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Washington, United States
loves: you win if you guessed "pets" and "museums". Also books, art history, travel, British punk, Korean kimchi, bindis, martinis, and other things TBD. I will always make it very clear if a post is sponsored in any way. Drop me a line at thepetmuseum AT gmail.com !

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

a ship's pig

. . . The ship that can claim an unusual pet is the envy of the Fleet.  Such a pet was Cronje of the cruiser Atlanta when she was stationed on the South Atlantic Station. It was at the time of the Boer War, in which General Cronje was a leading Boer general. So, when a Brazilian wild boar, or peccary, was added to the complement of the Atlanta, he was promptly christened Cronje. Cronje adapted himself to shipboard life as though he had always been a sailor instead of a denizen of a South American jungle.
If by any chance a member of the pig family could be called good-looking, then Cronje was a handsome pig. His nose fairly quivered with the joy of life at sea, his feet were daintily formed, and his coat was sleek from the care it received daily. Cronje loved to poke his nose, which was shaped, of course, somewhat like a pansy, into everything. But most of all he took pleasure in sticking it into a can of the brick-red paste used to clean the brasses on board the cruiser. The crew firmly believed that Cronje had been the beau of his jungle, and thought it was pig rouge. . .

 Orton Porter Jackson and Frank Edgar Evans, The Marvel Book of American Ships (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1917), pp. 331-2.  I tried my hardest to find a photo of this marvelous pig, but no luck yet!

2 comments:

Undine said...

Found him!

http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ux-AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA334&lpg=PA334&dq=cronje+boar+atlanta&source=bl&ots=LUkZoMCrsg&sig=LslVIYFgRNLEKX1sX71tJjBEdc8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cuHeUuGMGceTkQfxpIHADQ&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

curator said...

OMG! I should have paged forward a few! Undine, yet again you blow my mind : )