But before concluding this part of the subject, I would add a word or two on the importance of an accurate description of the snake, as far as possible, when one is found in some unusual situation; because a snake being found in the water is no proof that it is a water snake, or even that it was there by choice. Livingstone, in his Expedition to the Zambesi, p. 150, describes the number of venomous creatures, such as scorpions, centipedes, etc., that were found on board, ‘having been brought into the ship with wood.’ ‘Snakes also came sometimes with the wood, but oftener floated down the river to us, climbing easily by the chain cable. Some poisonous ones were caught in the cabin. A green one was there several weeks, hiding in the daytime.’
Often in newspapers are stories of ‘sea snakes’ as having appeared quite out of their geographical range. These on investigation may reasonably be traced to land snakes which have been carried out by the tidal rivers. In Land and Water of Jan. 5, 1878, was such a story. Again, March 31, the following year, a correspondent, ‘J. J. A.,’ on ‘Animal Life in New Caledonia,’ stated that the sea inside the reefs is sometimes covered with both dead and living creatures carried out by the violence of the currents after heavy rains. ‘The flooded rivers rush with great force from the mountains,’ and numbers of reptiles were among the victims of that force. He saw ‘incredible numbers of snakes,’ and described the common sea snakes as ‘stupid, fearless things, that will not get out of your way.... The small sand-islands are literally alive with them.’ The writer made no pretensions to be a naturalist, or to state confidently what the snakes were specifically. New Caledonia would seem to be rather beyond the range of sea snakes proper, and those ‘incredible numbers’ may have been only land snakes involuntarily taking a sea bath, or certain species frequenting brackish waters, like those in South Carolina described by Lawson.
About the same time an American newspaper contained an account given by Captain O. A. Pitfield, of the steamship Mexico, who stated that he had ‘passed through a tangled mass of snakes’ off the Tortuga islands, at the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. The ship was ‘more than an hour’ in passing them. ‘They were of all sizes, from the ordinary green water snake of two feet long, to monsters, genuine “sea serpents,” of fourteen to fifteen feet in length.’ I replied to both these communications at the time (Land and Water, April 5, 1879), inviting further information, and describing the features by which true water and true sea snakes could be easily distinguished. Nothing further appeared on the subject, and I have little doubt but that, in both cases, the ‘shoals of sea snakes’ were land species that had been merely carried out to sea by force of rivers. I have since been more strongly inclined to this opinion on learning from Dr. Stradling that similar transportations of snakes occur through the force of some of the South American rivers. ‘Do you know the snakes which belong to the River Plate proper?’ he asks me by letter. ‘So many are brought down by floods from Paraguay—even the big constrictors—that it is difficult to determine from occasional specimens.’
I could not, unfortunately, refer to any books that afforded much information on this subject; for amongst the greatest literary needs experienced by an ophiologist is some complete and special work on the South American snakes, corresponding with Günther’s Reptiles of British India, and Krefft’s Snakes of Australia.
Other writers have mentioned the occurrence of boa constrictors and anacondas far out at sea occasionally, beguiling the unsophisticated into reporting a veritable ‘sea serpent’ to the Times by the first homeward-bound mail.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE PELAGIC OR SEA SNAKES.