Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life

by Catherine Cooper Hopley

Hakluyt, Hernandez, Master Anthony Kniuet, and many others are quoted by Purchas, but of them all, ‘No man hath written so absolute a Discourse of Brazil as was taken from a Portugall Frier and sold to Master Hakluit,’ he tells us; giving at the same time a history of the persecution and imprisonment of this unfortunate friar, whose unusual intelligence seems to have rendered him an object of suspicion. Thus do we who come after benefit by the misfortunes of our predecessors, and thus has the stolen ‘Discourse’ of the sixteenth century been turned to account for our edification in the nineteenth.

In the Portuguese friar’s description of animals, it is not difficult to separate the true snakes from the ‘Serpentes with foure Legges and a Taile,’ or to identify the rattlesnakes among them. Says the writer, ‘The Boycininga is a Snake called of the Bell: it is of a great Poison, but it maketh such a Noise with a Bell it hath in its Tayle that it catcheth very few: though it be so swift that they call it the flying Snake. His Length is twelve or thirteen Spannes long. There is another Boycininpeba. This also hath a Bell, but smaller. It is blacke and very venomous.’

These two may be Crotalus horridus and Crotalus durissus, the two commonest; or they may be only one species of a different size, age, and colouring—a confusion which frequently occurs with even more recent and more scientific worthies than the good ‘Pilgrim’ Purchas. In a later edition he says: ‘Other Serpents there are that carrie upon the Tippe of their Tayle a certaine little roundelle, like a Bell, which ringeth as they goe.’

Marcgrave, in his Travels in Brazil, 1648, further helps us to label the right snake with the long vernaculars by figuring a rattlesnake and calling it by the same name, only with an additional syllable, Boicinininga, quem Cascavel, the latter euphonious Spanish word, for a little round bell, having widely obtained ever since.

As soon as the first English colony was settled in North America, the rattlesnake again comes upon the stage. Captain John Smith, whom we may call the founder of Virginia (since it was owing to his good judgment, endurance, and intelligence that the colony did not share the fate of Sir W. Raleigh’s adventurers), tells us of the ornaments worn by the Indians, and the favour in which certain Rattells were held by them as amulets. In his Generall Historie of Virginia, 1632, Captain Smith describes their barbarous adornments,—birds’ claws, serpent skins, feathers with a ‘rattell’ tied on to them, which ‘Rattells they take from the Taile of a Snake,’ and regard with superstitious veneration.

With the spirit of enterprise which marked that era, and the discovery of new countries and strange creatures, ‘Natural History’ began to be a recognised science in Europe. Aldrovanus and Gesner had produced their ponderous tomes, and the authors quoted by Purchas were eagerly read by Ingenious Chirugions, who in England appear to have taken the lead in science; while at Florence an assembly of ‘Knowing Physicians’ were experimentalizing with all the Vipers procurable in Southern Europe, holding council as to the source of their ‘Mischiefs’ and specific ‘Remedies for their Bitings,’ etc., with just such tests with the ‘Master Teeth’ of both living and dead vipers as have of late again occupied the attention of living scientists. In 1660 the learned Redi of Florence published his book on Vipers, and soon after M. Moyse Charas, a Frenchman, produced a work which would not be a bad textbook even now.

And for the Scientific World what greater stimulus could arise than the foundation of the ROYAL SOCIETY by Charles II., and the channel for ventilating discoveries and inventions which their published Transactions afforded? Very early in these do we find that viper poison was engaging professional attention, and soon did communications appear from those ‘knowing physicians’ at Florence. A correspondence sprang up between M.D.’s of England, France, and Italy; and the details of their experiments proved very inciting to the members of the Royal Society of London, who with the limited subjects at their disposal—virtually only our own little English viper—also set themselves to work to analyze the ‘Poyson Bag.’

One enthusiast, Mr. Platt, addressing the Royal Society from Florence, with an account of some of the experiments then going on, made mention of the M. Charas who had written such an important work, and ended by hoping to animate the virtuosi here to ‘do something that may be not unworthy your knowlege.’[77]

That the work of M. Moyse Charas was translated into English the following year, proves that the English virtuosi had really become ‘animated’ in the looked-for direction.[78]