CUTTLE-FISH AND SEA SERPENTS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 741, 14 May 1886, Page 9

CUTTLE-FISH AND SEA SERPENTS.

CORNHILL MAGAZINE. The honnor of setting at rest all doubts as to the great squid certainly belongs to the Rev. M. Harvey, the learned and accurate Newfoundland naturalist. In 1873, two fishermen were catching cod in Conception Bay, when they saw a shapeless mas* floating on the water at a little distance. ‘ Wreck, no doubt,’ they said to themselves ; and as fishermen are not above salvage, they approached close to it, and struck it with a boat-hook. In a second, the supposed wreck developed suddenly into a fearsome monster, opened its huge staring eyes ferociously with a ghastly roll, and snapped at the boat-hook with its huge bill or jaws. The men were so fascinated with terror that they could not move ; and before they had recovered their self-possession the creature was full upon them shooting out from its head several long fleshy arms, and groping at the boat with them in its hideous fury. Only the two long tentacles succeeded in grappling it, and one of the men, seizing his hatchet, cut off both of them with a well-delivered blow. The cuttle-fish then absconded promptly, which goes to prove that the race, though ill-tem-pered and savage, is cowardly when wounded. Unfortunately, one of the arms was destroyed before its scientific interest was known ; but the other was brought to St. John and examined by Mr Harvey, who found that the fragment alone measured 19 feet. Professor Virrill considers that the total length of the animal must have been about sixty feet. A very gruesome monster indeed, no doubt, but still by no means up to sample as a full-grown sea-serpent. Some months later, Mr Harvey came across yet another big cuttle-fish. This time he was lucky enough to secure the entire animal, and to get it properly measured, photographed, ancl preserved in brine. The body is 8 feet long, and 5 feet round; the long tentacles are 24 feet in length, and the short arms 6 feet apiece. Each of them has nearly a hundred suckers, and every sucker is provided with a livingpiston, by means of which the creature can create a vacuum the moment it touches its prey, and so reinforce its own powerful muscles by all the weight of the atmosphere and the ocean above the spot it thus fastens upon. * No fate could be more horrible,’ says Mr Harvey, * than to be entwined in the embrace of those eight clammy corpse-like arms, and to feel their folds creeping and gliding around you, and the eight hundred discs, with their cold adhesive touch, glueing themselves to you with a grasp which nothing could relax, and feeling like so many mouths devouring you at the same time. Slowly the horrible arms, supple as leather, strong as steel, and cold as death, draw their prey under the awful beak, and press it against the glutinous mass which forms the body. The cold slimy grasp paralyses the victim with terror, and the powerful mandibles rend and devour him alive.’ Everybody has read the wonderfully dramatic account of a conflict with a huge cuttle-fish in the ‘ Travailleurs de la Mer ’; but even Vfctor Hugo's pieuvre would be but a pigmy beside Mr Harvey’s gigantic calamaries. Another Newfoundland clergy man, Mr Gabriel, measured two still larger squids, cast ashore at Lamaline in IS7O, in one of which the body was 40 feet long, and in another 47 feet. And one of Mr Harvey’s informants measured a specimen which was washed up by the waves a little earlier, and found it to be 80 feet in length. Altogether, the eases collected by this able and very trnstworthy naturalist conclusively prove that cuttle-fish of perfectly colossal size do really occur in considerable numbers in the

North Atlantic. . . . One of the best-cap-tured sea serpents on record was that caught by the crew of the barque Aberfoyle in September 1877. This canny craft was cruising in the classic home of sea-serpents, off the Scotch coast, during the warm summer weather, when (as we all. know) the gigantic beast loves to bask upon the surface and sun himself before the eyes of ladies and of knights; andlo ! of a sudden, on the lee side enter a seaserpent, in humor debonair, basking and sunning himself quite according to precedent on the summit of the water. The gallant crew, congratulating themselves that they had got him this time, lowered a boat forthwith, and preceeded to harpoon the dubious monster with all alacrity. _ Alas ! the harpoon went write through him ; and when the Aberfoyle’s men came to examine him in detail, he proved to he a mass of slime, like decaying jellyfish, some of which, when bottled, finally melted away into a watery consistence. Strings of porpoises, drifting legs, and bunches of wrack have often similarly done duty for a sea-serpent till hooked or closely observed; and it is interesting to note how generally the first descriptions of the object, as it apperred before the disillusion, coincides with all the popular ideas of the sea serpent one and indivisible. Especially do they almost all rejoice in welldeveloped manes ; a feature extremely improbable in a real marine beast, but practically indispensible in one form or another to dragons, wyverns, krakents, hippogryphs, unicorns, and other familiar denizens of the mediceval zoological gardens. The observed but uncaught sea serpents are harder far to deal with ; and in many cases it is certainly possible that they may have been large unknown marine animals. The two best instances are undoubtedly the well known ones of the Daedalus and the Osborne. In 1848, Captain McQuhse, of the former ship, saw *an enormous serpent ’ (note the mythical name—not * snake ’), which passed him rapidly, with head and shoulders about four feet above the water, and a body some sixty feet long. In 1877, the officers of the Osborne, with more caution, saw ‘ a large marine animal ’ off the coast of Sicily. It was in 1875 that skipper Drevar, of the Pauline, espied his famous creature, which he describes in his affidavit by the suspicious words, * a huge serpent.’ In all these cases, it appears pretty certain that something was seen, for a good many officers and men were on deck together, and it is not likely that they could all of them have been mistaken as to the main facts to which they testified. But in the very best authenticated instance, that of the Osborne, the accounts of the four officers who saw the object showed considerable discrepancies (due, of course, to hasty observation); and in any case, whatever the creature was, it was certainly not a sea-serpant, as the seaserpent is generally understood. The one thing in which almost all the officers coin cide is the statement that the very big beast had both fins and flippers. The captain, who calls it a “ fish,” saw it through a telescope, and thought it had a head like a seal. The lieutenant and engineer saw * a ridge of fins,’ and another officer saw a huge monster ‘ having a head about fifteen to twenty feet in length.’ All these particulars, with others too long to mention, are decidedly and suspiciously whale like. Now there can be little doubt that the Osborne really did see some very big animal, and the appearance of such an animal is in itself sufficiently remarkable ; but it was not—no, it was not the great sea-serpent. Nobody denies that there are many very large creatures in the sea ; probable, also, noboby would dogmatically assert that every big marine creature is already, in the ordinary hackneyed phrase, ‘known to science.’ But before anyone can declare that the particnlar animal he sees is new, he must have seen and examined all the other animals of anything like the same size that are now duly recognised by the naturalists. Just consider for a moment how many big marine monsters are actually known, which might be mistaken, singly or in combination, for a sea-serpent or other unnamed prodigy; and then reflect what are the chances that everyone of them has been tried and rejected in explanation.