Animals: Apes on a Rock

On the towering lump of limestone called Gibraltar, British military authorities last week arrested a German student named Wupperman, whom they suspected of photographing fortifications. Wupperman was released after brief examination, but the quiet dignity of the procedure was soothing to the pride of His Majesty’s troops. It atoned somewhat for the undignified time they had lately had with another offender. An Englishwoman and her daughter had been attacked and troops had been called out to hunt down the attacker—one of Gibraltar’s famed Barbary apes, last wild monkeys in Europe.

Natives of Algeria and Morocco, the apes had run wild on Gibraltar long before Britain’s Sir George Rooke snatched it from Spain in 1704. Their presence was once thought to prove that a land link between Europe and Africa existed as late as the Pleistocene period. But scientists grew doubtful when they could find no monkey fossils in Gibraltar’s honeycomb of caves. Natives explained that easily: the apes had a secret sub-Mediterranean tunnel by which they returned to Africa to die. Scientists decided that the apes must have been imported by Romans or Moors.

“When the apes go, so will the British” is another belief to which Gibraltar’s polyglot population fondly clings. Sensible Britishers smile tolerantly, take no chances on the apes disappearing. Food for them is a standard item in Gibraltar’s colonial budget.

Few years ago the ape colony had dwindled to two aged females. Natives and the Governor of Algeciras, who signs himself “Governor of Algeciras and Gibraltar (temporarily in the hands of the British),” hoped that deliverance was near. But the British smuggled over four young apes from Africa, saved “Gib” for the Crown. Last spring two births upped the colony’s population to ten.

The Barbary ape looks like a figure in a bilious dream, is just as unpleasant in action. Its squarish, long-snouted, wrinkle-mouthed face is palely naked except for matted tufts protruding from cheeks and forehead. It is yellowish brown & white, about the size of an Airedale, walks on four legs like its cousin the baboon. No tree-climber, it lives in Gibraltar’s caves, is apt to turn up almost anywhere on the Rock.