LEAVING BURMAH.—CAPTURING A SEA-SNAKE.—STORIES OF THE SEA-SERPENT.
"Where shall we go next?" one of the boys asked, as soon as they were safe on shore at Rangoon.
"That will depend on circumstances," the Doctor answered. "India and Ceylon are before us, and we must first see to which we can get with the least trouble and delay. We can find ships for Calcutta or Madras, I presume, and perhaps we may hit upon one that is ready to go to Ceylon. The latter would be preferable, as we can easily get from Ceylon to India, whereas it might be out of our way to go to Ceylon after seeing the peninsula of Hindostan. We will see what can be done."
The trio proceeded to their banker's, and asked about the possibilities of departure.
To their delight they ascertained that there was a steamer ready to leave for England with a cargo of rice, and she would stop for coal at Point de Galle, in Ceylon. She had accommodations for a few passengers—the banker they were visiting was agent for her—and it required but a short time for the whole business to be arranged. Doctor Bronson and the youths were booked for Point de Galle, and returned at once to their hotel to be ready to go on board as soon as the sun rose the next morning.
The steamer sailed promptly, and by noon they were out of the river and leaving the shores of Burmah behind them.
COAST OF THE ANDAMAN ISLANDS.
The general direction of the ship was toward the south-west. The captain told the boys that on the morning of the second day out they would pass the Andaman Islands, but would not stop there; the Andaman Islands, he explained, were a long narrow group that extended nearly parallel to the coast, and belonged nominally to British India, though only a few of them had been occupied. "The remarkable things about these islands," he continued, "are the inhabitants. They are different from any other known race in the world, and their language has no resemblance to that of any part of India or the peninsula of Malacca.
"They are small in stature, being rarely more than five feet in height, and they have slender limbs, woolly hair, flat noses and thick lips, so that they resemble the negro more than any other race. Their skins are black, and the only clothing they wear is a thick plastering of mud, which they put on to prevent the insects biting them. When it cracks, or becomes worn in spots, a fresh roll in the mud gives them a new suit of clothes, and I doubt if there is any place in the world where a man can be clad more cheaply than in these islands, provided he follows the fashions of the natives. They never cultivate the soil, but live entirely by fishing; and one of their favorite amusements is to paint their faces with red ochre."
Frank thought it would be very interesting to have a look at this strange people, but the captain shook his head, and continued:
"They will not hold any intercourse with strangers, and whenever a ship goes there the natives flee to the interior. If a ship is wrecked on the coast, and the crew falls into the hands of the natives, they are usually killed; it need to be said that the natives were cannibals, and for a long time the story was believed; but later investigation shows that it is untrue. But their bad reputation and strange appearance caused it to be reported that the people of the Andaman Islands were monsters; in the time of Marco Polo this story was current, and the dog-headed men of Angamanain, of which he writes, are generally believed to have been the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands."
As the captain had predicted, the islands were visible at daylight on the second morning; Frank and Fred were up early to have a look at them, and, while they steamed steadily onward, the boys indulged in numerous speculations as to the strange region of the world they were now in.
Suddenly the first officer of the ship called to them to see a curiosity. The inspection of the islands was abruptly terminated, and the boys went to where the officer was standing.
The men were occupied with their daily task of washing the deck of the steamer; half a dozen were busily scrubbing with old brooms and "swabs," and two were engaged in hoisting water over the ship's side by means of a large bucket. At the last haul the bucket had brought up a snake that was wriggling about on the deck in the hope of getting away, and he kept opening and closing his mouth as though he would like to revenge himself on somebody or something by a bite.
Fred observed that the men kept at a respectful distance from the snake, as though they were afraid of him; consequently, he followed their example, and did not venture closely.
"Here's a sea-serpent for you," said the officer. "If you want him you're welcome."
Neither of the youths cared for the property in its present condition, and so the offer was declined. Frank asked if it was a genuine sea-serpent.
"As near as I've ever seen," was the reply; "but it isn't what you commonly understand by the sea-serpent. This is a sea-snake, and he is found only in the Indian Ocean and the waters connected with it. They are generally not far from land, but I've seen 'em one or two hundred miles away from shore, so it's pretty certain they spend most if not all their lives in the water."
"His bite is said to be poisonous," he continued, "and for that reason nobody wants to go near him. As soon as you've seen all you want to of him in his live state we'll kill him, and then you can look at him closely."
Just then Doctor Bronson came on deck, and after a brief survey of the reptile his curiosity was satisfied. Then the snake was killed by a blow from a handspike, and stretched on the deck.
SEA-SNAKE OF THE INDIAN OCEAN AND FOX-SHARK.
Frank measured the reptile, and found him a trifle over three feet in length. The head was quite broad and long, and the neck slender. The body was covered with fine scales, and the tail was formed by a gradual thinning of the body without any reduction of height. The Doctor said the tail was a close resemblance to that of the thrasher, or fox-shark, and he added that the latter had sometimes been mistaken for a sea-serpent.
While Frank was measuring the snake, Fred was looking over the side of the ship in the hope of seeing another. Suddenly he shouted,
"Here! here! come quick! A snake! a snake!"
Doctor Bronson and Frank ran to the side, and looked in the direction where Fred pointed.
There, sure enough, was a snake swimming with his head a couple of inches out of the water, and taking things very leisurely. He propelled himself with his tail, which he swung easily from side to side, exactly as we see with the great majority of fishes. He made very little ripple on the water, and it required sharp eyes to discover him. They watched him as he swum away from the side of the ship, and in a very short time he was out of sight.
Meantime, the captured snake had been thrown overboard, as no one cared to preserve it, and the men did not wish to keep it on deck. "These reptiles come to life sometimes after they're killed," said one of the old mariners, "and before you know it they lay hold of your foot if it is the first thing handy."
The Doctor and the youths walked aft, and seated themselves under the awning, where they could look at the receding shores of the islands. A few moments after they were seated, Frank asked the Doctor if he had ever seen a real sea-serpent.
The Doctor smiled, as he answered in the negative.
"But is there such a thing as a sea-serpent?" Frank persisted.
"That is a direct question," the Doctor responded, "but I am not able to answer it directly. Before I say yes or no I must make an explanation, or rather I will tell you what is known on the subject, and then you may make the answer for yourselves.
"It is the fashion of the time," he continued, "to laugh at any one who thinks he has seen what may be a sea-serpent. On several occasions reputable ship-captains have come forward with their officers and crew to make oath to what they had witnessed, and their chief reward has been to be ridiculed by the newspapers generally: they have been treated as deliberate liars, or it is hinted that they were intoxicated at the time they supposed they were looking at a sea-serpent. The result has been to make mariners reluctant to give any kind of testimony concerning the possible existence of a sea-serpent, through fear of being treated as impostors.
"About a year ago, while one of the steamers of the Peninsula and Oriental Company was making its voyage from Bombay to Aden, two or three passengers, who were on deck early in the morning, saw what exactly resembled a snake, sixty or eighty feet long, thrashing the water about half a mile from the ship. They called the attention of the captain to it, and then that of the officer on watch; the captain turned for a few seconds in the direction indicated, and then looked away, and, as he did so, he instructed the officer of the watch to keep his eyes straight ahead. The passengers afterward drew up a statement of what they had seen, and asked the captain to sign it; he refused to do so, and furthermore ordered his officers and men to make no mention of the affair in any way whatever. He gave as an excuse for his action that, no matter how seriously and carefully he made his statement, he would be ridiculed for it, and his veracity and sobriety questioned, and he did not care to be thus treated. 'If a snake should come on board,' said he, 'and eat up half the crew and passengers, I wouldn't say it was a snake, unless I could take him along to prove it, and perhaps then I wouldn't.'
"The sea-serpent described in ancient histories is undoubtedly fictitious, and so is the one referred to in the nautical song, somewhat like this,
"'From the tip of his nose to the end of his tail
Is just nine thousand miles.'
"We will dismiss everything of antiquity, and also the serpent of the foregoing ballad, and come down to modern times. Naturalists are now pretty well agreed that the existence of the sea-serpent is a possibility; the celebrated Professor Agassiz said that if a naturalist had to sketch the outlines of an ichthyosaurus or plesiosaurus from the remains we have of them, he would make a drawing very similar to the sea-serpent as it has been described. The race is generally believed to be extinct, but he thought it probable that it would be the good-fortune of some person on the coast of Norway or North America to find a living representative of this type of reptile.
"Fossil remains of reptiles that lived ages and ages ago have been found by the geologists, and their former existence is proved beyond a doubt. For example, we find that on the coast of North America,there were reptiles that could swallow a full-sized man as easily as a frog swallows a fly. A restoration of the fossil reptiles that once flourished in the State of New Jersey would not make that State a pleasant one to reside in, and the same may be said of the plains of Kansas and other parts of America. Look at this picture of the reptiles of New Jersey, and then say if you would like them for neighbors.
RESTORED FOSSIL REPTILES OF NEW JERSEY.
"If such things have lived, why is it impossible for some members of the family to be prowling around to-day in the depths of the ocean? If the size of the monsters causes us to be sceptical, let us remember that there are inhabitants of the deep that quite equal them in bulk. Whales that exceed eighty feet in length are not uncommon, and when we consider their great depth in proportion to their length, we can easily have enough to make a first-class sea-serpent, and leave a few tons to spare.
CUTTLE-FISH ATTACKING A CHINESE JUNK.
"Then there is the colossal cuttle-fish which abounds in the Indian Ocean and adjacent waters; they have been found with arms twenty-eight feet long and two feet in diameter, and, as they have eight of these arms, the aggregate length of all of them would surpass any respectable sea-serpent. Fishing-boats and canoes are sometimes attacked by them, and it is said that they have been known to overturn a two-masted junk. In the year 1878 the steamer Yang-tse, of the French Mail Company, while coming down the China Sea, ran into one of these cuttle-fish during the night, and the shock of the blow was so great that it was felt throughout the ship.
"Among the islands of the Indian Ocean the cuttle-fish is the great dread of the natives, and on the coast of Madagascar the negroes will not venture to swim near rocks or cliffs. They will tell you any number of stories of men that have been pulled under water by these fish and drowned; and from their great dread of the fish, it is very evident that their stories are not works of fiction.
"So much for the huge inhabitants of the deep that we know about; let us come to the sea-serpent himself, and investigate the cases in which he is said to have been seen.
"The Rev. Paul Egede, missionary to Greenland in the eighteenth century, says as follows:
"'On the 6th day of July, 1734, there appeared a very large and frightful sea-monster which raised itself so high out of water that its head reached above our main-top. It had a long, sharp snout, and spouted water like a whale, and very broad flappers. The body seemed to be covered with scales, and the skin was uneven and wrinkled, and the lower part was formed like a snake. After some time the creature plunged backward into the water, and then turned its tail up above the surface, a whole ship-length from the head.'"
"Perhaps it was only a whale he saw," Frank remarked.
"I should have said," responded the Doctor, "that the good missionary was as familiar as an old whaleman with the appearance of the whale and his kindred, and furthermore that his book shows him in other things to have been a very careful and exact observer.
"Bishop Pontoppidan, of Norway, devoted a good deal of time to the investigation of the sea-serpent, and personally sought out all the mariners he could hear of who had seen one of the monsters. Here is the story told by Captain Lawrence de Ferry, of Bergen, Norway, and he, with two of his sailors, made oath to its correctness before a magistrate:
"'The latter end of August, in the year 1746, on my return from Trondhjem on a very calm and hot day, within six miles of Molde I heard a kind of murmuring voice from the men at the oars, and observed that the man at the helm kept off the land. I inquired what was the matter, and was told that there was a sea-snake before us. I then ordered the man at the helm to keep to the land again, and to come up with this sea-snake, of which I had heard so many stories; as the snake swum faster than we could row, I took my gun and fired at it; on this he immediately plunged into the water. We rowed to the place where it sunk down, thinking it would come to the surface; however, it would not. The head of this snake, which he held more than two feet above the surface of the water, resembled that of a horse. It was of a grayish color, and the mouth was quite black and very large; it had black eyes, and a long white mane that hung down from the neck to the surface of the water. Besides the head and neck we saw seven or eight coils or folds of the snake, which were very thick; and as far as we could guess, there was about a fathom distance between each fold.'
CAPTAIN LAWRENCE DE FERRY'S SEA-SERPENT.
"Captain Little, of the United States Navy, in 1781, describes a snake he saw in broad day on the coast of Maine, in 1780. It was about forty or fifty feet long and fifteen inches in diameter, and he carried three or four feet of his length out of water. Captain Little ordered out his boat to pursue the snake, but they did not succeed in capturing him.
"Rev. Donald Maclean, a Scotch minister, describes a snake that he saw in 1808, which greatly alarmed his own crew and that of several fishing-boats that were out with him. In 1809 an American clergyman, who was out in a boat with his wife and daughter and another lady, in Penobscot Bay, saw a serpent that they estimated to be about sixty feet long, and as large as a sloop's mast. About this time the same snake, or one closely resembling it, was frequently seen in the neighborhood of Penobscot Bay, and a few years later (1817) a similar sea-monster appeared near Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was seen on many occasions and by great numbers of persons. The Linnæan Society of Boston took the matter up, and collected the testimony of as many witnesses as could be reached. It remained in sight all the way from several minutes to two hours, and at distances varying from thirty feet to a quarter of a mile. One man saw it moving across the bay at the rate of a mile a minute; another watched it for half a day, and says it had a head shaped like a rattlesnake's, but as large as that of a horse. One man saw it open its mouth, which was like a snake's; another said the body was rough and scaly; and another that it darted out its tongue at least a couple of feet. Its length was estimated all the way from forty to eighty feet, and its color was dark. Finally, the magistrate before whom the testimony was taken had an opportunity of seeing the monster, and his evidence corroborates that of the rest.
HEAD OF CAPTAIN M'QUHAE'S SERPENT.
"In 1830 the sea-serpent appeared near Kennebunk, Maine, and was seen by several persons. In 1845 he showed himself near Lynn, Massachusetts, and he had a great many observers, among whom were several of the old merchants and other solid men of Boston and its vicinity. He has appeared several times since then at various points on the New England coast, but has not been seen by many persons.
"Later still we have the evidence of Captain Peter M'Quhae, commanding the frigate Dædalus, of the British Navy. He testifies that, on August 6th, 1849, in latitude 24° 44' S., longitude 9° 22' E., he and his officers and crew saw a sea-serpent. He thus describes it:
"'Our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea; and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with what our main-top-sail yard would show in the water, there was at least sixty feet of the animal just under the surface, no part of which was used in propelling it through the water, either by horizontal or vertical undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee-quarter that, had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye; and 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 any 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 color 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. It was seen by the quarter-master, the boatswain's mate, and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above mentioned.'
CAPTAIN M'QUHAE'S SEA-SERPENT.
"He gives a sketch of the serpent to show his general appearance, which certainly is very snaky.
"In 1860," the Doctor continued, "a sea-serpent was washed ashore on the Bermuda Islands, which answered exactly the description of Captain M'Quhae's snake, except in size. It was sixteen feet seven inches long, and its construction was such as to show very clearly that its home was in the water. A snake three feet long, lacking a single inch, was killed on the coast of Massachusetts and sent to some of the scientific men of Boston. They pronounced it a true sea-serpent, and found that its body could be bent vertically with the greatest ease, but it was difficult to bend it horizontally. The same was the case with the Bermuda serpent; and in all the descriptions of the sea-serpent off the coast of New England or of Norway, it has been observed that the folds came above the water, one beyond another. One observer said it was like a string of kegs or floats; and those who are sceptical as to the existence of the snake have attributed this appearance to a school of porpoises pursuing each other. But it should be remembered that most of the observers are men perfectly familiar with porpoises and other marine productions, and not very likely to be deceived."
"Haven't I read somewhere," said Fred, "that there was a skeleton of a large sea-serpent in a museum in Germany?"
"Quite possibly you have," Doctor Bronson answered, with a smile, "and thereby hangs a bit of history. An enterprising American was trading on the coast of Siberia, where formerly great numbers of whales were killed. Their bones were thickly scattered along the beach, and he conceived the idea of turning them to account.
"He hired the natives, and set some of his own men at work to collect the bones of three good-sized whales. Out of the ribs and vertebræ of the three he constructed a magnificent snake a hundred and ten feet long, and with a capacity sufficient for swallowing a four-horse coach, with team, passengers, driver, and all. He was careful to reject the head, pretending it had not been found; if he had shown the head, the deception would have been revealed too soon for his purpose, as some one would have been sure to recognize it as the head of a whale.
"He shipped his prize to Hamburg, and it was put on exhibition there, and then offered for sale. It was bought by a wealthy museum, and the scientific men came from far and near to see it. The speculator disappeared; not long after he had gone the secret came out, and the wonderful serpent was found to be the skeletons of three whales neatly put together.
"One thing I had almost forgotten to mention: the snakes in the Indian seas were useful in showing ships their position before the mariner's compass was invented. Pliny says the Roman navigators 'directed their course by the flight of birds, which they took with them and let go from time to time; also various signs in the sea, such as the color of the water, and sea-snakes floating on the surface.' A Turkish treatise, written in 1550, mentions a route from Aden to Guzerat, and then by the coast to Malabar, working by the stars, sea-snakes, and birds; and a Mohammedan writer, in 1749, says that, while sailing along the coast of Ceylon, they knew they were near the land three days before they saw it, from the snakes in the sea."