Seba records that he had received these Serpents from the Island of St Domingo. This was at that time a flourishing French colony, and its natural productions were far better known to Europe than they now are. When I visited the neighbouring island of Jamaica in 1845-46, I heard accounts of a wonderful animal occasionally seen in the eastern districts of the island, which was reported as a Snake with a cock's comb and wattles, and which crowed like a cock. A good deal of mystery attached to this strange Serpent.
It was appropriated to a very remarkable and peculiar character of scenery:—A wild mountain-region, formed of white limestone, abounding in narrow glens, bounded by abrupt precipices, and permeated by whispering streams that frequently pour in slender cascades over the rocks. The limestone rock rises in abrupt terraces, wall above wall, and its entire surface is most singularly honeycombed, "as if wrought by a graving tool into rough diamond-points," alternating with smooth and rounded holes of various sizes, from that of a hazel-nut upward. In many of these hollows lie the small land-shells of the country, bleached perfectly white, like the stone itself, of the genera Helix, Cyclostoma, Helicina, Cylindrella, Achatina, &c., many of them perfect, but many more in fragments. They exactly resemble fossil shells in situ, but the species are absolutely identical with those that crawl over the shrubs and trees in the same region. In very many cases the dead shells accurately fit the hollows in the rock, whose interior is impressed with the form and sculpturing of the shell in intaglio:—a most curious and interesting fact, as it points to the very recent formation of the region, the stone bearing evident tokens of having been in a plastic condition when the shells were enveloped in it. Out of the hollows of the rock, their roots fast grasping the sharp-edged projections and tooth-like points of stone, and twining through the tortuous cavities, and insinuating their fibrils into every minute hollow where water may lodge, grow many tall trees of various kinds, interlaced with climbers, and hung with festoons of lianes, that resemble long and twisted cords, thrown from one to another, or depending from the branches towards the ground. The noble Agave, or what we in England call the American Aloe, here throws out its broad, fleshy, spine-edged leaves, and lifts its tall flower-stalk loaded with the candelabra-like branches of bloom; and numerous thick Cacti, some erect and massive, others whip-like, long and trailing, give a peculiar aspect to the vegetation. Great tufts of Orchideœ,—the lovely Broughtonia, with its thick ovate leaves, and racemes of elegant crimson flowers, the Brasavola, with long leaves resembling porcupine-quills in form, and blossoms of virgin white, the Oncidium, with its yellow and red flowers, like a score of painted butterflies dancing in every breath, and many others,—crowd the forks or droop from the twisted boughs of the trees.
This formation of honeycombed limestone is full of caverns, many of which lead into one another in chains, and which have invested the region with a sort of superstitious mystery. Runaway slaves and outlaws have availed themselves of the facilities which its ravines and inaccessible fastnesses afford, to defy capture; and during the rebellion of the Maroons, it attained a considerable notoriety. There is one estate about eight miles from Kingston, in the immediate vicinity of which the famous hero, Three-fingered Jack, made his head-quarters. It is a district of wild torrents and waterfalls of the most romantic character; "the imagination of no painter of theatrical spectacles can surpass the wild wonders of the mountain-hold of the real Three-fingered Jack. Part of the road by which you ascend the falls is a subterranean passage; and caverns are entered by simple crevices which seem mere chinks in the irregular surface of the rock, all which natural peculiarities account for the mysterious disappearances which the mountain hero was enabled to enact from his pursuers."
It was at this spot I first heard reliable tidings of the strange Crested Snake. A medical gentleman of reputation informed me that he had seen, in 1829, a serpent of about four feet in length, but of unwonted thickness, dull ochry in colour with well-defined dark spots, having on its head a sort of pyramidal helmet, somewhat lobed at the summit, of a pale red hue. The animal, however, was dead, and decomposition was already setting in. He informed me that the negroes of the district were well acquainted with it; and that they represented it as making a noise, not unlike the crowing of a cock, and as being addicted to preying on poultry.
Nor is it in Jamaica alone that the Crested Snake is known. In the island of St Domingo, whence Seba received his curious specimens, my friend Mr Hill heard reports of it. A Spanish gentleman whom he was visiting in Hayti, told him that he had seen it, and begged him to note it among the remarkable things of the country. It was in that far east of the island, known as the ancient Caciquedom of Higuey, where the Indians were of a more warlike disposition than their meek brethren of the centre and west, and where the cruelties perpetrated upon them by their Spanish invaders reached such a superhuman pitch of diabolism, that even Las Casas says he almost feared to repeat them. The limestone mountains are here of exactly the same description as those in Jamaica, and the scenery assumes exactly the same romantic character. My friend's Spanish informant had seen the serpent with mandibles like a bird, with a cock's crest, with scarlet lobes or wattles; and he described its habits,—perhaps rather from common fame than from personal observation,—as a frequenter of hen-roosts, into which it would thrust its head, and deceive the young chickens by its imitative physiognomy, and by its attempts to crow, like their own Chanticleer. "Il canta como un Gallo;" was the report in Hayti, just as in Jamaica.
I was much interested in this mysterious reptile, and mentioned in the public papers my wish to possess a specimen. A gentleman of the vicinity, Mr Jasper Cargill, was so desirous to oblige me that he offered a sovereign for one; but though several persons were prompt to promise the capture, no example was forthcoming.
After my return from Jamaica, the occurrence of two specimens found came under the notice of my friend, but neither of them was preserved. Mr Cargill had informed him that some years before, when visiting Skibo, in St George's, an estate of his father's, in descending the mountain-road, his attention was drawn to a snake of a dark hue, that erected itself from amid some fragments of limestone-rock that lay about. It was about four feet long, and unusually thick-bodied. His surprise was greatly increased on perceiving that it was crested, and that from the side of the cheeks depended some red-coloured flaps, like gills or wattles. After gazing at him intently some time, with its head well erect, it drew itself in, and disappeared among the fragmentary rocks.
The son of this gentleman met with another specimen under the following circumstances, as detailed to me by my friend:—"It was, I think, on Easter Eve, the 30th of March last, [1850,] that some youngsters of the town came running to tell me of a curious snake, unlike any snake they had ever seen before, which young Cargill had shot, when out for a day's sport among the woodlands of a neighbouring penn. They described it as in all respects a serpent, but with a very curious shaped head, and with wattles on each side of its jaws. After taking it in hand and looking at it, they placed it in a hollow tree, intending to return for it when they should be coming home, but they had strolled from the place so far that it was inconvenient to retrace their steps when wearied with rambling; but they had lost no time in relating the adventure to me, knowing it would interest me much, particularly as young Cargill's father had thought it a snake similar to the one he had seen at Skibo, in St George's, or to the crested serpent for a specimen of which, when in St Thomas's in the East, he had offered the sum of twenty shillings. The youth that shot the snake fell ill on the following morning with fever, and could not go back to the woodlands to seek it, but he sent his younger brother who had been with him; but although he thought he rediscovered the tree in which his brother had placed it, he could not find the snake. He conjectured that the rats had devoured it in the night. When this adventure was related to me, another youth, Ulick Ramsay, a godson of mine, who came with the young Cargills to tell me of their discovery, informed me that not long previously, he had seen in the hand of the barrack-master-serjeant at the barracks in Spanish Town, a curious snake, which he, too, had shot among the rocks of a little line of eminences near the railway, about two miles out, called Craigallechie. It was a serpent with a curious shaped head, and projections on each side, which he likened to the fins of an eel, but said they were close up to the jaws. Here are, unquestionably, two of the same snakes with those of Seba's Thesaurus, taken near Spanish Town, and both about the honeycombed rocks that protrude through the plain of St Catherine's in detached ridges and cones and hummocks, being points of the greater lines of limestone, which have been covered by the detritus of the plains, leaving masses of the under-rocks here and there uncovered. These are the spots frequented, too, by the Cyclura; and are continuations of our Red Hills—a country that so much resembles the terraced cliffs and red-soil glens of Higuey.
It is remarkable that I have heard nothing more of this serpent of renown, this true Basilisk, from that time till now; though I have no doubt my Jamaica friends, who had become much interested in the matter, would have communicated the specimen to me if any one had been obtained. There is, however, sufficient evidence to assume the existence of such a form in the greater Antilles, whether Seba's figures be identical with it or not.