Part 6 (1/2)
With the two lines and his exhausted state, it was comparatively easy to bring him to the rocks again, and then with blows of the hatchet we had soon murdered him. Even then it was a job of some moment to get the body safely up the slimy and uneven rocks.
At length our prey was well secured, and we stood about him in triumph.
It was a shark, measuring five feet and three inches in length, and he must certainly have weighed nearly a hundred pounds.
From the study Mr Clare made of the subject, we found that the name by which the shark is technically known is _Squalidae_, which includes a large family fitly designated, as your Latin dictionary will prove when you find the adjective _squalidus_--”filthy, slovenly, loathsome.” It is a family of many species, there being some thirty or forty cousins; and the different forms of the teeth, snout, mouth, lips, and tail-fins, the existence or absence of eyelids, spiracles, (those are the apertures by which the water taken in for respiration is thrown out again), the situation of the different fins, etcetera, distinguish the different divisions of the common family. The cousin who, wandering about that stormy Sat.u.r.day, had frightened away the ba.s.s, and finally astonished himself by swallowing a fish-hook when he only thought to suck a dainty bit of his family's favourite delicacy, was known as the _Zygaena_--so Mr Clare introduced him to us when his sharks.h.i.+p had grown so exceedingly diffident as not to be able to say one word for himself--a genus distinguished by having the sides of the head greatly prolonged in a horizontal direction, from which circ.u.mstance they are commonly known as the hammer-headed sharks.
His teeth were in three rows, the points of the teeth being directed towards the corners of the mouth. The two back rows were bent down, and only intended, Mr Clare told us, to replace the foremost when injured.
These horrible teeth were notched like a saw.
I think the face, if so you might call it, of that piratical fish wore the most fearfully cruel and rapacious expression I had ever seen. That _Zygaena_ family of the _Squalidae_, (I think they sound more horribly devilish when called by their cla.s.sical t.i.tles), is one dangerous to man, and it is very rare that a man-eating or man-biting shark is ever found on the English coast.
I proposed to cut him open, and so we did. Among the half-digested food, most of which was fish, I found something that at first looked like a leather strap. I seized it and pulled it out. Surely there was a buckle. I washed and laid it out on the rock, while we all gathered about in great excitement to make out what our dead enemy had been preying on. There was no longer a doubt that it was a dog-collar--the collar of a medium-sized dog, perhaps a spaniel or terrier. There was a plate on it, which, with a little rubbing, we made to read, ”David Atherton, Newcastle.” How very strange! Had the little fellow been washed overboard from some vessel? or had he swum off some neighbouring beach to bring a stick for his master?
We could never discover any antecedents of any kind whatever to that mysterious sequel to ”The Romance of the Poor Young Dog.” Was there a fond master mourning for him in Newcastle, England, or in Newcastle, Pennsylvania? Alas, poor dog! thou wert hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed from this world--the ocean thy grave and a shark's belly thy coffin. Thy collar hangs, as I write this, over my study table, and many a time has my old Ponto sniffed at that relic of a fellow-dog, and his eyes grown moist as I repeated to him my surmises of the sad fate of David Atherton's companion.
Mr Clare told us a good deal about sharks. Of the many varieties, the most hideous is the Wolf-fish, (_Anarrhicas lupus_). Though much smaller than the white shark, he is a very formidable creature. He has six rows of grinders in each jaw, excellently adapted for bruising the crabs, lobsters, scallops, and large whelks, which the voracious animal grinds to pieces, and swallows along with the sh.e.l.ls. When caught, it fastens with indiscriminate rage upon anything within its reach, fights desperately, even when out of the water, and inflicts severe wounds if not avoided cautiously. Schonfeld relates this wolf-fish will seize on an anchor and leave the marks of its teeth in it, and Steller mentions one on the coast of Kamschatka, which he saw lay hold of a cutla.s.s, with which a man was attempting to kill it, and break it to bits as if it had been made of gla.s.s. This monster is, from its great size, one of the most formidable denizens of the ocean; in the British waters it attains the length of six or seven feet, and is said to be much larger in the more Northern seas. It usually frequents the deep parts of the sea, but comes among the marine plants of the coast in spring, to deposit its sp.a.w.n. It swims rather slowly, and glides along with somewhat of the motion of an eel.
The white shark is far more dreadful, from its gigantic size and strength; its jaws are also furnished with from three to six rows of strong, flat, triangular, sharp-pointed, and finely serrated teeth, which it can raise or depress at will.
This brute grows to a length of thirty feet, and its strength may be imagined from the fact that a young shark, only six feet long, has been known to break a man's leg by a stroke of its tail. Therefore, when sailors have caught a shark at sea, with a baited hook, the first thing they do when it is drawn upon deck is to chop off its tail, to prevent the mischief to be dreaded from its immense strength.
Hughes, the author of the ”Natural History of Barbadoes,” relates an anecdote which gives a good idea of the nature of this monster: ”In the reign of Queen Anne a merchant s.h.i.+p from England arrived at Barbadoes; some of the crew, ignorant of the danger of doing so, were bathing in the sea, when a large shark suddenly appeared swimming directly towards them. All hurried on board, and escaped, except one unfortunate fellow, who was bit in two by the shark. A comrade and friend of the man, seeing the severed body of his companion, vowed instant revenge. The voracious shark was seen swimming about in search of the rest of his prey, when the brave lad leaped into the water. He carried in his hand a long, sharp-pointed knife, and the fierce monster pushed furiously towards him. Already he had turned over, and opened his huge, deadly jaws, when the youth, diving cleverly, seized the shark somewhere near the fins with his left hand, and stabbed him several times in the belly.
The creature, mad with pain and streaming with blood, attempted vainly to escape. The crews of the s.h.i.+ps near saw that the fight was over, but knew not which was slain, till, as the shark became exhausted, he rose nearer the sh.o.r.e, and the gallant a.s.sailant still continuing his efforts, was able, with a.s.sistance, to drag him on sh.o.r.e. There he ripped open the stomach of the shark and took from it the half of his friend's body, which he then buried together with the trunk half.”
The negroes are admirable swimmers and divers, and they sometimes attack and vanquish the terrible shark, but great skill is necessary.
When Sir Brooke Watson, as a youth, was in the West Indies, he was once swimming near a s.h.i.+p when he saw a shark making towards him. He cried out in terror for help, and caught a rope thrown to him; but even as the men were drawing him up the side of the vessel, the monster darted after, and took off his leg at a single snap.
Fortunately for sea-bathers on our sh.o.r.es, the white shark and the monstrous hammer-headed _zygaena_ seldom appear in the colder lat.i.tudes, though both have occasionally been seen on the British coasts.
The northern ocean has its peculiar sharks, but some are good-natured, like the huge basking shark, (_S maximus_), and feed on seaweeds and medusae and the rest, such as the _picked_ dog-fish, (_Galeus acanthius_), are, although fierce, of too small a size to be dangerous to man.
But the dog-fish and others, such as the blue shark, are very troublesome and injurious to the fisherman; though they do not venture to attack him, for they hover about his boat and cut the hooks from his lines. Indeed, this sometimes leads to their own destruction; and when their teeth do not deliver them from their difficulty, the blue sharks, which hover about the coast of Cornwall during the pilchard season, roll their bodies round so as to twine the line about them in its whole length, and often in such a way that Mr Yarrell has known a fisherman give up as hopeless the attempt to unroll it.
This shark is very dangerous to the pilchard drift-net, and very often will pa.s.s along the whole length of net, cutting out, as if with shears, the fish and the net which holds them, and swallowing both together.
CHAPTER TEN.
UGLY--PLOVER, SNIPE, AND RABBIT SHOOTING--A CRUISE PROPOSED.
Recounting that last event reminds me of a well-beloved character in our cape days--one, too, that was destined to play an important part in our little drama.
Ugly was his name; Trusty Greatheart it should have been.
Ugly was a clipped-eared, setter-tailed, short-legged, long-haired, black-nosed, bright-eyed little mongrel. In limiting his ancestry to no particular aristocratic family, he could prove some of the blood of many. There were evident traces of the water-spaniel, the Skye terrier, and that most beautiful of all the hound family--the beagle.
I do not know what education Ugly may have had in his earlier days, but I believe it to have been limited, though his acquirements were great.
I believe him to have been a canine genius. He was as ready on the water as on the land. His feats of diving and swimming were remarkable; and a better rabbit-dog and more sagacious, courageous watchdog never lived. As to the languages, I will acknowledge he could speak none; but he understood English perfectly, and never failed to construe rightly any of Mr Clare's Latin addresses--much better than ever Walter could do. Indeed, Mr Clare's commands to and conversations with Ugly were always in Latin.