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 Lieutenant Drummond, 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
animal _à 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. The _Dædalus_ at
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
barque _Pauline_, 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 time suffocating,
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 tear the
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 the _Pauline_
went 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’s _Encyclopædia_ and 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 over which 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 is
_matatoro_, 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 no satisfactory
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 that there 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 turning on 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 of worry 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.