CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XV.Ocean Life.—The Harvest of the Sea(concluded).TheClupedæ—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The“Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep-sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The“Huer”—Raising the“Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword-fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep?A great and important group of the bony fish is comprised under the family nameClupedæ. It includes such useful fish as the herring, pilchard, shad, and anchovy. The family is as interesting to the merchant as to the gastronomist.The herring hardly needs description here, but it may just be remarked,en passant, that its back, indigo-coloured after death, is greenish during life. The curious markings often found on the herring have been considered by ignorant fishermen to signify mysterious words of cabalistic import. On one November day, near three hundred years ago, two herrings were caught on the coast of Norway, which bore marks resembling Gothic printed[pg 169]characters.“They were presented to the then King of Norway, Frederick II., who was so frightened by the characters he saw on the backs of the innocent fish that he turned ghastly pale, for he thought that they announced his approaching death and that of his queen.”A council ofsavantswas convened, and the learned ones solemnly reported that the words implied,“Very soon you will cease to fish herrings, as well as other people.”Some more politic scientists gave another explanation, but it was useless, for the king died next year, and his late subjects became firmly convinced that the two herrings had been celestial messengers charged to announce that monarch’s sudden end.The herring abounds in the entire Northern Ocean from the coasts of France and England to Greenland and Lapland. They are very gregarious, and travel in immense shoals, their appearance in any specified locality being uncertain and always sudden. On the coast of Norway the electric telegraph is used to announce to the fishing towns the approach of the shoals, which can always be perceived at a distance by the wave they raise. In the fiords of Norway the herring fisheries are the principal means of existence for the seaboard population. So in 1857 the paternal Norwegian Government laid a submarine cable round the coast 100 miles in length, with stations ashore at intervals conveniently placed for the purpose of notifying the fishermen. In Holland the industries of catching and curing the fish are highly profitable; the fishery is in consequence known as“the great,”while whaling is known as the“small fishery.”To a simple Dutch fisherman, George Benkel, who died in 1397, Holland owes the introduction of the art of preserving and curing the herring. Two hundred years after his death, the Emperor Charles V. solemnly ate a herring on his tomb, as homage to the memory of the creator of a great national industry.THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).In our country there is also an important trade in the fish. Yarmouth sends out 400 vessels of from forty to sixty tons, the larger carrying a crew of twelve. In 1857 three fishing boats of this seaport brought home 3,762,000 fish. In Scotland the one town of Wick had a few years ago 920 boats employed in the fisheries.The Dutch use lines 500 feet in length, with fifty or more nets to each. The upper part of these nets is buoyed with empty barrels or cork, while they are kept down by lead or stone weights; they can be lowered by lengthening the cord to which the buoys are attached. The meshes of the nets are so arranged that if the herring is too small to be caught in the first meshes, he passes through and gets caught in the succeeding one. Dr. Bertram went out in a Wick boat to the fishing grounds. He says:—[pg 170]“At last, after a lengthened cruise, our commander, who had been silent for half an hour, jumped up and called to action.‘Up men, and at them!’was the order of the night. The preparations for shooting the nets at once began by lowering sail. Surrounding us on all sides was to be seen a moving world of boats; many with sails down, their nets floating in the water, and their crews at rest. Others were still flitting uneasily about, their skippers, like our own, anxious to shoot in the right place. By-and-by we were ready; the‘dog,’a large inflated bladder to mark the far end of the train, is heaved overboard, and the nets, breadth after breadth, follow as fast as the men can pay them out, till the immense train is all in the water, forming a perforated wall a mile long and many feet in depth, the‘dog’and the marking bladder, floating and dipping in long zig-zag lines, reminding one of the imaginary coils of the great sea-serpent. After three hours of quietude beneath a beautiful sky, the stars—“The eternal orbs that beautify the night”—began to pale their fires, and the grey dawn appearing indicated that it was time to take stock. We found that the boat had floated quietly with the tide till we were a long distance from the harbour. The skipper had a presentiment that there were fish in his net, and the bobbing down of a few of the bladders made it almost a certainty; and he resolved to examine the drifts.‘Hurrah!’exclaimed Murdoch of Skye;‘there’s a lot of fish, skipper, and no mistake.’Murdoch’s news was true; our nets were silvery with herrings—so laden, in fact, that it took a long time to haul them in. It was a beautiful sight to see the shimmering fish as they came up like a sheet of silver from the water, each uttering a weak death-chirp as it was flung into the bottom of the boat. Formerly the fish were left in the meshes of the net till the boat arrived in the harbour; but now, as the net is hauled on board, they are at once shaken out. As our silvery treasure showers into the boat, we roughly guess our capture at fifty cranes—a capital night’s work.”Wick boats are not, however, always so fortunate. The herring fleet has been overtaken more than once by fearful storms, when valuable lives, boats, and nets, have been sacrificed.Early in December, 1879, an apparent epidemic of suicide attacked the herrings and sprats in Deal Roads, and they rushed ashore in such myriads at Walmer that the fishermen got tired of carting them off, and they were left on the beach for all who cared to help themselves. Nature seems now and then to put bounds to over-population, but if this be the case, no herring famines need be feared, for economical Nature would never have played into the hands of the fishermen who are always at war with her. Such wholesale suicides occur among other forms of animal life. In Africa regiments of ants have been seen deliberately marching into streams, where they were immediately devoured by fish. Rats have migrated in myriads, stopping nowhere, neither day nor night, and have been preyed upon by both large birds and beasts of prey. In the Seychelles some years ago several hundred turtles conspired to die together on the island in front of the harbour, and carried out their decision. Were they the victims of hydrophobia, delirium tremens, or some other disease? Even the gay and sprightly butterfly has been known to migrate in immense clouds from the land straight out to sea, without the remotest chance of ever reaching another shore. What could be the reason for such a suicidal act?[pg 171]It would be difficult to over-estimate the value of deep sea fisheries; in which, according to trustworthy statistics, England and Wales alone employ nearly 15,000 boats, with nearly double that number of“hands,”added to whom are over 14,000 others to whom they give occasional employment on the coasts. The report of Commissioners Frank Buckland and Spencer Walpole, who were instructed to investigate the modes of fishing in the two countries named, and how far they were conducted on proper principles, has therefore both importance and interest. It was feared that in certain directions deep-sea fishing, which undeniably leads to the capture of myriads of young and useless fish, might have the same effect as wasteful fishing and dredging did in the case of the salmon and oyster.The Commissioners assure us that there is neither ground for alarm nor for legislative interference. The beneficent sea is practically inexhaustible.“Bearing in mind,”wrote a commentator on the Report,“how much has been said regarding the wilful destruction of spawn, it is startling to hear that nobody‘has ever seen the eggs of soles, turbot, plaice, and other like fish after their extrusion from the parent,’while, with respect to the finny tribe in general, the Commissioners add:‘So far as we know, there is, with one exception—herring spawn—no clearly-established instance of the spawn of any edible fish being raised in a trawl net or taken in any other net.’With these words one bugbear of the sea disappears. Nature, whatever may be her shortcomings elsewhere, knows how to take care of herself here. She carries on her life-giving processes beyond our reach, and is veiled in a mystery which even the keen observation of the present time cannot penetrate, for the Commissioners remind us that, generally speaking,‘little is known either of the seasons in which sea fish spawn or of the places in which the spawn is cast; still less of the time which the spawn, after it is cast, takes to vivify.’But if the spawn evades the power of man, the young fish are not so fortunate. It is unquestionable that an immense waste of fry of all kinds goes on round our coasts. The trawler, the shrimper, the seine net, and the fixed engine, combine against these little creatures, tons upon tons of which are annually destroyed. At first sight it would seem that a grave matter here presents itself. The Commissioners, however, proceed so to reason away its importance that in the end it assumes very small dimensions indeed. Starting from the indisputable fact that all animals have‘a tendency to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence,’Messrs. Buckland and Walpole go on to show that this especially applies to sea fish; and they take as an example the fecund herring. Assuming that the British waters contain sixty thousand millions of female herrings, each of which deposits twenty thousand eggs, it follows that the total number of eggs which, but for natural and artificial checks, would come to maturity is twelve hundred millions of millions—an expression which is easy to put on paper, but which the mind can no more comprehend than it can grasp the idea of eternity. Enough that these countless hordes, if compressed by five hundreds into foot cubes, would build a wall round the earth two hundred feet broad and one hundred high. The inference from such astounding figures is that man’s destructiveness can do little. He takes one herring for every half-million of eggs, while the original stock would be kept up were only one egg to mature out of ten thousand. All fish, it is true, are not as prolific as the herring, but the argument applies to each kind in its degree, and may be summed[pg 172]up generally by the statement that the proportion of spawn and fry which must perish is so great as to reduce the operations of man to limits barely appreciable. On the important related question whether the supply of fish is decreasing, the Commissioners entertain no doubt whatever. They say,‘so far from the stock of fish decreasing, we believe that the supply of fish, taken on the whole, is at least as great as it has ever been; there are some reasons for even thinking that it is actually increasing.’On the other hand, they refer to a general impression that the take of flat-fish, such as soles and plaice, is becoming less; the local explanation referring almost universally to the destruction of fry. Yet while the Commissioners do not, except in the case of soles, contest the alleged decrease, they refuse to recognise the assigned cause, nor, generally speaking, do they see any reason for legislative action of a restrictive nature.”The prospects of our ocean fishing, both as an industry and as a food supply, are, therefore, encouraging. The harvest of the sea is constant, and though there must be local fluctuations, the return for the labour of those“who reap where they have not sowed”is sure.HERRING FISHING.HERRING FISHING.[pg 173]Of the shad, though not as commonly known as the herring, there are twenty known species. In the season this fish regularly approaches the mouths of great rivers for the purpose of spawning. It is found in the spring in the Rhine, Seine, Garonne, Volga, Elbe, and in many of our own rivers. In some Irish rivers the masses of shad taken have been so great that hardly any amount of exertion has been sufficient to land the net. It sometimes attains a very considerable size, weighing from four to six pounds. The shad taken at sea is considered coarser eating than that caught in rivers.The sprat has been by some taken for the young of the herring, and the controversy on the subject has at times waxed warm. Some anatomists declare that their peculiarities show no difference but size. It has a serrated belly, which Bertram looks upon as the tuck in the child’s frock, a provision for growth.“The slaughter of sprats,”says he,“is as decided a case of killing the goose with the golden eggs as the grilse slaughter carried on in our salmon rivers.”But Figuier reminds that writer that the young herrings are caught without the serrated belly, and that the curer’s purchase is regulated by the sprat’s rough, and the herring’s smooth, belly. Sprats are often so abundant as to be unsaleable, and are then actually used for manure.THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).The pilchard visits our coasts at all times, the leading fisheries being in Cornwall. Wilkie Collins has given us a lively and interesting picture of the“look-out”for their approach and capture.46He says:“A stranger in Cornwall, taking his first walk along the cliffs in August, could not advance far without witnessing what would strike him as a very singular and even alarming phenomenon. He would see a man standing on the extreme edge of a precipice just over the sea, gesticulating in a very remarkable manner, with a bush in his hand, waving it to the right and to the left, brandishing it over his head, sweeping it past his feet; in short, acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous description. It would add considerably to the stranger’s surprise if he were told that the insane individual before him was paid for flourishing the bush at the rate of a guinea a week.47And if he advanced a little, so as to obtain a nearer view of the madman, and observed a well-manned boat below turning carefully to the right and left as the bush turned, his mystification would probably be complete, and his ideas as to the sanity of the inhabitants would be expressed with grievous doubt.“But a few words of explanation would make him alter his opinion. He would learn that the man was an important agent in the pilchard fishery of Cornwall, that he had just discovered a shoal swimming towards the land, and that the men in the boats were guided by his gesticulations alone in their arrangements for securing the fish on which[pg 174]so many depend for a livelihood.”These watchers are known locally as“huers.”They can easily detect the approach of the shoals, as they darken the water, producing the effect of a cloud. As they approach the fish may themselves be seen leaping and playing on the surface by hundreds; sometimes they are so abundant that the fish behind force those in front ashore, and they are taken by hand or in baskets.The boats, each of about fifteen tons burden, carry a large, long seine net, kept up by corks and down by lead. The grand object in the fishery, guided by the“huer”on the cliffs ashore, is to drive the shoals into shallow waters and bays.“The grand object is now to enclose the entire shoal. The leads sink one side of the net perpendicularly to the bottom, the corks buoy the other to the surface of the water. When it has been taken all round the shoal, the two extremities are made fast, and the fish are imprisoned within an oblong barrier of netting. The art is now to let as few of the pilchards escape as possible while the process is being completed. Whenever the‘huer’observes that they are startled, and separating at any particular point, he waves his bush, and thither the boat is steered, and there the net is shot at once; the fish are thus headed and thwarted in every direction with extraordinary address and skill. This labour completed, the silence of intense expectation that has hitherto prevailed is broken, there is a shout of joy on all sides—the shoal is secured.”The seine is now regarded as a great reservoir of fish, and may remain in the water for a week or more. The pilchards are collected from it in a smaller net known as the“tuck.”When this net has travelled round the whole circuit of the seine, everything is prepared for the great event—hauling the fish to the surface.“Now all is excitement on sea and shore; every little boat in the place puts off crammed with idle spectators; boys shout, dogs bark, and the shrill voices of the former are joined by the deep voices of the‘seiners.’There they stand, six or eight stalwart, sunburnt fellows, ranged in a row in the seine-boat, hauling with all their might at the‘tuck’-net, and roaring out the nautical‘Yo, heave ho!’in chorus. Higher and higher rises the net; louder and louder shout the boys and the idlers; the‘huer,’so calm and collected hitherto, loses his self-possession, and waves his cap triumphantly.‘Hooray! hooray! Yoy—hoy, hoy! Pull away, boys! Up she comes! Here they are!’The water boils and eddies; the‘tuck’-net rises to the surface; one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing, silvery scales, one compact mass of thousands of fish, each one of which is madly striving to escape, appears in an instant. Boats as large as barges now pull up in hot haste all round the nets, baskets are produced by dozens, the fish are dipped up in them, and shot out, like coals out of a sack, into the boats. Presently the men are ankle-deep in pilchards; they jump upon the benches, and work on till the boats can hold no more. They are almost gunwale under before they leave for the shore.”At the little fishing cove of Trereen, Mr. Wilkie Collins tells us, 600 hogsheads, each of 2,400 fish and upwards, were taken in little more than a week.The sardine also comes under theClupedæfamily. It derives its commercial name from Sardinia, but is found all over the Mediterranean, the coast of Brittany, &c. On the latter coast the fish are caught in floating nets, and arranged in osier baskets, layer after layer, each boat returning to port when it has secured 25,000.[pg 175]Space will not permit of more than a passing notice to the flat-fish, orPleuronectidæ. These fish swim by means of a caudal fin, and they can ascend or descend in the water readily, but they cannot turn to right or left with the same facility as other fish. Most flat-fish, soles, turbot, flounders, and plaice, are taken by trawl nets. Some of the larger are speared.The holibut (or halibut) is a fish which attains a great size, sometimes as much as seven feet in length, and weighing 300 pounds. One brought to Edinburgh measured seven-and-a-half feet in length by three feet in breadth; it weighed 320 pounds. In Norway and Greenland a long cord, from which branch thirty or so smaller cords, each furnished with a barbed hook, is employed for their capture. The main cord is attached to floating planks, which indicate the place where it is let down.TheGadidæfamily includes some most important fish, commercially considered, such as the whiting, haddock, and cod, the general form and peculiarities of which are familiar to all.The cod fish is a most voracious feeder, and is provided with a vast stomach; it eats molluscs, crabs, and small fish, and has been known even to swallow pieces of wood. It is essentially a sea fish, and is never seen in rivers. From the days of John Cabot, the English, French, Dutch, and Americans have prosecuted the great fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland; 2,000 English vessels, manned by 32,000 seamen, are employed in the pursuit. The modern cod-smack is clipper-built, has large tank wells for carrying the fish alive, and costs about £1,500. The fish is taken in nets, or by line. Bertram tells us that each man has a line of fifty fathoms in length, and attached to this are a hundred hooks, baited with mussels, pieces of herring, or whiting.“On arriving at the fishing ground, the fishermen heave overboard a cork buoy, with a flagstaff about six feet in height attached to it. The buoy is kept stationary by a line, called the‘pow end,’reaching to the bottom of the water, where it is held by a stone or grapnel fastened to the lower end. To the‘pow end’is also fastened the fishing-line, which is then paid out as fast as the boat sails, which may be from four to five knots an hour. Should the wind be unfavourable for the direction in which the crew wish to set the line, they use the oars. When the line, or‘taes,’is all out, the end is dropped, and the boat returns to the buoy. The‘pow’line is hauled up with the anchor and fishing-line attached to it. The fishermen then haul in the line, with the fish attached to it. Eight hundred fish might be, and often have been, taken by eight men in a few hours by this operation; but many fishermen say now that they consider themselves fortunate when they get a fish on every fifth hook on an eight-lined‘taes’line.”On our own coasts the cod is principally taken by deep-sea lines, with many shorter lines depending from them armed with large hooks. One man has in ten hours taken 400, and eight men have taken eighty score in one day off the Doggerbank. The Norfolk and Lincoln coasts afford a large supply; the fish taken is stowed in well-boats, and brought to Gravesend, whence they are transhipped into market boats and sent to Billingsgate. The store-boats with their wells, through which the water circulates, cannot come higher, as the fresh water of the Thames, and possibly some of that which isnottoo fresh, would kill the fish.THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).The haddock is also taken with lines. In the village of Findhorn, Morayshire, large[pg 176]numbers of fine haddocks are dried and smoked with the fumes of hard wood and sawdust. Hence the term,“Finnan haddies,”which, when obtained, are the finest for gastronomic purposes, being of superior flavour.The mackerel (Scomber scombrus) is a most valuable fish for man. The tunny, bonita, and mackerel have yielded immense supplies of excellent food, the first-named being esteemed in parts of France far above any other fish. It is called the salmon of Provence. They attain a far larger growth than the mackerel, specimens having been found of seven, eight, and even nine feet in length, and weighing up to 400 pounds. They are specially abundant in the Mediterranean, where they are usually caught in nets. In Provence they are driven, much as are the pilchards in Cornwall, into an enclosed space called themadrague, where at last the fish finds itself ensnared in shallow water. Then“the carnage commences. The unhappy creatures,”says Figuier,“are struck with long poles, boat-hooks, and other weapons. The tunny-fishing presents a very sad spectacle at this its last stage; fine large fish perish under the blows of a multitude of fishermen, who pursue their bloody task with most dramatic effect. The sight of the poor creatures, some of them wounded and half dead, trying in vain to struggle with their ferocious assailants, is very painful to see. The sea red with blood, long preserves traces of this frightful slaughter.”The bonita is principally a tropical fish, not unlike the mackerel, but more than double its size. It is the great enemy of the flying-fish, and possesses electrical or stinging powers, for any one attempting to hold the living fish is violently shaken as in palsy, and one’s very tongue is tied, and unable to make more than a spasmodic sputter.THE MACKEREL (Scomber scombrus).The mackerel is common to all European seas. It is themacquereauof the French, themacarelloof the modern Romans, themakrilof the Swedes, thebretalof some parts of Brittany, thescombroof the Venetians, thelacestoof the Neapolitans, and thecavalloof the Spaniards. It is one of the most universally-esteemed fish.The mackerel is very voracious, and has courage enough to attack fish much larger than itself. It will even attack man, and is said to love him, gastronomically speaking. A Norwegian bishop who lived in the sixteenth century records the case of a sailor attacked by a shoal of mackerel, while he was bathing. His companions came to the rescue; but though they succeeded in driving off the fish, their assistance came too late; he died a few hours afterwards.[pg 177]This fish is generally taken by drift-nets, usually 20 feet deep, and 120 long, well buoyed with cork, but without weights to sink them. The meshes are made of fine tarred twine. They are in their best condition in June and July. The ancients used to make a sauce piquant from their fat, which was calledgarum, and sold for the equivalent of sixteen shillings the pint. It was acrid and nauseous, but had the property of stimulating jaded appetites. Seneca charged it with destroying the coats of the stomach, and injuring the health of the high livers of his day. A traveller of the sixteenth century, Pierre Belon, found it highly esteemed in Constantinople.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.The formidable sword-fish is also tolerable eating, especially when young, and there are fisheries for its capture in the Mediterranean. The fishermen of Messina and Reggio fish by night, using large boats carrying torches, and a mast, at the top of which one of their number is stationed to announce the approach of their prey, which is harpooned by a man standing in the bows. This fish attains a length of five or six feet, its sword forming three-tenths of its length. It is one of the whale’s natural enemies, and it objects even to ships passing through its element. There are numerous cases cited of ship’s bottoms having been pierced by it. In 1725, some carpenters having occasion to examine a ship[pg 178]just returned from the tropics, found the sword of one of these animals buried in its lower timbers. They averred that to drive a pointed iron bolt of the same size to the same depth would require eight or nine blows with a thirty-pound hammer. It was further evident from the position of the weapon that the fish had followed the ship while under full sail; it had penetrated the metal sheathing and three-and-a-half inches of the timber.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.And now, before leaving the minor and intermediate types of ocean life for the monsters of the deep, a few general observations may be permitted. Pliny described 94 species of fish; Linnæus described 478; the scientists of to-day know upwards of 13,000, one-tenth of which are fresh-water fish. The reader will then understand why only a few of the more important, useful, or curious have been described in these pages.A hard man of science once described fish-life as“silent, monotonous, and joyless.”Modern science has disproved each and all of these statements. As regards the first, there are species actually known which“indulge in jews’-harps, trumpets, and drums.... Musical fish are a fact of positive knowledge, for not only can they be heard in shoals thrumming their jews’-harps in unison, but other kinds have been taken in the very act of trumpeting and drumming.”Bertram, as we have seen, speaks of the“death-chirp”of the captured herring. The application of the telephone has proved that a fish, placed alone in some water, actually talked to itself! Mr. S. E. Peal, in a letter to a scientific journal, tells us of a large fish,Barbes macrocephalus, which converses with a peculiar“cluck,”or persuasive sound, which may be heard as far as forty feet from the water. He also mentions a bivalve of Eastern Assam which actually“sings loudly in concert.”How fish-life could be called monotonous and joyless will puzzle any one who has watched them in a large aquarium, where their every movement tells of pleasure, or at least excitement. Imagine, then, their life in the ocean itself. All around them is life—life in constant activity. The ancients said, and Pliny assented to the dictum, that in the water might be found anything or everything that was found out of it, and as much more besides. Then there is the excitement of the chase, in which they may be either the pursued or the pursuers.“Not only,”said a writer in a leading daily journal,“can they indulge themselves in running away from sharks, as we should do from tigers if they swarmed in the streets, in contemplating the while the elephant of the seas sauntering along through his domain, or finding diversion and instruction in the winged process of the flying-fish or the tree-climbing of perch, the buffooneries of sun-fish and pipe-fish, the cunning artifices of the‘angler-fish,’the electric propensities of some, the luminosity of others, the venomous nature of these or the grotesque appearance of those—not only is all the variety of experience to be found on the earth to be found also in the water, but even in a wider range and a greater diversity. The sea floor is strewn with marvels, and the rocks are instinct with wonders.”Fish-life is, then, full of excitement and interest.An accomplished ichthyologist, Mr. F. Francis, has stirred up the vexed question,“Do fish sleep?”Only a very few fish, the dog-fish being one of the few exceptions, can close their eyes at all. Still, on the other hand, some human beings, and notably infants, can sleep with one or both eyes open, while the hare is credited with being able to take his nap in the latter condition. Fish would seem to require sleep from their constant activity; but in actual fact, no scientific watcher has yet caught one asleep.[pg 179]CHAPTER XVI.Monsters of the Deep.48Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the“Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.Some years ago, when an invalid wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice as to the value of fish as“brain food,”the answer of that humourist was plain indeed:—“Fish-food is good: abounds in phosphorus and nutrition. In your case I must recommend a small whale!”Unfortunately, Mark Twain fell into a very common error. The whale isnota fish; it is a mammal: it suckles its young. The writer has eaten whale—that is, a little bit of one. Whale brain, enclosed in batter, and treated as a fritter, is not to be despised.The British whaler of about 1670 is quaintly described by Frederic Martin, who visited Spitzbergen and Greenland that year. He says:—“Whoever of the ships’ crews sees a dead whale cries out,‘Fish mine!’and therefore the merchants must pay him a ducat for his care and vigilance. Many of them climb often into the mast in hopes to have a ducat, but in vain. When the dead whale is thus fastened to the ship, two sloops hold on the other side of the fish, or whale, and in each of them doth stand a man or boy that has a long hook in his hands, wherewith he doth hold the boat to the ship, and the harpooner stands before in the sloop or upon the whale, with a leathern suit on, and sometimes they have boots on. Underneath the hook are some sharp nails fixed, that they may be able to stand firm. These two men that cut the fat off have their peculiar wages for it, viz., about four or five rix dollars. First they cut a large piece from behind the head, by the eyes, which they call thekenter-piece, that is as much as to say, thewinding-piece; for as they cut all the other fat all in rows from the whale towards the end, so they cut this greatkenter-piecelarger and wider than all the rest. This piece, when it is cut round about from the whale, reaches from the water to the cradle (that is, the round circle that goes round about the middle of the mast, and is made in the shape of a basket), whence you may guess of the bigness of a whale. A strong and thick rope is fixed to this kenter-piece, and the other end is fixed to underneath the cradle, whereby the whale is as it were borne up out of the water, that they may come at it, and by reason of the great weight of the whale the ship leans towards that side. One may judge how tough the fat is, for in this piece a hole is made, through which the rope is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,”and so on.Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the“killer,”a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These[pg 180]“killers”often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look-out that a whale has been“hove-to”by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty-five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale.The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold-water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale-fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer. The whale-fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother[pg 181]escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of‘Mysticete’has been applied to various whales.”THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; therightwhale delights in cold water. The log-books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn.Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut-water of a ship. On the right[pg 182]side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed“the blanket,”of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty-two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.49Many years since theSamuel Enderby, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.This whale swallows quantities of small fishes, and has been known to eject from its stomach a fish as large as a moderate-sized salmon. This species is gregarious; and the herds, called“schools,”are females and young males. Mr. Beale saw 500 or 600 in one school. With each female school are one to three large“bulls,”or“schoolmasters,”as they are termed by the whalers. The full-grown males almost always go in search of food. A large whale will yield eighty, and sometimes one hundred, barrels of oil. Among the habits of the whale are“breaching,”or leaping clear out of the water and falling back on its side, so that the breach may be seen on a clear day from the mast-head at six miles’ distance; in“going ahead”the whale attains ten or twelve miles an hour, which Mr. Beale believes to be its greatest velocity;“lob-tailing”is lashing the water with its tail. The dangers and hairbreadth escapes in the capture are very numerous.In 1839 there were discovered among rubbish in a tower of Durham Castle the bones of a sperm whale, which, from a letter of June 20th, 1661, in the Surtees Collection, is shown to have been cast ashore at that time, andskeletonisedin order to ornament this old tower. Clusius describes, in 1605, a sperm whale thrown ashore seven years before, near Scheveling, where Cuvier supposed its head to be still preserved, and there is an antiquity of the kind still shown there.The whale chase is an exciting scene. Sometimes the whale places himself in a perpendicular position, with the head downwards, and rearing his tail on high, beats the water with awful violence. The sea foams, and vapours darken the air; the lashing is heard several miles off, like the roar of a distant tempest. Sometimes he makes an immense spring, and rears his whole body above the waves, to the admiration of the experienced whaler, but to the terror of those who see for the first time this astonishing spectacle. Other motions, equally expressive of his boundless strength, attract the attention of navigators at the distance of miles. The whole structure of the whale exhibits most admirable adaptation to his situations and the element in which he lives, in the toughness and thickness of his skin and disposition of the coating of blubber beneath, which serves the purpose—if we may be permitted to use so homely a simile—of an extra great-coat to keep him warm, and prevent his warm red blood from being chilled by the icy seas. But provision is especially made to enable him to descend uninjured to very great depths. The orifices of the nostrils are closed by valves, wonderfully suited to keep out the water from the lungs, notwithstanding the pressure. In one species[pg 183]they are shaped like cones, which fit into the orifice like corks in the neck of a bottle, and the greater the pressure the tighter they hold. The most surprising fact in the whale, probably, is the power of descending to enormous depths below the surface of the sea, and sustaining that almost inconceivable pressure of the superincumbent water. On one occasion which fell under Mr. Scoresby’s own observation a whale was struck from a boat. The animal instantly descended, dragging down with him a rope nearlyone mile long. Having let out this much of the rope, the situation of the boat’s crew became critical. Either they must have cut the line, and submitted to a very serious loss, or have run the risk of being dragged under water by the whale. The men were desired to retire to the stern, to counterbalance the pulls of the whale, which dragged the bow down sometimes to within an inch of the water. In this dangerous dilemma the boat remained some time, vibrating up and down with the tugs of the monster, but never moving from the place where it lay when the harpoon was first thrown. This fact proves that the whale must have descended at once perpendicularly, as had he advanced in any direction he must have pulled the boat along with him. Mr. Scoresby and the crew were rescued by the timely arrival of another boat furnished with fresh ropes and harpoons. A whale when struck will dive sometimes to a depth of 800 fathoms; and as the surface of a large animal may be estimated at 1,500 square feet, at this depth it will have to sustain a pressure equal to 211,000 tons. The transition from that which it is exposed to at the surface, and which may be taken at about 1,300 tons, to so enormous an increase, must be productive of the utmost exhaustion.Strange incidents are related of harpooning. On September 24th, 1864, as theAlexander, belonging to Dundee, was steaming about in Davis’s Straits, a whale of about twelve tons was observed not far distant from her. Boats were put out, and the crew secured the animal. When they cleansed it, they found embedded in its body, two or three inches beneath the skin, a piece of a harpoon about eighteen inches long; on the one side were engraved the words—“Traveller,”Peterhead, and on the other,“1838.”This vessel was lost in 1856, in the Cumberland Straits whale-fishery; it is therefore clear that the harpoon must have remained in the animal from that time.A sailor gives the following description of sleepinginsidea whale; not, however, quite as Jonah may have done. He says:50—“We were on a little expedition in the long-boat one voyage, and we had to encamp for the night with as much comfort as our scant means would afford. The shore was terrible for its wildness and desolation—it was indeed lonely, sad, and sandy, but what was strange and welcome, was, great carcases of whales, stranded like wrecks on the far-reaching shore, in some cases the backbone holding together like a good keel and the great ribs still round, giving you an idea of an elongated hogshead without the staves. We landed for the night, unbent our sails and stretched them over the bleached ribs of a whale’s skeleton, and after supper took a comfortable sleep under the most curious roof-tree I ever rested under.”This was on the north-west coast of Africa; and the sailor came to the conclusion that whales come ashore to die.“And to my mind,”says he,“it is as poetical as it is welcome. I like[pg 184]to think of these mighty travellers in the mighty deep hugging the shore when the fires of life burn low, and the mighty waves, their playmates from their childhood, giving their last lift up on the beach!”And now for that great mythical or actual animal the sea-serpent.For ages an animal of immense size and serpentine form has been believed to inhabit the ocean, though rarely seen. A strong conviction of its existence has always prevailed in Norway and the fiords, where it has been reported to have been frequently seen. It is also said that the coasts of New England have been frequently visited by this marine monster many times during this century.Bishop Pontoppidan, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, wrote a history of Norway, his native land, collected a quantity of testimonies as to its occasional appearance. Among other evidence he mentions that of Captain de Ferry, of the Norwegian Navy, who saw the serpent, while in a boat rowed by eight men, near Molde, in August, 1774. A declaration of this was made by the captain and two of the crew before a magistrate. The animal was described as of the general form of a serpent stretched on the surface in[pg 185]receding coils or undulations, and the head, which resembled that of a horse, elevated some two feet out of the water.In the summer of 1846 many respectable persons stated that in the vicinity of Christiansand and Molde they had seen the marine serpent. The affidavits of numerous persons were given in the papers, which, with some discrepancies in minute particulars, agree in testifying that an animal of great length (from about fifty to a hundred feet) had been seen at various times, in many cases more than once. All agreed that the eyes were large and glaring; that the body was dark-brown and comparatively slender; and that the head, which for size was compared to a ten-gallon cask, was covered with a long spreading mane.An account of one of these encounters, which took place on the 28th May, 1845, was published by the Rev. P. W. Demboll, Archdeacon of Molde, those present being J. C. Lund, bookseller and printer, G. S. Krogh, merchant, Christian Flang, Lund’s apprentice, and John Elgenses, labourer. These men were fishing on the Romsdal Fjord, and the appearance took place about seven in the evening, a little distance from shore, near the ballast place and the Molde Hove. Lund fired at the animal, which followed them till they came to shallow water, when it dived and disappeared.In 1817 the Linnæan Society of New England published“A Report relative to a Large Marine Animal, supposed to be a Serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August,”of that year. A good deal of care was taken to obtain evidence, and the deposition of eleven witnesses of fair and unblemished characters were certified on oath before the magistrates. The length was estimated at fifty to a hundred feet, and the head compared to that of a sea-turtle, a rattlesnake, and a serpent generally, but in this case there was no appearance of a mane.Again, in theBoston Daily Advertiserfor November 25th, 1840, there is a communication from the Hon. T. H. Perkins of that city, attesting his own personal observation of the marine serpent at Gloucester Harbour, near Cape Ann, in 1817. This communication took the form of a letter written to a friend in 1820.Captain Perkins speaks of the animal’s motion being the vertical movement of the caterpillar, and not that of the common snake either on land or water, and this confirms the account of Mr. M‘Clean, the minister of a parish in the Hebrides, who saw in 1809 a serpentine monster about eighty feet in length. He distinctly states that it seemed to move by undulations up and down, which is not only contrary to all that is known of serpents, but from the structure of their vertebræ impossible. Hans Egede mentions the appearance of a marine snake off the coast of Greenland in 1734.On the 15th of May, 1833, a party, consisting of Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant Lyster of the Artillery, and Mr. Ince the ordnance store-keeper at Halifax, started from that town in a small yacht for Mahone Bay, on a fishing excursion. When about half-way they came upon a shoal of grampuses in an unusual state of excitement, and to the surprise of the party they perceived the head and neck of a snake, at least eighty feet in length, following them. An account of this occurrence was published in theZoologistfor 1847. The editor stated that he was indebted for it to Mr. W. H. Ince, who received it from his brother,[pg 186]Commander J. M. R. Ince, R.N. It was written by one of the eye-witnesses, Mr. Henry Ince, and signed as follows:—W. Sullivan, Captain Rifle Brigade,June 21, 1831.A. Maclachlan, Lieut.  „      „August 5, 1824.G. P. Malcolm, Ensign  „      „August 13, 1830.B. O’Neal Lyster, Lieut. Artillery,June 7, 1816.Henry Ince, Storekeeper at Halifax.The dates affixed to the names were those on which the gentlemen received their respective commissions.Great interest was excited in 1848 by an account of a great sea-serpent seen in lat. 24° 44′ S., and long. 9° 20′ E., in the tropics, and not very far from the coast of Africa, by the officers and crew of her Majesty’s frigateDædalus. It was not, as in other cases, in bright and fine weather, but on a dark and cloudy afternoon, and with a long ocean swell. Captain Peter M‘Quhæ, in his report to the Admiralty, published in theTimesfor the 13th of October, describes it with confidence as“an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea;”and he adds:“As nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main topsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animalà fleur d’eau, no portion of which was to our perception used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised his features with the naked eye; but it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the south-west, which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was without doubt that of a snake; and it was never during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed washed about its back.”THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S. DÆDALUS.THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S.DÆDALUS.(After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ, sent to the Lords of the Admiralty, October, 1848.)Drawings prepared from a sketch by Captain M‘Quhæ were published in theIllustrated London Newsof 28th October, 1848. Lieutenant Drummond, the officer of the watch at the time, also printed his own impression of the animal, which differs in some slight points from the Captain’s account, particularly in ascribing a more elongated form to the head, in the mention of a back-fin (whereas Captain M‘Quhæ expressly says no fins were seen), and the lower estimate of the length of the portion of the animal visible. Lieutenant Drummond’s words are:—“The appearance of its head, which with the back fin was the only portion of the animal visible, was long, pointed, and flattened at the top, perhaps ten feet in length; the upper jaw projecting considerably; the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head, and visible occasionally. The Captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin about the same distance behind it. The upper part of the head and shoulders appeared of a dark brown colour, and beneath the jaw a brownish white. It pursued a steady and undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the[pg 187]water, and in rather a raised position, disappearing occasionally beneath a wave for a very brief interval, and not apparently for the purposes of respiration. It was going at the rate of perhaps from twelve to fourteen miles an hour, and when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant. In fact, it gave one quite the idea of a large snake or eel.”Lieutenant Drummond’s account is the more worthy of regard, as it was derived from his journal, and so gives the exact impressions of the hour, while Captain M‘Quhæ’s description was written from memory after his arrival in England.HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)These statements caused much discussion at the time. It was suggested by Mr. J. D. Morriss Stirling, a gentleman long living in Norway, and also by a writer in theTimesof November 2, 1848, under the signature of“F. G. S.,”that the monster had an affinity with the great fossil reptiles known to geologists as theEnaliosauria, and particularly adduced the genusPlesiosaurus, or gigantic lizard, with a serpent-like neck. This is also the opinion of Professor Agassiz, as given in the report of his lectures in Philadelphia, in 1849, and reaffirmed in his“Geological Researches.”A master in science, Professor Richard Owen, now appeared upon the field, and in a most able article in theTimes, November 11, 1848, gave his verdict against the serpentine character of the animal, and pronounced it to have been, in his judgment, a seal. He argued this partly from the description of its appearance, and partly from the fact that no remains of any dead marine serpent had ever been found. He says:“On weighing the question whether creatures meriting the name of‘great sea serpent’do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilised state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea serpents, Krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent.”However, Captain M‘Quhæ gallantly returned to the charge, and combated the idea that he had mistaken one of thePhocaspecies for a snake; and he was strongly corroborated by Mr. R. Davidson, Superintending Surgeon, Nagpore Subsidiary Force, in a letter from Kamptee, published in theBombay Bi-monthly Times, for January, 1849. This gentleman says that an animal,“of which no more generally correct description could be given than that by Captain M‘Quhæ,”passed within thirty-five yards of the shipRoyal Saxonwhile he and its commander, Captain Petrie, were standing on the poop, when they were returning to India in 1829.Again, a letter was printed in theZoologistfor 1852, communicated by Captain Steele, 9th Lancers, to his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Steele of the Coldstream Guards, stating that while on his way to India in theBartramhe andevery one on boardsaw“the head and neck of an enormous snake.”This was corroborated in a letter from one of the officers of the ship, who says:—“His head appeared to be about sixteen feet above the[pg 188]water, and he kept moving it up and down, sometimes showing his enormous neck, which was surmounted with a huge crest in the shape of a saw.”Another theory was put forward in the LondonSunof the 9th July, 1849, by Captain Herriman, of the British shipBrazilian, who, on the 24th February, 1849, was becalmed on almost the same spot that Captain M‘Quhæ saw his monster while on a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope.“I perceived,”wrote Captain Herriman,“something right abeam, about half a mile to the westward, stretched along the water to the length of about twenty-five to thirty feet, and perceptibly moving from the ship with a steady sinuous motion. The head, which seemed to be lifted several feet above the water, had something resembling a mane running down to the floating portion, and within six feet of the tail it forked out into a sort of double fin.”On approaching in a small boat, however, Captain Herriman discovered that his monster was nothing more formidable than“an immense piece of sea-weed, evidently detached from a coral reef, and drifting with the current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, and which, together with the swell left by the subsidence of the gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion.”In theTimesof 5th February, 1858, a letter from Captain Harrington, of the shipCastilian, stating that he and his crew had seen a gigantic serpent on the 12th December, 1857, about ten miles N.E. of St. Helena, brought out another witness on the sea-weed hypothesis. This was Captain Fred. Smith, of the shipPekin, who gave a very similar account to that of Captain Herriman, stating that in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E., on the 28th December, 1848, he captured what he believed to be a serpent, but what turned out to be a gigantic piece of weed covered with snaky-looking barnacles.This last imputation brought up“An Officer of H.M. shipDædalus,”whose testimony, in theTimesof 16th February, 1858, putshors de combatthe sea-weed theory in that renowned case. He states that,“at its nearest position, being not more than 200 yards from us,the eye,the mouth, the nostril, the colour and form, all beingmost distinctly visible to us... my impression was it was rather of a lizard than a serpentine character, as its movement was steady and uniform,as if propelled by fins, not by any undulatory power.”That there is some mighty denizen of the vasty deep, sometimes but seldom seen, is more than possible, and highly probable; but to which of the recognised classes of created being can this huge rover of the ocean be referred? First of all, is it an animal at all? On two occasions monstrous pieces of weed have been mistaken for the Kraken, but on each occasion the distance from the vessel is estimated at half a mile; while Captain M‘Quhæ says that he was within 200 yards, and Mr. Davidson within thirty-five yards of the animal. Under these circumstances we may fairly dismiss the sea-weed hypothesis.Professor Owen would place the sea-serpent among the mammalia, butPhoca proboscideais the only seal which will bear comparison with theDædalusanimal in dimensions, it reaching from twenty to thirty feet. The officers declare, however, that at least sixty feet of their animal was visible at the surface. Again, the fore paws of the seal are placed at about one-third of the total length from the muzzle, and yet no appearance of fins was seen. To continue, the greatPhoca proboscideahas no mane, the only seals possessing what may be dignified with the title being the two kinds of sea lions—theOtaria jubataandPlatyrhynchus leoninus—which are far too small to come into the count.[pg 189]It is quite possible that the great unknown is a reptile, and his marine habits present no difficulty. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans there are numerous specimens of true snakes (Hydrophidæ), which are exclusively inhabitants of the sea. None of these, however, are known to exceed a few feet in length, and none of them, so far as is known, have found their way into the Atlantic.The most probable solution of the riddle is the hypothesis of Mr. Morriss Stirling and Professor Agassiz, that the so-called sea-serpent will find its closest affinities with those extraordinary animals theEnaliosauria, or marine lizards, whose fossil skeletons are found so abundantly through the Oolite and the Lias. If the Plesiosaur could be seen alive you would find nearly its total length on the face of the water propelled at a rapid rate, without any undulation, by an apparatus altogether invisible—the powerful paddles beneath—while the entire serpentine neck would probably be projected obliquely, carrying the reptilian head, with an eye of moderate aperture, and a mouth whose gape did not extend behind the eye. Add to this a body of leathery skin like that of the whale, give the creature a length[pg 190]of some sixty feet or more, and you would have before you almost the very counterpart of the apparition that wrought such amazement on board theDædalus.In evidence of the existence of such an animal, Captain the Hon. George Hope states that when in H.M.S.Fly, in the Gulf of California, the sea being perfectly smooth and clear, he saw at the bottom a large marine animal with the head and general figure of an alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that, instead of legs, the animal had four large flappers, something like those of turtles.The two strong objections to this theory are—first, the hypothetical improbability of such forms having been transmitted from the era of the secondary strata to the present time; and, second, the entire absence of any parts of the carcases or unfossilised skeletons of such animals in museums. Many fossil types, however, of marine animals have been transmitted, with or without interruption, from remote geological epochs to the present time; among these may be mentioned the Port Jackson Shark (Cestracion), and the gar-pike (Lepidosteus), which have come down to us without interruption, theChimæra percopsisof Lake Superior, and soft-shelled tortoises (Trionychidæ), with more or less apparent disappearance. The non-occurrence of dead animals is of little weight as disproving the existence of the sea-serpent; its carcase would float only a short time, and the rock-bound coasts of Norway would be very unlikely to retain any fragment cast up by the waves; many whales being known to naturalists only from two or three specimens in many centuries.The conclusion of the best naturalists is that the existence of the sea-serpent is possibly a verity, and that it may prove to be some modified type of the secondaryEnaliosaurians, or possibly some intermediate form between them and the elongatedCetaceans.

CHAPTER XV.Ocean Life.—The Harvest of the Sea(concluded).TheClupedæ—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The“Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep-sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The“Huer”—Raising the“Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword-fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep?A great and important group of the bony fish is comprised under the family nameClupedæ. It includes such useful fish as the herring, pilchard, shad, and anchovy. The family is as interesting to the merchant as to the gastronomist.The herring hardly needs description here, but it may just be remarked,en passant, that its back, indigo-coloured after death, is greenish during life. The curious markings often found on the herring have been considered by ignorant fishermen to signify mysterious words of cabalistic import. On one November day, near three hundred years ago, two herrings were caught on the coast of Norway, which bore marks resembling Gothic printed[pg 169]characters.“They were presented to the then King of Norway, Frederick II., who was so frightened by the characters he saw on the backs of the innocent fish that he turned ghastly pale, for he thought that they announced his approaching death and that of his queen.”A council ofsavantswas convened, and the learned ones solemnly reported that the words implied,“Very soon you will cease to fish herrings, as well as other people.”Some more politic scientists gave another explanation, but it was useless, for the king died next year, and his late subjects became firmly convinced that the two herrings had been celestial messengers charged to announce that monarch’s sudden end.The herring abounds in the entire Northern Ocean from the coasts of France and England to Greenland and Lapland. They are very gregarious, and travel in immense shoals, their appearance in any specified locality being uncertain and always sudden. On the coast of Norway the electric telegraph is used to announce to the fishing towns the approach of the shoals, which can always be perceived at a distance by the wave they raise. In the fiords of Norway the herring fisheries are the principal means of existence for the seaboard population. So in 1857 the paternal Norwegian Government laid a submarine cable round the coast 100 miles in length, with stations ashore at intervals conveniently placed for the purpose of notifying the fishermen. In Holland the industries of catching and curing the fish are highly profitable; the fishery is in consequence known as“the great,”while whaling is known as the“small fishery.”To a simple Dutch fisherman, George Benkel, who died in 1397, Holland owes the introduction of the art of preserving and curing the herring. Two hundred years after his death, the Emperor Charles V. solemnly ate a herring on his tomb, as homage to the memory of the creator of a great national industry.THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).In our country there is also an important trade in the fish. Yarmouth sends out 400 vessels of from forty to sixty tons, the larger carrying a crew of twelve. In 1857 three fishing boats of this seaport brought home 3,762,000 fish. In Scotland the one town of Wick had a few years ago 920 boats employed in the fisheries.The Dutch use lines 500 feet in length, with fifty or more nets to each. The upper part of these nets is buoyed with empty barrels or cork, while they are kept down by lead or stone weights; they can be lowered by lengthening the cord to which the buoys are attached. The meshes of the nets are so arranged that if the herring is too small to be caught in the first meshes, he passes through and gets caught in the succeeding one. Dr. Bertram went out in a Wick boat to the fishing grounds. He says:—[pg 170]“At last, after a lengthened cruise, our commander, who had been silent for half an hour, jumped up and called to action.‘Up men, and at them!’was the order of the night. The preparations for shooting the nets at once began by lowering sail. Surrounding us on all sides was to be seen a moving world of boats; many with sails down, their nets floating in the water, and their crews at rest. Others were still flitting uneasily about, their skippers, like our own, anxious to shoot in the right place. By-and-by we were ready; the‘dog,’a large inflated bladder to mark the far end of the train, is heaved overboard, and the nets, breadth after breadth, follow as fast as the men can pay them out, till the immense train is all in the water, forming a perforated wall a mile long and many feet in depth, the‘dog’and the marking bladder, floating and dipping in long zig-zag lines, reminding one of the imaginary coils of the great sea-serpent. After three hours of quietude beneath a beautiful sky, the stars—“The eternal orbs that beautify the night”—began to pale their fires, and the grey dawn appearing indicated that it was time to take stock. We found that the boat had floated quietly with the tide till we were a long distance from the harbour. The skipper had a presentiment that there were fish in his net, and the bobbing down of a few of the bladders made it almost a certainty; and he resolved to examine the drifts.‘Hurrah!’exclaimed Murdoch of Skye;‘there’s a lot of fish, skipper, and no mistake.’Murdoch’s news was true; our nets were silvery with herrings—so laden, in fact, that it took a long time to haul them in. It was a beautiful sight to see the shimmering fish as they came up like a sheet of silver from the water, each uttering a weak death-chirp as it was flung into the bottom of the boat. Formerly the fish were left in the meshes of the net till the boat arrived in the harbour; but now, as the net is hauled on board, they are at once shaken out. As our silvery treasure showers into the boat, we roughly guess our capture at fifty cranes—a capital night’s work.”Wick boats are not, however, always so fortunate. The herring fleet has been overtaken more than once by fearful storms, when valuable lives, boats, and nets, have been sacrificed.Early in December, 1879, an apparent epidemic of suicide attacked the herrings and sprats in Deal Roads, and they rushed ashore in such myriads at Walmer that the fishermen got tired of carting them off, and they were left on the beach for all who cared to help themselves. Nature seems now and then to put bounds to over-population, but if this be the case, no herring famines need be feared, for economical Nature would never have played into the hands of the fishermen who are always at war with her. Such wholesale suicides occur among other forms of animal life. In Africa regiments of ants have been seen deliberately marching into streams, where they were immediately devoured by fish. Rats have migrated in myriads, stopping nowhere, neither day nor night, and have been preyed upon by both large birds and beasts of prey. In the Seychelles some years ago several hundred turtles conspired to die together on the island in front of the harbour, and carried out their decision. Were they the victims of hydrophobia, delirium tremens, or some other disease? Even the gay and sprightly butterfly has been known to migrate in immense clouds from the land straight out to sea, without the remotest chance of ever reaching another shore. What could be the reason for such a suicidal act?[pg 171]It would be difficult to over-estimate the value of deep sea fisheries; in which, according to trustworthy statistics, England and Wales alone employ nearly 15,000 boats, with nearly double that number of“hands,”added to whom are over 14,000 others to whom they give occasional employment on the coasts. The report of Commissioners Frank Buckland and Spencer Walpole, who were instructed to investigate the modes of fishing in the two countries named, and how far they were conducted on proper principles, has therefore both importance and interest. It was feared that in certain directions deep-sea fishing, which undeniably leads to the capture of myriads of young and useless fish, might have the same effect as wasteful fishing and dredging did in the case of the salmon and oyster.The Commissioners assure us that there is neither ground for alarm nor for legislative interference. The beneficent sea is practically inexhaustible.“Bearing in mind,”wrote a commentator on the Report,“how much has been said regarding the wilful destruction of spawn, it is startling to hear that nobody‘has ever seen the eggs of soles, turbot, plaice, and other like fish after their extrusion from the parent,’while, with respect to the finny tribe in general, the Commissioners add:‘So far as we know, there is, with one exception—herring spawn—no clearly-established instance of the spawn of any edible fish being raised in a trawl net or taken in any other net.’With these words one bugbear of the sea disappears. Nature, whatever may be her shortcomings elsewhere, knows how to take care of herself here. She carries on her life-giving processes beyond our reach, and is veiled in a mystery which even the keen observation of the present time cannot penetrate, for the Commissioners remind us that, generally speaking,‘little is known either of the seasons in which sea fish spawn or of the places in which the spawn is cast; still less of the time which the spawn, after it is cast, takes to vivify.’But if the spawn evades the power of man, the young fish are not so fortunate. It is unquestionable that an immense waste of fry of all kinds goes on round our coasts. The trawler, the shrimper, the seine net, and the fixed engine, combine against these little creatures, tons upon tons of which are annually destroyed. At first sight it would seem that a grave matter here presents itself. The Commissioners, however, proceed so to reason away its importance that in the end it assumes very small dimensions indeed. Starting from the indisputable fact that all animals have‘a tendency to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence,’Messrs. Buckland and Walpole go on to show that this especially applies to sea fish; and they take as an example the fecund herring. Assuming that the British waters contain sixty thousand millions of female herrings, each of which deposits twenty thousand eggs, it follows that the total number of eggs which, but for natural and artificial checks, would come to maturity is twelve hundred millions of millions—an expression which is easy to put on paper, but which the mind can no more comprehend than it can grasp the idea of eternity. Enough that these countless hordes, if compressed by five hundreds into foot cubes, would build a wall round the earth two hundred feet broad and one hundred high. The inference from such astounding figures is that man’s destructiveness can do little. He takes one herring for every half-million of eggs, while the original stock would be kept up were only one egg to mature out of ten thousand. All fish, it is true, are not as prolific as the herring, but the argument applies to each kind in its degree, and may be summed[pg 172]up generally by the statement that the proportion of spawn and fry which must perish is so great as to reduce the operations of man to limits barely appreciable. On the important related question whether the supply of fish is decreasing, the Commissioners entertain no doubt whatever. They say,‘so far from the stock of fish decreasing, we believe that the supply of fish, taken on the whole, is at least as great as it has ever been; there are some reasons for even thinking that it is actually increasing.’On the other hand, they refer to a general impression that the take of flat-fish, such as soles and plaice, is becoming less; the local explanation referring almost universally to the destruction of fry. Yet while the Commissioners do not, except in the case of soles, contest the alleged decrease, they refuse to recognise the assigned cause, nor, generally speaking, do they see any reason for legislative action of a restrictive nature.”The prospects of our ocean fishing, both as an industry and as a food supply, are, therefore, encouraging. The harvest of the sea is constant, and though there must be local fluctuations, the return for the labour of those“who reap where they have not sowed”is sure.HERRING FISHING.HERRING FISHING.[pg 173]Of the shad, though not as commonly known as the herring, there are twenty known species. In the season this fish regularly approaches the mouths of great rivers for the purpose of spawning. It is found in the spring in the Rhine, Seine, Garonne, Volga, Elbe, and in many of our own rivers. In some Irish rivers the masses of shad taken have been so great that hardly any amount of exertion has been sufficient to land the net. It sometimes attains a very considerable size, weighing from four to six pounds. The shad taken at sea is considered coarser eating than that caught in rivers.The sprat has been by some taken for the young of the herring, and the controversy on the subject has at times waxed warm. Some anatomists declare that their peculiarities show no difference but size. It has a serrated belly, which Bertram looks upon as the tuck in the child’s frock, a provision for growth.“The slaughter of sprats,”says he,“is as decided a case of killing the goose with the golden eggs as the grilse slaughter carried on in our salmon rivers.”But Figuier reminds that writer that the young herrings are caught without the serrated belly, and that the curer’s purchase is regulated by the sprat’s rough, and the herring’s smooth, belly. Sprats are often so abundant as to be unsaleable, and are then actually used for manure.THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).The pilchard visits our coasts at all times, the leading fisheries being in Cornwall. Wilkie Collins has given us a lively and interesting picture of the“look-out”for their approach and capture.46He says:“A stranger in Cornwall, taking his first walk along the cliffs in August, could not advance far without witnessing what would strike him as a very singular and even alarming phenomenon. He would see a man standing on the extreme edge of a precipice just over the sea, gesticulating in a very remarkable manner, with a bush in his hand, waving it to the right and to the left, brandishing it over his head, sweeping it past his feet; in short, acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous description. It would add considerably to the stranger’s surprise if he were told that the insane individual before him was paid for flourishing the bush at the rate of a guinea a week.47And if he advanced a little, so as to obtain a nearer view of the madman, and observed a well-manned boat below turning carefully to the right and left as the bush turned, his mystification would probably be complete, and his ideas as to the sanity of the inhabitants would be expressed with grievous doubt.“But a few words of explanation would make him alter his opinion. He would learn that the man was an important agent in the pilchard fishery of Cornwall, that he had just discovered a shoal swimming towards the land, and that the men in the boats were guided by his gesticulations alone in their arrangements for securing the fish on which[pg 174]so many depend for a livelihood.”These watchers are known locally as“huers.”They can easily detect the approach of the shoals, as they darken the water, producing the effect of a cloud. As they approach the fish may themselves be seen leaping and playing on the surface by hundreds; sometimes they are so abundant that the fish behind force those in front ashore, and they are taken by hand or in baskets.The boats, each of about fifteen tons burden, carry a large, long seine net, kept up by corks and down by lead. The grand object in the fishery, guided by the“huer”on the cliffs ashore, is to drive the shoals into shallow waters and bays.“The grand object is now to enclose the entire shoal. The leads sink one side of the net perpendicularly to the bottom, the corks buoy the other to the surface of the water. When it has been taken all round the shoal, the two extremities are made fast, and the fish are imprisoned within an oblong barrier of netting. The art is now to let as few of the pilchards escape as possible while the process is being completed. Whenever the‘huer’observes that they are startled, and separating at any particular point, he waves his bush, and thither the boat is steered, and there the net is shot at once; the fish are thus headed and thwarted in every direction with extraordinary address and skill. This labour completed, the silence of intense expectation that has hitherto prevailed is broken, there is a shout of joy on all sides—the shoal is secured.”The seine is now regarded as a great reservoir of fish, and may remain in the water for a week or more. The pilchards are collected from it in a smaller net known as the“tuck.”When this net has travelled round the whole circuit of the seine, everything is prepared for the great event—hauling the fish to the surface.“Now all is excitement on sea and shore; every little boat in the place puts off crammed with idle spectators; boys shout, dogs bark, and the shrill voices of the former are joined by the deep voices of the‘seiners.’There they stand, six or eight stalwart, sunburnt fellows, ranged in a row in the seine-boat, hauling with all their might at the‘tuck’-net, and roaring out the nautical‘Yo, heave ho!’in chorus. Higher and higher rises the net; louder and louder shout the boys and the idlers; the‘huer,’so calm and collected hitherto, loses his self-possession, and waves his cap triumphantly.‘Hooray! hooray! Yoy—hoy, hoy! Pull away, boys! Up she comes! Here they are!’The water boils and eddies; the‘tuck’-net rises to the surface; one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing, silvery scales, one compact mass of thousands of fish, each one of which is madly striving to escape, appears in an instant. Boats as large as barges now pull up in hot haste all round the nets, baskets are produced by dozens, the fish are dipped up in them, and shot out, like coals out of a sack, into the boats. Presently the men are ankle-deep in pilchards; they jump upon the benches, and work on till the boats can hold no more. They are almost gunwale under before they leave for the shore.”At the little fishing cove of Trereen, Mr. Wilkie Collins tells us, 600 hogsheads, each of 2,400 fish and upwards, were taken in little more than a week.The sardine also comes under theClupedæfamily. It derives its commercial name from Sardinia, but is found all over the Mediterranean, the coast of Brittany, &c. On the latter coast the fish are caught in floating nets, and arranged in osier baskets, layer after layer, each boat returning to port when it has secured 25,000.[pg 175]Space will not permit of more than a passing notice to the flat-fish, orPleuronectidæ. These fish swim by means of a caudal fin, and they can ascend or descend in the water readily, but they cannot turn to right or left with the same facility as other fish. Most flat-fish, soles, turbot, flounders, and plaice, are taken by trawl nets. Some of the larger are speared.The holibut (or halibut) is a fish which attains a great size, sometimes as much as seven feet in length, and weighing 300 pounds. One brought to Edinburgh measured seven-and-a-half feet in length by three feet in breadth; it weighed 320 pounds. In Norway and Greenland a long cord, from which branch thirty or so smaller cords, each furnished with a barbed hook, is employed for their capture. The main cord is attached to floating planks, which indicate the place where it is let down.TheGadidæfamily includes some most important fish, commercially considered, such as the whiting, haddock, and cod, the general form and peculiarities of which are familiar to all.The cod fish is a most voracious feeder, and is provided with a vast stomach; it eats molluscs, crabs, and small fish, and has been known even to swallow pieces of wood. It is essentially a sea fish, and is never seen in rivers. From the days of John Cabot, the English, French, Dutch, and Americans have prosecuted the great fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland; 2,000 English vessels, manned by 32,000 seamen, are employed in the pursuit. The modern cod-smack is clipper-built, has large tank wells for carrying the fish alive, and costs about £1,500. The fish is taken in nets, or by line. Bertram tells us that each man has a line of fifty fathoms in length, and attached to this are a hundred hooks, baited with mussels, pieces of herring, or whiting.“On arriving at the fishing ground, the fishermen heave overboard a cork buoy, with a flagstaff about six feet in height attached to it. The buoy is kept stationary by a line, called the‘pow end,’reaching to the bottom of the water, where it is held by a stone or grapnel fastened to the lower end. To the‘pow end’is also fastened the fishing-line, which is then paid out as fast as the boat sails, which may be from four to five knots an hour. Should the wind be unfavourable for the direction in which the crew wish to set the line, they use the oars. When the line, or‘taes,’is all out, the end is dropped, and the boat returns to the buoy. The‘pow’line is hauled up with the anchor and fishing-line attached to it. The fishermen then haul in the line, with the fish attached to it. Eight hundred fish might be, and often have been, taken by eight men in a few hours by this operation; but many fishermen say now that they consider themselves fortunate when they get a fish on every fifth hook on an eight-lined‘taes’line.”On our own coasts the cod is principally taken by deep-sea lines, with many shorter lines depending from them armed with large hooks. One man has in ten hours taken 400, and eight men have taken eighty score in one day off the Doggerbank. The Norfolk and Lincoln coasts afford a large supply; the fish taken is stowed in well-boats, and brought to Gravesend, whence they are transhipped into market boats and sent to Billingsgate. The store-boats with their wells, through which the water circulates, cannot come higher, as the fresh water of the Thames, and possibly some of that which isnottoo fresh, would kill the fish.THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).The haddock is also taken with lines. In the village of Findhorn, Morayshire, large[pg 176]numbers of fine haddocks are dried and smoked with the fumes of hard wood and sawdust. Hence the term,“Finnan haddies,”which, when obtained, are the finest for gastronomic purposes, being of superior flavour.The mackerel (Scomber scombrus) is a most valuable fish for man. The tunny, bonita, and mackerel have yielded immense supplies of excellent food, the first-named being esteemed in parts of France far above any other fish. It is called the salmon of Provence. They attain a far larger growth than the mackerel, specimens having been found of seven, eight, and even nine feet in length, and weighing up to 400 pounds. They are specially abundant in the Mediterranean, where they are usually caught in nets. In Provence they are driven, much as are the pilchards in Cornwall, into an enclosed space called themadrague, where at last the fish finds itself ensnared in shallow water. Then“the carnage commences. The unhappy creatures,”says Figuier,“are struck with long poles, boat-hooks, and other weapons. The tunny-fishing presents a very sad spectacle at this its last stage; fine large fish perish under the blows of a multitude of fishermen, who pursue their bloody task with most dramatic effect. The sight of the poor creatures, some of them wounded and half dead, trying in vain to struggle with their ferocious assailants, is very painful to see. The sea red with blood, long preserves traces of this frightful slaughter.”The bonita is principally a tropical fish, not unlike the mackerel, but more than double its size. It is the great enemy of the flying-fish, and possesses electrical or stinging powers, for any one attempting to hold the living fish is violently shaken as in palsy, and one’s very tongue is tied, and unable to make more than a spasmodic sputter.THE MACKEREL (Scomber scombrus).The mackerel is common to all European seas. It is themacquereauof the French, themacarelloof the modern Romans, themakrilof the Swedes, thebretalof some parts of Brittany, thescombroof the Venetians, thelacestoof the Neapolitans, and thecavalloof the Spaniards. It is one of the most universally-esteemed fish.The mackerel is very voracious, and has courage enough to attack fish much larger than itself. It will even attack man, and is said to love him, gastronomically speaking. A Norwegian bishop who lived in the sixteenth century records the case of a sailor attacked by a shoal of mackerel, while he was bathing. His companions came to the rescue; but though they succeeded in driving off the fish, their assistance came too late; he died a few hours afterwards.[pg 177]This fish is generally taken by drift-nets, usually 20 feet deep, and 120 long, well buoyed with cork, but without weights to sink them. The meshes are made of fine tarred twine. They are in their best condition in June and July. The ancients used to make a sauce piquant from their fat, which was calledgarum, and sold for the equivalent of sixteen shillings the pint. It was acrid and nauseous, but had the property of stimulating jaded appetites. Seneca charged it with destroying the coats of the stomach, and injuring the health of the high livers of his day. A traveller of the sixteenth century, Pierre Belon, found it highly esteemed in Constantinople.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.The formidable sword-fish is also tolerable eating, especially when young, and there are fisheries for its capture in the Mediterranean. The fishermen of Messina and Reggio fish by night, using large boats carrying torches, and a mast, at the top of which one of their number is stationed to announce the approach of their prey, which is harpooned by a man standing in the bows. This fish attains a length of five or six feet, its sword forming three-tenths of its length. It is one of the whale’s natural enemies, and it objects even to ships passing through its element. There are numerous cases cited of ship’s bottoms having been pierced by it. In 1725, some carpenters having occasion to examine a ship[pg 178]just returned from the tropics, found the sword of one of these animals buried in its lower timbers. They averred that to drive a pointed iron bolt of the same size to the same depth would require eight or nine blows with a thirty-pound hammer. It was further evident from the position of the weapon that the fish had followed the ship while under full sail; it had penetrated the metal sheathing and three-and-a-half inches of the timber.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.And now, before leaving the minor and intermediate types of ocean life for the monsters of the deep, a few general observations may be permitted. Pliny described 94 species of fish; Linnæus described 478; the scientists of to-day know upwards of 13,000, one-tenth of which are fresh-water fish. The reader will then understand why only a few of the more important, useful, or curious have been described in these pages.A hard man of science once described fish-life as“silent, monotonous, and joyless.”Modern science has disproved each and all of these statements. As regards the first, there are species actually known which“indulge in jews’-harps, trumpets, and drums.... Musical fish are a fact of positive knowledge, for not only can they be heard in shoals thrumming their jews’-harps in unison, but other kinds have been taken in the very act of trumpeting and drumming.”Bertram, as we have seen, speaks of the“death-chirp”of the captured herring. The application of the telephone has proved that a fish, placed alone in some water, actually talked to itself! Mr. S. E. Peal, in a letter to a scientific journal, tells us of a large fish,Barbes macrocephalus, which converses with a peculiar“cluck,”or persuasive sound, which may be heard as far as forty feet from the water. He also mentions a bivalve of Eastern Assam which actually“sings loudly in concert.”How fish-life could be called monotonous and joyless will puzzle any one who has watched them in a large aquarium, where their every movement tells of pleasure, or at least excitement. Imagine, then, their life in the ocean itself. All around them is life—life in constant activity. The ancients said, and Pliny assented to the dictum, that in the water might be found anything or everything that was found out of it, and as much more besides. Then there is the excitement of the chase, in which they may be either the pursued or the pursuers.“Not only,”said a writer in a leading daily journal,“can they indulge themselves in running away from sharks, as we should do from tigers if they swarmed in the streets, in contemplating the while the elephant of the seas sauntering along through his domain, or finding diversion and instruction in the winged process of the flying-fish or the tree-climbing of perch, the buffooneries of sun-fish and pipe-fish, the cunning artifices of the‘angler-fish,’the electric propensities of some, the luminosity of others, the venomous nature of these or the grotesque appearance of those—not only is all the variety of experience to be found on the earth to be found also in the water, but even in a wider range and a greater diversity. The sea floor is strewn with marvels, and the rocks are instinct with wonders.”Fish-life is, then, full of excitement and interest.An accomplished ichthyologist, Mr. F. Francis, has stirred up the vexed question,“Do fish sleep?”Only a very few fish, the dog-fish being one of the few exceptions, can close their eyes at all. Still, on the other hand, some human beings, and notably infants, can sleep with one or both eyes open, while the hare is credited with being able to take his nap in the latter condition. Fish would seem to require sleep from their constant activity; but in actual fact, no scientific watcher has yet caught one asleep.[pg 179]CHAPTER XVI.Monsters of the Deep.48Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the“Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.Some years ago, when an invalid wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice as to the value of fish as“brain food,”the answer of that humourist was plain indeed:—“Fish-food is good: abounds in phosphorus and nutrition. In your case I must recommend a small whale!”Unfortunately, Mark Twain fell into a very common error. The whale isnota fish; it is a mammal: it suckles its young. The writer has eaten whale—that is, a little bit of one. Whale brain, enclosed in batter, and treated as a fritter, is not to be despised.The British whaler of about 1670 is quaintly described by Frederic Martin, who visited Spitzbergen and Greenland that year. He says:—“Whoever of the ships’ crews sees a dead whale cries out,‘Fish mine!’and therefore the merchants must pay him a ducat for his care and vigilance. Many of them climb often into the mast in hopes to have a ducat, but in vain. When the dead whale is thus fastened to the ship, two sloops hold on the other side of the fish, or whale, and in each of them doth stand a man or boy that has a long hook in his hands, wherewith he doth hold the boat to the ship, and the harpooner stands before in the sloop or upon the whale, with a leathern suit on, and sometimes they have boots on. Underneath the hook are some sharp nails fixed, that they may be able to stand firm. These two men that cut the fat off have their peculiar wages for it, viz., about four or five rix dollars. First they cut a large piece from behind the head, by the eyes, which they call thekenter-piece, that is as much as to say, thewinding-piece; for as they cut all the other fat all in rows from the whale towards the end, so they cut this greatkenter-piecelarger and wider than all the rest. This piece, when it is cut round about from the whale, reaches from the water to the cradle (that is, the round circle that goes round about the middle of the mast, and is made in the shape of a basket), whence you may guess of the bigness of a whale. A strong and thick rope is fixed to this kenter-piece, and the other end is fixed to underneath the cradle, whereby the whale is as it were borne up out of the water, that they may come at it, and by reason of the great weight of the whale the ship leans towards that side. One may judge how tough the fat is, for in this piece a hole is made, through which the rope is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,”and so on.Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the“killer,”a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These[pg 180]“killers”often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look-out that a whale has been“hove-to”by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty-five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale.The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold-water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale-fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer. The whale-fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother[pg 181]escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of‘Mysticete’has been applied to various whales.”THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; therightwhale delights in cold water. The log-books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn.Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut-water of a ship. On the right[pg 182]side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed“the blanket,”of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty-two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.49Many years since theSamuel Enderby, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.This whale swallows quantities of small fishes, and has been known to eject from its stomach a fish as large as a moderate-sized salmon. This species is gregarious; and the herds, called“schools,”are females and young males. Mr. Beale saw 500 or 600 in one school. With each female school are one to three large“bulls,”or“schoolmasters,”as they are termed by the whalers. The full-grown males almost always go in search of food. A large whale will yield eighty, and sometimes one hundred, barrels of oil. Among the habits of the whale are“breaching,”or leaping clear out of the water and falling back on its side, so that the breach may be seen on a clear day from the mast-head at six miles’ distance; in“going ahead”the whale attains ten or twelve miles an hour, which Mr. Beale believes to be its greatest velocity;“lob-tailing”is lashing the water with its tail. The dangers and hairbreadth escapes in the capture are very numerous.In 1839 there were discovered among rubbish in a tower of Durham Castle the bones of a sperm whale, which, from a letter of June 20th, 1661, in the Surtees Collection, is shown to have been cast ashore at that time, andskeletonisedin order to ornament this old tower. Clusius describes, in 1605, a sperm whale thrown ashore seven years before, near Scheveling, where Cuvier supposed its head to be still preserved, and there is an antiquity of the kind still shown there.The whale chase is an exciting scene. Sometimes the whale places himself in a perpendicular position, with the head downwards, and rearing his tail on high, beats the water with awful violence. The sea foams, and vapours darken the air; the lashing is heard several miles off, like the roar of a distant tempest. Sometimes he makes an immense spring, and rears his whole body above the waves, to the admiration of the experienced whaler, but to the terror of those who see for the first time this astonishing spectacle. Other motions, equally expressive of his boundless strength, attract the attention of navigators at the distance of miles. The whole structure of the whale exhibits most admirable adaptation to his situations and the element in which he lives, in the toughness and thickness of his skin and disposition of the coating of blubber beneath, which serves the purpose—if we may be permitted to use so homely a simile—of an extra great-coat to keep him warm, and prevent his warm red blood from being chilled by the icy seas. But provision is especially made to enable him to descend uninjured to very great depths. The orifices of the nostrils are closed by valves, wonderfully suited to keep out the water from the lungs, notwithstanding the pressure. In one species[pg 183]they are shaped like cones, which fit into the orifice like corks in the neck of a bottle, and the greater the pressure the tighter they hold. The most surprising fact in the whale, probably, is the power of descending to enormous depths below the surface of the sea, and sustaining that almost inconceivable pressure of the superincumbent water. On one occasion which fell under Mr. Scoresby’s own observation a whale was struck from a boat. The animal instantly descended, dragging down with him a rope nearlyone mile long. Having let out this much of the rope, the situation of the boat’s crew became critical. Either they must have cut the line, and submitted to a very serious loss, or have run the risk of being dragged under water by the whale. The men were desired to retire to the stern, to counterbalance the pulls of the whale, which dragged the bow down sometimes to within an inch of the water. In this dangerous dilemma the boat remained some time, vibrating up and down with the tugs of the monster, but never moving from the place where it lay when the harpoon was first thrown. This fact proves that the whale must have descended at once perpendicularly, as had he advanced in any direction he must have pulled the boat along with him. Mr. Scoresby and the crew were rescued by the timely arrival of another boat furnished with fresh ropes and harpoons. A whale when struck will dive sometimes to a depth of 800 fathoms; and as the surface of a large animal may be estimated at 1,500 square feet, at this depth it will have to sustain a pressure equal to 211,000 tons. The transition from that which it is exposed to at the surface, and which may be taken at about 1,300 tons, to so enormous an increase, must be productive of the utmost exhaustion.Strange incidents are related of harpooning. On September 24th, 1864, as theAlexander, belonging to Dundee, was steaming about in Davis’s Straits, a whale of about twelve tons was observed not far distant from her. Boats were put out, and the crew secured the animal. When they cleansed it, they found embedded in its body, two or three inches beneath the skin, a piece of a harpoon about eighteen inches long; on the one side were engraved the words—“Traveller,”Peterhead, and on the other,“1838.”This vessel was lost in 1856, in the Cumberland Straits whale-fishery; it is therefore clear that the harpoon must have remained in the animal from that time.A sailor gives the following description of sleepinginsidea whale; not, however, quite as Jonah may have done. He says:50—“We were on a little expedition in the long-boat one voyage, and we had to encamp for the night with as much comfort as our scant means would afford. The shore was terrible for its wildness and desolation—it was indeed lonely, sad, and sandy, but what was strange and welcome, was, great carcases of whales, stranded like wrecks on the far-reaching shore, in some cases the backbone holding together like a good keel and the great ribs still round, giving you an idea of an elongated hogshead without the staves. We landed for the night, unbent our sails and stretched them over the bleached ribs of a whale’s skeleton, and after supper took a comfortable sleep under the most curious roof-tree I ever rested under.”This was on the north-west coast of Africa; and the sailor came to the conclusion that whales come ashore to die.“And to my mind,”says he,“it is as poetical as it is welcome. I like[pg 184]to think of these mighty travellers in the mighty deep hugging the shore when the fires of life burn low, and the mighty waves, their playmates from their childhood, giving their last lift up on the beach!”And now for that great mythical or actual animal the sea-serpent.For ages an animal of immense size and serpentine form has been believed to inhabit the ocean, though rarely seen. A strong conviction of its existence has always prevailed in Norway and the fiords, where it has been reported to have been frequently seen. It is also said that the coasts of New England have been frequently visited by this marine monster many times during this century.Bishop Pontoppidan, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, wrote a history of Norway, his native land, collected a quantity of testimonies as to its occasional appearance. Among other evidence he mentions that of Captain de Ferry, of the Norwegian Navy, who saw the serpent, while in a boat rowed by eight men, near Molde, in August, 1774. A declaration of this was made by the captain and two of the crew before a magistrate. The animal was described as of the general form of a serpent stretched on the surface in[pg 185]receding coils or undulations, and the head, which resembled that of a horse, elevated some two feet out of the water.In the summer of 1846 many respectable persons stated that in the vicinity of Christiansand and Molde they had seen the marine serpent. The affidavits of numerous persons were given in the papers, which, with some discrepancies in minute particulars, agree in testifying that an animal of great length (from about fifty to a hundred feet) had been seen at various times, in many cases more than once. All agreed that the eyes were large and glaring; that the body was dark-brown and comparatively slender; and that the head, which for size was compared to a ten-gallon cask, was covered with a long spreading mane.An account of one of these encounters, which took place on the 28th May, 1845, was published by the Rev. P. W. Demboll, Archdeacon of Molde, those present being J. C. Lund, bookseller and printer, G. S. Krogh, merchant, Christian Flang, Lund’s apprentice, and John Elgenses, labourer. These men were fishing on the Romsdal Fjord, and the appearance took place about seven in the evening, a little distance from shore, near the ballast place and the Molde Hove. Lund fired at the animal, which followed them till they came to shallow water, when it dived and disappeared.In 1817 the Linnæan Society of New England published“A Report relative to a Large Marine Animal, supposed to be a Serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August,”of that year. A good deal of care was taken to obtain evidence, and the deposition of eleven witnesses of fair and unblemished characters were certified on oath before the magistrates. The length was estimated at fifty to a hundred feet, and the head compared to that of a sea-turtle, a rattlesnake, and a serpent generally, but in this case there was no appearance of a mane.Again, in theBoston Daily Advertiserfor November 25th, 1840, there is a communication from the Hon. T. H. Perkins of that city, attesting his own personal observation of the marine serpent at Gloucester Harbour, near Cape Ann, in 1817. This communication took the form of a letter written to a friend in 1820.Captain Perkins speaks of the animal’s motion being the vertical movement of the caterpillar, and not that of the common snake either on land or water, and this confirms the account of Mr. M‘Clean, the minister of a parish in the Hebrides, who saw in 1809 a serpentine monster about eighty feet in length. He distinctly states that it seemed to move by undulations up and down, which is not only contrary to all that is known of serpents, but from the structure of their vertebræ impossible. Hans Egede mentions the appearance of a marine snake off the coast of Greenland in 1734.On the 15th of May, 1833, a party, consisting of Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant Lyster of the Artillery, and Mr. Ince the ordnance store-keeper at Halifax, started from that town in a small yacht for Mahone Bay, on a fishing excursion. When about half-way they came upon a shoal of grampuses in an unusual state of excitement, and to the surprise of the party they perceived the head and neck of a snake, at least eighty feet in length, following them. An account of this occurrence was published in theZoologistfor 1847. The editor stated that he was indebted for it to Mr. W. H. Ince, who received it from his brother,[pg 186]Commander J. M. R. Ince, R.N. It was written by one of the eye-witnesses, Mr. Henry Ince, and signed as follows:—W. Sullivan, Captain Rifle Brigade,June 21, 1831.A. Maclachlan, Lieut.  „      „August 5, 1824.G. P. Malcolm, Ensign  „      „August 13, 1830.B. O’Neal Lyster, Lieut. Artillery,June 7, 1816.Henry Ince, Storekeeper at Halifax.The dates affixed to the names were those on which the gentlemen received their respective commissions.Great interest was excited in 1848 by an account of a great sea-serpent seen in lat. 24° 44′ S., and long. 9° 20′ E., in the tropics, and not very far from the coast of Africa, by the officers and crew of her Majesty’s frigateDædalus. It was not, as in other cases, in bright and fine weather, but on a dark and cloudy afternoon, and with a long ocean swell. Captain Peter M‘Quhæ, in his report to the Admiralty, published in theTimesfor the 13th of October, describes it with confidence as“an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea;”and he adds:“As nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main topsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animalà fleur d’eau, no portion of which was to our perception used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised his features with the naked eye; but it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the south-west, which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was without doubt that of a snake; and it was never during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed washed about its back.”THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S. DÆDALUS.THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S.DÆDALUS.(After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ, sent to the Lords of the Admiralty, October, 1848.)Drawings prepared from a sketch by Captain M‘Quhæ were published in theIllustrated London Newsof 28th October, 1848. Lieutenant Drummond, the officer of the watch at the time, also printed his own impression of the animal, which differs in some slight points from the Captain’s account, particularly in ascribing a more elongated form to the head, in the mention of a back-fin (whereas Captain M‘Quhæ expressly says no fins were seen), and the lower estimate of the length of the portion of the animal visible. Lieutenant Drummond’s words are:—“The appearance of its head, which with the back fin was the only portion of the animal visible, was long, pointed, and flattened at the top, perhaps ten feet in length; the upper jaw projecting considerably; the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head, and visible occasionally. The Captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin about the same distance behind it. The upper part of the head and shoulders appeared of a dark brown colour, and beneath the jaw a brownish white. It pursued a steady and undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the[pg 187]water, and in rather a raised position, disappearing occasionally beneath a wave for a very brief interval, and not apparently for the purposes of respiration. It was going at the rate of perhaps from twelve to fourteen miles an hour, and when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant. In fact, it gave one quite the idea of a large snake or eel.”Lieutenant Drummond’s account is the more worthy of regard, as it was derived from his journal, and so gives the exact impressions of the hour, while Captain M‘Quhæ’s description was written from memory after his arrival in England.HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)These statements caused much discussion at the time. It was suggested by Mr. J. D. Morriss Stirling, a gentleman long living in Norway, and also by a writer in theTimesof November 2, 1848, under the signature of“F. G. S.,”that the monster had an affinity with the great fossil reptiles known to geologists as theEnaliosauria, and particularly adduced the genusPlesiosaurus, or gigantic lizard, with a serpent-like neck. This is also the opinion of Professor Agassiz, as given in the report of his lectures in Philadelphia, in 1849, and reaffirmed in his“Geological Researches.”A master in science, Professor Richard Owen, now appeared upon the field, and in a most able article in theTimes, November 11, 1848, gave his verdict against the serpentine character of the animal, and pronounced it to have been, in his judgment, a seal. He argued this partly from the description of its appearance, and partly from the fact that no remains of any dead marine serpent had ever been found. He says:“On weighing the question whether creatures meriting the name of‘great sea serpent’do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilised state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea serpents, Krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent.”However, Captain M‘Quhæ gallantly returned to the charge, and combated the idea that he had mistaken one of thePhocaspecies for a snake; and he was strongly corroborated by Mr. R. Davidson, Superintending Surgeon, Nagpore Subsidiary Force, in a letter from Kamptee, published in theBombay Bi-monthly Times, for January, 1849. This gentleman says that an animal,“of which no more generally correct description could be given than that by Captain M‘Quhæ,”passed within thirty-five yards of the shipRoyal Saxonwhile he and its commander, Captain Petrie, were standing on the poop, when they were returning to India in 1829.Again, a letter was printed in theZoologistfor 1852, communicated by Captain Steele, 9th Lancers, to his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Steele of the Coldstream Guards, stating that while on his way to India in theBartramhe andevery one on boardsaw“the head and neck of an enormous snake.”This was corroborated in a letter from one of the officers of the ship, who says:—“His head appeared to be about sixteen feet above the[pg 188]water, and he kept moving it up and down, sometimes showing his enormous neck, which was surmounted with a huge crest in the shape of a saw.”Another theory was put forward in the LondonSunof the 9th July, 1849, by Captain Herriman, of the British shipBrazilian, who, on the 24th February, 1849, was becalmed on almost the same spot that Captain M‘Quhæ saw his monster while on a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope.“I perceived,”wrote Captain Herriman,“something right abeam, about half a mile to the westward, stretched along the water to the length of about twenty-five to thirty feet, and perceptibly moving from the ship with a steady sinuous motion. The head, which seemed to be lifted several feet above the water, had something resembling a mane running down to the floating portion, and within six feet of the tail it forked out into a sort of double fin.”On approaching in a small boat, however, Captain Herriman discovered that his monster was nothing more formidable than“an immense piece of sea-weed, evidently detached from a coral reef, and drifting with the current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, and which, together with the swell left by the subsidence of the gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion.”In theTimesof 5th February, 1858, a letter from Captain Harrington, of the shipCastilian, stating that he and his crew had seen a gigantic serpent on the 12th December, 1857, about ten miles N.E. of St. Helena, brought out another witness on the sea-weed hypothesis. This was Captain Fred. Smith, of the shipPekin, who gave a very similar account to that of Captain Herriman, stating that in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E., on the 28th December, 1848, he captured what he believed to be a serpent, but what turned out to be a gigantic piece of weed covered with snaky-looking barnacles.This last imputation brought up“An Officer of H.M. shipDædalus,”whose testimony, in theTimesof 16th February, 1858, putshors de combatthe sea-weed theory in that renowned case. He states that,“at its nearest position, being not more than 200 yards from us,the eye,the mouth, the nostril, the colour and form, all beingmost distinctly visible to us... my impression was it was rather of a lizard than a serpentine character, as its movement was steady and uniform,as if propelled by fins, not by any undulatory power.”That there is some mighty denizen of the vasty deep, sometimes but seldom seen, is more than possible, and highly probable; but to which of the recognised classes of created being can this huge rover of the ocean be referred? First of all, is it an animal at all? On two occasions monstrous pieces of weed have been mistaken for the Kraken, but on each occasion the distance from the vessel is estimated at half a mile; while Captain M‘Quhæ says that he was within 200 yards, and Mr. Davidson within thirty-five yards of the animal. Under these circumstances we may fairly dismiss the sea-weed hypothesis.Professor Owen would place the sea-serpent among the mammalia, butPhoca proboscideais the only seal which will bear comparison with theDædalusanimal in dimensions, it reaching from twenty to thirty feet. The officers declare, however, that at least sixty feet of their animal was visible at the surface. Again, the fore paws of the seal are placed at about one-third of the total length from the muzzle, and yet no appearance of fins was seen. To continue, the greatPhoca proboscideahas no mane, the only seals possessing what may be dignified with the title being the two kinds of sea lions—theOtaria jubataandPlatyrhynchus leoninus—which are far too small to come into the count.[pg 189]It is quite possible that the great unknown is a reptile, and his marine habits present no difficulty. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans there are numerous specimens of true snakes (Hydrophidæ), which are exclusively inhabitants of the sea. None of these, however, are known to exceed a few feet in length, and none of them, so far as is known, have found their way into the Atlantic.The most probable solution of the riddle is the hypothesis of Mr. Morriss Stirling and Professor Agassiz, that the so-called sea-serpent will find its closest affinities with those extraordinary animals theEnaliosauria, or marine lizards, whose fossil skeletons are found so abundantly through the Oolite and the Lias. If the Plesiosaur could be seen alive you would find nearly its total length on the face of the water propelled at a rapid rate, without any undulation, by an apparatus altogether invisible—the powerful paddles beneath—while the entire serpentine neck would probably be projected obliquely, carrying the reptilian head, with an eye of moderate aperture, and a mouth whose gape did not extend behind the eye. Add to this a body of leathery skin like that of the whale, give the creature a length[pg 190]of some sixty feet or more, and you would have before you almost the very counterpart of the apparition that wrought such amazement on board theDædalus.In evidence of the existence of such an animal, Captain the Hon. George Hope states that when in H.M.S.Fly, in the Gulf of California, the sea being perfectly smooth and clear, he saw at the bottom a large marine animal with the head and general figure of an alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that, instead of legs, the animal had four large flappers, something like those of turtles.The two strong objections to this theory are—first, the hypothetical improbability of such forms having been transmitted from the era of the secondary strata to the present time; and, second, the entire absence of any parts of the carcases or unfossilised skeletons of such animals in museums. Many fossil types, however, of marine animals have been transmitted, with or without interruption, from remote geological epochs to the present time; among these may be mentioned the Port Jackson Shark (Cestracion), and the gar-pike (Lepidosteus), which have come down to us without interruption, theChimæra percopsisof Lake Superior, and soft-shelled tortoises (Trionychidæ), with more or less apparent disappearance. The non-occurrence of dead animals is of little weight as disproving the existence of the sea-serpent; its carcase would float only a short time, and the rock-bound coasts of Norway would be very unlikely to retain any fragment cast up by the waves; many whales being known to naturalists only from two or three specimens in many centuries.The conclusion of the best naturalists is that the existence of the sea-serpent is possibly a verity, and that it may prove to be some modified type of the secondaryEnaliosaurians, or possibly some intermediate form between them and the elongatedCetaceans.

CHAPTER XV.Ocean Life.—The Harvest of the Sea(concluded).TheClupedæ—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The“Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep-sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The“Huer”—Raising the“Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword-fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep?A great and important group of the bony fish is comprised under the family nameClupedæ. It includes such useful fish as the herring, pilchard, shad, and anchovy. The family is as interesting to the merchant as to the gastronomist.The herring hardly needs description here, but it may just be remarked,en passant, that its back, indigo-coloured after death, is greenish during life. The curious markings often found on the herring have been considered by ignorant fishermen to signify mysterious words of cabalistic import. On one November day, near three hundred years ago, two herrings were caught on the coast of Norway, which bore marks resembling Gothic printed[pg 169]characters.“They were presented to the then King of Norway, Frederick II., who was so frightened by the characters he saw on the backs of the innocent fish that he turned ghastly pale, for he thought that they announced his approaching death and that of his queen.”A council ofsavantswas convened, and the learned ones solemnly reported that the words implied,“Very soon you will cease to fish herrings, as well as other people.”Some more politic scientists gave another explanation, but it was useless, for the king died next year, and his late subjects became firmly convinced that the two herrings had been celestial messengers charged to announce that monarch’s sudden end.The herring abounds in the entire Northern Ocean from the coasts of France and England to Greenland and Lapland. They are very gregarious, and travel in immense shoals, their appearance in any specified locality being uncertain and always sudden. On the coast of Norway the electric telegraph is used to announce to the fishing towns the approach of the shoals, which can always be perceived at a distance by the wave they raise. In the fiords of Norway the herring fisheries are the principal means of existence for the seaboard population. So in 1857 the paternal Norwegian Government laid a submarine cable round the coast 100 miles in length, with stations ashore at intervals conveniently placed for the purpose of notifying the fishermen. In Holland the industries of catching and curing the fish are highly profitable; the fishery is in consequence known as“the great,”while whaling is known as the“small fishery.”To a simple Dutch fisherman, George Benkel, who died in 1397, Holland owes the introduction of the art of preserving and curing the herring. Two hundred years after his death, the Emperor Charles V. solemnly ate a herring on his tomb, as homage to the memory of the creator of a great national industry.THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).In our country there is also an important trade in the fish. Yarmouth sends out 400 vessels of from forty to sixty tons, the larger carrying a crew of twelve. In 1857 three fishing boats of this seaport brought home 3,762,000 fish. In Scotland the one town of Wick had a few years ago 920 boats employed in the fisheries.The Dutch use lines 500 feet in length, with fifty or more nets to each. The upper part of these nets is buoyed with empty barrels or cork, while they are kept down by lead or stone weights; they can be lowered by lengthening the cord to which the buoys are attached. The meshes of the nets are so arranged that if the herring is too small to be caught in the first meshes, he passes through and gets caught in the succeeding one. Dr. Bertram went out in a Wick boat to the fishing grounds. He says:—[pg 170]“At last, after a lengthened cruise, our commander, who had been silent for half an hour, jumped up and called to action.‘Up men, and at them!’was the order of the night. The preparations for shooting the nets at once began by lowering sail. Surrounding us on all sides was to be seen a moving world of boats; many with sails down, their nets floating in the water, and their crews at rest. Others were still flitting uneasily about, their skippers, like our own, anxious to shoot in the right place. By-and-by we were ready; the‘dog,’a large inflated bladder to mark the far end of the train, is heaved overboard, and the nets, breadth after breadth, follow as fast as the men can pay them out, till the immense train is all in the water, forming a perforated wall a mile long and many feet in depth, the‘dog’and the marking bladder, floating and dipping in long zig-zag lines, reminding one of the imaginary coils of the great sea-serpent. After three hours of quietude beneath a beautiful sky, the stars—“The eternal orbs that beautify the night”—began to pale their fires, and the grey dawn appearing indicated that it was time to take stock. We found that the boat had floated quietly with the tide till we were a long distance from the harbour. The skipper had a presentiment that there were fish in his net, and the bobbing down of a few of the bladders made it almost a certainty; and he resolved to examine the drifts.‘Hurrah!’exclaimed Murdoch of Skye;‘there’s a lot of fish, skipper, and no mistake.’Murdoch’s news was true; our nets were silvery with herrings—so laden, in fact, that it took a long time to haul them in. It was a beautiful sight to see the shimmering fish as they came up like a sheet of silver from the water, each uttering a weak death-chirp as it was flung into the bottom of the boat. Formerly the fish were left in the meshes of the net till the boat arrived in the harbour; but now, as the net is hauled on board, they are at once shaken out. As our silvery treasure showers into the boat, we roughly guess our capture at fifty cranes—a capital night’s work.”Wick boats are not, however, always so fortunate. The herring fleet has been overtaken more than once by fearful storms, when valuable lives, boats, and nets, have been sacrificed.Early in December, 1879, an apparent epidemic of suicide attacked the herrings and sprats in Deal Roads, and they rushed ashore in such myriads at Walmer that the fishermen got tired of carting them off, and they were left on the beach for all who cared to help themselves. Nature seems now and then to put bounds to over-population, but if this be the case, no herring famines need be feared, for economical Nature would never have played into the hands of the fishermen who are always at war with her. Such wholesale suicides occur among other forms of animal life. In Africa regiments of ants have been seen deliberately marching into streams, where they were immediately devoured by fish. Rats have migrated in myriads, stopping nowhere, neither day nor night, and have been preyed upon by both large birds and beasts of prey. In the Seychelles some years ago several hundred turtles conspired to die together on the island in front of the harbour, and carried out their decision. Were they the victims of hydrophobia, delirium tremens, or some other disease? Even the gay and sprightly butterfly has been known to migrate in immense clouds from the land straight out to sea, without the remotest chance of ever reaching another shore. What could be the reason for such a suicidal act?[pg 171]It would be difficult to over-estimate the value of deep sea fisheries; in which, according to trustworthy statistics, England and Wales alone employ nearly 15,000 boats, with nearly double that number of“hands,”added to whom are over 14,000 others to whom they give occasional employment on the coasts. The report of Commissioners Frank Buckland and Spencer Walpole, who were instructed to investigate the modes of fishing in the two countries named, and how far they were conducted on proper principles, has therefore both importance and interest. It was feared that in certain directions deep-sea fishing, which undeniably leads to the capture of myriads of young and useless fish, might have the same effect as wasteful fishing and dredging did in the case of the salmon and oyster.The Commissioners assure us that there is neither ground for alarm nor for legislative interference. The beneficent sea is practically inexhaustible.“Bearing in mind,”wrote a commentator on the Report,“how much has been said regarding the wilful destruction of spawn, it is startling to hear that nobody‘has ever seen the eggs of soles, turbot, plaice, and other like fish after their extrusion from the parent,’while, with respect to the finny tribe in general, the Commissioners add:‘So far as we know, there is, with one exception—herring spawn—no clearly-established instance of the spawn of any edible fish being raised in a trawl net or taken in any other net.’With these words one bugbear of the sea disappears. Nature, whatever may be her shortcomings elsewhere, knows how to take care of herself here. She carries on her life-giving processes beyond our reach, and is veiled in a mystery which even the keen observation of the present time cannot penetrate, for the Commissioners remind us that, generally speaking,‘little is known either of the seasons in which sea fish spawn or of the places in which the spawn is cast; still less of the time which the spawn, after it is cast, takes to vivify.’But if the spawn evades the power of man, the young fish are not so fortunate. It is unquestionable that an immense waste of fry of all kinds goes on round our coasts. The trawler, the shrimper, the seine net, and the fixed engine, combine against these little creatures, tons upon tons of which are annually destroyed. At first sight it would seem that a grave matter here presents itself. The Commissioners, however, proceed so to reason away its importance that in the end it assumes very small dimensions indeed. Starting from the indisputable fact that all animals have‘a tendency to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence,’Messrs. Buckland and Walpole go on to show that this especially applies to sea fish; and they take as an example the fecund herring. Assuming that the British waters contain sixty thousand millions of female herrings, each of which deposits twenty thousand eggs, it follows that the total number of eggs which, but for natural and artificial checks, would come to maturity is twelve hundred millions of millions—an expression which is easy to put on paper, but which the mind can no more comprehend than it can grasp the idea of eternity. Enough that these countless hordes, if compressed by five hundreds into foot cubes, would build a wall round the earth two hundred feet broad and one hundred high. The inference from such astounding figures is that man’s destructiveness can do little. He takes one herring for every half-million of eggs, while the original stock would be kept up were only one egg to mature out of ten thousand. All fish, it is true, are not as prolific as the herring, but the argument applies to each kind in its degree, and may be summed[pg 172]up generally by the statement that the proportion of spawn and fry which must perish is so great as to reduce the operations of man to limits barely appreciable. On the important related question whether the supply of fish is decreasing, the Commissioners entertain no doubt whatever. They say,‘so far from the stock of fish decreasing, we believe that the supply of fish, taken on the whole, is at least as great as it has ever been; there are some reasons for even thinking that it is actually increasing.’On the other hand, they refer to a general impression that the take of flat-fish, such as soles and plaice, is becoming less; the local explanation referring almost universally to the destruction of fry. Yet while the Commissioners do not, except in the case of soles, contest the alleged decrease, they refuse to recognise the assigned cause, nor, generally speaking, do they see any reason for legislative action of a restrictive nature.”The prospects of our ocean fishing, both as an industry and as a food supply, are, therefore, encouraging. The harvest of the sea is constant, and though there must be local fluctuations, the return for the labour of those“who reap where they have not sowed”is sure.HERRING FISHING.HERRING FISHING.[pg 173]Of the shad, though not as commonly known as the herring, there are twenty known species. In the season this fish regularly approaches the mouths of great rivers for the purpose of spawning. It is found in the spring in the Rhine, Seine, Garonne, Volga, Elbe, and in many of our own rivers. In some Irish rivers the masses of shad taken have been so great that hardly any amount of exertion has been sufficient to land the net. It sometimes attains a very considerable size, weighing from four to six pounds. The shad taken at sea is considered coarser eating than that caught in rivers.The sprat has been by some taken for the young of the herring, and the controversy on the subject has at times waxed warm. Some anatomists declare that their peculiarities show no difference but size. It has a serrated belly, which Bertram looks upon as the tuck in the child’s frock, a provision for growth.“The slaughter of sprats,”says he,“is as decided a case of killing the goose with the golden eggs as the grilse slaughter carried on in our salmon rivers.”But Figuier reminds that writer that the young herrings are caught without the serrated belly, and that the curer’s purchase is regulated by the sprat’s rough, and the herring’s smooth, belly. Sprats are often so abundant as to be unsaleable, and are then actually used for manure.THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).The pilchard visits our coasts at all times, the leading fisheries being in Cornwall. Wilkie Collins has given us a lively and interesting picture of the“look-out”for their approach and capture.46He says:“A stranger in Cornwall, taking his first walk along the cliffs in August, could not advance far without witnessing what would strike him as a very singular and even alarming phenomenon. He would see a man standing on the extreme edge of a precipice just over the sea, gesticulating in a very remarkable manner, with a bush in his hand, waving it to the right and to the left, brandishing it over his head, sweeping it past his feet; in short, acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous description. It would add considerably to the stranger’s surprise if he were told that the insane individual before him was paid for flourishing the bush at the rate of a guinea a week.47And if he advanced a little, so as to obtain a nearer view of the madman, and observed a well-manned boat below turning carefully to the right and left as the bush turned, his mystification would probably be complete, and his ideas as to the sanity of the inhabitants would be expressed with grievous doubt.“But a few words of explanation would make him alter his opinion. He would learn that the man was an important agent in the pilchard fishery of Cornwall, that he had just discovered a shoal swimming towards the land, and that the men in the boats were guided by his gesticulations alone in their arrangements for securing the fish on which[pg 174]so many depend for a livelihood.”These watchers are known locally as“huers.”They can easily detect the approach of the shoals, as they darken the water, producing the effect of a cloud. As they approach the fish may themselves be seen leaping and playing on the surface by hundreds; sometimes they are so abundant that the fish behind force those in front ashore, and they are taken by hand or in baskets.The boats, each of about fifteen tons burden, carry a large, long seine net, kept up by corks and down by lead. The grand object in the fishery, guided by the“huer”on the cliffs ashore, is to drive the shoals into shallow waters and bays.“The grand object is now to enclose the entire shoal. The leads sink one side of the net perpendicularly to the bottom, the corks buoy the other to the surface of the water. When it has been taken all round the shoal, the two extremities are made fast, and the fish are imprisoned within an oblong barrier of netting. The art is now to let as few of the pilchards escape as possible while the process is being completed. Whenever the‘huer’observes that they are startled, and separating at any particular point, he waves his bush, and thither the boat is steered, and there the net is shot at once; the fish are thus headed and thwarted in every direction with extraordinary address and skill. This labour completed, the silence of intense expectation that has hitherto prevailed is broken, there is a shout of joy on all sides—the shoal is secured.”The seine is now regarded as a great reservoir of fish, and may remain in the water for a week or more. The pilchards are collected from it in a smaller net known as the“tuck.”When this net has travelled round the whole circuit of the seine, everything is prepared for the great event—hauling the fish to the surface.“Now all is excitement on sea and shore; every little boat in the place puts off crammed with idle spectators; boys shout, dogs bark, and the shrill voices of the former are joined by the deep voices of the‘seiners.’There they stand, six or eight stalwart, sunburnt fellows, ranged in a row in the seine-boat, hauling with all their might at the‘tuck’-net, and roaring out the nautical‘Yo, heave ho!’in chorus. Higher and higher rises the net; louder and louder shout the boys and the idlers; the‘huer,’so calm and collected hitherto, loses his self-possession, and waves his cap triumphantly.‘Hooray! hooray! Yoy—hoy, hoy! Pull away, boys! Up she comes! Here they are!’The water boils and eddies; the‘tuck’-net rises to the surface; one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing, silvery scales, one compact mass of thousands of fish, each one of which is madly striving to escape, appears in an instant. Boats as large as barges now pull up in hot haste all round the nets, baskets are produced by dozens, the fish are dipped up in them, and shot out, like coals out of a sack, into the boats. Presently the men are ankle-deep in pilchards; they jump upon the benches, and work on till the boats can hold no more. They are almost gunwale under before they leave for the shore.”At the little fishing cove of Trereen, Mr. Wilkie Collins tells us, 600 hogsheads, each of 2,400 fish and upwards, were taken in little more than a week.The sardine also comes under theClupedæfamily. It derives its commercial name from Sardinia, but is found all over the Mediterranean, the coast of Brittany, &c. On the latter coast the fish are caught in floating nets, and arranged in osier baskets, layer after layer, each boat returning to port when it has secured 25,000.[pg 175]Space will not permit of more than a passing notice to the flat-fish, orPleuronectidæ. These fish swim by means of a caudal fin, and they can ascend or descend in the water readily, but they cannot turn to right or left with the same facility as other fish. Most flat-fish, soles, turbot, flounders, and plaice, are taken by trawl nets. Some of the larger are speared.The holibut (or halibut) is a fish which attains a great size, sometimes as much as seven feet in length, and weighing 300 pounds. One brought to Edinburgh measured seven-and-a-half feet in length by three feet in breadth; it weighed 320 pounds. In Norway and Greenland a long cord, from which branch thirty or so smaller cords, each furnished with a barbed hook, is employed for their capture. The main cord is attached to floating planks, which indicate the place where it is let down.TheGadidæfamily includes some most important fish, commercially considered, such as the whiting, haddock, and cod, the general form and peculiarities of which are familiar to all.The cod fish is a most voracious feeder, and is provided with a vast stomach; it eats molluscs, crabs, and small fish, and has been known even to swallow pieces of wood. It is essentially a sea fish, and is never seen in rivers. From the days of John Cabot, the English, French, Dutch, and Americans have prosecuted the great fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland; 2,000 English vessels, manned by 32,000 seamen, are employed in the pursuit. The modern cod-smack is clipper-built, has large tank wells for carrying the fish alive, and costs about £1,500. The fish is taken in nets, or by line. Bertram tells us that each man has a line of fifty fathoms in length, and attached to this are a hundred hooks, baited with mussels, pieces of herring, or whiting.“On arriving at the fishing ground, the fishermen heave overboard a cork buoy, with a flagstaff about six feet in height attached to it. The buoy is kept stationary by a line, called the‘pow end,’reaching to the bottom of the water, where it is held by a stone or grapnel fastened to the lower end. To the‘pow end’is also fastened the fishing-line, which is then paid out as fast as the boat sails, which may be from four to five knots an hour. Should the wind be unfavourable for the direction in which the crew wish to set the line, they use the oars. When the line, or‘taes,’is all out, the end is dropped, and the boat returns to the buoy. The‘pow’line is hauled up with the anchor and fishing-line attached to it. The fishermen then haul in the line, with the fish attached to it. Eight hundred fish might be, and often have been, taken by eight men in a few hours by this operation; but many fishermen say now that they consider themselves fortunate when they get a fish on every fifth hook on an eight-lined‘taes’line.”On our own coasts the cod is principally taken by deep-sea lines, with many shorter lines depending from them armed with large hooks. One man has in ten hours taken 400, and eight men have taken eighty score in one day off the Doggerbank. The Norfolk and Lincoln coasts afford a large supply; the fish taken is stowed in well-boats, and brought to Gravesend, whence they are transhipped into market boats and sent to Billingsgate. The store-boats with their wells, through which the water circulates, cannot come higher, as the fresh water of the Thames, and possibly some of that which isnottoo fresh, would kill the fish.THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).The haddock is also taken with lines. In the village of Findhorn, Morayshire, large[pg 176]numbers of fine haddocks are dried and smoked with the fumes of hard wood and sawdust. Hence the term,“Finnan haddies,”which, when obtained, are the finest for gastronomic purposes, being of superior flavour.The mackerel (Scomber scombrus) is a most valuable fish for man. The tunny, bonita, and mackerel have yielded immense supplies of excellent food, the first-named being esteemed in parts of France far above any other fish. It is called the salmon of Provence. They attain a far larger growth than the mackerel, specimens having been found of seven, eight, and even nine feet in length, and weighing up to 400 pounds. They are specially abundant in the Mediterranean, where they are usually caught in nets. In Provence they are driven, much as are the pilchards in Cornwall, into an enclosed space called themadrague, where at last the fish finds itself ensnared in shallow water. Then“the carnage commences. The unhappy creatures,”says Figuier,“are struck with long poles, boat-hooks, and other weapons. The tunny-fishing presents a very sad spectacle at this its last stage; fine large fish perish under the blows of a multitude of fishermen, who pursue their bloody task with most dramatic effect. The sight of the poor creatures, some of them wounded and half dead, trying in vain to struggle with their ferocious assailants, is very painful to see. The sea red with blood, long preserves traces of this frightful slaughter.”The bonita is principally a tropical fish, not unlike the mackerel, but more than double its size. It is the great enemy of the flying-fish, and possesses electrical or stinging powers, for any one attempting to hold the living fish is violently shaken as in palsy, and one’s very tongue is tied, and unable to make more than a spasmodic sputter.THE MACKEREL (Scomber scombrus).The mackerel is common to all European seas. It is themacquereauof the French, themacarelloof the modern Romans, themakrilof the Swedes, thebretalof some parts of Brittany, thescombroof the Venetians, thelacestoof the Neapolitans, and thecavalloof the Spaniards. It is one of the most universally-esteemed fish.The mackerel is very voracious, and has courage enough to attack fish much larger than itself. It will even attack man, and is said to love him, gastronomically speaking. A Norwegian bishop who lived in the sixteenth century records the case of a sailor attacked by a shoal of mackerel, while he was bathing. His companions came to the rescue; but though they succeeded in driving off the fish, their assistance came too late; he died a few hours afterwards.[pg 177]This fish is generally taken by drift-nets, usually 20 feet deep, and 120 long, well buoyed with cork, but without weights to sink them. The meshes are made of fine tarred twine. They are in their best condition in June and July. The ancients used to make a sauce piquant from their fat, which was calledgarum, and sold for the equivalent of sixteen shillings the pint. It was acrid and nauseous, but had the property of stimulating jaded appetites. Seneca charged it with destroying the coats of the stomach, and injuring the health of the high livers of his day. A traveller of the sixteenth century, Pierre Belon, found it highly esteemed in Constantinople.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.The formidable sword-fish is also tolerable eating, especially when young, and there are fisheries for its capture in the Mediterranean. The fishermen of Messina and Reggio fish by night, using large boats carrying torches, and a mast, at the top of which one of their number is stationed to announce the approach of their prey, which is harpooned by a man standing in the bows. This fish attains a length of five or six feet, its sword forming three-tenths of its length. It is one of the whale’s natural enemies, and it objects even to ships passing through its element. There are numerous cases cited of ship’s bottoms having been pierced by it. In 1725, some carpenters having occasion to examine a ship[pg 178]just returned from the tropics, found the sword of one of these animals buried in its lower timbers. They averred that to drive a pointed iron bolt of the same size to the same depth would require eight or nine blows with a thirty-pound hammer. It was further evident from the position of the weapon that the fish had followed the ship while under full sail; it had penetrated the metal sheathing and three-and-a-half inches of the timber.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.And now, before leaving the minor and intermediate types of ocean life for the monsters of the deep, a few general observations may be permitted. Pliny described 94 species of fish; Linnæus described 478; the scientists of to-day know upwards of 13,000, one-tenth of which are fresh-water fish. The reader will then understand why only a few of the more important, useful, or curious have been described in these pages.A hard man of science once described fish-life as“silent, monotonous, and joyless.”Modern science has disproved each and all of these statements. As regards the first, there are species actually known which“indulge in jews’-harps, trumpets, and drums.... Musical fish are a fact of positive knowledge, for not only can they be heard in shoals thrumming their jews’-harps in unison, but other kinds have been taken in the very act of trumpeting and drumming.”Bertram, as we have seen, speaks of the“death-chirp”of the captured herring. The application of the telephone has proved that a fish, placed alone in some water, actually talked to itself! Mr. S. E. Peal, in a letter to a scientific journal, tells us of a large fish,Barbes macrocephalus, which converses with a peculiar“cluck,”or persuasive sound, which may be heard as far as forty feet from the water. He also mentions a bivalve of Eastern Assam which actually“sings loudly in concert.”How fish-life could be called monotonous and joyless will puzzle any one who has watched them in a large aquarium, where their every movement tells of pleasure, or at least excitement. Imagine, then, their life in the ocean itself. All around them is life—life in constant activity. The ancients said, and Pliny assented to the dictum, that in the water might be found anything or everything that was found out of it, and as much more besides. Then there is the excitement of the chase, in which they may be either the pursued or the pursuers.“Not only,”said a writer in a leading daily journal,“can they indulge themselves in running away from sharks, as we should do from tigers if they swarmed in the streets, in contemplating the while the elephant of the seas sauntering along through his domain, or finding diversion and instruction in the winged process of the flying-fish or the tree-climbing of perch, the buffooneries of sun-fish and pipe-fish, the cunning artifices of the‘angler-fish,’the electric propensities of some, the luminosity of others, the venomous nature of these or the grotesque appearance of those—not only is all the variety of experience to be found on the earth to be found also in the water, but even in a wider range and a greater diversity. The sea floor is strewn with marvels, and the rocks are instinct with wonders.”Fish-life is, then, full of excitement and interest.An accomplished ichthyologist, Mr. F. Francis, has stirred up the vexed question,“Do fish sleep?”Only a very few fish, the dog-fish being one of the few exceptions, can close their eyes at all. Still, on the other hand, some human beings, and notably infants, can sleep with one or both eyes open, while the hare is credited with being able to take his nap in the latter condition. Fish would seem to require sleep from their constant activity; but in actual fact, no scientific watcher has yet caught one asleep.

TheClupedæ—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The“Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep-sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The“Huer”—Raising the“Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword-fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep?

TheClupedæ—The Herring—Its Cabalistic Marks—A Warning to Royalty—The“Great Fishery”—Modes of Fishing—A Night with the Wick Fishermen—Suicidal Fish—The Value of Deep-sea Fisheries—Report of the Commissioners—Fecundity of the Herring—No fear of Fish Famine—The Shad—The Sprat—The Cornish Pilchard Fisheries—The“Huer”—Raising the“Tuck”—A Grand Harvest—Gigantic Holibut—Newfoundland Cod Fisheries—Brutalities of Tunny Fishing—The Mackerel—Its Courage, and Love of Man—Garum Sauce—The formidable Sword-fish—Fishing by Torchlight—Sword through a Ship’s side—General Remarks on Fish—Fish Life—Conversation—Musical Fish—Pleasures and Excitements—Do Fish sleep?

A great and important group of the bony fish is comprised under the family nameClupedæ. It includes such useful fish as the herring, pilchard, shad, and anchovy. The family is as interesting to the merchant as to the gastronomist.

The herring hardly needs description here, but it may just be remarked,en passant, that its back, indigo-coloured after death, is greenish during life. The curious markings often found on the herring have been considered by ignorant fishermen to signify mysterious words of cabalistic import. On one November day, near three hundred years ago, two herrings were caught on the coast of Norway, which bore marks resembling Gothic printed[pg 169]characters.“They were presented to the then King of Norway, Frederick II., who was so frightened by the characters he saw on the backs of the innocent fish that he turned ghastly pale, for he thought that they announced his approaching death and that of his queen.”A council ofsavantswas convened, and the learned ones solemnly reported that the words implied,“Very soon you will cease to fish herrings, as well as other people.”Some more politic scientists gave another explanation, but it was useless, for the king died next year, and his late subjects became firmly convinced that the two herrings had been celestial messengers charged to announce that monarch’s sudden end.

The herring abounds in the entire Northern Ocean from the coasts of France and England to Greenland and Lapland. They are very gregarious, and travel in immense shoals, their appearance in any specified locality being uncertain and always sudden. On the coast of Norway the electric telegraph is used to announce to the fishing towns the approach of the shoals, which can always be perceived at a distance by the wave they raise. In the fiords of Norway the herring fisheries are the principal means of existence for the seaboard population. So in 1857 the paternal Norwegian Government laid a submarine cable round the coast 100 miles in length, with stations ashore at intervals conveniently placed for the purpose of notifying the fishermen. In Holland the industries of catching and curing the fish are highly profitable; the fishery is in consequence known as“the great,”while whaling is known as the“small fishery.”To a simple Dutch fisherman, George Benkel, who died in 1397, Holland owes the introduction of the art of preserving and curing the herring. Two hundred years after his death, the Emperor Charles V. solemnly ate a herring on his tomb, as homage to the memory of the creator of a great national industry.

THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).

THE HERRING (Clupea harengus).

In our country there is also an important trade in the fish. Yarmouth sends out 400 vessels of from forty to sixty tons, the larger carrying a crew of twelve. In 1857 three fishing boats of this seaport brought home 3,762,000 fish. In Scotland the one town of Wick had a few years ago 920 boats employed in the fisheries.

The Dutch use lines 500 feet in length, with fifty or more nets to each. The upper part of these nets is buoyed with empty barrels or cork, while they are kept down by lead or stone weights; they can be lowered by lengthening the cord to which the buoys are attached. The meshes of the nets are so arranged that if the herring is too small to be caught in the first meshes, he passes through and gets caught in the succeeding one. Dr. Bertram went out in a Wick boat to the fishing grounds. He says:—[pg 170]“At last, after a lengthened cruise, our commander, who had been silent for half an hour, jumped up and called to action.‘Up men, and at them!’was the order of the night. The preparations for shooting the nets at once began by lowering sail. Surrounding us on all sides was to be seen a moving world of boats; many with sails down, their nets floating in the water, and their crews at rest. Others were still flitting uneasily about, their skippers, like our own, anxious to shoot in the right place. By-and-by we were ready; the‘dog,’a large inflated bladder to mark the far end of the train, is heaved overboard, and the nets, breadth after breadth, follow as fast as the men can pay them out, till the immense train is all in the water, forming a perforated wall a mile long and many feet in depth, the‘dog’and the marking bladder, floating and dipping in long zig-zag lines, reminding one of the imaginary coils of the great sea-serpent. After three hours of quietude beneath a beautiful sky, the stars—

“The eternal orbs that beautify the night”—

“The eternal orbs that beautify the night”—

began to pale their fires, and the grey dawn appearing indicated that it was time to take stock. We found that the boat had floated quietly with the tide till we were a long distance from the harbour. The skipper had a presentiment that there were fish in his net, and the bobbing down of a few of the bladders made it almost a certainty; and he resolved to examine the drifts.‘Hurrah!’exclaimed Murdoch of Skye;‘there’s a lot of fish, skipper, and no mistake.’Murdoch’s news was true; our nets were silvery with herrings—so laden, in fact, that it took a long time to haul them in. It was a beautiful sight to see the shimmering fish as they came up like a sheet of silver from the water, each uttering a weak death-chirp as it was flung into the bottom of the boat. Formerly the fish were left in the meshes of the net till the boat arrived in the harbour; but now, as the net is hauled on board, they are at once shaken out. As our silvery treasure showers into the boat, we roughly guess our capture at fifty cranes—a capital night’s work.”Wick boats are not, however, always so fortunate. The herring fleet has been overtaken more than once by fearful storms, when valuable lives, boats, and nets, have been sacrificed.

Early in December, 1879, an apparent epidemic of suicide attacked the herrings and sprats in Deal Roads, and they rushed ashore in such myriads at Walmer that the fishermen got tired of carting them off, and they were left on the beach for all who cared to help themselves. Nature seems now and then to put bounds to over-population, but if this be the case, no herring famines need be feared, for economical Nature would never have played into the hands of the fishermen who are always at war with her. Such wholesale suicides occur among other forms of animal life. In Africa regiments of ants have been seen deliberately marching into streams, where they were immediately devoured by fish. Rats have migrated in myriads, stopping nowhere, neither day nor night, and have been preyed upon by both large birds and beasts of prey. In the Seychelles some years ago several hundred turtles conspired to die together on the island in front of the harbour, and carried out their decision. Were they the victims of hydrophobia, delirium tremens, or some other disease? Even the gay and sprightly butterfly has been known to migrate in immense clouds from the land straight out to sea, without the remotest chance of ever reaching another shore. What could be the reason for such a suicidal act?

It would be difficult to over-estimate the value of deep sea fisheries; in which, according to trustworthy statistics, England and Wales alone employ nearly 15,000 boats, with nearly double that number of“hands,”added to whom are over 14,000 others to whom they give occasional employment on the coasts. The report of Commissioners Frank Buckland and Spencer Walpole, who were instructed to investigate the modes of fishing in the two countries named, and how far they were conducted on proper principles, has therefore both importance and interest. It was feared that in certain directions deep-sea fishing, which undeniably leads to the capture of myriads of young and useless fish, might have the same effect as wasteful fishing and dredging did in the case of the salmon and oyster.

The Commissioners assure us that there is neither ground for alarm nor for legislative interference. The beneficent sea is practically inexhaustible.“Bearing in mind,”wrote a commentator on the Report,“how much has been said regarding the wilful destruction of spawn, it is startling to hear that nobody‘has ever seen the eggs of soles, turbot, plaice, and other like fish after their extrusion from the parent,’while, with respect to the finny tribe in general, the Commissioners add:‘So far as we know, there is, with one exception—herring spawn—no clearly-established instance of the spawn of any edible fish being raised in a trawl net or taken in any other net.’With these words one bugbear of the sea disappears. Nature, whatever may be her shortcomings elsewhere, knows how to take care of herself here. She carries on her life-giving processes beyond our reach, and is veiled in a mystery which even the keen observation of the present time cannot penetrate, for the Commissioners remind us that, generally speaking,‘little is known either of the seasons in which sea fish spawn or of the places in which the spawn is cast; still less of the time which the spawn, after it is cast, takes to vivify.’But if the spawn evades the power of man, the young fish are not so fortunate. It is unquestionable that an immense waste of fry of all kinds goes on round our coasts. The trawler, the shrimper, the seine net, and the fixed engine, combine against these little creatures, tons upon tons of which are annually destroyed. At first sight it would seem that a grave matter here presents itself. The Commissioners, however, proceed so to reason away its importance that in the end it assumes very small dimensions indeed. Starting from the indisputable fact that all animals have‘a tendency to increase at a greater rate than their means of subsistence,’Messrs. Buckland and Walpole go on to show that this especially applies to sea fish; and they take as an example the fecund herring. Assuming that the British waters contain sixty thousand millions of female herrings, each of which deposits twenty thousand eggs, it follows that the total number of eggs which, but for natural and artificial checks, would come to maturity is twelve hundred millions of millions—an expression which is easy to put on paper, but which the mind can no more comprehend than it can grasp the idea of eternity. Enough that these countless hordes, if compressed by five hundreds into foot cubes, would build a wall round the earth two hundred feet broad and one hundred high. The inference from such astounding figures is that man’s destructiveness can do little. He takes one herring for every half-million of eggs, while the original stock would be kept up were only one egg to mature out of ten thousand. All fish, it is true, are not as prolific as the herring, but the argument applies to each kind in its degree, and may be summed[pg 172]up generally by the statement that the proportion of spawn and fry which must perish is so great as to reduce the operations of man to limits barely appreciable. On the important related question whether the supply of fish is decreasing, the Commissioners entertain no doubt whatever. They say,‘so far from the stock of fish decreasing, we believe that the supply of fish, taken on the whole, is at least as great as it has ever been; there are some reasons for even thinking that it is actually increasing.’On the other hand, they refer to a general impression that the take of flat-fish, such as soles and plaice, is becoming less; the local explanation referring almost universally to the destruction of fry. Yet while the Commissioners do not, except in the case of soles, contest the alleged decrease, they refuse to recognise the assigned cause, nor, generally speaking, do they see any reason for legislative action of a restrictive nature.”The prospects of our ocean fishing, both as an industry and as a food supply, are, therefore, encouraging. The harvest of the sea is constant, and though there must be local fluctuations, the return for the labour of those“who reap where they have not sowed”is sure.

HERRING FISHING.HERRING FISHING.

HERRING FISHING.

Of the shad, though not as commonly known as the herring, there are twenty known species. In the season this fish regularly approaches the mouths of great rivers for the purpose of spawning. It is found in the spring in the Rhine, Seine, Garonne, Volga, Elbe, and in many of our own rivers. In some Irish rivers the masses of shad taken have been so great that hardly any amount of exertion has been sufficient to land the net. It sometimes attains a very considerable size, weighing from four to six pounds. The shad taken at sea is considered coarser eating than that caught in rivers.

The sprat has been by some taken for the young of the herring, and the controversy on the subject has at times waxed warm. Some anatomists declare that their peculiarities show no difference but size. It has a serrated belly, which Bertram looks upon as the tuck in the child’s frock, a provision for growth.“The slaughter of sprats,”says he,“is as decided a case of killing the goose with the golden eggs as the grilse slaughter carried on in our salmon rivers.”But Figuier reminds that writer that the young herrings are caught without the serrated belly, and that the curer’s purchase is regulated by the sprat’s rough, and the herring’s smooth, belly. Sprats are often so abundant as to be unsaleable, and are then actually used for manure.

THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).

THE PILCHARD (Clupea pilchardus).

The pilchard visits our coasts at all times, the leading fisheries being in Cornwall. Wilkie Collins has given us a lively and interesting picture of the“look-out”for their approach and capture.46He says:“A stranger in Cornwall, taking his first walk along the cliffs in August, could not advance far without witnessing what would strike him as a very singular and even alarming phenomenon. He would see a man standing on the extreme edge of a precipice just over the sea, gesticulating in a very remarkable manner, with a bush in his hand, waving it to the right and to the left, brandishing it over his head, sweeping it past his feet; in short, acting the part of a maniac of the most dangerous description. It would add considerably to the stranger’s surprise if he were told that the insane individual before him was paid for flourishing the bush at the rate of a guinea a week.47And if he advanced a little, so as to obtain a nearer view of the madman, and observed a well-manned boat below turning carefully to the right and left as the bush turned, his mystification would probably be complete, and his ideas as to the sanity of the inhabitants would be expressed with grievous doubt.

“But a few words of explanation would make him alter his opinion. He would learn that the man was an important agent in the pilchard fishery of Cornwall, that he had just discovered a shoal swimming towards the land, and that the men in the boats were guided by his gesticulations alone in their arrangements for securing the fish on which[pg 174]so many depend for a livelihood.”These watchers are known locally as“huers.”They can easily detect the approach of the shoals, as they darken the water, producing the effect of a cloud. As they approach the fish may themselves be seen leaping and playing on the surface by hundreds; sometimes they are so abundant that the fish behind force those in front ashore, and they are taken by hand or in baskets.

The boats, each of about fifteen tons burden, carry a large, long seine net, kept up by corks and down by lead. The grand object in the fishery, guided by the“huer”on the cliffs ashore, is to drive the shoals into shallow waters and bays.

“The grand object is now to enclose the entire shoal. The leads sink one side of the net perpendicularly to the bottom, the corks buoy the other to the surface of the water. When it has been taken all round the shoal, the two extremities are made fast, and the fish are imprisoned within an oblong barrier of netting. The art is now to let as few of the pilchards escape as possible while the process is being completed. Whenever the‘huer’observes that they are startled, and separating at any particular point, he waves his bush, and thither the boat is steered, and there the net is shot at once; the fish are thus headed and thwarted in every direction with extraordinary address and skill. This labour completed, the silence of intense expectation that has hitherto prevailed is broken, there is a shout of joy on all sides—the shoal is secured.”The seine is now regarded as a great reservoir of fish, and may remain in the water for a week or more. The pilchards are collected from it in a smaller net known as the“tuck.”When this net has travelled round the whole circuit of the seine, everything is prepared for the great event—hauling the fish to the surface.

“Now all is excitement on sea and shore; every little boat in the place puts off crammed with idle spectators; boys shout, dogs bark, and the shrill voices of the former are joined by the deep voices of the‘seiners.’There they stand, six or eight stalwart, sunburnt fellows, ranged in a row in the seine-boat, hauling with all their might at the‘tuck’-net, and roaring out the nautical‘Yo, heave ho!’in chorus. Higher and higher rises the net; louder and louder shout the boys and the idlers; the‘huer,’so calm and collected hitherto, loses his self-possession, and waves his cap triumphantly.‘Hooray! hooray! Yoy—hoy, hoy! Pull away, boys! Up she comes! Here they are!’The water boils and eddies; the‘tuck’-net rises to the surface; one teeming, convulsed mass of shining, glancing, silvery scales, one compact mass of thousands of fish, each one of which is madly striving to escape, appears in an instant. Boats as large as barges now pull up in hot haste all round the nets, baskets are produced by dozens, the fish are dipped up in them, and shot out, like coals out of a sack, into the boats. Presently the men are ankle-deep in pilchards; they jump upon the benches, and work on till the boats can hold no more. They are almost gunwale under before they leave for the shore.”At the little fishing cove of Trereen, Mr. Wilkie Collins tells us, 600 hogsheads, each of 2,400 fish and upwards, were taken in little more than a week.

The sardine also comes under theClupedæfamily. It derives its commercial name from Sardinia, but is found all over the Mediterranean, the coast of Brittany, &c. On the latter coast the fish are caught in floating nets, and arranged in osier baskets, layer after layer, each boat returning to port when it has secured 25,000.

Space will not permit of more than a passing notice to the flat-fish, orPleuronectidæ. These fish swim by means of a caudal fin, and they can ascend or descend in the water readily, but they cannot turn to right or left with the same facility as other fish. Most flat-fish, soles, turbot, flounders, and plaice, are taken by trawl nets. Some of the larger are speared.

The holibut (or halibut) is a fish which attains a great size, sometimes as much as seven feet in length, and weighing 300 pounds. One brought to Edinburgh measured seven-and-a-half feet in length by three feet in breadth; it weighed 320 pounds. In Norway and Greenland a long cord, from which branch thirty or so smaller cords, each furnished with a barbed hook, is employed for their capture. The main cord is attached to floating planks, which indicate the place where it is let down.

TheGadidæfamily includes some most important fish, commercially considered, such as the whiting, haddock, and cod, the general form and peculiarities of which are familiar to all.

The cod fish is a most voracious feeder, and is provided with a vast stomach; it eats molluscs, crabs, and small fish, and has been known even to swallow pieces of wood. It is essentially a sea fish, and is never seen in rivers. From the days of John Cabot, the English, French, Dutch, and Americans have prosecuted the great fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland; 2,000 English vessels, manned by 32,000 seamen, are employed in the pursuit. The modern cod-smack is clipper-built, has large tank wells for carrying the fish alive, and costs about £1,500. The fish is taken in nets, or by line. Bertram tells us that each man has a line of fifty fathoms in length, and attached to this are a hundred hooks, baited with mussels, pieces of herring, or whiting.“On arriving at the fishing ground, the fishermen heave overboard a cork buoy, with a flagstaff about six feet in height attached to it. The buoy is kept stationary by a line, called the‘pow end,’reaching to the bottom of the water, where it is held by a stone or grapnel fastened to the lower end. To the‘pow end’is also fastened the fishing-line, which is then paid out as fast as the boat sails, which may be from four to five knots an hour. Should the wind be unfavourable for the direction in which the crew wish to set the line, they use the oars. When the line, or‘taes,’is all out, the end is dropped, and the boat returns to the buoy. The‘pow’line is hauled up with the anchor and fishing-line attached to it. The fishermen then haul in the line, with the fish attached to it. Eight hundred fish might be, and often have been, taken by eight men in a few hours by this operation; but many fishermen say now that they consider themselves fortunate when they get a fish on every fifth hook on an eight-lined‘taes’line.”On our own coasts the cod is principally taken by deep-sea lines, with many shorter lines depending from them armed with large hooks. One man has in ten hours taken 400, and eight men have taken eighty score in one day off the Doggerbank. The Norfolk and Lincoln coasts afford a large supply; the fish taken is stowed in well-boats, and brought to Gravesend, whence they are transhipped into market boats and sent to Billingsgate. The store-boats with their wells, through which the water circulates, cannot come higher, as the fresh water of the Thames, and possibly some of that which isnottoo fresh, would kill the fish.

THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).

THE COD (Morrhua vulgaris).

The haddock is also taken with lines. In the village of Findhorn, Morayshire, large[pg 176]numbers of fine haddocks are dried and smoked with the fumes of hard wood and sawdust. Hence the term,“Finnan haddies,”which, when obtained, are the finest for gastronomic purposes, being of superior flavour.

The mackerel (Scomber scombrus) is a most valuable fish for man. The tunny, bonita, and mackerel have yielded immense supplies of excellent food, the first-named being esteemed in parts of France far above any other fish. It is called the salmon of Provence. They attain a far larger growth than the mackerel, specimens having been found of seven, eight, and even nine feet in length, and weighing up to 400 pounds. They are specially abundant in the Mediterranean, where they are usually caught in nets. In Provence they are driven, much as are the pilchards in Cornwall, into an enclosed space called themadrague, where at last the fish finds itself ensnared in shallow water. Then“the carnage commences. The unhappy creatures,”says Figuier,“are struck with long poles, boat-hooks, and other weapons. The tunny-fishing presents a very sad spectacle at this its last stage; fine large fish perish under the blows of a multitude of fishermen, who pursue their bloody task with most dramatic effect. The sight of the poor creatures, some of them wounded and half dead, trying in vain to struggle with their ferocious assailants, is very painful to see. The sea red with blood, long preserves traces of this frightful slaughter.”

The bonita is principally a tropical fish, not unlike the mackerel, but more than double its size. It is the great enemy of the flying-fish, and possesses electrical or stinging powers, for any one attempting to hold the living fish is violently shaken as in palsy, and one’s very tongue is tied, and unable to make more than a spasmodic sputter.

THE MACKEREL (Scomber scombrus).

The mackerel is common to all European seas. It is themacquereauof the French, themacarelloof the modern Romans, themakrilof the Swedes, thebretalof some parts of Brittany, thescombroof the Venetians, thelacestoof the Neapolitans, and thecavalloof the Spaniards. It is one of the most universally-esteemed fish.

The mackerel is very voracious, and has courage enough to attack fish much larger than itself. It will even attack man, and is said to love him, gastronomically speaking. A Norwegian bishop who lived in the sixteenth century records the case of a sailor attacked by a shoal of mackerel, while he was bathing. His companions came to the rescue; but though they succeeded in driving off the fish, their assistance came too late; he died a few hours afterwards.

This fish is generally taken by drift-nets, usually 20 feet deep, and 120 long, well buoyed with cork, but without weights to sink them. The meshes are made of fine tarred twine. They are in their best condition in June and July. The ancients used to make a sauce piquant from their fat, which was calledgarum, and sold for the equivalent of sixteen shillings the pint. It was acrid and nauseous, but had the property of stimulating jaded appetites. Seneca charged it with destroying the coats of the stomach, and injuring the health of the high livers of his day. A traveller of the sixteenth century, Pierre Belon, found it highly esteemed in Constantinople.

FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.

FISHING FOR TUNNY OFF THE COAST OF PROVENCE.

The formidable sword-fish is also tolerable eating, especially when young, and there are fisheries for its capture in the Mediterranean. The fishermen of Messina and Reggio fish by night, using large boats carrying torches, and a mast, at the top of which one of their number is stationed to announce the approach of their prey, which is harpooned by a man standing in the bows. This fish attains a length of five or six feet, its sword forming three-tenths of its length. It is one of the whale’s natural enemies, and it objects even to ships passing through its element. There are numerous cases cited of ship’s bottoms having been pierced by it. In 1725, some carpenters having occasion to examine a ship[pg 178]just returned from the tropics, found the sword of one of these animals buried in its lower timbers. They averred that to drive a pointed iron bolt of the same size to the same depth would require eight or nine blows with a thirty-pound hammer. It was further evident from the position of the weapon that the fish had followed the ship while under full sail; it had penetrated the metal sheathing and three-and-a-half inches of the timber.

FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.

FISHING FOR SWORD-FISH.

And now, before leaving the minor and intermediate types of ocean life for the monsters of the deep, a few general observations may be permitted. Pliny described 94 species of fish; Linnæus described 478; the scientists of to-day know upwards of 13,000, one-tenth of which are fresh-water fish. The reader will then understand why only a few of the more important, useful, or curious have been described in these pages.

A hard man of science once described fish-life as“silent, monotonous, and joyless.”Modern science has disproved each and all of these statements. As regards the first, there are species actually known which“indulge in jews’-harps, trumpets, and drums.... Musical fish are a fact of positive knowledge, for not only can they be heard in shoals thrumming their jews’-harps in unison, but other kinds have been taken in the very act of trumpeting and drumming.”Bertram, as we have seen, speaks of the“death-chirp”of the captured herring. The application of the telephone has proved that a fish, placed alone in some water, actually talked to itself! Mr. S. E. Peal, in a letter to a scientific journal, tells us of a large fish,Barbes macrocephalus, which converses with a peculiar“cluck,”or persuasive sound, which may be heard as far as forty feet from the water. He also mentions a bivalve of Eastern Assam which actually“sings loudly in concert.”

How fish-life could be called monotonous and joyless will puzzle any one who has watched them in a large aquarium, where their every movement tells of pleasure, or at least excitement. Imagine, then, their life in the ocean itself. All around them is life—life in constant activity. The ancients said, and Pliny assented to the dictum, that in the water might be found anything or everything that was found out of it, and as much more besides. Then there is the excitement of the chase, in which they may be either the pursued or the pursuers.“Not only,”said a writer in a leading daily journal,“can they indulge themselves in running away from sharks, as we should do from tigers if they swarmed in the streets, in contemplating the while the elephant of the seas sauntering along through his domain, or finding diversion and instruction in the winged process of the flying-fish or the tree-climbing of perch, the buffooneries of sun-fish and pipe-fish, the cunning artifices of the‘angler-fish,’the electric propensities of some, the luminosity of others, the venomous nature of these or the grotesque appearance of those—not only is all the variety of experience to be found on the earth to be found also in the water, but even in a wider range and a greater diversity. The sea floor is strewn with marvels, and the rocks are instinct with wonders.”Fish-life is, then, full of excitement and interest.

An accomplished ichthyologist, Mr. F. Francis, has stirred up the vexed question,“Do fish sleep?”Only a very few fish, the dog-fish being one of the few exceptions, can close their eyes at all. Still, on the other hand, some human beings, and notably infants, can sleep with one or both eyes open, while the hare is credited with being able to take his nap in the latter condition. Fish would seem to require sleep from their constant activity; but in actual fact, no scientific watcher has yet caught one asleep.

[pg 179]CHAPTER XVI.Monsters of the Deep.48Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the“Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.Some years ago, when an invalid wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice as to the value of fish as“brain food,”the answer of that humourist was plain indeed:—“Fish-food is good: abounds in phosphorus and nutrition. In your case I must recommend a small whale!”Unfortunately, Mark Twain fell into a very common error. The whale isnota fish; it is a mammal: it suckles its young. The writer has eaten whale—that is, a little bit of one. Whale brain, enclosed in batter, and treated as a fritter, is not to be despised.The British whaler of about 1670 is quaintly described by Frederic Martin, who visited Spitzbergen and Greenland that year. He says:—“Whoever of the ships’ crews sees a dead whale cries out,‘Fish mine!’and therefore the merchants must pay him a ducat for his care and vigilance. Many of them climb often into the mast in hopes to have a ducat, but in vain. When the dead whale is thus fastened to the ship, two sloops hold on the other side of the fish, or whale, and in each of them doth stand a man or boy that has a long hook in his hands, wherewith he doth hold the boat to the ship, and the harpooner stands before in the sloop or upon the whale, with a leathern suit on, and sometimes they have boots on. Underneath the hook are some sharp nails fixed, that they may be able to stand firm. These two men that cut the fat off have their peculiar wages for it, viz., about four or five rix dollars. First they cut a large piece from behind the head, by the eyes, which they call thekenter-piece, that is as much as to say, thewinding-piece; for as they cut all the other fat all in rows from the whale towards the end, so they cut this greatkenter-piecelarger and wider than all the rest. This piece, when it is cut round about from the whale, reaches from the water to the cradle (that is, the round circle that goes round about the middle of the mast, and is made in the shape of a basket), whence you may guess of the bigness of a whale. A strong and thick rope is fixed to this kenter-piece, and the other end is fixed to underneath the cradle, whereby the whale is as it were borne up out of the water, that they may come at it, and by reason of the great weight of the whale the ship leans towards that side. One may judge how tough the fat is, for in this piece a hole is made, through which the rope is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,”and so on.Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the“killer,”a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These[pg 180]“killers”often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look-out that a whale has been“hove-to”by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty-five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale.The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold-water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale-fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer. The whale-fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother[pg 181]escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of‘Mysticete’has been applied to various whales.”THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; therightwhale delights in cold water. The log-books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn.Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut-water of a ship. On the right[pg 182]side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed“the blanket,”of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty-two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.49Many years since theSamuel Enderby, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.This whale swallows quantities of small fishes, and has been known to eject from its stomach a fish as large as a moderate-sized salmon. This species is gregarious; and the herds, called“schools,”are females and young males. Mr. Beale saw 500 or 600 in one school. With each female school are one to three large“bulls,”or“schoolmasters,”as they are termed by the whalers. The full-grown males almost always go in search of food. A large whale will yield eighty, and sometimes one hundred, barrels of oil. Among the habits of the whale are“breaching,”or leaping clear out of the water and falling back on its side, so that the breach may be seen on a clear day from the mast-head at six miles’ distance; in“going ahead”the whale attains ten or twelve miles an hour, which Mr. Beale believes to be its greatest velocity;“lob-tailing”is lashing the water with its tail. The dangers and hairbreadth escapes in the capture are very numerous.In 1839 there were discovered among rubbish in a tower of Durham Castle the bones of a sperm whale, which, from a letter of June 20th, 1661, in the Surtees Collection, is shown to have been cast ashore at that time, andskeletonisedin order to ornament this old tower. Clusius describes, in 1605, a sperm whale thrown ashore seven years before, near Scheveling, where Cuvier supposed its head to be still preserved, and there is an antiquity of the kind still shown there.The whale chase is an exciting scene. Sometimes the whale places himself in a perpendicular position, with the head downwards, and rearing his tail on high, beats the water with awful violence. The sea foams, and vapours darken the air; the lashing is heard several miles off, like the roar of a distant tempest. Sometimes he makes an immense spring, and rears his whole body above the waves, to the admiration of the experienced whaler, but to the terror of those who see for the first time this astonishing spectacle. Other motions, equally expressive of his boundless strength, attract the attention of navigators at the distance of miles. The whole structure of the whale exhibits most admirable adaptation to his situations and the element in which he lives, in the toughness and thickness of his skin and disposition of the coating of blubber beneath, which serves the purpose—if we may be permitted to use so homely a simile—of an extra great-coat to keep him warm, and prevent his warm red blood from being chilled by the icy seas. But provision is especially made to enable him to descend uninjured to very great depths. The orifices of the nostrils are closed by valves, wonderfully suited to keep out the water from the lungs, notwithstanding the pressure. In one species[pg 183]they are shaped like cones, which fit into the orifice like corks in the neck of a bottle, and the greater the pressure the tighter they hold. The most surprising fact in the whale, probably, is the power of descending to enormous depths below the surface of the sea, and sustaining that almost inconceivable pressure of the superincumbent water. On one occasion which fell under Mr. Scoresby’s own observation a whale was struck from a boat. The animal instantly descended, dragging down with him a rope nearlyone mile long. Having let out this much of the rope, the situation of the boat’s crew became critical. Either they must have cut the line, and submitted to a very serious loss, or have run the risk of being dragged under water by the whale. The men were desired to retire to the stern, to counterbalance the pulls of the whale, which dragged the bow down sometimes to within an inch of the water. In this dangerous dilemma the boat remained some time, vibrating up and down with the tugs of the monster, but never moving from the place where it lay when the harpoon was first thrown. This fact proves that the whale must have descended at once perpendicularly, as had he advanced in any direction he must have pulled the boat along with him. Mr. Scoresby and the crew were rescued by the timely arrival of another boat furnished with fresh ropes and harpoons. A whale when struck will dive sometimes to a depth of 800 fathoms; and as the surface of a large animal may be estimated at 1,500 square feet, at this depth it will have to sustain a pressure equal to 211,000 tons. The transition from that which it is exposed to at the surface, and which may be taken at about 1,300 tons, to so enormous an increase, must be productive of the utmost exhaustion.Strange incidents are related of harpooning. On September 24th, 1864, as theAlexander, belonging to Dundee, was steaming about in Davis’s Straits, a whale of about twelve tons was observed not far distant from her. Boats were put out, and the crew secured the animal. When they cleansed it, they found embedded in its body, two or three inches beneath the skin, a piece of a harpoon about eighteen inches long; on the one side were engraved the words—“Traveller,”Peterhead, and on the other,“1838.”This vessel was lost in 1856, in the Cumberland Straits whale-fishery; it is therefore clear that the harpoon must have remained in the animal from that time.A sailor gives the following description of sleepinginsidea whale; not, however, quite as Jonah may have done. He says:50—“We were on a little expedition in the long-boat one voyage, and we had to encamp for the night with as much comfort as our scant means would afford. The shore was terrible for its wildness and desolation—it was indeed lonely, sad, and sandy, but what was strange and welcome, was, great carcases of whales, stranded like wrecks on the far-reaching shore, in some cases the backbone holding together like a good keel and the great ribs still round, giving you an idea of an elongated hogshead without the staves. We landed for the night, unbent our sails and stretched them over the bleached ribs of a whale’s skeleton, and after supper took a comfortable sleep under the most curious roof-tree I ever rested under.”This was on the north-west coast of Africa; and the sailor came to the conclusion that whales come ashore to die.“And to my mind,”says he,“it is as poetical as it is welcome. I like[pg 184]to think of these mighty travellers in the mighty deep hugging the shore when the fires of life burn low, and the mighty waves, their playmates from their childhood, giving their last lift up on the beach!”And now for that great mythical or actual animal the sea-serpent.For ages an animal of immense size and serpentine form has been believed to inhabit the ocean, though rarely seen. A strong conviction of its existence has always prevailed in Norway and the fiords, where it has been reported to have been frequently seen. It is also said that the coasts of New England have been frequently visited by this marine monster many times during this century.Bishop Pontoppidan, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, wrote a history of Norway, his native land, collected a quantity of testimonies as to its occasional appearance. Among other evidence he mentions that of Captain de Ferry, of the Norwegian Navy, who saw the serpent, while in a boat rowed by eight men, near Molde, in August, 1774. A declaration of this was made by the captain and two of the crew before a magistrate. The animal was described as of the general form of a serpent stretched on the surface in[pg 185]receding coils or undulations, and the head, which resembled that of a horse, elevated some two feet out of the water.In the summer of 1846 many respectable persons stated that in the vicinity of Christiansand and Molde they had seen the marine serpent. The affidavits of numerous persons were given in the papers, which, with some discrepancies in minute particulars, agree in testifying that an animal of great length (from about fifty to a hundred feet) had been seen at various times, in many cases more than once. All agreed that the eyes were large and glaring; that the body was dark-brown and comparatively slender; and that the head, which for size was compared to a ten-gallon cask, was covered with a long spreading mane.An account of one of these encounters, which took place on the 28th May, 1845, was published by the Rev. P. W. Demboll, Archdeacon of Molde, those present being J. C. Lund, bookseller and printer, G. S. Krogh, merchant, Christian Flang, Lund’s apprentice, and John Elgenses, labourer. These men were fishing on the Romsdal Fjord, and the appearance took place about seven in the evening, a little distance from shore, near the ballast place and the Molde Hove. Lund fired at the animal, which followed them till they came to shallow water, when it dived and disappeared.In 1817 the Linnæan Society of New England published“A Report relative to a Large Marine Animal, supposed to be a Serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August,”of that year. A good deal of care was taken to obtain evidence, and the deposition of eleven witnesses of fair and unblemished characters were certified on oath before the magistrates. The length was estimated at fifty to a hundred feet, and the head compared to that of a sea-turtle, a rattlesnake, and a serpent generally, but in this case there was no appearance of a mane.Again, in theBoston Daily Advertiserfor November 25th, 1840, there is a communication from the Hon. T. H. Perkins of that city, attesting his own personal observation of the marine serpent at Gloucester Harbour, near Cape Ann, in 1817. This communication took the form of a letter written to a friend in 1820.Captain Perkins speaks of the animal’s motion being the vertical movement of the caterpillar, and not that of the common snake either on land or water, and this confirms the account of Mr. M‘Clean, the minister of a parish in the Hebrides, who saw in 1809 a serpentine monster about eighty feet in length. He distinctly states that it seemed to move by undulations up and down, which is not only contrary to all that is known of serpents, but from the structure of their vertebræ impossible. Hans Egede mentions the appearance of a marine snake off the coast of Greenland in 1734.On the 15th of May, 1833, a party, consisting of Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant Lyster of the Artillery, and Mr. Ince the ordnance store-keeper at Halifax, started from that town in a small yacht for Mahone Bay, on a fishing excursion. When about half-way they came upon a shoal of grampuses in an unusual state of excitement, and to the surprise of the party they perceived the head and neck of a snake, at least eighty feet in length, following them. An account of this occurrence was published in theZoologistfor 1847. The editor stated that he was indebted for it to Mr. W. H. Ince, who received it from his brother,[pg 186]Commander J. M. R. Ince, R.N. It was written by one of the eye-witnesses, Mr. Henry Ince, and signed as follows:—W. Sullivan, Captain Rifle Brigade,June 21, 1831.A. Maclachlan, Lieut.  „      „August 5, 1824.G. P. Malcolm, Ensign  „      „August 13, 1830.B. O’Neal Lyster, Lieut. Artillery,June 7, 1816.Henry Ince, Storekeeper at Halifax.The dates affixed to the names were those on which the gentlemen received their respective commissions.Great interest was excited in 1848 by an account of a great sea-serpent seen in lat. 24° 44′ S., and long. 9° 20′ E., in the tropics, and not very far from the coast of Africa, by the officers and crew of her Majesty’s frigateDædalus. It was not, as in other cases, in bright and fine weather, but on a dark and cloudy afternoon, and with a long ocean swell. Captain Peter M‘Quhæ, in his report to the Admiralty, published in theTimesfor the 13th of October, describes it with confidence as“an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea;”and he adds:“As nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main topsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animalà fleur d’eau, no portion of which was to our perception used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised his features with the naked eye; but it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the south-west, which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was without doubt that of a snake; and it was never during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed washed about its back.”THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S. DÆDALUS.THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S.DÆDALUS.(After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ, sent to the Lords of the Admiralty, October, 1848.)Drawings prepared from a sketch by Captain M‘Quhæ were published in theIllustrated London Newsof 28th October, 1848. Lieutenant Drummond, the officer of the watch at the time, also printed his own impression of the animal, which differs in some slight points from the Captain’s account, particularly in ascribing a more elongated form to the head, in the mention of a back-fin (whereas Captain M‘Quhæ expressly says no fins were seen), and the lower estimate of the length of the portion of the animal visible. Lieutenant Drummond’s words are:—“The appearance of its head, which with the back fin was the only portion of the animal visible, was long, pointed, and flattened at the top, perhaps ten feet in length; the upper jaw projecting considerably; the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head, and visible occasionally. The Captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin about the same distance behind it. The upper part of the head and shoulders appeared of a dark brown colour, and beneath the jaw a brownish white. It pursued a steady and undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the[pg 187]water, and in rather a raised position, disappearing occasionally beneath a wave for a very brief interval, and not apparently for the purposes of respiration. It was going at the rate of perhaps from twelve to fourteen miles an hour, and when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant. In fact, it gave one quite the idea of a large snake or eel.”Lieutenant Drummond’s account is the more worthy of regard, as it was derived from his journal, and so gives the exact impressions of the hour, while Captain M‘Quhæ’s description was written from memory after his arrival in England.HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)These statements caused much discussion at the time. It was suggested by Mr. J. D. Morriss Stirling, a gentleman long living in Norway, and also by a writer in theTimesof November 2, 1848, under the signature of“F. G. S.,”that the monster had an affinity with the great fossil reptiles known to geologists as theEnaliosauria, and particularly adduced the genusPlesiosaurus, or gigantic lizard, with a serpent-like neck. This is also the opinion of Professor Agassiz, as given in the report of his lectures in Philadelphia, in 1849, and reaffirmed in his“Geological Researches.”A master in science, Professor Richard Owen, now appeared upon the field, and in a most able article in theTimes, November 11, 1848, gave his verdict against the serpentine character of the animal, and pronounced it to have been, in his judgment, a seal. He argued this partly from the description of its appearance, and partly from the fact that no remains of any dead marine serpent had ever been found. He says:“On weighing the question whether creatures meriting the name of‘great sea serpent’do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilised state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea serpents, Krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent.”However, Captain M‘Quhæ gallantly returned to the charge, and combated the idea that he had mistaken one of thePhocaspecies for a snake; and he was strongly corroborated by Mr. R. Davidson, Superintending Surgeon, Nagpore Subsidiary Force, in a letter from Kamptee, published in theBombay Bi-monthly Times, for January, 1849. This gentleman says that an animal,“of which no more generally correct description could be given than that by Captain M‘Quhæ,”passed within thirty-five yards of the shipRoyal Saxonwhile he and its commander, Captain Petrie, were standing on the poop, when they were returning to India in 1829.Again, a letter was printed in theZoologistfor 1852, communicated by Captain Steele, 9th Lancers, to his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Steele of the Coldstream Guards, stating that while on his way to India in theBartramhe andevery one on boardsaw“the head and neck of an enormous snake.”This was corroborated in a letter from one of the officers of the ship, who says:—“His head appeared to be about sixteen feet above the[pg 188]water, and he kept moving it up and down, sometimes showing his enormous neck, which was surmounted with a huge crest in the shape of a saw.”Another theory was put forward in the LondonSunof the 9th July, 1849, by Captain Herriman, of the British shipBrazilian, who, on the 24th February, 1849, was becalmed on almost the same spot that Captain M‘Quhæ saw his monster while on a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope.“I perceived,”wrote Captain Herriman,“something right abeam, about half a mile to the westward, stretched along the water to the length of about twenty-five to thirty feet, and perceptibly moving from the ship with a steady sinuous motion. The head, which seemed to be lifted several feet above the water, had something resembling a mane running down to the floating portion, and within six feet of the tail it forked out into a sort of double fin.”On approaching in a small boat, however, Captain Herriman discovered that his monster was nothing more formidable than“an immense piece of sea-weed, evidently detached from a coral reef, and drifting with the current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, and which, together with the swell left by the subsidence of the gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion.”In theTimesof 5th February, 1858, a letter from Captain Harrington, of the shipCastilian, stating that he and his crew had seen a gigantic serpent on the 12th December, 1857, about ten miles N.E. of St. Helena, brought out another witness on the sea-weed hypothesis. This was Captain Fred. Smith, of the shipPekin, who gave a very similar account to that of Captain Herriman, stating that in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E., on the 28th December, 1848, he captured what he believed to be a serpent, but what turned out to be a gigantic piece of weed covered with snaky-looking barnacles.This last imputation brought up“An Officer of H.M. shipDædalus,”whose testimony, in theTimesof 16th February, 1858, putshors de combatthe sea-weed theory in that renowned case. He states that,“at its nearest position, being not more than 200 yards from us,the eye,the mouth, the nostril, the colour and form, all beingmost distinctly visible to us... my impression was it was rather of a lizard than a serpentine character, as its movement was steady and uniform,as if propelled by fins, not by any undulatory power.”That there is some mighty denizen of the vasty deep, sometimes but seldom seen, is more than possible, and highly probable; but to which of the recognised classes of created being can this huge rover of the ocean be referred? First of all, is it an animal at all? On two occasions monstrous pieces of weed have been mistaken for the Kraken, but on each occasion the distance from the vessel is estimated at half a mile; while Captain M‘Quhæ says that he was within 200 yards, and Mr. Davidson within thirty-five yards of the animal. Under these circumstances we may fairly dismiss the sea-weed hypothesis.Professor Owen would place the sea-serpent among the mammalia, butPhoca proboscideais the only seal which will bear comparison with theDædalusanimal in dimensions, it reaching from twenty to thirty feet. The officers declare, however, that at least sixty feet of their animal was visible at the surface. Again, the fore paws of the seal are placed at about one-third of the total length from the muzzle, and yet no appearance of fins was seen. To continue, the greatPhoca proboscideahas no mane, the only seals possessing what may be dignified with the title being the two kinds of sea lions—theOtaria jubataandPlatyrhynchus leoninus—which are far too small to come into the count.[pg 189]It is quite possible that the great unknown is a reptile, and his marine habits present no difficulty. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans there are numerous specimens of true snakes (Hydrophidæ), which are exclusively inhabitants of the sea. None of these, however, are known to exceed a few feet in length, and none of them, so far as is known, have found their way into the Atlantic.The most probable solution of the riddle is the hypothesis of Mr. Morriss Stirling and Professor Agassiz, that the so-called sea-serpent will find its closest affinities with those extraordinary animals theEnaliosauria, or marine lizards, whose fossil skeletons are found so abundantly through the Oolite and the Lias. If the Plesiosaur could be seen alive you would find nearly its total length on the face of the water propelled at a rapid rate, without any undulation, by an apparatus altogether invisible—the powerful paddles beneath—while the entire serpentine neck would probably be projected obliquely, carrying the reptilian head, with an eye of moderate aperture, and a mouth whose gape did not extend behind the eye. Add to this a body of leathery skin like that of the whale, give the creature a length[pg 190]of some sixty feet or more, and you would have before you almost the very counterpart of the apparition that wrought such amazement on board theDædalus.In evidence of the existence of such an animal, Captain the Hon. George Hope states that when in H.M.S.Fly, in the Gulf of California, the sea being perfectly smooth and clear, he saw at the bottom a large marine animal with the head and general figure of an alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that, instead of legs, the animal had four large flappers, something like those of turtles.The two strong objections to this theory are—first, the hypothetical improbability of such forms having been transmitted from the era of the secondary strata to the present time; and, second, the entire absence of any parts of the carcases or unfossilised skeletons of such animals in museums. Many fossil types, however, of marine animals have been transmitted, with or without interruption, from remote geological epochs to the present time; among these may be mentioned the Port Jackson Shark (Cestracion), and the gar-pike (Lepidosteus), which have come down to us without interruption, theChimæra percopsisof Lake Superior, and soft-shelled tortoises (Trionychidæ), with more or less apparent disappearance. The non-occurrence of dead animals is of little weight as disproving the existence of the sea-serpent; its carcase would float only a short time, and the rock-bound coasts of Norway would be very unlikely to retain any fragment cast up by the waves; many whales being known to naturalists only from two or three specimens in many centuries.The conclusion of the best naturalists is that the existence of the sea-serpent is possibly a verity, and that it may prove to be some modified type of the secondaryEnaliosaurians, or possibly some intermediate form between them and the elongatedCetaceans.

Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the“Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.

Mark Twain on Whales—A New Version of an Old Story—Whale as Food—Whaling in 1670—The Great Mammal’s Enemy, the“Killer”—The Animal’s Home—The So-called Fisheries—The Sperm Whale—Spermaceti—The Chase—The Capture—A Mythical Monster—The Great Sea-Serpent—Yarns from Norway—An Archdeacon’s Testimony—Stories from America—From Greenland—Mahone Bay—A Tropical Sea-Serpent—What is the Animal?—Seen on a Voyage to India—Off the Coast of Africa—Other Accounts—Professor Owen on the Subject—Other Theories.

Some years ago, when an invalid wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice as to the value of fish as“brain food,”the answer of that humourist was plain indeed:—“Fish-food is good: abounds in phosphorus and nutrition. In your case I must recommend a small whale!”Unfortunately, Mark Twain fell into a very common error. The whale isnota fish; it is a mammal: it suckles its young. The writer has eaten whale—that is, a little bit of one. Whale brain, enclosed in batter, and treated as a fritter, is not to be despised.

The British whaler of about 1670 is quaintly described by Frederic Martin, who visited Spitzbergen and Greenland that year. He says:—“Whoever of the ships’ crews sees a dead whale cries out,‘Fish mine!’and therefore the merchants must pay him a ducat for his care and vigilance. Many of them climb often into the mast in hopes to have a ducat, but in vain. When the dead whale is thus fastened to the ship, two sloops hold on the other side of the fish, or whale, and in each of them doth stand a man or boy that has a long hook in his hands, wherewith he doth hold the boat to the ship, and the harpooner stands before in the sloop or upon the whale, with a leathern suit on, and sometimes they have boots on. Underneath the hook are some sharp nails fixed, that they may be able to stand firm. These two men that cut the fat off have their peculiar wages for it, viz., about four or five rix dollars. First they cut a large piece from behind the head, by the eyes, which they call thekenter-piece, that is as much as to say, thewinding-piece; for as they cut all the other fat all in rows from the whale towards the end, so they cut this greatkenter-piecelarger and wider than all the rest. This piece, when it is cut round about from the whale, reaches from the water to the cradle (that is, the round circle that goes round about the middle of the mast, and is made in the shape of a basket), whence you may guess of the bigness of a whale. A strong and thick rope is fixed to this kenter-piece, and the other end is fixed to underneath the cradle, whereby the whale is as it were borne up out of the water, that they may come at it, and by reason of the great weight of the whale the ship leans towards that side. One may judge how tough the fat is, for in this piece a hole is made, through which the rope is fastened, yet not deep into the fat, wherewith they turn the fish at pleasure. Then they cut another piece down hard by this, which is also hauled up into the ship, where it is cut into pieces a foot square. The knives used are, with their hafts, about the length of a man,”and so on.

Mr. Brierly tells us that the most important natural enemy of the whale on the coast of Australia is the“killer,”a kind of large porpoise, with a blunt head and large teeth. These[pg 180]“killers”often attack the whale, and worry it like a pack of dogs, and sometimes kill it. The whalemen regard these creatures as important allies, for when they see from the look-out that a whale has been“hove-to”by them they are pretty sure of capturing it. The killers show no fear of the boats, but will attack the whale at the same time; and if a boat is stove in, which often happens, they will not hurt the men when in the water. The Australian natives about Twofold Bay say the killers are the spirits of their own people, and when they see them will pretend to point out particular individuals they have known. Some are very large, exceeding twenty-five feet; they blow from the head, in the same manner as the whale.

The homes of whales are hardly known. Where the northern whale breeds has long been a puzzling question among whalemen. It is a cold-water animal. Maury asks:—“Is the nursery for the great whale in the Polar Sea, which has been so set about and hemmed in with a ledge of ice that man may not trespass there? This providential economy still further prompts the question, Whence comes all the food for the young whales there? Do the teeming whalers of the Gulf Stream convey it there also, in channels so far in the depths of the sea that no enemy may waylay and spoil it in the long journey? It may generally be believed that the northern whale, which is now confined to the Polar Sea, descended annually into the temperate region of the Atlantic, as far as the Bay of Biscay, and that it was only the persecution of the whale-fishers which compelled it to seek its frozen retreat. This opinion is now shown to be erroneous, and to have rested only on the confounding of two distinct species of whale. Like other whales, the northern is migratory, and changes its quarters according to the seasons; and the systematic registers of the Danish colonists of Greenland show that often the same individual appears at the same epoch in the same fiord. The females of the southern whale visit the coasts of the Cape in June to bring forth their young, and return to the high seas in August or September. It was supposed that the migration of the northern whale was for a similar purpose. This, however, is not now considered to be the case. Its movements are attributed to climatal changes alone, and especially to the transport of ice into Baffin’s Bay. It lives entirely in the midst of glaciers, and therefore is found in the south during winter and in the north during summer. The whale-fishery has diminished its numbers, but not altered its mode of life. It is stated now that the whale believed to have visited the North Atlantic Ocean is a totally different species, a much more violent and dangerous animal than the northern whale, also smaller, and less rich in oil. The fishery for the latter ceased towards the end of the last century, but it is thought to be not wholly extinct. On September 17th, 1854, a whale, with its little one, appeared before St. Sebastian, in the Bay of Biscay; the mother[pg 181]escaped, but the young one was taken, and from a drawing of a skeleton of the latter MM. Eschricht and Rheinhardt, of Copenhagen, are convinced that it belonged to a species distinct from the Greenland whale; so that the name of‘Mysticete’has been applied to various whales.”

THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).

THE NORTHERN WHALE (Balina mysticetus).

The sperm whale, says Maury, is a warm water animal; therightwhale delights in cold water. The log-books of the American whalers show that the torrid zone is to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which it cannot pass; and that the right whale of the northern hemisphere and that of the southern are two different animals; and that the sperm whale has never been known to double the Cape of Good Hope—he doubles Cape Horn.

Mr. Beale has done more to elucidate the habits and form of this whale than any other writer. Its great peculiarity of form is the head, presenting a very thick, blunt extremity, about a third of the whole length of the animal. The head, viewed in front, has a broad, flattened surface, rounded and contracted above, considerably expanded on the sides, and gradually contracted below, resembling in some degree the cut-water of a ship. On the right[pg 182]side of the nose is a cavity for secreting and containing an oily fluid, which after death concretes into the substance called spermaceti, of which in a large whale there is not unfrequently a ton. The mouth extends nearly the whole length of the head, and the throat is capacious enough to give passage to the body of a man, presenting a strong contrast to the contracted gullet of the Greenland whale. Immediately beneath the black skin of the sperm whale is the blubber, or fat, termed“the blanket,”of a light yellowish colour, producing when melted the sperm oil. A specimen taken in 1829 near Whitstable measured sixty-two feet in length. The oil was worth £320, exclusive of the spermaceti.49Many years since theSamuel Enderby, whaler, returned from the south with a cargo of sperm oil worth £40,000.

CUTTING UP THE WHALE.CUTTING UP THE WHALE.

CUTTING UP THE WHALE.

This whale swallows quantities of small fishes, and has been known to eject from its stomach a fish as large as a moderate-sized salmon. This species is gregarious; and the herds, called“schools,”are females and young males. Mr. Beale saw 500 or 600 in one school. With each female school are one to three large“bulls,”or“schoolmasters,”as they are termed by the whalers. The full-grown males almost always go in search of food. A large whale will yield eighty, and sometimes one hundred, barrels of oil. Among the habits of the whale are“breaching,”or leaping clear out of the water and falling back on its side, so that the breach may be seen on a clear day from the mast-head at six miles’ distance; in“going ahead”the whale attains ten or twelve miles an hour, which Mr. Beale believes to be its greatest velocity;“lob-tailing”is lashing the water with its tail. The dangers and hairbreadth escapes in the capture are very numerous.

In 1839 there were discovered among rubbish in a tower of Durham Castle the bones of a sperm whale, which, from a letter of June 20th, 1661, in the Surtees Collection, is shown to have been cast ashore at that time, andskeletonisedin order to ornament this old tower. Clusius describes, in 1605, a sperm whale thrown ashore seven years before, near Scheveling, where Cuvier supposed its head to be still preserved, and there is an antiquity of the kind still shown there.

The whale chase is an exciting scene. Sometimes the whale places himself in a perpendicular position, with the head downwards, and rearing his tail on high, beats the water with awful violence. The sea foams, and vapours darken the air; the lashing is heard several miles off, like the roar of a distant tempest. Sometimes he makes an immense spring, and rears his whole body above the waves, to the admiration of the experienced whaler, but to the terror of those who see for the first time this astonishing spectacle. Other motions, equally expressive of his boundless strength, attract the attention of navigators at the distance of miles. The whole structure of the whale exhibits most admirable adaptation to his situations and the element in which he lives, in the toughness and thickness of his skin and disposition of the coating of blubber beneath, which serves the purpose—if we may be permitted to use so homely a simile—of an extra great-coat to keep him warm, and prevent his warm red blood from being chilled by the icy seas. But provision is especially made to enable him to descend uninjured to very great depths. The orifices of the nostrils are closed by valves, wonderfully suited to keep out the water from the lungs, notwithstanding the pressure. In one species[pg 183]they are shaped like cones, which fit into the orifice like corks in the neck of a bottle, and the greater the pressure the tighter they hold. The most surprising fact in the whale, probably, is the power of descending to enormous depths below the surface of the sea, and sustaining that almost inconceivable pressure of the superincumbent water. On one occasion which fell under Mr. Scoresby’s own observation a whale was struck from a boat. The animal instantly descended, dragging down with him a rope nearlyone mile long. Having let out this much of the rope, the situation of the boat’s crew became critical. Either they must have cut the line, and submitted to a very serious loss, or have run the risk of being dragged under water by the whale. The men were desired to retire to the stern, to counterbalance the pulls of the whale, which dragged the bow down sometimes to within an inch of the water. In this dangerous dilemma the boat remained some time, vibrating up and down with the tugs of the monster, but never moving from the place where it lay when the harpoon was first thrown. This fact proves that the whale must have descended at once perpendicularly, as had he advanced in any direction he must have pulled the boat along with him. Mr. Scoresby and the crew were rescued by the timely arrival of another boat furnished with fresh ropes and harpoons. A whale when struck will dive sometimes to a depth of 800 fathoms; and as the surface of a large animal may be estimated at 1,500 square feet, at this depth it will have to sustain a pressure equal to 211,000 tons. The transition from that which it is exposed to at the surface, and which may be taken at about 1,300 tons, to so enormous an increase, must be productive of the utmost exhaustion.

Strange incidents are related of harpooning. On September 24th, 1864, as theAlexander, belonging to Dundee, was steaming about in Davis’s Straits, a whale of about twelve tons was observed not far distant from her. Boats were put out, and the crew secured the animal. When they cleansed it, they found embedded in its body, two or three inches beneath the skin, a piece of a harpoon about eighteen inches long; on the one side were engraved the words—“Traveller,”Peterhead, and on the other,“1838.”This vessel was lost in 1856, in the Cumberland Straits whale-fishery; it is therefore clear that the harpoon must have remained in the animal from that time.

A sailor gives the following description of sleepinginsidea whale; not, however, quite as Jonah may have done. He says:50—“We were on a little expedition in the long-boat one voyage, and we had to encamp for the night with as much comfort as our scant means would afford. The shore was terrible for its wildness and desolation—it was indeed lonely, sad, and sandy, but what was strange and welcome, was, great carcases of whales, stranded like wrecks on the far-reaching shore, in some cases the backbone holding together like a good keel and the great ribs still round, giving you an idea of an elongated hogshead without the staves. We landed for the night, unbent our sails and stretched them over the bleached ribs of a whale’s skeleton, and after supper took a comfortable sleep under the most curious roof-tree I ever rested under.”This was on the north-west coast of Africa; and the sailor came to the conclusion that whales come ashore to die.“And to my mind,”says he,“it is as poetical as it is welcome. I like[pg 184]to think of these mighty travellers in the mighty deep hugging the shore when the fires of life burn low, and the mighty waves, their playmates from their childhood, giving their last lift up on the beach!”

And now for that great mythical or actual animal the sea-serpent.

For ages an animal of immense size and serpentine form has been believed to inhabit the ocean, though rarely seen. A strong conviction of its existence has always prevailed in Norway and the fiords, where it has been reported to have been frequently seen. It is also said that the coasts of New England have been frequently visited by this marine monster many times during this century.

Bishop Pontoppidan, who, about the middle of the eighteenth century, wrote a history of Norway, his native land, collected a quantity of testimonies as to its occasional appearance. Among other evidence he mentions that of Captain de Ferry, of the Norwegian Navy, who saw the serpent, while in a boat rowed by eight men, near Molde, in August, 1774. A declaration of this was made by the captain and two of the crew before a magistrate. The animal was described as of the general form of a serpent stretched on the surface in[pg 185]receding coils or undulations, and the head, which resembled that of a horse, elevated some two feet out of the water.

In the summer of 1846 many respectable persons stated that in the vicinity of Christiansand and Molde they had seen the marine serpent. The affidavits of numerous persons were given in the papers, which, with some discrepancies in minute particulars, agree in testifying that an animal of great length (from about fifty to a hundred feet) had been seen at various times, in many cases more than once. All agreed that the eyes were large and glaring; that the body was dark-brown and comparatively slender; and that the head, which for size was compared to a ten-gallon cask, was covered with a long spreading mane.

An account of one of these encounters, which took place on the 28th May, 1845, was published by the Rev. P. W. Demboll, Archdeacon of Molde, those present being J. C. Lund, bookseller and printer, G. S. Krogh, merchant, Christian Flang, Lund’s apprentice, and John Elgenses, labourer. These men were fishing on the Romsdal Fjord, and the appearance took place about seven in the evening, a little distance from shore, near the ballast place and the Molde Hove. Lund fired at the animal, which followed them till they came to shallow water, when it dived and disappeared.

In 1817 the Linnæan Society of New England published“A Report relative to a Large Marine Animal, supposed to be a Serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August,”of that year. A good deal of care was taken to obtain evidence, and the deposition of eleven witnesses of fair and unblemished characters were certified on oath before the magistrates. The length was estimated at fifty to a hundred feet, and the head compared to that of a sea-turtle, a rattlesnake, and a serpent generally, but in this case there was no appearance of a mane.

Again, in theBoston Daily Advertiserfor November 25th, 1840, there is a communication from the Hon. T. H. Perkins of that city, attesting his own personal observation of the marine serpent at Gloucester Harbour, near Cape Ann, in 1817. This communication took the form of a letter written to a friend in 1820.

Captain Perkins speaks of the animal’s motion being the vertical movement of the caterpillar, and not that of the common snake either on land or water, and this confirms the account of Mr. M‘Clean, the minister of a parish in the Hebrides, who saw in 1809 a serpentine monster about eighty feet in length. He distinctly states that it seemed to move by undulations up and down, which is not only contrary to all that is known of serpents, but from the structure of their vertebræ impossible. Hans Egede mentions the appearance of a marine snake off the coast of Greenland in 1734.

On the 15th of May, 1833, a party, consisting of Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant Lyster of the Artillery, and Mr. Ince the ordnance store-keeper at Halifax, started from that town in a small yacht for Mahone Bay, on a fishing excursion. When about half-way they came upon a shoal of grampuses in an unusual state of excitement, and to the surprise of the party they perceived the head and neck of a snake, at least eighty feet in length, following them. An account of this occurrence was published in theZoologistfor 1847. The editor stated that he was indebted for it to Mr. W. H. Ince, who received it from his brother,[pg 186]Commander J. M. R. Ince, R.N. It was written by one of the eye-witnesses, Mr. Henry Ince, and signed as follows:—

The dates affixed to the names were those on which the gentlemen received their respective commissions.

Great interest was excited in 1848 by an account of a great sea-serpent seen in lat. 24° 44′ S., and long. 9° 20′ E., in the tropics, and not very far from the coast of Africa, by the officers and crew of her Majesty’s frigateDædalus. It was not, as in other cases, in bright and fine weather, but on a dark and cloudy afternoon, and with a long ocean swell. Captain Peter M‘Quhæ, in his report to the Admiralty, published in theTimesfor the 13th of October, describes it with confidence as“an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea;”and he adds:“As nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main topsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animalà fleur d’eau, no portion of which was to our perception used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised his features with the naked eye; but it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the south-west, which it held on at the pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head, which was without doubt that of a snake; and it was never during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water; its colour a dark brown with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed washed about its back.”

THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S. DÆDALUS.THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S.DÆDALUS.(After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ, sent to the Lords of the Admiralty, October, 1848.)

THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT WHEN FIRST SEEN FROM H.M.S.DÆDALUS.(After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ, sent to the Lords of the Admiralty, October, 1848.)

Drawings prepared from a sketch by Captain M‘Quhæ were published in theIllustrated London Newsof 28th October, 1848. Lieutenant Drummond, the officer of the watch at the time, also printed his own impression of the animal, which differs in some slight points from the Captain’s account, particularly in ascribing a more elongated form to the head, in the mention of a back-fin (whereas Captain M‘Quhæ expressly says no fins were seen), and the lower estimate of the length of the portion of the animal visible. Lieutenant Drummond’s words are:—“The appearance of its head, which with the back fin was the only portion of the animal visible, was long, pointed, and flattened at the top, perhaps ten feet in length; the upper jaw projecting considerably; the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head, and visible occasionally. The Captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin about the same distance behind it. The upper part of the head and shoulders appeared of a dark brown colour, and beneath the jaw a brownish white. It pursued a steady and undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the[pg 187]water, and in rather a raised position, disappearing occasionally beneath a wave for a very brief interval, and not apparently for the purposes of respiration. It was going at the rate of perhaps from twelve to fourteen miles an hour, and when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant. In fact, it gave one quite the idea of a large snake or eel.”Lieutenant Drummond’s account is the more worthy of regard, as it was derived from his journal, and so gives the exact impressions of the hour, while Captain M‘Quhæ’s description was written from memory after his arrival in England.

HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)

HEAD OF SEA-SERPENT. (After a Drawing by Captain M‘Quhæ.)

These statements caused much discussion at the time. It was suggested by Mr. J. D. Morriss Stirling, a gentleman long living in Norway, and also by a writer in theTimesof November 2, 1848, under the signature of“F. G. S.,”that the monster had an affinity with the great fossil reptiles known to geologists as theEnaliosauria, and particularly adduced the genusPlesiosaurus, or gigantic lizard, with a serpent-like neck. This is also the opinion of Professor Agassiz, as given in the report of his lectures in Philadelphia, in 1849, and reaffirmed in his“Geological Researches.”

A master in science, Professor Richard Owen, now appeared upon the field, and in a most able article in theTimes, November 11, 1848, gave his verdict against the serpentine character of the animal, and pronounced it to have been, in his judgment, a seal. He argued this partly from the description of its appearance, and partly from the fact that no remains of any dead marine serpent had ever been found. He says:“On weighing the question whether creatures meriting the name of‘great sea serpent’do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilised state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea serpents, Krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent.”

However, Captain M‘Quhæ gallantly returned to the charge, and combated the idea that he had mistaken one of thePhocaspecies for a snake; and he was strongly corroborated by Mr. R. Davidson, Superintending Surgeon, Nagpore Subsidiary Force, in a letter from Kamptee, published in theBombay Bi-monthly Times, for January, 1849. This gentleman says that an animal,“of which no more generally correct description could be given than that by Captain M‘Quhæ,”passed within thirty-five yards of the shipRoyal Saxonwhile he and its commander, Captain Petrie, were standing on the poop, when they were returning to India in 1829.

Again, a letter was printed in theZoologistfor 1852, communicated by Captain Steele, 9th Lancers, to his brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Steele of the Coldstream Guards, stating that while on his way to India in theBartramhe andevery one on boardsaw“the head and neck of an enormous snake.”This was corroborated in a letter from one of the officers of the ship, who says:—“His head appeared to be about sixteen feet above the[pg 188]water, and he kept moving it up and down, sometimes showing his enormous neck, which was surmounted with a huge crest in the shape of a saw.”

Another theory was put forward in the LondonSunof the 9th July, 1849, by Captain Herriman, of the British shipBrazilian, who, on the 24th February, 1849, was becalmed on almost the same spot that Captain M‘Quhæ saw his monster while on a voyage from the Cape of Good Hope.

“I perceived,”wrote Captain Herriman,“something right abeam, about half a mile to the westward, stretched along the water to the length of about twenty-five to thirty feet, and perceptibly moving from the ship with a steady sinuous motion. The head, which seemed to be lifted several feet above the water, had something resembling a mane running down to the floating portion, and within six feet of the tail it forked out into a sort of double fin.”On approaching in a small boat, however, Captain Herriman discovered that his monster was nothing more formidable than“an immense piece of sea-weed, evidently detached from a coral reef, and drifting with the current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, and which, together with the swell left by the subsidence of the gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion.”

In theTimesof 5th February, 1858, a letter from Captain Harrington, of the shipCastilian, stating that he and his crew had seen a gigantic serpent on the 12th December, 1857, about ten miles N.E. of St. Helena, brought out another witness on the sea-weed hypothesis. This was Captain Fred. Smith, of the shipPekin, who gave a very similar account to that of Captain Herriman, stating that in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E., on the 28th December, 1848, he captured what he believed to be a serpent, but what turned out to be a gigantic piece of weed covered with snaky-looking barnacles.

This last imputation brought up“An Officer of H.M. shipDædalus,”whose testimony, in theTimesof 16th February, 1858, putshors de combatthe sea-weed theory in that renowned case. He states that,“at its nearest position, being not more than 200 yards from us,the eye,the mouth, the nostril, the colour and form, all beingmost distinctly visible to us... my impression was it was rather of a lizard than a serpentine character, as its movement was steady and uniform,as if propelled by fins, not by any undulatory power.”

That there is some mighty denizen of the vasty deep, sometimes but seldom seen, is more than possible, and highly probable; but to which of the recognised classes of created being can this huge rover of the ocean be referred? First of all, is it an animal at all? On two occasions monstrous pieces of weed have been mistaken for the Kraken, but on each occasion the distance from the vessel is estimated at half a mile; while Captain M‘Quhæ says that he was within 200 yards, and Mr. Davidson within thirty-five yards of the animal. Under these circumstances we may fairly dismiss the sea-weed hypothesis.

Professor Owen would place the sea-serpent among the mammalia, butPhoca proboscideais the only seal which will bear comparison with theDædalusanimal in dimensions, it reaching from twenty to thirty feet. The officers declare, however, that at least sixty feet of their animal was visible at the surface. Again, the fore paws of the seal are placed at about one-third of the total length from the muzzle, and yet no appearance of fins was seen. To continue, the greatPhoca proboscideahas no mane, the only seals possessing what may be dignified with the title being the two kinds of sea lions—theOtaria jubataandPlatyrhynchus leoninus—which are far too small to come into the count.

It is quite possible that the great unknown is a reptile, and his marine habits present no difficulty. In the Indian and Pacific Oceans there are numerous specimens of true snakes (Hydrophidæ), which are exclusively inhabitants of the sea. None of these, however, are known to exceed a few feet in length, and none of them, so far as is known, have found their way into the Atlantic.

The most probable solution of the riddle is the hypothesis of Mr. Morriss Stirling and Professor Agassiz, that the so-called sea-serpent will find its closest affinities with those extraordinary animals theEnaliosauria, or marine lizards, whose fossil skeletons are found so abundantly through the Oolite and the Lias. If the Plesiosaur could be seen alive you would find nearly its total length on the face of the water propelled at a rapid rate, without any undulation, by an apparatus altogether invisible—the powerful paddles beneath—while the entire serpentine neck would probably be projected obliquely, carrying the reptilian head, with an eye of moderate aperture, and a mouth whose gape did not extend behind the eye. Add to this a body of leathery skin like that of the whale, give the creature a length[pg 190]of some sixty feet or more, and you would have before you almost the very counterpart of the apparition that wrought such amazement on board theDædalus.

In evidence of the existence of such an animal, Captain the Hon. George Hope states that when in H.M.S.Fly, in the Gulf of California, the sea being perfectly smooth and clear, he saw at the bottom a large marine animal with the head and general figure of an alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that, instead of legs, the animal had four large flappers, something like those of turtles.

The two strong objections to this theory are—first, the hypothetical improbability of such forms having been transmitted from the era of the secondary strata to the present time; and, second, the entire absence of any parts of the carcases or unfossilised skeletons of such animals in museums. Many fossil types, however, of marine animals have been transmitted, with or without interruption, from remote geological epochs to the present time; among these may be mentioned the Port Jackson Shark (Cestracion), and the gar-pike (Lepidosteus), which have come down to us without interruption, theChimæra percopsisof Lake Superior, and soft-shelled tortoises (Trionychidæ), with more or less apparent disappearance. The non-occurrence of dead animals is of little weight as disproving the existence of the sea-serpent; its carcase would float only a short time, and the rock-bound coasts of Norway would be very unlikely to retain any fragment cast up by the waves; many whales being known to naturalists only from two or three specimens in many centuries.

The conclusion of the best naturalists is that the existence of the sea-serpent is possibly a verity, and that it may prove to be some modified type of the secondaryEnaliosaurians, or possibly some intermediate form between them and the elongatedCetaceans.

Back to IndexNext