Buccaneer Monkey

The Buccaneer Monkey, the Unpaid Hand

Temperament

Ships take it aboard for a practical reason: in the rigging, it moves faster than any cabin boy and weighs nothing on a yard. It catches the lines thrown to it, fetches a fallen block, and bites the rat gnawing at the hold. It also steals, anything that shines and anything that can be eaten, and stashes its loot in its hammock. It has one of its own like any sailor, but it often hangs it in the captain’s cabin. On a ship it has lived on for years, that hammock ends up holding half the crew’s lost belongings.

How to Handle It

It bonds with a single master, but treats the whole ship as its territory. Pay it: a piece of fruit, or a dull coin it will go and store with the others. Never punish it in front of the crew. Humiliated, it takes its revenge a few days later, and more often than not it’s its master’s purse that ends up in the hammock.

Rewards

It knows every corner of the ship better than the carpenter. It slips through places a man’s hand can’t fit: a porthole, a grate, the pocket of a sleeping passenger. It also feels the weather turn before the sailors do. On the eve of a heavy squall, it refuses to come down from the mast and shrieks without stopping.

At the Table

The monkey gives the group a scout up high and a pair of hands for things out of reach. Above all, it senses danger before anyone else, and when it panics, it’s never without reason. When something goes missing aboard, search its hammock before you accuse anyone.