[59]. “The First Voyage of Columbus” in Harris’s collection.
One might justly count that fish queer which was believed to breed birds. How mean as an illustration of Nature’s capacity as a humourist would be the gnarled and rounded trout or the stickleback like a mouse side by side with a turtle, capable of producing, say, wrens or canaries! The reverend and learned Mr. John Ray, whilst travelling some two centuries ago through the Low Countries, took some trouble to inquire into this matter of bird-breeding by turtles and tortoises, and pronounced it—humbug! He had to oppose a very profound reasoner, no less a personage, indeed, than Michael Meyerus—of whom, of course, every schoolboy has heard—a gentleman who has devoted a whole big book to the subject. But though he terms the statement false and frivolous, there is so much of possibly designed ambiguity in his “explanation” that I confess I cannot understand what he means. The “bernacles,” he says, which are said to be bred in the tortoise, are “hatch’d of eggs of their own laying, like other birds.” Like other birds! Did the learned Mr. Ray conceive a tortoise to be a bird?[[60]] The Hollanders, he goes on, in their third voyage to discover the North-East Passage, found two islands, “in one of which they observed a great number of these Geese,” he is talking of tortoises! “sitting on their Eggs.” He sums up: “All the Ground of this fancy, as I conceive, is because this fish hath a bunch of cirri somewhat resembling a tuft of feathers, or the tail of a bird, which it sometimes puts out into the water, and draws back again.” Here to be sure is a very great muddle of good meaning. One may take it that the sailors who believed that turtle and tortoise “engendered fowlys” were not going to suffer their solemn affirmations to be discredited by such reasoning as the Rev. John Ray’s.[[61]]
[60]. By “bernacle” I suspect he means the barnacle goose.
[61]. Sinbad the sailor saw “a bird that cometh forth from a sea-shell and layeth its eggs and hatcheth them upon the surface of the water and never cometh forth upon the sea upon the face of the earth.” If the tortoise breeds birds time enough is vouchsafed it for that work. Grose speaks of the shells of two tortoises: one in the library at Lambeth Palace that was brought there alive in 1633, and died of the frost in 1753; the other that was brought to Fulham in 1628, and died in the same year as the other. “What were the ages of these tortoises at the time they were placed in the above gardens is not known.”—Olio. 288.
So far as the superstitious emotions they excited are concerned, it may be truly said of queer fish that even in their ashes live the wonted fires. As an example: the quantity of petrified fish-bones found at Malta fired the ingenious Monkish imagination with the idea of a curious fable. It was said that St. Paul when at Malta, on being bitten in the hand by a viper, did by his prayers obtain of God that all the serpents in Malta should be turned into stones. That all the petrified bones upon which this fancy was based belonged to queer fish is not to be supposed; but that many queer fish did deposit their bones on the Maltese shore in the course of ages need not be questioned, and such is my faith in the distorted trouts and mouse-formed sticklebacks of the deep that I do not scruple to count the above fable concerning St. Paul and the vipers due to the inspirations of the fossilized remains of the “queer fish” only. Was not the sea-unicorn a queer fish in the judgment of our great grandsires? If not, it is strange that they should have endowed its horn or sword with quite magical properties. It was even believed of the little cheval marin, or cavaletto, that if roasted and partly devoured, the remainder being applied to the wound, after some preparing of it with honey and vinegar, would cure the bite of a mad dog. There is no doubt it got this reputation from its fancied resemblance to the unicorn. An old Danish traveller thought to explode this superstition of medicinal and magical virtues in the horn of the sea-unicorn: “Supposing that what has been pretended to be the true horn was really such, I will venture to affirm there is no more virtue in it than in that of a stag, a goat, or elephant’s tooth, which is made use of to stop the spitting of blood, which is done by the astringent quality of these horns, and that cannot so properly be called a virtue as a malignity.” Yet this writer was one of a trading party who presented the King of Denmark with two of these horns, as though they were extraordinary rareties and possessed of a score of curative qualities; and his Majesty took them to be real unicorn horns—the horns of a fabled beast—and valued them accordingly. A queer fish indeed in those old times, but common enough in these, and universally known as the “sword fish.” Dr. Edward Browne when at Utrecht, two hundred years ago, saw three of such horns, one of which, tipped with silver, was used as a drinking cup; and he enters them in his notes as wonders. Possibly he was impressed by the sight of a drinking cup five feet long. But he was in the land of Mynheer van Dunk, who was probably living at that time. He tells of a Danish king that had one hundred horns of the sea-unicorn “for the making of a magnificent throne.” And what finer throne should an old sea king desire to sit upon?
It is not hard to conceive that fish undergo constitutional and organic changes in the course of centuries, and that, say, about the period of the Deluge the sea was full of objects which would strike us as extremely queer specimens now, though to Noah, Ham, and Shem they would be as familiar as the whiting or the dab is to us. But I cannot imagine that very remarkable transformations or developments could take place in three or four, or even five or six centuries. Who shall tell, for example, how many hundreds of years have gone to the making of the unhappy stickleback that was sent to the Aquarium? The changes would be gradual. Taking the evolvments in their gradations, you would possibly find the family mouse-like expression growing less and less marked as you worked your way back through this stickleback’s pedigree. But the extreme circumstantiality of the old voyagers’ descriptions of queer fish should almost really persuade one to suppose that what they beheld died shortly after having been viewed, so that the like has never been seen since. Here is an example of my meaning, taken from Commodore Beaulieu’s voyage:
“While the calm and the excessive heat continued we saw a certain white thing about the bigness of an ostrich-egg floating upon the water, which sunk when the ship came within fifty or sixty paces of it. It resembled a man’s head without hair, and some say they observed two black eyes and a mouth upon it.”
It is the “some say” of these tales which makes them so bewildering. Did this remarkable sea-face with its two black eyes wink? Did it sneer as it sank? Why did not “others say” that ere sinking it raised its thumb to its nose and extended its fingers in the form of a fan, “thereby designing an ironical salutation of farewell”?
But a mere bald head with black eyes and a mouth floating about the sea is but a twopenny queer fish compared with the marine curiosities which ancient mariners have beheld and even given portraits of. Figure a hairy whale, four acres big, with eye-sockets so capacious that fifteen men could sit in each of them, as in a public house parlour, and pass jacks of whiskey about; the eyes themselves of ten cubits in circumference! or hear Père Fournier tell of the monster that “in the reign of Philip II. of Spain”—the epoch of marine chimeras dire!—“appeared in the ocean with two great wings, and sailing like a ship. A vessel saw it, and breaking one of its wings with a cannon ball, the monster swiftly entered the Straits of Gibraltar with horrible cries, and finally came ashore at Valentia, where it was found dead.” Then follow these circumstantial strokes: “Its skull was so large that seven men could enter into it. A man on horseback could enter its throat. The jaw-bone, seventeen feet long, is still in the Escurial.” Most readers would feel inclined to say of this monster, “Very like a whale!”
Unhappily conjecture is blinded by imaginative touches, such as those of the eyes and mouth of the bald-headed fungus of Beaulieu’s voyage. Queer fish as big as islands are constantly occurring in the old accounts. The whale was Job’s Leviathan in those days, and the goggling sailor was easily persuaded by his terrors to multiply the mountain of blubber by two or three hundred. A man saw a whale in the sea of Zendi that was nearly forty-five thousand cubits long—about a mile, if the cubit be eighteen inches. Sinbad wrote in perfect correspondence with the spirit of the Ancient Mariner when he describes his landing on an island which suddenly trembled and proved the back of a prodigious fish. Others tell of fish like cows and camels; of fish dressed like monks and bishops, cowled and mitred, and gazing up at the ship with austere and lenten countenances. Others arrived home with the news of the kraken, that “hugest of living things” as Sir Walter Scott describes it, whose horns would be seen “welking” and waving over the heights of a fog-bank, to the horror and consternation of even the hardiest fishermen, who made haste to bear away under all press of oar and sail. Others, again, would tell of cuttle fish, or squid, so vast in size and titanic in power that they easily coiled their serpentine membranes round about the masts of ships of a thousand tons and quietly capsized them.