THE SEA ROVERS (POULPE, &C.)
The Medusæ and the Molluscs are generally innocent creatures, and I
have thus far dwelt, as it were, with them in their amiable and
peaceful world. Thus far I have met with few carnivora; and even those
few killed only in the stern necessity of hunger, and even of those
part fed only on atoms, animal jelly, life unorganized, and scarcely
commenced. As a consequence, pain, anger, cruelty were absent. Their
little souls had, nevertheless, a ray, the aspiration towards the
light alike of Heaven and of Love, revealed in the changing flame
which illumines and rejoices the seas.
But, now, I have to enter into quite another world: a world of war,
slaughter, fierce pursuit, and greedy devouring. I must confess that
from the beginning, from the first appearance of life, death also
appeared; a rapid and useful purification of the globe from the weak
and slow, but prolific tribes whose fecundity would otherwise have
been mischievous. In the oldest strata we find two wondrous creatures,
the _Devourer_ and the _Sucker_. The first is made known to us by the
imprint of the Trilobite, a species no longer existing, an extinct
destroyer of extinct species. The second is known to us by a frightful
remnant, a beak of almost two feet pertaining to the great Sucker, the
Leiche or Poulpe of Dujardin. Judging from that immense beak, this
monster must have had an enormous body, and sucking-arms of twenty or
thirty feet, like a prodigious spider.
Sad reflection, these murderous creatures are those which we earliest
find in the depths of the earth. Are we then to suppose that death
preceded life? No doubt; but the soft creatures upon which these
monsters fed have perished utterly, not leaving remains or even
imprint of themselves.
The devourers and the devoured, were they two nations of different
origin? The contrary is more probable. From the mollusc, form
undecided, matter still fit to be converted to any form, the
superabundant strength of the young world, richly plethoric, abounding
in alimentation, there must at an early period have proceeded two
forms, contrary in appearance, but tending and qualified to the same
end. Swelling and breathing, and measurelessly inflating itself, the
Mollusc became an enormous balloon, an absorbing bladder, absorbing
all the more as it stretched the more, ever craving and ever
consuming, but toothless,--and we have the _Sucker_. On the other
hand, by the self-same force, the Mollusc gradually developing
articulated members of which each had its shell, and hardening this
shelled creature everywhere, but especially at the claws and mandibles
formed for gnawing and grinding, to pulp or powder, the very hardest
substances became--the _Devourer_. Let us in the first place, in this
chapter, speak of the first, the _Sucker_.
The Sucker of the soft gelatinous world, was himself soft and
gelatinous. Warring upon and devouring the molluscs, he himself none
the less, remained mollusc, that is to say, still a mere embryon.
There would be something absurd, caricatural, were it not so terrible,
in this sight of a mere foetus, soft and transparent, yet cruel,
raging, eager, breathing nothing but murder. For he, see you, goes not
to war for the mere sake of food. He has a real passion for
destroying, for destruction's sake; whenever he has gorged himself,
well nigh to bursting, he will destroy still. Destitute of defensive
armour, his threatening snortings disguise, but by no means quiet, his
real anxiety; his real, his only safety, is an attack. He is the
veritable bully of the young world; really vulnerable himself, and yet
so terrible to others; he sees in everything that he meets only enemy
or victim. At all risks he casts hither and thither his long arms, or
rather his whip-lashes, tipped with cupping glasses, and upon enemy or
victim, before the fight or the capture commences, he sends out his
stupefying, paralysing effluvia.
Double power. To the mechanical strength of these outstretched arms,
add the magical force of that mysterious fluid, and a singularly acute
hearing and quick eye. You see in all these, a creature to alarm you.
What must it have been, then, when the early world so lavished its
wealth of alimentation, that these monsters of the deep could feed and
swell indefinitely? They have decreased now, both in number and in
size. Yet, even lately, Rang tells us that he has seen them big as a
hogshead; and Peron has seen them quite as large in the South Sea. The
creature rolled, and snorted in the rolling wave, with a noise to
terrify, to astonish, all meaner creatures. His arms, six or seven
feet in length, turning, twisting, writhing, and grasping in every
direction, imitated some furious pantomime, some fantastic dance of at
once furious and eccentric serpents.
After these matter of fact statements, it seems to me, that we should
not be quite so incredulous, not quite so scornful, when we read the
accounts of the old voyagers; we should not curl the lip _quite_ so
insolently as we read, in Denis de Montford, that he saw a monstrous
Poulpe, grasp, with his enormous arms, lash, scourge, smite, stupefy
with his electric lashes a fierce and strong mastiff which, in spite
of all his efforts, and his terrible howlings, had to succumb, did
succumb, _did_ die in that giant and terrible embrace.
The Poulpe, that terrible and living steam machine, can accumulate
such incalculable force and elasticity, that, as d'Orbigny tells us
(see his article Cephal.) it can leap from the sea to the deck of a
ship. This at once relieves our old voyagers from the charge so often
and so lightly made against them, of exaggeration and mere romance.
They told us, and it now seems quite truly told us, that they came
athwart a gigantic Poulpe that leaped inboard, twining its prodigious
arms around masts and shrouds; and the monstrous creature would have
had possession of the craft, and would have devoured all hands, but
that these latter cut away its arms with their axes, as they would
have cut away masts in a case of impending wreck, and the mutilated
but still threatening creature fell into the sea.
Some have given this creature credit for arms of sixty feet in length;
and others have reported that while cruising in the North seas, they
fell in with the Kraken, a monstrous creature, half a league in
circumference, no doubt, one of our terrible _Poulpes_, able to
embrace, stupefy, and devour, a whale a hundred feet long.
The prolonged existence of these monsters, would have endangered
Nature herself, would have absorbed our very globe. But, on the one
hand, gigantic birds (perhaps, for instance, the _Epiornis_) made war
upon them; and on the other hand the exhausted earth destroyed the
monster by cutting off its supply of alimentation.
Thank Heaven, our existing Poulpes are somewhat less terrible. Their
elegant species of the present day, the Argonaut, that graceful
swimmer in its wavy shell, the Calmar, good sailor, if ever there was
one, and the handsome Seiche, blue-eyed, and beautiful to look upon,
traverse the Ocean, hither and thither, annoying nothing but the small
creatures that they need for their support.
In them we see exhibited the first approach to the vertebral bone;
they display, too, a perfect rainbow of changing colors, that come and
go--shine, fade, dazzle and die. We may quite fairly call them the
Chameleons of the sea. They have the exquisite perfume, ambergris,
which the whale only owes to the countless multitudes of Seiches which
it has absorbed. And the porpoises, too, make an enormous destruction
of them. Your Seiches are very gregarious. About the month of May,
they seek the coast to deposit their eggs, and the Porpoises await
them there, sure of a splendid banquet. And your Porpoise is somewhat
of a _gourmet_ though sufficiently _gourmand_; he feeds delicately,
though we cannot deny that he feeds largely. The head and the eight
arms are his tid-bits, tender and easy of digestion; the rest of the
carcass they may have who come for it. Tens of thousands of these
mutilated Seiches you find upon the coast at Royan; and there, too,
you will see the Porpoises making their mighty bounds when in chase of
their coveted prey, the Seiches, or in bacchanal enjoyment and
revelling when the prey has been taken and the banquet is over.
Notwithstanding the strange, not to say grotesque, appearance of its
beak, the Seiche is decidedly an interesting creature. All the various
shades of the most brilliant and various rainbow, come and go, die and
reappear on his transparent skin, according to the play of the light
as he turns now hither and now thither, and as he dies his azure eyes
look upon you with an expression, now flashing and now fading, which
seems to rebuke you for your cruelty in killing, or to express a
regret at parting with life.
The general decrease of that class, so immensely important in the past
ages, is less remarkable as to the navigators (Seiches, &c.) than in
the Poulpe, properly so called, the sad frequenter of our shores. It
has not the same firmness as the Seiche, strengthened as the latter is
by an interior bone, and it has not, like the Argonaut, a resisting
exterior, a shell to protect the most vulnerable organs. Neither has
it the kind of sail which aids its navigation and spares it the labor
of _rowing_. It paddles about along our shores, hugging the shore
like some timid coaster. And its conscious inferiority teaches it
habits of treachery; it is at once timid and bold--lying in ambush
until quite sure that it can devour without the preliminary necessity
of a fight. Lying in wait in some rocky crevice, it awaits its prey.
That having passed in unsuspicious security, your Poulpe throws out
the terrible lashes, the weaker of the prey are devoured, the stronger
get loose and escape. A man when swimming, if thus attacked, finds no
difficulty in mastering his at once insolent and imbecile assailant.
Disgusted, but not alarmed, he handles the creature without gloves,
crushes, collapses him, and feels actually vexed with himself for
having even for an instant been provoked by an enemy so contemptible.
"Bah!" one is tempted to exclaim, on having so easily vanquished such
a thing--"Bah! You came swelling, blowing, threatening, and after all
you prove to be only a sham, a mask rather than a being. Without
fixity, without substance, a blown-up bladder, now collapsed, to be
to-morrow a mere drop, a nameless portion of the dark blue waters of
the Sea."