attention, one gets to see how it happens that in the old voyages the
relaters of the wonders they viewed sometimes wrote as if their hair
stood on end. Suppose the stickleback to be a denizen of the deep; then
conceive it, wearing the shape of a mouse, to rise beside some becalmed
vessel filled with a company of “pilgrimes” of the kind whose narratives
are preserved in “Purchas” and “Hakluyt.” The object is observed by some
old mariner who carries a child’s eye for wonders and marvels amid the
knobs and warts of his walnutshell of a face. Before he can sing out the
mouse vanishes. But the ancient mariner has beheld it, and he
straightway goes and reports the astonishing spectacle to two or three
other ancient mariners, representing the strange fish possibly as of the
size of a cat. The tale is bandied from one long-since venerable
nautical mouth to another till by the time it reaches the captain’s
cabin the sea-mouse has grown as big as a porpoise, collecting, in the
course of its enlargement, a very pretty apparel of flaming eyes, “ears
which itt did cocke, nostrils whence proceeded a sort of white smoak, a
skin whereof ye furre was exceeding riche, and did shine as though
covered with manye gemmes of brighte and piercynge lighte.”[57]
Footnote 57:
Take Captain Edward Haies’ description of a sea-lion in his narrative
of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage: “So upon Saturday in the afternoon,
August 31, we changed our course, and returned back for England; at
which very instant, even in winding about, there passed along between
us and toward the land, which we now forsook, a very lion, to our
seeming in shape, hair, and colour; not swimming after the manner of a
beast, by moving of his feet, but rather sliding upon the water with
his whole body. Thus he passed along, turning his head to and fro,
yawning and gaping wide, with ugly demonstration of long teeth and
glaring eyes, and to bid us a farewell (coming right against the
Hinde) he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring and bellowing as doth a
lion, which spectacle we all beheld, so far as we were able to discern
the same, as men prone to wonder at every strange thing, as this
doubtless was, to see a lion in the ocean sea, or fish in shape of a
lion; what opinion others had thereof, and chiefly the General
himself, I forbear to deliver, but he took it for _bonum omen_,
rejoicing that he was to war against such an enemy, if it were the
devil.”—Hakluyt’s “Voyages,” vol. iii. p. 154.
Few of the queer fish one reads of in the old travels but were evolved
in some such fashion as this, no doubt. It was in a sort of stealthy,
peering way, crossing themselves often and chanting their litanies, that
the early navigators entered the deep solitudes of the great oceans.
Whatever befel them was startling or affrighting, or of wild and amazing
beauty. Their meteors were not the waterspouts of to-day; the eclipse
provoked their _misericordias_ and _Salve Reginas_ and rendered ashen
the chocolate cheeks of the darkest-burnt on board; the glittering
exhalations, known to us as corposants, which danced in the gale or
burnt in the calm at the yard-arms or on the bowsprit end, were prayed
to as the spirit or presence of a saint; the very thunder, though its
roar was no louder than that which broke the repose of the Portugal or
Andalusian hills of the seamen, snatched a note of horror, reverberated
an echo of terror, from the solemn immensity of the liquid plain into
whose horizon over the ships’ bows the mariners stared under the shelter
of their hands, gaping for the auriferous shores which day after day for
weeks their admirals, their captain-generals, had told them they should
have in view anon.
“The pilot smote his breast; the watchman cried,
“Land!” and his voice in faltering accents died.
At once the fury of the prow was quelled;
And (whence or why from many an age withheld)
Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast,
And armed shapes of God-like stature passed!
Slowly along the evening sky they went,
As on the edge of some vast battlement;
Helmet and shield and spear and gonfalon
Streaming a baleful light that was not of the sun!”[58]
Footnote 58:
“The Voyage of Columbus.” There are several fine passages in this
neglected poem. Rogers, in some places, has caught the spirit of the
old chronicles very happily.
I am not surprised, then, that many kinds of queer fish—of fish queerer
than the trout with its rheumatically-warped tail, or the stickleback
with the aspect of a mouse—should figure among the astonishments which
the mariners of those prying and creeping, but most bold-hearted, times,
set down for the edification of posterity. You particularly notice in
these records how exquisitely in keeping with the whole picture of those
old ships and oddly-clad sailors, as one loves to imagine them, and with
the spirit of the mystery of those unattempted seas as breathed by the
salt and ancient chronicler, are the terms in which the writers convey
their discoveries. As, for instance, in this passage from the first
voyage of Columbus: “A Wagtail flew very near the Ship, and they
perceived that the Currents ran not so strong as before, but turned back
with the Tides, and there were fewer Weeds; and the Day following they
took many gilt Fishes.” The word may not strike others as it strikes me;
but there is something in the expression “_gilt_ fishes” that is like a
revelation of the intertropical situation of the mariners. You think of
the long bald gleaming heave of the darkly pure blue swell of the sea,
the fragrance of the yet hidden islands of the Spanish main blowing
sweet in the warm wind coming from the west, the liquid light of the
moon showering its splendour upon the pallid fabric and her bearded men,
and gemming the quaint old structure with diamonds in the dew along her
rails and on her yards, lunar brilliants that shine with the glory of
the stars which softly crowd the velvet deeps of the sky of the
Columbian Antilles. To whom but to mariners exploring for the first time
the wonderland of ocean hidden, for how many centuries? from all Europe
behind the Atlantic sea line, could such a queer fish as this exhibit
itself? “They saw a great Fish, like a middling Whale, and it had on the
Neck a large Shell, like that of a Tortoise, little less than a Target;
the Head it held above water was like a Pipe or But, the Tail like that
of a Tunny Fish, very large, and two vast Fins on the side.”[59] Yet,
queer as this marine man-in-armour seems to have been, with its target
and its head like a butt, Columbus appears to have known enough of it to
enable him to witness in it a barometrical signification; for “by this
Fish and other observations in the sky”—the “other” here is a very
fine—“the Admiral perceived there was like to be a change of Weather.”
Footnote 59:
“The First Voyage of Columbus” in Harris’s collection.
One might justly count that fish queer which was believed to breed
birds. How mean as an illustration of Nature’s capacity as a humourist
would be the gnarled and rounded trout or the stickleback like a mouse
side by side with a turtle, capable of producing, say, wrens or
canaries! The reverend and learned Mr. John Ray, whilst travelling some
two centuries ago through the Low Countries, took some trouble to
inquire into this matter of bird-breeding by turtles and tortoises, and
pronounced it—humbug! He had to oppose a very profound reasoner, no less
a personage, indeed, than Michael Meyerus—of whom, of course, every
schoolboy has heard—a gentleman who has devoted a whole big book to the
subject. But though he terms the statement false and frivolous, there is
so much of possibly designed ambiguity in his “explanation” that I
confess I cannot understand what he means. The “bernacles,” he says,
which are said to be bred in the tortoise, are “hatch’d of eggs of their
own laying, like other birds.” Like _other_ birds! Did the learned Mr.
Ray conceive a tortoise to be a bird?[60] The Hollanders, he goes on, in
their third voyage to discover the North-East Passage, found two
islands, “in one of which they observed a great number of these Geese,”
he is talking of tortoises! “sitting on their Eggs.” He sums up: “All
the Ground of this fancy, as I conceive, is because this fish hath a
bunch of _cirri_ somewhat resembling a tuft of feathers, or the tail of
a bird, which it sometimes puts out into the water, and draws back
again.” Here to be sure is a very great muddle of good meaning. One may
take it that the sailors who believed that turtle and tortoise
“engendered fowlys” were not going to suffer their solemn affirmations
to be discredited by such reasoning as the Rev. John Ray’s.[61]
Footnote 60:
By “bernacle” I suspect he means the barnacle goose.
Footnote 61:
Sinbad the sailor saw “a bird that cometh forth from a sea-shell and
layeth its eggs and hatcheth them upon the surface of the water and
never cometh forth upon the sea upon the face of the earth.” If the
tortoise breeds birds time enough is vouchsafed it for that work.
Grose speaks of the shells of two tortoises: one in the library at
Lambeth Palace that was brought there alive in 1633, and died of the
frost in 1753; the other that was brought to Fulham in 1628, and died
in the same year as the other. “What were the ages of these tortoises
at the time they were placed in the above gardens is not
known.”—_Olio._ 288.
So far as the superstitious emotions they excited are concerned, it may
be truly said of queer fish that even in their ashes live the wonted
fires. As an example: the quantity of petrified fish-bones found at
Malta fired the ingenious Monkish imagination with the idea of a curious
fable. It was said that St. Paul when at Malta, on being bitten in the
hand by a viper, did by his prayers obtain of God that all the serpents
in Malta should be turned into stones. That all the petrified bones upon
which this fancy was based belonged to queer fish is not to be supposed;
but that many queer fish did deposit their bones on the Maltese shore in
the course of ages need not be questioned, and such is my faith in the
distorted trouts and mouse-formed sticklebacks of the deep that I do not
scruple to count the above fable concerning St. Paul and the vipers due
to the inspirations of the fossilized remains of the “queer fish” only.
Was not the sea-unicorn a queer fish in the judgment of our great
grandsires? If not, it is strange that they should have endowed its horn
or sword with quite magical properties. It was even believed of the
little _cheval marin_, or _cavaletto_, that if roasted and partly
devoured, the remainder being applied to the wound, after some preparing
of it with honey and vinegar, would cure the bite of a mad dog. There is
no doubt it got this reputation from its fancied resemblance to the
unicorn. An old Danish traveller thought to explode this superstition of
medicinal and magical virtues in the horn of the sea-unicorn: “Supposing
that what has been pretended to be the true horn was really such, I will
venture to affirm there is no more virtue in it than in that of a stag,
a goat, or elephant’s tooth, which is made use of to stop the spitting
of blood, which is done by the astringent quality of these horns, and
that cannot so properly be called a virtue as a malignity.” Yet this
writer was one of a trading party who presented the King of Denmark with
two of these horns, as though they were extraordinary rareties and
possessed of a score of curative qualities; and his Majesty took them to
be real unicorn horns—the horns of a fabled beast—and valued them
accordingly. A queer fish indeed in those old times, but common enough
in these, and universally known as the “sword fish.” Dr. Edward Browne
when at Utrecht, two hundred years ago, saw three of such horns, one of
which, tipped with silver, was used as a drinking cup; and he enters
them in his notes as wonders. Possibly he was impressed by the sight of
a drinking cup five feet long. But he was in the land of Mynheer van
Dunk, who was probably living at that time. He tells of a Danish king
that had one hundred horns of the sea-unicorn “for the making of a
magnificent throne.” And what finer throne should an old sea king desire
to sit upon?
It is not hard to conceive that fish undergo constitutional and organic
changes in the course of centuries, and that, say, about the period of
the Deluge the sea was full of objects which would strike us as
extremely queer specimens now, though to Noah, Ham, and Shem they would
be as familiar as the whiting or the dab is to us. But I cannot imagine
that very remarkable transformations or developments could take place in
three or four, or even five or six centuries. Who shall tell, for
example, how many hundreds of years have gone to the making of the
unhappy stickleback that was sent to the Aquarium? The changes would be
gradual. Taking the evolvments in their gradations, you would possibly
find the family mouse-like expression growing less and less marked as
you worked your way back through this stickleback’s pedigree. But the
extreme circumstantiality of the old voyagers’ descriptions of queer
fish should almost really persuade one to suppose that what they beheld
died shortly after having been viewed, so that the like has never been
seen since. Here is an example of my meaning, taken from Commodore
Beaulieu’s voyage:
“While the calm and the excessive heat continued we saw a certain white
thing about the bigness of an ostrich-egg floating upon the water, which
sunk when the ship came within fifty or sixty paces of it. It resembled
a man’s head without hair, and some say they observed two black eyes and
a mouth upon it.”
It is the “some say” of these tales which makes them so bewildering. Did
this remarkable sea-face with its two black eyes wink? Did it sneer as
it sank? Why did not “others say” that ere sinking it raised its thumb
to its nose and extended its fingers in the form of a fan, “thereby
designing an ironical salutation of farewell”?
But a mere bald head with black eyes and a mouth floating about the sea
is but a twopenny queer fish compared with the marine curiosities which
ancient mariners have beheld and even given portraits of. Figure a hairy
whale, four acres big, with eye-sockets so capacious that fifteen men
could sit in each of them, as in a public house parlour, and pass jacks
of whiskey about; the eyes themselves of ten cubits in circumference! or
hear Père Fournier tell of the monster that “in the reign of Philip II.
of Spain”—the epoch of marine chimeras dire!—“appeared in the ocean with
two great wings, and sailing like a ship. A vessel saw it, and breaking
one of its wings with a cannon ball, the monster swiftly entered the
Straits of Gibraltar with horrible cries, and finally came ashore at
Valentia, where it was found dead.” Then follow these circumstantial
strokes: “Its skull was so large that seven men could enter into it. A
man on horseback could enter its throat. The jaw-bone, seventeen feet
long, is still in the Escurial.” Most readers would feel inclined to say
of this monster, “Very like a whale!”
Unhappily conjecture is blinded by imaginative touches, such as those of
the eyes and mouth of the bald-headed fungus of Beaulieu’s voyage. Queer
fish as big as islands are constantly occurring in the old accounts. The
whale was Job’s Leviathan in those days, and the goggling sailor was
easily persuaded by his terrors to multiply the mountain of blubber by
two or three hundred. A man saw a whale in the sea of Zendi that was
nearly forty-five thousand cubits long—about a mile, if the cubit be
eighteen inches. Sinbad wrote in perfect correspondence with the spirit
of the Ancient Mariner when he describes his landing on an island which
suddenly trembled and proved the back of a prodigious fish. Others tell
of fish like cows and camels; of fish dressed like monks and bishops,
cowled and mitred, and gazing up at the ship with austere and lenten
countenances. Others arrived home with the news of the kraken, that
“hugest of living things” as Sir Walter Scott describes it, whose horns
would be seen “welking” and waving over the heights of a fog-bank, to
the horror and consternation of even the hardiest fishermen, who made
haste to bear away under all press of oar and sail. Others, again, would
tell of cuttle fish, or squid, so vast in size and titanic in power that
they easily coiled their serpentine membranes round about the masts of
ships of a thousand tons and quietly capsized them.
Where have all these queer fish gone? Why did they exhibit themselves
only in the middle ages and down to about old Sir Thomas Browne’s time?
No account of any prodigies such as ravished or affrighted the ancient
seaman is to be met in the records of the _Beagle_ or the _Challenger_.
Yet let us take heart. The stickleback like a mouse is indeed a meagre
substitute for the kraken; and the hard-alee trout looks mean alongside
a whale a mile long. But their existence serves to assure us that the
age is not wholly barren in wonders, and that there are still some queer
fish about.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_STRANGE CRAFT._
In the beginning of the seventeenth century one Peter Jansen, a Dutch
merchant, ordered a ship to be built for him on the lines of Noah’s ark.
Of course, as this vessel was designed to contain only a few animals,
and those chiefly men, her size was not that of her famous prototype.
The Dutchman’s orders were that the vessel should exactly answer
proportionally to the dimensions of the fabric that was stranded on
Ararat. Jansen flourished in pre-scientific times; but this notion of
his went so far beyond the most extravagant credulities of the period
that the scheme was viewed as a mere fanatical whim of a Mennonite, to
which sect our friend belonged. He persevered, however, in spite of
being heartily jeered at, more particularly by the seafaring folk who
assembled to view the shipwrights at work; but when the vessel was
eventually launched it was discovered that ships built in this manner
were, in times of peace, commodious above all others, because they would
convey one-third more cargo than other holds, and yet be navigated by
the same number of hands which other forecastles carried. Those who
would hear more of this ark may consult—if they can find it—the
“Bibliotheca Biblia,” vol. i.[62]
Footnote 62:
The story is there related: “Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, caused a
ship to be built for him, answering in its respective proportions to
those of Noah’s ark. At first this ark was looked upon as no better
than a fanatical vision of this Jansen; but afterwards it was
discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace,
beyond all others most commodious,” etc.
That Jansen erred, according to the light of his times, who shall
declare? Sir Thomas Browne, who lived much about that period, would
prove—I do not say he does—that Noah’s ark was the swiftest vessel that
ever drove a keel through a surge—nimbler than the Baltimore clippers,
the Mediterranean fruiters, the slavers of the Spanish main; in fact,
very nearly as fast as the Atlantic expresses which storm through the
ocean between the Mersey and New York. I find in the “Extracts from
Commonplace Books” in Browne’s works this passage: “Whether Noah might
not be the first man that compassed the globe? Since, if the flood
covered the whole earth, and no lands appeared to hinder the current, he
must be carried with the wind and current according to the sun, and so
in the space of the deluge might near make the tour of the globe. And
since if there were no continent of America, and all that tract a sea, a
ship setting out from Africa without other help would at last fall upon
some part of India or China.” This is as much as to say that Noah sailed
round the world in forty days! Smart work when you consider that it
takes a twelve-knot mail-boat thirty-seven days to steam to New Zealand.
It cannot, however, be concluded from her dimensions that, even though
blown along by a gale of wind right over her stern, the ark equalled the
speed of a Union or Royal Mail steamer. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his
“History of the World,” a mine of exquisite thought and of sweet and
noble expression, devotes a page or two to consideration of the size and
form of Noah’s ship; and what a man who was as great a sailor as he was
poet, philosopher, and soldier, and who lived near to Jansen’s time, has
to say of her must be worth hearing in this particular connection. He is
unable to point to the place where the ark was “framed,” but suspects it
was near the Caucasus where grew “goodly cedars.” “It was thought to
have a flat bottom, and a crested roof, and the wood gopher of which it
was made was very probably cedar, being light, easy to cut, sweet, and
lasting.” The pitch he thinks was bitumen. Her length was six hundred
feet, the breadth one hundred feet, and the depth sixty feet. He
calculates her internal capacity in cubical cubits, four hundred and
fifty thousand, “which is sufficient for an hundred kind of beasts and
their meat in the lower and second stories, and two hundred and eighty
fowls, with Noah and his family, in the third.” So far as beam and
length go she was considerably narrower than the ships in Jansen’s day,
which were commonly about three and a half times as long as they were
broad. But what of her bows? Had she a run? Had she the flat bottom of a
barge or the moulded depth of the clipper? But it matters not; Jansen’s
inspiration found no copyists; his fabric has floated solitarily down to
us as a strange ship; and now that we have viewed her she may brace
round her top-sail yard again and proceed on her phantom course.
I do not think, however, that we can find much title in our own marine
performances to justify laughter at the old folks’ ships. Is it
conceivable that ugly as Jansen’s Noah’s ark must have been she would
not have looked comely alongside some of the metal horrors of recent and
contemporary invention? Something of the indefinable charm you find in
the simpering shepherds and shepherdesses of the crockery age of
literature, in Melibœus piping to the skipping lambkins on an oaten pipe
and Daphne toying with a lover’s true-knot under some spreading shade,
enters into those vanished ships with their black or yellow sides, their
rows of little guns, their gay and fluttering finery of masthead
streamers, ancients, pennons, and the like. I know more than one war
ship now afloat that you might “dress” from stem to pole-masthead and
overboard aft, turn her into a rainbow of bunting, without achieving
more than the accentuation of her ugliness. No! it is not for us,
forsooth, to talk of taste, smile as we may at the illustrations of our
grandsires’ sturdy struggles towards that imperial fruition in which we,
their inheritors, find our most reasonable and sovereign boast.
I find a pretty fancy, and an audacious one, too, in an account of a
strange ship in 1769. In that year there arrived at Naples from Palermo
a small vessel, whose length of keel was twelve feet. She was
ship-rigged—that is to say, she had three masts, with all the yards that
ships then carried across, and her ship’s company was composed of one
man only. She is described as being the model of a man-of-war of sixty
guns. Her builder, who navigated her, was a carpenter; he had worked in
an Italian arsenal, then went to Trieste, where he built his ship,
embarked in her with two men for Messina, then proceeded alone to
Palermo and Naples to present his wonderful model to the King. She is
probably the only full-rigged model of a ship actually sailed by a man
in her from one port to another on record. Figure the blue Italian
waters and this lovely toy, with the sunshine flashing up its canvas
into satin, blandly leaning over from the fragrant breeze, and slipping
through the liquid sapphire with a little curl of silver at her stem!