Another of these commanders having given a man three dozen lashes on the starboard of the vessel, ordered him two dozen more on the larboard; that, as he said, one side might not laugh at the other.
The man cited many more incidents of a like kind; adding, that when on board a king’s ship, he many a time wished himself dead. Observe, I can only be answerable for my own veracity; I faithfully repeat what I was told.
I shall be equally accurate in what I am going to relate; though it is on a subject which some naturalists have treated as absurd. The Captain and Mate of the Kennet, had both navigated the Coast of Norway, the Northern Ocean, and the Atlantic; and I questioned them concerning the Kraken. They neither of them pretended to have seen this supposed stupendous monster of the waters: but they immediately expressed their firm conviction of its existence. I asked their reasons; and they affirmed it had been twice seen within the last four years.
The first instance they cited was that of a Captain coming from Archangel, or Greenland, through the Atlantic; who was surprised at the appearance of rocks unknown to the chart of mariners, and immediately ordered out his boat, to have them examined; meanwhile the Kraken, that is, the imaginary rocks, disappeared, and he sailed over the place; but forgot, during his astonishment, to sound.
Their second instance was more circumstantial. About two years and a half before the time at which they spoke, a Dane, sailing through the Firth of Forth, on the coast of Scotland, was so terrified, at the appearance of rocks in such a place, that he lay to; being for some time persuaded that he had lost his reckoning, and had arrived he knew not where. After consideration, he took courage, and sailed past them; and when he arrived at Dundee, gave a relation of what he had seen. Finding himself at first disbelieved, he and his crew made oath of the fact; either at the Custom-house or before a Magistrate of Dundee. The narrators were both Scotchmen; and affirmed they spoke of the attestation being thus made from their own knowledge. Persons, who shall deem it worth their trouble, may easily make an inquiry whether any such attestation exists at Dundee.
My informants confirmed, unquestioned, the usual accounts, fabulous or not, that fishermen find plenty of fish on the back of the Kraken; as they do on sand banks, at a certain distance below the surface; and that these fishermen hasten away, as soon as they perceive the Kraken beginning to rise; because when it goes down, it occasions a dangerous whirlpool. These, you will recollect, are the old stories of Pontoppidan.
Finding this Leviathan so familiar to their belief, I next inquired if they had heard, or knew any thing of the sea-snake, by some called the sea-worm? To this question I received a still more direct answer. The Mate, Mr Baird, who certainly was not a liar by habit, whatever mistake or credulity might make him, assured me that, about the midway in a voyage to America, in the Atlantic, he had himself seen a fish, comparatively small in the body, of from forty to fifty fathoms in length; and that it had excited great terror in the Captain, who was well acquainted with those latitudes, lest it should sink the ship.
They both related other stories, concerning the appearance of this sea-worm: asserting that it will rise out of the water as high as a common main mast.
Should you ask, do you repeat these things because you think them credible? I answer, no. But who can affirm he can mark out the boundaries of possibility? Some mariners treat these tales as absolutely false and ridiculous: others seriously affirm them to be true; and I think it a duty to collect evidence, and to remain on this question as on many another, in a certain degree of scepticism.
They spoke of another fact; which, supposing them to speak truth, deserves attention. The waves in the Western Ocean are sometimes so oily, from dead whales, as it is imagined, that they are not much disturbed by a brisk gale. The sailor’s brisk gale, observe, by you and me would be called a high wind.