I was lately reading an account of two queer fish which had been sent to the South Kensington Aquarium. One was a trout, three years old, that was forced to carry its tail hard a starboard—that is, the tail stands out at right angles with the fish’s body. Whether this deformity is due to gout, or whether the fish is in the case of the drunken Irishman who, on becoming sober and discovering that the surgeon at a hospital had been trying, without result, to put his hip right, cried out, “I was born so!” I do not know. That a trout should be able to steer a straight course through the water, however slowly, with his helm hard over, proves that this kind of fish must have a trick of navigation above the reach of mortal mariners. The second marine oddity was a stickleback of the length of a young rat, and extremely like an old mouse. I think I see these two strokes of nature swimming in company and consoling each other. We do not require either the fables of Æsop or the maxims of Rochefoucauld to assure us that there is something in the misfortunes of our best friends that does not secretly displease us. Possibly the stickleback in his heart thinks that, on the whole, he would rather look like a mouse than carry his tail through life athwart ships. On the other hand, the trout may consider that, though the obligation of having on all occasions to struggle against a weather helm must weigh heavy on a life whose essential condition is one of fins, yet, being a fish, it is better to be distorted as a fish than to carry the emotions of a fish in the caricature of a mouse. Presuming these to be their confidential opinions, it may be supposed that their efforts to console each other would not be entirely wanting in unconscious humour.

When absurd natural touches of this kind are brought under one’s attention, one gets to see how it happens that in the old voyages the relaters of the wonders they viewed sometimes wrote as if their hair stood on end. Suppose the stickleback to be a denizen of the deep; then conceive it, wearing the shape of a mouse, to rise beside some becalmed vessel filled with a company of “pilgrimes” of the kind whose narratives are preserved in “Purchas” and “Hakluyt.” The object is observed by some old mariner who carries a child’s eye for wonders and marvels amid the knobs and warts of his walnutshell of a face. Before he can sing out the mouse vanishes. But the ancient mariner has beheld it, and he straightway goes and reports the astonishing spectacle to two or three other ancient mariners, representing the strange fish possibly as of the size of a cat. The tale is bandied from one long-since venerable nautical mouth to another till by the time it reaches the captain’s cabin the sea-mouse has grown as big as a porpoise, collecting, in the course of its enlargement, a very pretty apparel of flaming eyes, “ears which itt did cocke, nostrils whence proceeded a sort of white smoak, a skin whereof ye furre was exceeding riche, and did shine as though covered with manye gemmes of brighte and piercynge lighte.”^[57]

Few of the queer fish one reads of in the old travels but were evolved in some such fashion as this, no doubt. It was in a sort of stealthy, peering way, crossing themselves often and chanting their litanies, that the early navigators entered the deep solitudes of the great oceans. Whatever befel them was startling or affrighting, or of wild and amazing beauty. Their meteors were not the waterspouts of to-day; the eclipse provoked their misericordias and Salve Reginas and rendered ashen the chocolate cheeks of the darkest-burnt on board; the glittering exhalations, known to us as corposants, which danced in the gale or burnt in the calm at the yard-arms or on the bowsprit end, were prayed to as the spirit or presence of a saint; the very thunder, though its roar was no louder than that which broke the repose of the Portugal or Andalusian hills of the seamen, snatched a note of horror, reverberated an echo of terror, from the solemn immensity of the liquid plain into whose horizon over the ships’ bows the mariners stared under the shelter of their hands, gaping for the auriferous shores which day after day for weeks their admirals, their captain-generals, had told them they should have in view anon.

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.”

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]

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.