A sword-fish, when swimming near the surface, usually allows its dorsal fin and the upper lobe of its caudal fin to be visible, projecting out of the water several inches. It is this habit which enables the fishermen to detect the presence of the fish in the vicinity of their vessel. It moves slowly along, and the schooner, even with a light breeze, finds no difficulty in overtaking it. When excited its movements are very rapid and nervous. Sword-fish are sometimes seen to leap entirely out of the water. Early writers attributed this habit to the tormenting presence of parasites, but such a theory seems unnecessary. The pointed head, the fins of the back and abdomen snugly fitting into grooves, the long, lithe, muscular body, with contour sloping slowly from shoulders to tail, fit it for the most rapid and forcible movement through the water. Prof. Richard Owen, the celebrated English anatomist, testifying in court in regard to its power, said: “It strikes with the accumulated force of fifteen double-handed hammers. Its velocity is equal to that of a swivel shot, and is as dangerous in its effects as a heavy artillery projectile.”
Many very curious instances are recorded of their encounters with other fishes, or of their attacks upon ships. It is hard to surmise what may be the inducement to attack objects so much larger than themselves. Every one knows the couplet from Oppian:
“Nature her bounty to his mouth confined,
Gave him a sword, but left unarmed his mind.”
It surely seems as if the fish sometimes become possessed with temporary insanity. It is not strange that when harpooned they retaliate upon their assailants. There are, however, numerous instances of entirely unprovoked assaults upon vessels at sea, both by the sword-fish, and still more frequently by the spear-fish (known to American sailors by the name of “boohoo,” apparently a corruption of “Guebucu,” a word apparently of Indian origin, applied to the same fish in Brazil). The writer’s note-book contains notes upon scores of such instances. The ship “Priscilla,” from Pernambuco to London had eighteen inches of sword thrust through her planking; the English ship “Queensbury,” in 1871, was penetrated to a depth of thirty inches, necessitating the discharge of the cargo; the “Dreadnought,” in 1864, when off Colombo, had a round hole, an inch in diameter, bored through the copper sheeting and planking; the schooner “Wyoming,” of Gloucester, in 1875, was attacked in the night time by a sword-fish, which pushed his snout two feet into her planking, and then escaped by breaking it off.
One of the traditions of the sea, time honored, believed by all mariners, handed down in varied phrases in a hundred books of ocean travel, relates to the terrific combats between the whale and the sword-fish, aided by the thrasher shark. The sword-fish was said to attack from below, goading his mighty adversary to the surface with his sharp beak, while the shark, at the top of the water, belabors him with strokes of his long lithe tail. Thus wrote a would-be naturalist from Bermuda in 1609: “The swoard-fish swimmes under the whale and pricketh him upward. The threasher keepeth above him, and with a mighty great thing like unto a flaile, hee so bangeth the whale that hee will roare as though it thundered, and doth give him such blows with his weapon that you would think it to be a crake of great shot.”
Skeptical modern science is not satisfied with this interpretation of any combat at sea seen at a distance. It recognizes the improbability of aggressive partnership between two animals so different as the sword-fish and a shark, and explains the turbulent encounters occasionally seen at sea by ascribing them to the attacks of the killer whale, Orca, upon larger species of the same order.
There can be little doubt that sword-fish sometimes attack whales just as they do ships. This habit is mentioned by Pliny, and furnishes a motive for all of Edmund Spenser’s “Visions of the World.”
“Toward the sea turning my troubled eye
I saw the fish (if fish I may it cleepe)