CHAPTER XXIIITHE SEA-SERPENT—MANY OCCASIONS ON WHICH IT HAS BEEN SEEN—CONSCIENTIOUS SCEPTICISM OF SCIENTIFIC MEN—A FIGHT BETWEEN MONSTERS—THE LARGEST LAND-SERPENT—SNAKES AND SNAKE-STONES—MEDICAL EVIDENCE—A COLONIAL REMEDY.
THE SEA-SERPENT—MANY OCCASIONS ON WHICH IT HAS BEEN SEEN—CONSCIENTIOUS SCEPTICISM OF SCIENTIFIC MEN—A FIGHT BETWEEN MONSTERS—THE LARGEST LAND-SERPENT—SNAKES AND SNAKE-STONES—MEDICAL EVIDENCE—A COLONIAL REMEDY.
It used to be thought that the great whales—the cachalot, the rorqual, and the Greenland whale—were the largest of ocean’s dwellers, but if evidence is of any value whatever, there is one marine creature that is larger even than they—indeed, so much larger and more powerful that he is able to make them his prey, conquering them—even the mighty sperm-whale himself—by main strength put forth in single combat. This portentous monster is, of course, the great sea-serpent, which has been seen, at intervals, probably from time immemorial, and recorded also from, at least, as far back as 1734. In 1740 we have Bishop Pontoppidan’s word for its appearance—and we know now that he was right about the kraken—who describes it as having a length of 600 feet; and in 1822 it was again seen off Norway, and again it was 600 feet long; so, perhaps, it was the same one.
Then, in 1829, there is a description of such a creature, seen in the Indian seas, which tallies, on the whole, with the later joint account of Captain McQuhæ and LieutenantDrummond, of H.M.S.Dædalus, in 1848. Captain McQuhæ describes the creature that he saw, as an “enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea,” and “as nearly,” he says, “as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our maintopsail 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 undulations. There seemed to be as much as thirty or forty feet of tail, as well.” This great serpent, which, however, by this computation, would not have been so large as the largest whales, “passed the ship rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should easily have recognised his features with the naked eye. It had no fins, but there was something like the mane of a horse, or, rather, a bunch of seaweed, washing about its back.” It swam at about the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and was in sight for a full twenty minutes. Lieutenant Drummond thought the creature looked more like an eel than a snake. It had, he thought, “a back fin ten feet long, and also a tail fin.” The head, too, he describes, I think, as of a somewhat different shape, and says that it was “rather raised and occasionally dipping.” Still, there is nothing in the one account that is irreconcilable with the other, nor is it often the case that two people, seeing the same thing, describe it in just the same way. TheDædalusat the time that this creature was seen, was somewhere between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena.
Twenty-seven years later, in 1875, the officers and crew of the barquePauline, whilst sailing in the Indian seas, had a still more interesting experience. They were, one day, watching three large sperm-whales not far from the ship, when a most enormous serpent, shooting suddenly out of the water by the side of the largest one, encircled it in two coils of its body, and in about fifteen minutes, during which time there was a terrific struggle between the two leviathans, succeeded in crushing it to death. This, at least, may be assumed, for one by one the ribs of the unfortunate whale were heard to crack, with a sound resembling the report of a small cannon, and, at the end of the time stated, the snake dived downwards, carrying its victim with it, head first. When one thinks of the enormous strength of a large bull cachalot, which may be from fifty to eighty feet in length, one can form some idea of that of the monster by whom it was overpowered, yet possibly it was not so much the strength of the great serpent as the application of it, by which the whale was vanquished. Could it have got any portion of the sinuous body within its vast toothed jaws, or could it have delivered a blow upon it with its mighty tail, the issue of the combat might have been different; but enveloped in a double noose, each foot of which was charged with enormous constricting power, its strength was choked out of it; and as the serpent’s tail—or that part of it beyond the folds on one side—no doubt hung down in the water, whilst as much of the neck as was disengaged on the other would have been equally out of harm’s way, what could the whale, who was all the timesuffocating, do? Neither with jaws nor tail would any effective reply have been open to him. He might almost as easily have struck or bitten himself, as the preposterous enemy that was wreathed so closely about him.
When one comes to think of it, it is most extraordinary what powers are contained in the limbless body of a snake. The ancestors of snakes had limbs, as can be proved by dissection, for in some, even now, the minute bones of rudimentary hind legs lie embedded in the flesh. They are, of course, perfectly useless, and their presence can only be explained on evolutionary doctrines. Snakes, then, have lost their limbs, and the theory is that they have lost them because they gradually came to require them less and less, not because their body got to be better adapted for the uses to which limbs are put. And yet to a very large extent this has actually come to be the case. For instance, one thing that the two forelegs, or arms, seem specially fitted for, is to clasp or hug, as we see not only with ourselves, but, to an even greater extent, with the ant-eater of South America, or—according to popular belief, at any rate—with the bears. A snake, however, with its long rope-like body, can hug with infinitely greater power and effect than can the strongest pair of arms belonging to an animal of the same size—or, rather, weight. But not only arms, but even hands, may be eclipsed, for the whipster of America, by coiling two different parts of its body round the body of another snake, and then suddenly straightening out the portion between them, which has hitherto been looped, can tearthe individual so attacked into halves. It is doubtful, however, whether a monkey of comparable size could do the same with hands and arms together. In both monkeys and men, again, one of the most useful offices of the hand—perhaps we may call it the chief office—is to convey food to the mouth, but this a snake can do with a coil of its own body, if not as well as ourselves, at least a good deal better than can many animals, whose hands are only paws.
Again, most animals can raise themselves on their hind legs so as to survey the surrounding country, and they walk with their heads raised more or less in the air. These privileges snakes are supposed to have forfeited, yet some of them can stand several feet high, if they wish it, and they can even get over the ground—and that at considerable speed—with the head and front part of the body held thus high in the air. When a creature loses certain highly developed organs, which it once possessed, it is said to have degenerated—to have become a more lowly organised being—and the theory is that as its wants were lowly, it has gained by the change, for a complicated structure is only an encumbrance when it is not required. What good, for instance, would arms and legs be to a man, if he only cared for crawling through mud? He had much better lose them, and become like a worm. But if snakes have lost their limbs in accordance with these principles, on what principle is it that they can do as much or more without them, as other animals can with? For my part, I can’t help thinking that their wants,instead of diminishing, increased, and that, as their limbs didn’t improve, they used their bodies, and found they did better with them.
The different people who had seen the sea-serpent on board thePaulinewent before a magistrate, and made a statement to that effect, which was taken down in writing. I have read it, and it agrees with all I have said, except that there is nothing in it about the cracking of the whale’s ribs. As, however, this is mentioned as having occurred, both in Chambers’sEncyclopædiaand elsewhere, I suppose it really did—that is to say, that the men who witnessed the combat, heard the loud noise like a cannon-shot as each rib broke, and talked about it afterwards, though they did not mention it before the magistrate. The sea-serpent, as well as other huge monsters of a less snake-like appearance, continued to be seen at tolerably frequent intervals after this, and the last time, I think, was only a year or two ago. Again it was a serpent, and off the coast of Norway, and it came so near, that the ship, which was not a large one, seemed endangered, and someone who was on it fired a shot, on which the monster sank.
From all this evidence it would appear that there are various unknown creatures of vast size inhabiting the sea, which are but rarely seen, and that one of these is a gigantic serpent that crushes its prey to death, like a boa-constrictor on land. When one thinks how vast the expanse of ocean is, how profound are its depths, and how inaccessible, compared to the land, is the floor overwhich its waves roll, this does not seem very wonderful, especially as, even on the land, new animals, sometimes of considerable size, are from time to time discovered. The real wonder is that the sea-serpent should have been disbelieved in for such a very long time. Now, a great many people do believe in it, even including some of the more learned ones, who tell us so in solemn, pompous strains, as if what they thought about a thing was almost as important as the thing itself—or, indeed, quite, if not more so. There are scientists, in fact, who seem really to fancy that by giving their adherence to anything, they allow it to be, and so, as it were, create it; nothing else, surely, can explain the sense of awful responsibility under which they seem to labour. No wonder, then, that they should hesitate before saying, “Let there be sea-serpents!” Any conscientious man would, taking their size and voracity into consideration.
Next to the great sea-serpent, the largest and most powerful constricting snake that we know of is the anaconda of South America, which grows to at least thirty feet long, and is said by the Spaniards to be capable of overpowering and eating a bull. Hence the Spanish name for it ismatatoro, or bull-killer, but whether the name is founded upon a fact or a fiction does not appear to be certain. Waterton thought that the Spaniards must have known what they were talking about, and that the very name was an evidence of the thing. He was told, moreover, that the matatoro grew to a much greater length than thirty feet—more than double as long, in fact—but of this, again, there is nosatisfactory evidence. It does not seem in itself impossible that a snake of even thirty, or thirty-five, feet in length should be able to destroy a bull; but there is one thing which inclines me to doubt the anaconda’s doing so, as well as its growing to such a size as the Spaniards reported. Before South America was colonised by the Spaniards there were no cattle in the country, so we must assume that this great snake was not larger or stronger than would be necessary to allow it to overcome the largest wild animals with which it came in contact. These would be the jaguar and the tapir, and as neither of these are so large, or, I think, so strong as a Spanish South American bull, the latter ought, one would think, to be too much for an anaconda. This is not quite conclusive, indeed, for the jaguar itself found no difficulty in preying on horses and cattle as soon as they were introduced, though it had had nothing larger to attack, before, than the tapir or huanaco. Nay, more, the puma, which is smaller and more slightly built than the jaguar, at once began to attack these large animals, as though it had been both “native and to the manner born.” Still, in the manner in which these creatures secure their prey, agility and skill—since they generally dislocate the neck—may come more into play than sheer strength, whereas it is the latter that would be most required by a serpent, in the actual process of constriction, after the seizure had once been made.
Be this as it may, the safest plan is to limit our ideas in regard to the destructive powers of the anaconda, by what it has been known to do, and I do not think thatthere is any properly authenticated instance of its having killed a bull—not for us, that is to say; there may be cases known to the Spaniard. Now, the anaconda is very fond of the water—indeed, it is almost, if not quite, as amphibious as the crocodile; and I have sometimes wondered if it does not prey upon the latter. If it does, then we probably see in this the starting-point from which the great oceanic anaconda, or sea-serpent, has been developed. We have only to picture the remote ancestors of the latter having got first to the mouths of the rivers, and then further and further out to sea, proceeding from crocodiles to sharks of about the same size, and so to larger sharks, and thence, gradually, to more and more gigantic marine forms, till at length, in fierce contention with rorqual or cachalot, the zenith of power was attained.
Other snakes which live in the sea are small, or comparatively small, and these, which, unlike the sea-serpent, are very well known, are extremely poisonous. They, no doubt, have had their origin in some water-loving viper, or other kind of poisonous snakes, of which there are many examples—most snakes, indeed, are fairly at home in the water, and all, probably, are perfectly well able to swim. Of venomous land-snakes the most deadly, perhaps, is the well-known cobra, or hooded snake, of India. The skin of the neck, in this species, is flattened out from just behind the head. Under ordinary circumstances it lies loose, and is not so very noticeable, but when angry or excited the cobra can inflate it, and it then becomes very conspicuous. To do so, it rears its head, together with the upper part of its body, into the air—standing, as it were, on its tail,and, hissing loudly, presents a both strange and terrifying appearance.
This is the snake that the Indian snake-charmers lure out of its hole by playing on a sort of pipe, and then catch and handle with impunity. I, at least, believe that they can do so, and also that they are able, should they chance to be bitten, to cure the bite by applying to it a curious substance, which is called a snake-stone. I believe it because one of these snake-stones has found its way into Africa—probably through the Portuguese—and there I have seen it in the possession of a Dutch family of the name of De Lange, who, though poor people, once refused fifty pounds for it. This proves their belief in its efficacy, and that belief has been founded upon a number of trials, every one of which was successful. Here is one of them—I quote it from my brother’s work,Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa, pp. 14-15: “De Lange told us that the value of the stone was well known in the district, as it had saved the lives of so many people—whom he named—and several horses. Amongst other names he mentioned that of a daughter of an old elephant-hunter, named Antony Fortman, who, he averred, had been bitten by a cobra some years before, when quite a child. As the stone had to be sent for, it had only reached her, he said, just in time to save her life. Two years later, in 1877, this story, at any rate, met with a curious confirmation. At that time Antony Fortman was at Tati, in Matabililand, with his family, his eldest daughter being a girl about sixteen years of age. I had quite forgotten about the snake-stone, when one day, the conversation turningon snakes, Antony Fortman said to his daughter, ‘Turn up your sleeve, and show Mr. Selous where the snake bit you.’ This she did, and on the girl’s left arm, near the shoulder, was a very large and ugly scar, as if a piece of flesh had sloughed away, and the wound had then skinned over. Fortman then proceeded to tell me how the girl had been bitten, some years before, in Marico, when quite a child, and that a horse had been saddled up at once, and a messenger despatched for De Lange’s snake-stone, how the little girl had become insensible and turned nearly black before the stone arrived, and that it had been twice applied before it drew out the snake-poison. Both De Lange and Fortman described the action of the stone in the same way. Friedrich de Lange told me that he had brought this snake-stone with him from the Cape Colony, and that it had been an heirloom in his family for some generations.” Evidence like this appears to me stronger even than the sneers of doctors, though that, too, should be strong, considering how constantly they have sneered at the truth in whatever new form it presented itself—inoculation, mesmerism, and so forth—anything, in fact, that they did not understand, so that they were never at a loss for material.
Almost, if not quite as poisonous as the Indian cobra, is the rattlesnake of America, and, again, the puff-adder of Africa. However, I am not writing a book about snakes, so as space obliges me to finish this chapter, I will only add that I once walked right over a puff-adder without stepping on it, and consequently without its biting me. If it had done so it would have saved me a great deal ofworry and trouble—as is usual in such cases—for I was alone on the top of a very steep hill, and the homestead lay a long way off at the bottom. The brandy-bottle, therefore—which is the colonial remedy for being bitten, as well as for not being bitten, by a puff-adder—would not have been forthcoming, and I had no snake-stone in my pocket.