Valiant Finds His Way Home

Valiant Finds His Way Home

When the gates of Gibraltar opened one morning, the guard found an unexpected arrival: Valiant, a donkey they had good reason never to expect again. The 1901 collection A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals tells his story under the title ‘The Lost Ass’.^[1]

Valiant belonged to a Royal Navy captain and had been put aboard a frigate sailing from Gibraltar towards Malta. When the vessel struck sands off Point de Gat, he was thrown overboard in the hope that he might reach land. The sea was so rough, the account says, that a boat leaving the ship was lost.

Yet a few days later he presented himself at Gibraltar. Once admitted, he went straight to a merchant’s stable he had occupied before.

The narrator reckons his journey at more than two hundred miles through unfamiliar country. That extraordinary distance is the book’s claim; it supplies no route record. The ending needs no further ornament. After the wreck and the dangerous water, Valiant arrives at a gate, is let through, and heads for the stable he knows.