A Darwinian Schooner,” 545.

⁵ Jess Nevins, “Apes in Literature,” in Rick Klaw, ed. The Apes of Wrath (San Franciso, CA: Tachyon, 2012), 75-76.

⁶ Nevins, “Apes in Literature,” 76.