CHAPTER IX.

THE SEA ROVERS (POULPE, &C.)

The Medusæ and the Molluscs are generally innocent creatures, and I have thus far dwelt, as it were, with them in their amiable and peaceful world. Thus far I have met with few carnivora; and even those few killed only in the stern necessity of hunger, and even of those part fed only on atoms, animal jelly, life unorganized, and scarcely commenced. As a consequence, pain, anger, cruelty were absent. Their little souls had, nevertheless, a ray, the aspiration towards the light alike of Heaven and of Love, revealed in the changing flame which illumines and rejoices the seas.

But, now, I have to enter into quite another world: a world of war, slaughter, fierce pursuit, and greedy devouring. I must confess that from the beginning, from the first appearance of life, death also appeared; a rapid and useful purification of the globe from the weak and slow, but prolific tribes whose fecundity would otherwise have been mischievous. In the oldest strata we find two wondrous creatures, the _Devourer_ and the _Sucker_. The first is made known to us by the imprint of the Trilobite, a species no longer existing, an extinct destroyer of extinct species. The second is known to us by a frightful remnant, a beak of almost two feet pertaining to the great Sucker, the Leiche or Poulpe of Dujardin. Judging from that immense beak, this monster must have had an enormous body, and sucking-arms of twenty or thirty feet, like a prodigious spider.

Sad reflection, these murderous creatures are those which we earliest find in the depths of the earth. Are we then to suppose that death preceded life? No doubt; but the soft creatures upon which these monsters fed have perished utterly, not leaving remains or even imprint of themselves.

The devourers and the devoured, were they two nations of different origin? The contrary is more probable. From the mollusc, form undecided, matter still fit to be converted to any form, the superabundant strength of the young world, richly plethoric, abounding in alimentation, there must at an early period have proceeded two forms, contrary in appearance, but tending and qualified to the same end. Swelling and breathing, and measurelessly inflating itself, the Mollusc became an enormous balloon, an absorbing bladder, absorbing all the more as it stretched the more, ever craving and ever consuming, but toothless,--and we have the _Sucker_. On the other hand, by the self-same force, the Mollusc gradually developing articulated members of which each had its shell, and hardening this shelled creature everywhere, but especially at the claws and mandibles formed for gnawing and grinding, to pulp or powder, the very hardest substances became--the _Devourer_. Let us in the first place, in this chapter, speak of the first, the _Sucker_.

The Sucker of the soft gelatinous world, was himself soft and gelatinous. Warring upon and devouring the molluscs, he himself none the less, remained mollusc, that is to say, still a mere embryon. There would be something absurd, caricatural, were it not so terrible, in this sight of a mere foetus, soft and transparent, yet cruel, raging, eager, breathing nothing but murder. For he, see you, goes not to war for the mere sake of food. He has a real passion for destroying, for destruction's sake; whenever he has gorged himself, well nigh to bursting, he will destroy still. Destitute of defensive armour, his threatening snortings disguise, but by no means quiet, his real anxiety; his real, his only safety, is an attack. He is the veritable bully of the young world; really vulnerable himself, and yet so terrible to others; he sees in everything that he meets only enemy or victim. At all risks he casts hither and thither his long arms, or rather his whip-lashes, tipped with cupping glasses, and upon enemy or victim, before the fight or the capture commences, he sends out his stupefying, paralysing effluvia.

Double power. To the mechanical strength of these outstretched arms, add the magical force of that mysterious fluid, and a singularly acute hearing and quick eye. You see in all these, a creature to alarm you.

What must it have been, then, when the early world so lavished its wealth of alimentation, that these monsters of the deep could feed and swell indefinitely? They have decreased now, both in number and in size. Yet, even lately, Rang tells us that he has seen them big as a hogshead; and Peron has seen them quite as large in the South Sea. The creature rolled, and snorted in the rolling wave, with a noise to terrify, to astonish, all meaner creatures. His arms, six or seven feet in length, turning, twisting, writhing, and grasping in every direction, imitated some furious pantomime, some fantastic dance of at once furious and eccentric serpents.

After these matter of fact statements, it seems to me, that we should not be quite so incredulous, not quite so scornful, when we read the accounts of the old voyagers; we should not curl the lip _quite_ so insolently as we read, in Denis de Montford, that he saw a monstrous Poulpe, grasp, with his enormous arms, lash, scourge, smite, stupefy with his electric lashes a fierce and strong mastiff which, in spite of all his efforts, and his terrible howlings, had to succumb, did succumb, _did_ die in that giant and terrible embrace.

The Poulpe, that terrible and living steam machine, can accumulate such incalculable force and elasticity, that, as d'Orbigny tells us (see his article Cephal.) it can leap from the sea to the deck of a ship. This at once relieves our old voyagers from the charge so often and so lightly made against them, of exaggeration and mere romance. They told us, and it now seems quite truly told us, that they came athwart a gigantic Poulpe that leaped inboard, twining its prodigious arms around masts and shrouds; and the monstrous creature would have had possession of the craft, and would have devoured all hands, but that these latter cut away its arms with their axes, as they would have cut away masts in a case of impending wreck, and the mutilated but still threatening creature fell into the sea.

Some have given this creature credit for arms of sixty feet in length; and others have reported that while cruising in the North seas, they fell in with the Kraken, a monstrous creature, half a league in circumference, no doubt, one of our terrible _Poulpes_, able to embrace, stupefy, and devour, a whale a hundred feet long.

The prolonged existence of these monsters, would have endangered Nature herself, would have absorbed our very globe. But, on the one hand, gigantic birds (perhaps, for instance, the _Epiornis_) made war upon them; and on the other hand the exhausted earth destroyed the monster by cutting off its supply of alimentation.

Thank Heaven, our existing Poulpes are somewhat less terrible. Their elegant species of the present day, the Argonaut, that graceful swimmer in its wavy shell, the Calmar, good sailor, if ever there was one, and the handsome Seiche, blue-eyed, and beautiful to look upon, traverse the Ocean, hither and thither, annoying nothing but the small creatures that they need for their support.

In them we see exhibited the first approach to the vertebral bone; they display, too, a perfect rainbow of changing colors, that come and go--shine, fade, dazzle and die. We may quite fairly call them the Chameleons of the sea. They have the exquisite perfume, ambergris, which the whale only owes to the countless multitudes of Seiches which it has absorbed. And the porpoises, too, make an enormous destruction of them. Your Seiches are very gregarious. About the month of May, they seek the coast to deposit their eggs, and the Porpoises await them there, sure of a splendid banquet. And your Porpoise is somewhat of a _gourmet_ though sufficiently _gourmand_; he feeds delicately, though we cannot deny that he feeds largely. The head and the eight arms are his tid-bits, tender and easy of digestion; the rest of the carcass they may have who come for it. Tens of thousands of these mutilated Seiches you find upon the coast at Royan; and there, too, you will see the Porpoises making their mighty bounds when in chase of their coveted prey, the Seiches, or in bacchanal enjoyment and revelling when the prey has been taken and the banquet is over.

Notwithstanding the strange, not to say grotesque, appearance of its beak, the Seiche is decidedly an interesting creature. All the various shades of the most brilliant and various rainbow, come and go, die and reappear on his transparent skin, according to the play of the light as he turns now hither and now thither, and as he dies his azure eyes look upon you with an expression, now flashing and now fading, which seems to rebuke you for your cruelty in killing, or to express a regret at parting with life.

The general decrease of that class, so immensely important in the past ages, is less remarkable as to the navigators (Seiches, &c.) than in the Poulpe, properly so called, the sad frequenter of our shores. It has not the same firmness as the Seiche, strengthened as the latter is by an interior bone, and it has not, like the Argonaut, a resisting exterior, a shell to protect the most vulnerable organs. Neither has it the kind of sail which aids its navigation and spares it the labor of _rowing_. It paddles about along our shores, hugging the shore like some timid coaster. And its conscious inferiority teaches it habits of treachery; it is at once timid and bold--lying in ambush until quite sure that it can devour without the preliminary necessity of a fight. Lying in wait in some rocky crevice, it awaits its prey. That having passed in unsuspicious security, your Poulpe throws out the terrible lashes, the weaker of the prey are devoured, the stronger get loose and escape. A man when swimming, if thus attacked, finds no difficulty in mastering his at once insolent and imbecile assailant. Disgusted, but not alarmed, he handles the creature without gloves, crushes, collapses him, and feels actually vexed with himself for having even for an instant been provoked by an enemy so contemptible. "Bah!" one is tempted to exclaim, on having so easily vanquished such a thing--"Bah! You came swelling, blowing, threatening, and after all you prove to be only a sham, a mask rather than a being. Without fixity, without substance, a blown-up bladder, now collapsed, to be to-morrow a mere drop, a nameless portion of the dark blue waters of the Sea."