Part 15

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.”

Footnote 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]

Footnote 60:

By “bernacle” I suspect he means the barnacle goose.

Footnote 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.

Where have all these queer fish gone? Why did they exhibit themselves only in the middle ages and down to about old Sir Thomas Browne’s time? No account of any prodigies such as ravished or affrighted the ancient seaman is to be met in the records of the _Beagle_ or the _Challenger_. Yet let us take heart. The stickleback like a mouse is indeed a meagre substitute for the kraken; and the hard-alee trout looks mean alongside a whale a mile long. But their existence serves to assure us that the age is not wholly barren in wonders, and that there are still some queer fish about.

_STRANGE CRAFT._

In the beginning of the seventeenth century one Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, ordered a ship to be built for him on the lines of Noah’s ark. Of course, as this vessel was designed to contain only a few animals, and those chiefly men, her size was not that of her famous prototype. The Dutchman’s orders were that the vessel should exactly answer proportionally to the dimensions of the fabric that was stranded on Ararat. Jansen flourished in pre-scientific times; but this notion of his went so far beyond the most extravagant credulities of the period that the scheme was viewed as a mere fanatical whim of a Mennonite, to which sect our friend belonged. He persevered, however, in spite of being heartily jeered at, more particularly by the seafaring folk who assembled to view the shipwrights at work; but when the vessel was eventually launched it was discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace, commodious above all others, because they would convey one-third more cargo than other holds, and yet be navigated by the same number of hands which other forecastles carried. Those who would hear more of this ark may consult—if they can find it—the “Bibliotheca Biblia,” vol. i.[62]

Footnote 62:

The story is there related: “Peter Jansen, a Dutch merchant, caused a ship to be built for him, answering in its respective proportions to those of Noah’s ark. At first this ark was looked upon as no better than a fanatical vision of this Jansen; but afterwards it was discovered that ships built in this manner were, in times of peace, beyond all others most commodious,” etc.

That Jansen erred, according to the light of his times, who shall declare? Sir Thomas Browne, who lived much about that period, would prove—I do not say he does—that Noah’s ark was the swiftest vessel that ever drove a keel through a surge—nimbler than the Baltimore clippers, the Mediterranean fruiters, the slavers of the Spanish main; in fact, very nearly as fast as the Atlantic expresses which storm through the ocean between the Mersey and New York. I find in the “Extracts from Commonplace Books” in Browne’s works this passage: “Whether Noah might not be the first man that compassed the globe? Since, if the flood covered the whole earth, and no lands appeared to hinder the current, he must be carried with the wind and current according to the sun, and so in the space of the deluge might near make the tour of the globe. And since if there were no continent of America, and all that tract a sea, a ship setting out from Africa without other help would at last fall upon some part of India or China.” This is as much as to say that Noah sailed round the world in forty days! Smart work when you consider that it takes a twelve-knot mail-boat thirty-seven days to steam to New Zealand.

It cannot, however, be concluded from her dimensions that, even though blown along by a gale of wind right over her stern, the ark equalled the speed of a Union or Royal Mail steamer. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his “History of the World,” a mine of exquisite thought and of sweet and noble expression, devotes a page or two to consideration of the size and form of Noah’s ship; and what a man who was as great a sailor as he was poet, philosopher, and soldier, and who lived near to Jansen’s time, has to say of her must be worth hearing in this particular connection. He is unable to point to the place where the ark was “framed,” but suspects it was near the Caucasus where grew “goodly cedars.” “It was thought to have a flat bottom, and a crested roof, and the wood gopher of which it was made was very probably cedar, being light, easy to cut, sweet, and lasting.” The pitch he thinks was bitumen. Her length was six hundred feet, the breadth one hundred feet, and the depth sixty feet. He calculates her internal capacity in cubical cubits, four hundred and fifty thousand, “which is sufficient for an hundred kind of beasts and their meat in the lower and second stories, and two hundred and eighty fowls, with Noah and his family, in the third.” So far as beam and length go she was considerably narrower than the ships in Jansen’s day, which were commonly about three and a half times as long as they were broad. But what of her bows? Had she a run? Had she the flat bottom of a barge or the moulded depth of the clipper? But it matters not; Jansen’s inspiration found no copyists; his fabric has floated solitarily down to us as a strange ship; and now that we have viewed her she may brace round her top-sail yard again and proceed on her phantom course.

I do not think, however, that we can find much title in our own marine performances to justify laughter at the old folks’ ships. Is it conceivable that ugly as Jansen’s Noah’s ark must have been she would not have looked comely alongside some of the metal horrors of recent and contemporary invention? Something of the indefinable charm you find in the simpering shepherds and shepherdesses of the crockery age of literature, in Melibœus piping to the skipping lambkins on an oaten pipe and Daphne toying with a lover’s true-knot under some spreading shade, enters into those vanished ships with their black or yellow sides, their rows of little guns, their gay and fluttering finery of masthead streamers, ancients, pennons, and the like. I know more than one war ship now afloat that you might “dress” from stem to pole-masthead and overboard aft, turn her into a rainbow of bunting, without achieving more than the accentuation of her ugliness. No! it is not for us, forsooth, to talk of taste, smile as we may at the illustrations of our grandsires’ sturdy struggles towards that imperial fruition in which we, their inheritors, find our most reasonable and sovereign boast.

I find a pretty fancy, and an audacious one, too, in an account of a strange ship in 1769. In that year there arrived at Naples from Palermo a small vessel, whose length of keel was twelve feet. She was ship-rigged—that is to say, she had three masts, with all the yards that ships then carried across, and her ship’s company was composed of one man only. She is described as being the model of a man-of-war of sixty guns. Her builder, who navigated her, was a carpenter; he had worked in an Italian arsenal, then went to Trieste, where he built his ship, embarked in her with two men for Messina, then proceeded alone to Palermo and Naples to present his wonderful model to the King. She is probably the only full-rigged model of a ship actually sailed by a man in her from one port to another on record. Figure the blue Italian waters and this lovely toy, with the sunshine flashing up its canvas into satin, blandly leaning over from the fragrant breeze, and slipping through the liquid sapphire with a little curl of silver at her stem!

The model craft exercises a fascination that is felt beyond boyhood. Many a long hour have I spent on the shores of the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, watching the tiny fleets there till imagination has been transported by the charming miniature imagery into the heart of a horizon capacious enough to hold some scores of Londons with their metropolitan suburbs. This diversion seems to have delighted the fastidious and elegant taste of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, in his “American Note Books,” speaks of frequent visits to the “Frog Pond” merely to see the boys sail their ships. “There is a full-rigged man-of-war,” he says, “with, I believe, every spar, rope, and sail, that sometimes makes its appearance; and when on a voyage across the pond it so identically resembles a great ship, except in size, that it has the effect of a picture. All its motions—its tossing up and down on the small waves, and its sinking and rising in a calm swell, its heeling to the breeze—the whole effect, in short, is that of a real ship at sea; while, moreover, there is something that kindles the imagination more than the reality would do.” I have a note of another beautiful model constructed so long ago as 1767. It was a little ship of sixty-four guns, completely rigged—four inches long! The materials of which it was composed were gold, silver, steel, brass, copper, ivory, ebony, and hair. The hull, masts, yards, and booms were of ivory; the guns, blocks, anchors, and dead-eyes silver; the colours—the Royal Standard, the Admiralty and union flags, the jack and ensign—were of ivory. The sixty-four guns weighed fifty grains. The scale was forty feet to one inch. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was so delighted with its singular minuteness and the exquisite delicacy of its workmanship, that he recommended it to the attention of his Majesty, who was graciously pleased to place it in his cabinet of curiosities. The artist was an officer in the navy, and I hope the royal admiration was accompanied by recognition of the sailor’s genius.

Herman Melville, in “Redburn,” speaks of an old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, of French manufacture. “Every bit of it was glass, and that was a great wonder of itself; because the masts, yards, and ropes were made to exactly resemble the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea. She carried two tiers of black guns all along her two decks; and often I used to try to peep in at the portholes to see what else was inside.... Not to speak of the tall masts and yards and rigging of this famous ship, among whose mazes of spun glass I used to rove in imagination till I grew dizzy at the main truck, I will only make mention of the people on board of her. They, too, were all of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as anybody ever saw, with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets with a sort of ruffle round the bottom. Four or five of these sailors were very nimble little chaps, and were mounting up the rigging with very long strides; but for all that, they never gained a single inch in the year, as I can take my oath. Another sailor was sitting astride of the spanker-boom, with his arms over his head, but I never could find out what that was for; a second was in the foretop with a coil of glass rigging over his shoulder; the cook with a glass axe was splitting wood near the fore hatch; the steward in a glass apron was hurrying towards the cabin with a plate of glass pudding; and a glass dog with a red mouth was barking at him; whilst the captain in a glass cap was smoking a glass cigar on the quarter-deck.”