Travellers’ tales are notoriously hard of belief, and must be taken cum grano salis. We learn from Sir Thomas Herbert, an early voyager, that when he was on the coast of Sanquehar, a large kingdom on the east side of the Cape of Good Hope, he “saw there great numbers of dolphins,” of which he says: “They much affect the company of men, and are nourished like men; they are always constant to their mates, tenderly affected to their parents, feeding and defending them against hungry fishes when they are old,” and much more information equally astonishing.
A story is related of a man who once went to a mufti and asked him whether the flesh of the sea-pig (the dolphin) was lawful food. Without any hesitation the mufti declared that pig’s flesh was unlawful at all times and under all circumstances. Some time after another person submitted the question to the same authority, whether the fish of the sea, called the sea-pig, was lawful food. The mufti replied: “Fish is lawful food by whatever name it may be called.”
Classic Fable and Mediæval Legend have shed a halo of romantic interest around the dolphin which cleaves to it even to the present hour; the rare event of a dolphin being caught in British waters revives with a thrill all the old-world stories and historic associations of this famous fish as if it were a veritable relic of the golden age. The dolphin of fact we have found to be quite a different creature from what he is pictured by the ancients. The mariner may be engulfed by “the yawning, dashing, furious sea,” but no generous dolphin now watches with tender eye, solicitous for his safety, nor offers his ready back to speed him to the shore.
The dolphin of our modern poets and sailors—the swift swimmer that leaps after the flying-fish and frolics in front of the vessel’s prow until he is caught by the glittering tin—is the Coryphæna hippurus, the species famed for its changing tints when taken from the water. During a calm, these fishes, when swimming about a ship, appear of a brilliant blue or purple, shining with a metallic lustre in every change of reflected light. On being captured and brought on deck, the variety of these tints is very beautiful. The bright purple and golden yellow hues change to brilliant silver, varying back again into the original colours, purple and gold. This alteration of tints continues for some time, diminishing in intensity, and at last settles down into a dull leaden hue. The iridescent lines which play along its elegant curves as he lies on deck has awakened the enthusiasm of many a writer. Byron tells us in a beautiful simile:
“Parting day
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new lustre, as it gasps away,
The last still loveliest, till ’tis gone—and all is grey.”
Dolphin of classic art.
It is needless to say that the legendary dolphin is not to be confounded with the gay and graceful coryphæna to whom alone belong those rainbow flashes of colour in dying. The common dolphin (Delphinus delphis) is dark on the back and satiny white beneath but not even in the agonies of death does he change colour, though like all dead things the body becomes slightly phosphorescent during decomposition. There are two curious fresh water dolphins, the Sooloo of the Ganges and the Inia of the Amazon, which form the connecting-link between the herbaceous and carnivorous cetacea.
The dolphin (δελφίν) may be considered an accessory symbol of Apollo, who, as we read in the Homeric hymns, once took the form of a dolphin when he guided the Cretan ship to Crissa, whence, after commanding the crew to burn the ship and erect an altar to him as Apollo Delphinios, he led them to Delphi, and appointed them to be the first priests of his temple.
The dolphin is the most classic of fishes, the favourite of Apollo, and sacred to that bright divinity, deriving his name from the oracular Delphi, that mysterious spot, “the earth’s umbilicus,” the very centre of the world, Delphi or Delphos, a town in Phocis, famous for its oracle in the Temple of Apollo, upon the walls of which were sculptured the Helios ichthus, Apollo’s fish.