“Who can strip off his outer garment?
Who can open the doors of his face?
Round about his teeth is terror.
His strong scales are his pride,
Shut up together as with a close seal.
They are joined one to another,
They stick together that they cannot be sundered.
In his neck abideth strength,
And terror danceth before him.
If one lay at him with the sword it cannot avail,
Nor the spear, the dart, nor the pointed shaft.
He counteth iron as straw,
And brass as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee:
Sling-stones are turned with him into stubble.
He laugheth at the rushing of the javelin.
Upon earth there is not his like,
That is made without fear.”
The poetical ideas that clustered during classic times and the Middle Ages round the Nautilus were, after all, as mythical as they were poetic.
“The tender nautilus who steers his prow,
The sea-borne sailor of his shell canoe,
The ocean Mab, the fairy of the sea”[33]—
has, alas! no foundation in hard fact; and the lesson that Pope would teach when he bids us—
“Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar and catch the rising gale”—
is equally impracticable. The sad fiction-dispelling truth is, that in no case does the little argonaut use its arms as sails or as oars. It rises, it is true, occasionally to the surface, as other cuttle-fish forms do, but when there its only means of propulsion are the jets d’eau from its funnel, these jets consisting of the water which has been used in respiration. In Pliny’s “Natural History,” as translated by Philemon Holland, and published in London in 1601, we find that “among the greatest wonders of nature is that fish which of some is called nautilos, of others pompilos. This fish, for to come aloft upon the water, turneth upon his backe, and raiseth or heaveth himselfe up by little and little; and to the end he might swim with more ease as disburdened of a sinke, he dischargeth all the water within him at a pipe. After this, turning up his two foremost clawes or armes, hee displaieth and stretcheth out betweene them a membrane or skin of a wonderful thinnesse: this serveth him instead of a saile in the aire above water. With the rest of his armes or clawes he roweth and laboureth under water, and with his tail in the midst he directeth his course, and steereth as it were with an helme. Thus holdeth he on and maketh way in the sea, with a fair show of a galley under saile. Now if he be afraide of anything by the way, hee makes no more adoe, but draweth in water to baillise his bodie, and so plungeth himselfe downe and sinketh to the bottome.”
While the Dolphin, like the nautilus, has a veritable existence, and may be duly found amongst the works of nature, it has also, like the nautilus again, served as the foundation for a considerable amount of mythical lore. Thus Pliny, in his so-called Natural History, from which we have already drawn so many curious extracts, writes—“The swiftest of all other living creatures whatsoever, and not of sea-fish only, is the dolphin; quicker than the flying fowl, swifter than the arrow shot out of a bow.” The dolphin, so termed, of the mediæval heralds is a purely conventional form, having no counterpart whatever in Nature. “They are much deceived,” wrote an authority on natural history a little more than a hundred years ago, “who imagine Dolphins to be of the Figure they are usually represented on Signs; that Error being more owing to the unbridled License of Statuaries or Painters than to any such Thing found in Fact.” A much earlier writer, Gillius, tells us that when he was “in a Ship where many Dolphins were taken, he observed them so to deplore with Groans, Lamentations, and a Flood of Tears their Condition, that he himself, out of Compassion, could not forbear weeping, and so threw one that he observed to groan more than ordinary (the Fisherman being asleep) into the Water again, as choosing rather to damage the Fisherman than not to relieve the Miserable. But this gave him but little Rest, for all the Others increased their Groans, as seeming, by not obscure Signs, to beg the same Deliverance.” Another well-known belief in connection with the dolphin is the imaginary brilliancy of its supposititiously changeful colours when, having failed to find any one, like Gillius, compassionate enough to throw it overboard, it presently succumbs to its hard fate. The idea has been a favourite one with poets in all ages, but one example from Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” will suffice as an illustration:—
“Parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new colour as it gasps away;
The last still loveliest, till—’tis gone—and all is gray.”
According to some of the ancient writers, the eyes of the dolphin were in those most unlikely and unserviceable places, their blade-bones; they were also said to dig graves for their dead on the sandy shores of the sea, and to follow them to their burial in mournful procession. They were, too, an excellent means of travelling when other means of locomotion were not available. Thus the fifty daughters of Nereus travelled in safety on their backs, we are told in classic mythology in the dry-as-dust style of such fountains of knowledge as are available for reference ordinarily; but these statements help us but little to realise the scene that struck the eyes or the imaginations of the ancients when this bevy of charming girls, a good fifty strong, rode hither and thither in happy abandon in the brilliant summer sunlight of the azure Mediterranean Sea, their steeds the willing dolphins; a scene as unlike the frowsy omnibuses, the dreary chariots of moody men and women, that loom through the murk of a London fog, or that fill to suffocation with resentful fellow passengers, when the prolonged drizzle becomes a heavy downpour, as one can possibly imagine.