The dolphin’s love of music, again, was a firm article of faith to the ancients, and most of our readers are no doubt acquainted with the story of the sweet singer, Arion, who, forced to leap into the sea to escape the cruelty of the sailors, escaped to land on the back of a dolphin—one of many that had long followed the ship in rapturous appreciation of the sweet melodies of the singer; and how Arion—
“With harmonious strains
Requites his hearer for his friendly pains.”
Another strange fish believed in by our forefathers was the Acipenser, “a fish of an unnatural making and quality,” as an old writer terms him; and indeed he may very well do so, as we are told that “his scales are all turned towards the head.” We are not, therefore, much surprised to learn that “he ever swimmeth against the stream,” though we might well be still more astonished if we ever found him swimming at all.
The Remora. This was held to affix itself so firmly to a ship that neither wind nor waves could dislodge it, while its presence (even worse than that of the more prosaic barnacles and other sea impedimenta that plague the modern shipowner by fouling the bottom of his good ship, and so retarding her course) brought the voyage to an abrupt conclusion. Pliny indeed only says that “there is a little fish, keeping ordinarily about rockes, named Echeneis. It is thought that if it settle and sticke to the keele of a ship under water, it goeth the slower by that meanes,” whereupon it is called the stay-ship. But all these marvels have a wonderful way of growing more and more marvellous, and subsequent writers, not content with merely impeding the vessels in their increasingly wondrous stories, soon accredited the remora with the much more striking power of altogether arresting their progress. We see a relic and survival of this old belief in the following lines of Ben Jonson—
“I say a remora,
For it will stay a ship that’s under sail.”
And again much more elaborately worked out in Spenser’s “Visions of the World’s Vanity”—
“Looking far forth into the ocean wide,
A goodly ship, with banners bravely dight,
And flag in her top-gallant, I espied,
Through the main sea making her merry flight;
Fair blew the wind into her bosom right,
And th’ heavens looked lovely all the while,
That she did seem to dance as in delight,
And at her own felicity did smile;
All suddenly there clove unto her keel
A little fish that men call Remora,
Which stopt her course, and held her by the heel,
That wind nor tide could move her thence away.
Strange thing me seemeth that so small a thing
Should able be so great an one to wring.”
We have already seen how Leviathan, according to the Talmud, is to form a feast for the Saints; and on turning to the Koran we find a very similar belief, for the food of Mohammed’s Paradise is to consist, we are there told, of the flesh of the ox Balam and of the fish Nun. To allay any apprehension on the part of the faithful that these viands will not “go round,” as a schoolboy would say, we are reassured on reading that the liver alone of the fish Nun will supply an adequate portion for seventy thousand hungry souls.