strength against that of the fish. Your reel carries 200 yards of line, but it is rarely that half of that length is required. Most tarpon fishers bring their fish to the gaff from the boat, but it is far more sportsmanlike to beach them, as they need not then be destroyed.
When this lady foul-hooked the whip ray, it towed her boat about for quite half an hour. She then got rather tired and handed her rod to her husband, who, in the course of another hour’s hard fight, could do no more than raise the brute to the top of the water fully thirty yards away from his boat. He then sent along to the man with the harpoon to help him, and next time the ray came to the surface the harpooner had it fast, and it was triumphantly towed ashore by a remarkable procession of boats. Its estimated weight was 500 lb., and this I should regard as not far wide of the mark.
CHAPTER VI
Enormous Rays, or Devil-Fish
CHAPTER VI
ENORMOUS RAYS, OR DEVIL-FISH
Rays, which are somewhat closely related to the sharks, though so different to the casual observer, are characteristic of all seas, but especially perhaps of the tropical waters of America, where some of them attain to enormous weight. The stingrays, of which the one depicted in this volume is a variety, armed with formidable serrated spikes at the base of the tail, are in some cases fearsome creatures, while many of the family are provided with the means of numbing their victims with an electric discharge. The whip ray, however, though carrying spikes above the tail, is a harmless and indeed beautiful creature. At the same time, its frantic leaps when driven wild by the suckers that adhere to its disc are sufficiently alarming to those unaccustomed to its ways.
To see a kite-shaped creature with a long and whip-like tail leaping high in the air, then merely touching the water again like a ricocheting shell and again soaring aloft, a series of such leaps taking it quite a hundred yards over the surface, is, to say the least of it, a novel spectacle to those just out from Europe, the seas of which do not afford these apparitions. It is as if the monster fish were suddenly tenanted by the wandering spirit of a defunct kangaroo, and when it is added that its aerial leaps often bring it quite close to the boats—though I do not remember hearing of a single case in which it actually jumped into one—it will be seen that there is some excuse for the occasional signs of alarm evoked by its sudden appearance. The splash with which it regains the water can, on still days, be heard quite a mile away.
The swimming action of these great rays is very beautiful, displaying all the graceful undulating movements so characteristic of the shark tribe, which go so far towards mitigating the repulsive appearance of some of them. There is always this striking contrast between the live and dead shark; the one, though endowed with instincts that can never commend it to our goodwill, is yet a very lithe and graceful robber; the other, deprived of all life and movement, shows only the vices with none of the redeeming beauty.