Rating: 4/5
Lord and Lady Greystoke, perhaps better known as John and Alice Clayton, went away on an expedition in the deepest depths of Africa. Young Lady Alice had been pregnant at the time with who would become Tarzan of the Apes, and because of this minor drawback, her husband insisted that she stayed at home until he returned. But she was adamant that she would go with him; and soon enough it was agreed that they would hire a ship and get there as soon as possible, that they might return home in time for Alice to have the baby.
But this would not happen. The lord and lady might have put two and two together and realised that the crew of their so-hired ship was not trustworthy had they not had so much on their minds, and during the later mutiny of the ship, the former had to immediately be helpful to the rebelling right hand man in the hope that they might come across him as friends and be saved from a brutal demise. Black Michael might have looked like he was built of stone and stone only, but he had a clever brain beneath his hard skull that decided perhaps it would be a better idea to get these grovelling people out of the way lest the English government should send naval armies into the ocean to get their revenge.
And so Lord and Lady Greystoke escaped death – or at least, they escaped death during the mutiny. Black Michael anchored the boat near a fresh, sandy shore and delivered Alice and John onto that large beach along with their belongings, upon promising to alert the English government (somehow without putting the blame on themselves), that they might come and rescue them after a while. But the educated gentleman and gentlewoman were sure that this promise would not be brought about any time soon, if ever.
Time passed in the jungle (it appeared that it was here that the lord and lady had been marooned on), and they lived happily for a year or so in an increasingly large cabin that John Clayton built. They were rather frequently disturbed by wild panthers, lions, and even elephants; but with Lord Greystoke’s heavy rifles and Lady Alice’s delicate pistols, they managed to survive for a long while.
Then, one day, all that changed when mighty Bolgani the gorilla destroyed Alice almost entirely, leaving only the little unborn baby and a small portion of her partially alive brain with her. She lived on for a month or so in minor madness; Tarzan, unnamed then, was born; and then, one morning, Lord Greystoke awoke to find his baby crying for food and his young wife dead.
Once more, time passes. Soon poor John Clayton, too, was killed, again by a mighty beast of the jungle. This beast was Kerchak, the chief bull ape of the tribe in which little baby Tarzan was to grow up. Kala, a female ape from this tribe, came across the cabin and the little crying infant that was the Claytons’ child, and, upon finding her own little ape dead a while later, took Tarzan for herself and raised him in the jungle, teaching him only the language of the ape, and its uncivilised ways.
But Tarzan soon came across the cabin; the three skeletons that were the replaced dead baby of Kala, his father and his mother (though he did not know it); and also the books that were for his parents and for he when he was to grow a little older. Slowly Tarzan taught himself to read, but of course he knew not how to pronounce the little curly bugs that we know as letters: only to write them, read them, and understand the meanings of them through the medium of the picture books.
When Tarzan grew up, he learnt of mutiny. Not of the mutiny which his father and mother experienced; of course, he knew not who his father was, and believed his mother to be Kala, an ape. No: Tarzan himself encountered this mutiny. He watched the two old men, the Negress princess, the young man and the young lady all being marched out of a nearby boat by tens of rat-faced, evil sailors, who then promptly turned and disappeared back into the ship.
But that girl – that young lady – oh, the beauty, the perfectness, the absolute surrealism! He loved her with all his heart, though at that moment he did not, quite literally, know what love was. He was to take that woman away with him into the jungle as he had seen the apes of Kerchak’s tribe do so, and then he would announce that he had a wife to that tribe; but of course, Jane Porter was not so willing.
Then everything goes backwards. Jane, at first being revolted at the idea of this strange ape who was fully human – this man who could write and read English but who could not speak it – supposedly marrying her, then grew to love him and cherish him. But a month or so later, the kind, caring crew of a French ship saw their distress signals upon the island and immediately took them into their boat in the hope that they might get them back to England, back to their families and the government. This is all happens while Tarzan is away helping some ally of the jungle, and when he returns, does not realise that Jane was reluctant to go without him. But he is sure that she would still love him if she could see him again, and makes the perilous journey to America in the hope that he might find her again.