In Manila Bay the natives taught me how to catch a delicious fish like a more symmetrical John Dory, with a most delicate line of twisted grass and a tiny hook. The bait was rice, boiled to a paste; and so successful was I that all hands enjoyed a hearty supper of fish every evening, being the only crew in the harbour where such a thing was known. On that passage home, however, I caught a Tartar. I was fishing off the boom for bonito, when suddenly the school closed up into a compact body and fled. I thought it strange, but went on playing my bait. Suddenly out of the cool shade beneath the ship rushed an albacore, grabbing my bait before I had time to lift it out of his way. He wasn’t very large for his kind, but my gracious, he was all I wanted. I actually tried to haul him up at first, but I couldn’t begin to lift him; so I was fain to play him until we were both exhausted. He was eventually secured at last by the simple expedient of lowering a man overside who slipped a bowline round him, by which he was hoisted on board. He weighed 120 lb., but seemed as strong as a buffalo. Some years after, when out flying-fishing in Barbados one morning, we hooked an albacore that towed our boat, a 5-tonner, for over six miles before he gave in. We towed him alongside into the carenage and had him hoisted on to the wharf by a crane. He weighed 470 lb. The albacore is almost, if not quite, identical with the tunny of the Mediterranean and the tuna of California, and anybody who thirsts for greater sport than the noblest salmon can give, or even the magnificent tarpon, should try what the tuna can do for them.

But of all the queer fish I ever caught, one that I came across in Tonala River, Mexico, was the strangest. It was just inside the bar, and I had been sailing the boat smartly to and fro, catching a kind of caranx that loves a fleeting silvery bait. Sport becoming quiet, and wind falling, I packed about a pound of fish on my largest hook and let it trail while I smoked the cigarito of laziness. I hoped to get a good-sized fish in this way before returning on board. Suddenly my line tautened out, zip, zip—this was no ordinary fish. After about twenty minutes of thoroughly exhausting work I caught sight of a dirty, brownish mass away down under water. Redoubling my efforts, up came my fish—an alligator ten feet long. He looked perfectly devilish, and for the moment I was really scared. Hooks were scarce, however, so calling upon the darky with me to stand by with a running bowline, I hauled away till I got his hideous snout up out of the water, which I doubt whether I should have done but that he came for me with a rush at the last. Joe dropped the noose over his upper jaw most neatly, getting it tightened between his ugly yellow teeth so that he couldn’t bite it. Just then a breeze sprang up, and making the rope fast to a thwart we kept away for the ship, the great saurian’s jaws banging against the boat’s planks and ripping large splinters out of them. We got him aboard safely, to find “he” was a female, with over a bushel of eggs in her body and a strange collection of rubbish in her stomach.

XIX
DEVIL-FISH

Among such primitive peoples as still survive, not the least curious or notable trait which universally obtains is the manner in which all things uncanny, or which they are unable to comprehend, are by common consent ascribed to the Devil. Not to a devil as one of a host, but the Devil par excellence, as though they understood him to be definable only as the master and originator of whatsoever things are terrifying, incomprehensible, or cruel. Many eminent writers have copiously enriched our literature by their researches into this all-prevailing peculiarity, so that the subject has, on the whole, been well threshed out, and it is merely alluded to en passant as one of the chief reasons for the epithet which forms the title of this chapter.

Now it will doubtless be readily admitted that sea-folk retain, even among highly civilised nations, their old-world habits of thought and expression longer than any other branch of the population. This can scarcely be wondered at, since to all of us, even the least imaginative, the eternal mystery of the ocean appeals with thrilling and ever-fresh effect every time that we come into close personal relations with it.

But when those whose daily bread depends upon their constant struggle with the mighty marine forces, who are familiar with so many of its marvels, and saturated with the awe-inspiring solemnity which is the chief characteristic of the sea, are in the course of their avocations brought suddenly in contact with some seldom-seen visitor of horrent aspect arising from the gloomy unknown depths, with one accord they speak of the monster as a “devil-fish,” and the name never fails to adhere.

So that there is, not one species of devil-fish, but several, each peculiar to some different part of the world, and inspiring its own special terror in the hearts of mariners of many nations. Of the Devil-fish that we in this country hear most about, and have indelibly portrayed for us by Victor Hugo, the octopus, so much has been written and said that it is not necessary now to do much more than make passing allusion to the family. But the Cephalopoda embrace so vast a variety that it seems hardly fair to single out of them all the comparatively harmless octopus for opprobrium, while leaving severely unmentioned the gigantic onychoteuthis of the deep sea, to say nothing of many intermediate cuttle-fish. From the enormous mollusc just mentioned—which is, not unreasonably, credited by seamen with being the largest fish in the ocean—to the tiny loligo, upon which nearly all deep-water fish feed, hideousness is their prevailing feature, and truly appalling of aspect some of the larger ones are, while their omnivorous voracity makes them veritable sea-scavengers, to whom nothing comes amiss, alive or dead. And while having no intention to underrate the claims of the octopus to his diabolical prænomen on account of his slimy ugliness and unquenchable ferocity, I feel constrained to put in a word for that little-known horror of the deep, the ten-armed cuttle-fish, which, like some fearful creation of a diseased brain, broods over the dark and silent profundities of ocean, extending his far-reaching tentacles through an immense area, touching nothing living to which they do not cling with an embrace that never relaxes until the victim is safely deposited within the crushing clutch of the great parrot-like mandibles guarding the entrance to that vast and never-to-be satisfied stomach. Nothing that the morbid imagination of man has ever pictured can surpass in awful appearance the reality of this dire chimæra, which, notwithstanding, has undoubtedly an important part to play in the mysterious economy of the sea. “He dwelleth in the thick darkness”; for, not content with the natural gloom of his abode, he diffuses around him a cloud of sepia, which bewilders and blinds his victims, rendering them an easy prey to the never-resting tentacles which writhe through the mirk, ready at a touch to hold whatever is there, be it small or great.

But the strangest fact connected with this mighty mollusc is, that while from the earliest dawn of literature numberless allusions more or less tinged with imagination have been made to it, modern science has only very recently made up its mind to accept as a fact its existence at all. So many indisputable proofs have, however, been forthcoming of late years, both as to the size and structure of the gigantic cuttle-fish, that it has now taken its place among the verities of natural history as indisputably as the elephant or the tiger. It has also been firmly established that the sperm whale or cachalot (Physeter macrocephalus) finds his principal, if not his only, food in these huge gelatinous masses while ranging the middle depths of the ocean, and that their appearance on the sea surface is generally due to this whale’s aggression.

To pass on, however, to a much less known “devil-fish.” In the long fish gallery at the splendid Natural History Museum at South Kensington there is a small specimen, some eighteen inches across, of a fish whose habitat is the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.