In 1808 the body of a great sea monster was cast ashore at Stronsay, one of the Orkneys. This was some fifty feet long, and every one, even the fishermen themselves, declared that the sea serpent had turned up at last. A naturalist, however, decided that it was only an unusually fine specimen of the great basking shark; so we are as far off as ever, after all, from an authentic monster, and seem in every case to have only offered for our acceptance either outrageous hoaxes and impositions, the imaginations of the credulous, or, at the very best, cases of mistaken identity.
Amongst other serpent myths we may certainly place that most uncomfortable creation of the fancy, the Adissechen, a serpent with a thousand heads that, according to the Indian mythology, bears up the universe; and the Iormungandur, the serpent that according to the Scandinavian myth, encircles the whole earth, and binds it together in its flight through space.
It was a very old belief that the serpent’s egg was hatched by the joint labour of several serpents, and was buoyed up into the air by their hissing. Any one so intrepid as to catch it while thus suspended ’twixt earth and heaven bore away with him a talisman of mighty power, giving him strength to prevail in every contest, and the favour of all whose favour was worth the having. It could only be captured at the gallop, and even then the risk of being stung to death was a peril most imminent. Pliny tells us that he had himself seen one of these notable proofs of prowess, and that it was about as large as a moderately large apple.
The Fire-Drake was, according to mediæval fancy, a fiery serpent or dragon, keeping guard over hidden treasure. The drake, of course, has no affinity with the familiar ducks and drakes on the farmer’s pool, nor even with the ducks and drakes that people make of their money when they burn their fingers in too rash speculation, but is clearly suggested by the Latin word, draco, for a dragon. We find an interesting reference in Shakespeare to the word in his “Henry VIII.,” scene 3 of act v.—“There is a fellow somewhat near the door; he should be a brazier by his face, for, o’ my conscience, twenty of the dog-days now reign in his nose: all that stand about him are under the line, they need no further penance. That fire-drake.”
De Thaun in his “Bestiary” tells us of the Aspis, “a serpent cunning, sly, and aware of evil. When it perceives people who make enchantment, who want to enchant it, to take and snare it, it will stop very well the ears it has. It will press one against the earth; in the other it will stuff its tail firmly, so that it hears nothing. In this manner do the rich people of the world: one ear they have on earth to obtain riches, the other Sin stops up; yet they will see a day, the day of Judgment. This is the signification of the Aspis without doubt.” De Thaun always endeavours to see a religious meaning in everything, and where the moral declines to fit quite accurately to the facts, by a simple process of reversal the facts are made to fit to the moral. The creature that he had in his mind, and which would naturally occur to him from his familiarity with the Bible, is no doubt identical with the deaf adder that we are told in one of the Psalms stoppeth her ear, and refuseth to hear the voice of the charmer. Though the old author avowedly has no doubt as to the signification he assigns to the creature’s obstinate refusal to be charmed, one cannot but feel that his explanation is rather halting. A man who would amass riches has at least as much need of his eyes as of his ears, and his transition from the ear stopped up by sin to the awakened eye at the great day of account is also somewhat lame. The transition should have been not arbitrarily from one faculty to another, but in the sharp contrast between the sense first deliberately blunted and lost through sin, to be then at last terribly restored by the trumpet peal of the dread day of doom. Indeed, if it were not that we are all prepared instinctively to place the worst possible construction upon anything a creature so repellent to us may do, it is evident that the allegory might have been equally developed from quite another point of view. Had the dove shown a similar alacrity to bury one ear in the earth while it stuffed its tail into the other, we should have heard nothing of this wilful blunting of the senses to good counsel, but much, au contraire, of its determined resistance to temptation and evil.
The ancients believed in a horrible little brute called the Amphisbena, “a small kind of serpent which moveth backward or forward, and hath two heads, one at either extreme.” Galen, Pliny, Nicander, and many other early writers gravely describe this especially objectionable little reptile. Ælian, who was so far in advance of his age as to call the Chimæra and Hydra fables, believed fully in the amphisbena. Some few serpents really have the power of taking a mean advantage of those they assault by springing at them from directions not always “straight to your front,” as the drill sergeants express it,[29] but none, of course, have an equal facility for moving either backward or forward; and certainly still more of course, no serpent at present known to science, or likely to be, has a head “at either extreme.”
The Kraken is another notable example of the studies in unnatural history of the ancients. Pliny gravely narrates that one of these monsters—the “mountain fish” of the old Norsemen—haunted the ocean off the coasts of Spain and North Africa, but, owing to its bulk, was unable to penetrate through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. According to some old writers the kraken, when floating on the surface of the sea, stretched to a length of about a mile and a half, and appeared like an island. It is a difficult problem to say which would be the most embarrassing position—for a seaman to find himself stranded on the creature’s back on its sudden arrival at the surface, or to be engulfed in the whirlpool that would arise from its sinking again into the depths of ocean. One old writer tells us of a party of sailors that, from the tangled sea-weed on the creature’s back, took the kraken for an island, and after fishing for some time with some little success in the pools of water in the hollows of his back, proceeded to light a fire to cook their take, and suddenly found themselves engulfed in the sea when the heat became sufficiently great to awaken their animated island from its nap. Alaus Magnus, archbishop of Upsala, describes this colossus of the deep as the kraken, but he stops short at the length of a mile; while Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, adds that a whole regiment of soldiers could manœuvre on its back; while yet a third ecclesiastic, another bishop, tells us that he did actually erect an altar on the creature’s back and celebrate mass. We are told that the kraken submitted to the ceremony without flinching, but no sooner was it over than it plunged into the depths of the sea, to the great astonishment and peril of the divine. It may at first seem curious that so many of these stories should spring from ecclesiastics, but it must be remembered that they were in these early days the great repositories of truth, the laity being steeped in ignorance and superstition.
It has been conjectured that the kraken myth has sprung from stories of gigantic cuttle-fish or octopus, the devil fish described so vividly by Victor Hugo in his “Toilers of the Sea;” but one can hardly fall in quite readily with this notion, since the leading idea, so to speak, in the kraken belief is that of a monstrous and quiescent mass, suggestive more than anything else of an island rising from the sea, while the dominant idea in our minds of the octopus is of a creature armed with far-stretching and numerous arms that enwrap their hapless victim in their pitiless embrace. The kraken would scarcely have been described without any reference to these fearful feelers, armed with double rows of suckers, if the myth had had the origin that has been in several directions claimed for it. The belief in the kraken chiefly springs, probably, from that delight in something tremendously big that has also given us the roc carrying away elephants in its talons, or the serpent that encompasses the world in its folds, so that we need not then too anxiously strive to find any counterpart of it in nature.
“They that sail on the sea tell of the dangers thereof, and when we hear it with our ears we marvel thereat.