At once the fury of the prow was quelled;
And (whence or why from many an age withheld)
Shrieks, not of men, were mingling in the blast,
And armed shapes of God-like stature passed!
Slowly along the evening sky they went,
As on the edge of some vast battlement;
Helmet and shield and spear and gonfalon
Streaming a baleful light that was not of the sun!”[[58]]
[58]. “The Voyage of Columbus.” There are several fine passages in this neglected poem. Rogers, in some places, has caught the spirit of the old chronicles very happily.
I am not surprised, then, that many kinds of queer fish—of fish queerer than the trout with its rheumatically-warped tail, or the stickleback with the aspect of a mouse—should figure among the astonishments which the mariners of those prying and creeping, but most bold-hearted, times, set down for the edification of posterity. You particularly notice in these records how exquisitely in keeping with the whole picture of those old ships and oddly-clad sailors, as one loves to imagine them, and with the spirit of the mystery of those unattempted seas as breathed by the salt and ancient chronicler, are the terms in which the writers convey their discoveries. As, for instance, in this passage from the first voyage of Columbus: “A Wagtail flew very near the Ship, and they perceived that the Currents ran not so strong as before, but turned back with the Tides, and there were fewer Weeds; and the Day following they took many gilt Fishes.” The word may not strike others as it strikes me; but there is something in the expression “gilt fishes” that is like a revelation of the intertropical situation of the mariners. You think of the long bald gleaming heave of the darkly pure blue swell of the sea, the fragrance of the yet hidden islands of the Spanish main blowing sweet in the warm wind coming from the west, the liquid light of the moon showering its splendour upon the pallid fabric and her bearded men, and gemming the quaint old structure with diamonds in the dew along her rails and on her yards, lunar brilliants that shine with the glory of the stars which softly crowd the velvet deeps of the sky of the Columbian Antilles. To whom but to mariners exploring for the first time the wonderland of ocean hidden, for how many centuries? from all Europe behind the Atlantic sea line, could such a queer fish as this exhibit itself? “They saw a great Fish, like a middling Whale, and it had on the Neck a large Shell, like that of a Tortoise, little less than a Target; the Head it held above water was like a Pipe or But, the Tail like that of a Tunny Fish, very large, and two vast Fins on the side.”[[59]] Yet, queer as this marine man-in-armour seems to have been, with its target and its head like a butt, Columbus appears to have known enough of it to enable him to witness in it a barometrical signification; for “by this Fish and other observations in the sky”—the “other” here is a very fine—“the Admiral perceived there was like to be a change of Weather.”