Page:Under the Sun.djvu/301

Rh

Favorable to such discovery is the habitat now assigned to the great conger, for it lies on the highway of our commerce. Hitherto, fiords on the Scandinavian coast, the headlands of Greenland, and other unfrequented waterways have been selected by krakens and aaletusts for their exhibitions; and though Danes, Swedes, and Norsemen generally have long believed in the existence of these monsters of the deep, their haunts were so much out of the way of regular sea traffic, that only fishermen, the most superstitious and credulous of mankind, could say they had actually seen them. Now and again a glimpse was said to have been caught in more accessible waters of some bulky thing answering in length of body to the description of a serpent, but flaws in the Evidence always marred the value of the great vision. Six hundred feet of one, was, for instance, recorded off the English coast, but here the length alone sufficed to quench belief; while the other, with eyes “large and blue, like a couple of pewter plates,” found basking off the shore of Norway, was discredited by its possessing legs. Exactly a hundred years ago a whole ship’s crew vouched for the following awful apocalypse of the terrors of the sea: “A hundred fathoms long, with the head of a horse; the mouth large and black, and a white mane hanging from the neck. It raised itself so high that it reached above the top of the mast, and it spouted water like a whale;” and, what is more, the skipper shot it!

Captain Cox, then, will have to work hard before he can bring his worm abreast of so thrilling a creature; but, meanwhile, he has commenced well. To him we owe the latest confirmation of one of the oldest of the world’s superstitions, and though, in confirming it, he