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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

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I The

IMPENETRABLE
SEA

^1

ARTHUR CONSTANCE

MARINE

BIOLOGICAL

LABORATORY

LIBRARY

rrooos hole, mas:

W. H. 0. I.

THE CITADEL PRESS
NliW YORK

© Oldbourne Book Co. Ltd., 1958

First American Edition, 1958

SET IN 12 POINT BASKERVILLE

AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

BY EBENEZER BAYLIS AND SON, LTD., THE

TRINITY PRESS, WORCESTER, AND LONDON

*'wHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW of the sca cvcn today? Just
that Httle revealed to us by nautical soundings rather
limited in scope ; just the animals and the objects fished
up by more or less blind dredgings ; and, finally, just that
firagmentary information brought to the surface by
divers, few of whom have ever gone below the surface
with scientific intent and certainly none of whom have
ever descended from a poetic urge.

No, the fact is that man must admit that quite close to
his shores — practically within a few feet — an unknown
world begins, a zone more secret and mysterious than any
unexplored territory that ever was on dry land. And this
secret world laps all our shores, covers the greater part of
the maps of our world with featureless blue, contains the
most astonishing and prodigious forms of animal life, and
conceals the ultimate origin of all life whether on land or
sea.

Even for men who live all their lives along the coasts
and perhaps spend the greater part of their lives at sea,
this other world is still a tremendous enigma, a sheer
mass beyond the reach of our direct knowledge."

Pierre de Latil and Jean Rivoire

Man and the Underwater World

(Jarrolds. 1956)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I INTO THE DEPTHS .

II ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE?

III SKIMMING THE SURFACE

IV THE WINDS ....
V THE MOVING WATERS

VI WHIRLPOOLS ....

VII COASTLINES ....

VIII SPONGES AND CORALS

IX THE FISHMEN ....

X TIGERS OF THE DEEP

XI WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES .

XII THE DRIFTING SWARMS

XIII THE SINISTER CEPHALOPODS

XIV ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS
INDEX .....

PAGE
II

20

33
58

73

90
no

138

154
182

209

235
245
262

273

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE SOAP-BUBBLE SKIN WHICH WE KNOW AS THE

world's OCEANS, IN RELATION TO OUTER SPACE 25

SOLAR SAHARA — OUR WATERLESS UNIVERSE . 26

THE world's oceans COVERING THREE PARTS OF

ITS SURFACE ...... 27

FACING PAGE

HEAD OF SAWFISH, CAUGHT OFF RAGETTA ISLANDS . 64

SWORDFISH AND ITS WEAPON .

THE WEIRD ''chicken FISH"

THE BECHE-DE-MER A CHINESE LUXURY

SqUID ENCOUNTERING AN EEL

REMORA ATTACHED TO SHARK

AIR LEAP OF A SEVEN-FOOT PORPOISE

SOMERSAULT OF A SALMON

THE PORPOISE ....

A KEEL HARBOUR SHARK

A LIVE OCTOPUS ....

THE octopus's "jET-PROPULSIOn" FUNNEL

64

65
65
96

97
192
192

193

224

225
225

PREFACE

IN this age of progressive scientific achievement,
which fosters experimental activity at the expense of
contemplative meditation, we seem to be in some
danger of losing our sense of wonderment. Because the
miraculous has become commonplace, the commonplace
has ceased to be miraculous in the sense conveyed by
Whitman's words : "To me every hour of the light and
dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle."
Many books of recent years survey the world's oceans
and describe their teeming life-forms more comprehen-
sively than this book, and my research through numbers
of them has deepened my admiration and respect for all
whose scientific investigations and explorations have con-
tributed to our knowledge of the seas. Yet the subject is
so vast, and has so many ramifications, that even as the
light of the sun penetrates only a Httle way down into the
oceans (the last trace of light vanishing at 3,500 feet
below the surface) so all the accumulated knowledge of
man regarding the world's seas remains superficial. Be-
neath every carefully-acquired fact regarding any of the
sea's characteristics or living creatures lie infinities of
further facts : an incredibly vast realm of undiscovered
truth comparable with the dark, mysterious abysses of
the ocean itself, unpenetrated and virtually impenetrable.
Carlyle linked wonderment with worship in a signi-
ficant passage in which he said : ''The man who does not
habitually wonder ... is but a pair of spectacles behind
which there is no Eye." This thought is strikingly con-
firmed in a sentence written by the joint authors of the
first connected story of man's relationship to the sea, a
quotation from which appears at the beginning of this

II

PREFACE

book: "No other sources of information can ever make
up for that uUimate master knowledge revealed by men's
eyes, or for that less tangible but even profounder
knowledge attained emotionally by the soul of man
rather than his mind."

If this book increases a sense of wonderment in its
readers' minds regarding the sea, in the sense indicated
by these quotations, its purpose will be fulfilled.

I must express my sincere gratitude to Frank W. Lane,
author of that monumental and fascinating book King-
dom of the Octopus, for checking my chapter on the
cephalopods. My thanks are also due to Mr. H. A.
Humphrey of the Oldbourne Press for creative criticism ;
to correspondents in several countries (particularly
Fletcher King of Florida and others in the U.S.A.) for
news clippings ; and especially to my wife for her invalu-
able help in reading the MS. of this book.

27 Clarence Parade Arthur Constance

Cheltenham, England

12

CHAPTER I

INTO THE DEPTHS

THEY were awake at 6.30 a.m. on that momentous
14th of February, 1954. The sea was heaving
and tossing restlessly as though it resented what
they were about to do. Over two and a half miles of dark
swirling water lay below the Elie Monnier's keel as she
rolled and pitched with the motion of the waves. Com-
mander Houot and Lieutenant Willm (who were about
to make another descent in the bathyscaphe F.R.N.S.3,
160 miles south-west of Dakar, French West Africa)
made a hasty breakfast, checked their asdic signals,
shook hands with the others, and jumped down into the
dinghy which had been put over the side.

The boat rose and sank in the swell as they went
across to the F.R.N.S.3. The upper structure, or float,
of the "deep boat" lay on the heaving water like a
surfaced submarine. Suspended from its belly was the
ten- ton steel sphere which was to be their ''cabin" during
the descent. Grey mist shrouded the horizon and blotted
out the dunes on the coasthne. Only the Mamelles^ the
twin "Paps of Dakar", emerged remote and ghost-like
from the haze.

They reached the float, gained the bridge, and opened
the air-lock hatch. The divers, who had just come aboard,
received their orders and went over the side, holding
their boat-hooks, to make their final inspection. There
were, as always, last-moment diflficulties, but these were
quickly overcome. The tow-line was cast off'. To Willm,
who had gone ahead into the sphere, came the statement

13

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

over the phone that all the vents were opened. Those
above the two men, on deck, moved to the dinghy and
cast off from the bathyscaphe. In a few moments all
personnel were away from the float.

Inside the submerged sphere, Willm informed the Elie
Monnier that they were ready to dive. Back came the
instruction from Commander Tailliez, supervising the
operation: ''Hello, bathyscaphe, you may dive."

Houot — still in the upper structure — dashed for the
porthole of the hatch. Sea water was already swilling
over it. He went through into the steel ball — over six feet
in diameter, with a shell varying from 3 to 6 inches —
and closed the hatch. The two men took their positions
at the controls, watching the gauges. Over the radio-
telephone came the words : ''Your deck is going under.*'

The needles of the vertical-speed log jerked spas-
modically and then settled down to their registration,
showing that the blades of the instrument were already
turning. The dive had begun. Willm read off the metres :
"Seven — eight — nine — ten." Two-way communication
was cut as the bathyscaphe left the surface at 10.8 a.m.
While surfaced it had been possible by radio-telephone.
It still remained possible to send signals upward — not
speech. But no messages or signals of any kind could
come down to them through the intervening water, upon
the surface of which only a widening patch of fluorescent
green now remained to show where the bathyscaphe had
rested.

Houot and Willm were now suspended in their steel
sphere from a float carrying over 17,000 gallons of petrol
in twelve tanks, and several tons of lead and steel shot,
their controls enabling them to regulate the speed of the
entire structure's descent or ascent. Isolated from the
world above them, as they sank into the abyss, they
continually tapped out signals on the asdic key, but had
no means of knowing whether or not they were received
by the Elie Monnier above them.

14

INTO THE DEPTHS

They went down into a world seething with plankton
— multitudes of small crustaceans and other sea creatures
which (as seen through the perspex porthole) drifted up-
wards in swarms like a snowstorm in reverse. Strongly
illuminated by the light which streamed through the
porthole from one of two powerful searchlights, the
planktonic multitude rushed here and there, drew nearer
or receded, as they were left behind by the bathyscaphe's
descent, but their background was one of black and
mysterious stillness. Houot worked the camera as their
steel cabin went spiralling down.

By 10.40 a.m. they had reached a depth of 400 metres —
roughly 1,200 feet in 32 minutes. Now and again a few
siphonophores were glimpsed among the upward-
streaming plankton — transparent, beautifully-coloured
creatures similar to sea-anemones. One or two looked
like huge tadpoles of living light as they went
past.

There was no vibration, nor even any feeling of
motion, as Houot and Willm went down. They seemed
to be poised in a vast realm of unreality : spectators of
scenes beyond the perspex which seemed to be painted
on a vast black canvas ceaselessly unrolling upwards to
the surface of the sea, which now seemed infinitely
remote and lost to them.

Spots of water were now falling on them as they knelt
there. The enormous pressure of the waters outside was
compressing the two hemispheres of their spherical cabin
— sealing them even more tightly together and forcing
out drops of moisture from the circular joint.

They took it in turn to change their clothes. The
temperature of their strange compartment was falling
steadily.

They switched on their second floodlight at intervals —
reinforcing the one which sent its vivid beam downward
into the swirling darkness. At 3,000 feet down Houot
made a note that all forms of life had disappeared — but

15

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

he had to revise his opinion later when swarms of Hving
creatures passed the porthole again.

By 1 1.30 a.m. they were over a mile down, and a few
moments later they passed the greatest depth they had
attained during previous descents. Above them on the
surface the Elie Monnier was receiving their signals, and
the men on her realized, with rising excitement, that
they had broken their own record. Using the second
floodlight, Houot saw seething clouds of plankton, and
realized that he had previously been led to believe that
life had ceased because myriads of the living creatures
were too small to be seen with the one searchlight. But
now they were seeing slightly bigger ones — what seemed
to be red shrimps, with long antennae, drifted upwards in
vast shoals.

They had slowed down a little. By noon they were
down to nearly ten thousand feet, but still about three
thousand feet from the bottom. At that depth they halted
their queer craft for a while. The ''rain" had stopped.
The tremendous pressure of the water now crushing them
down was forcing the hemispheres tightly together.

The silence was broken only by the hissing of the
oxygen and the humming of the transformers. They had
no need to start the bathyscaphe descending again — it
started to move downwards of its own accord as the
temperature of the outer waters affected the petrol within
the tanks.

The pressure gauges at last registered a depth of two
miles — no one in human history had ever gone so far
down into the ocean.

At that depth they again saw great swarms of shrimps
and siphonophores — or, as Houot described them, desir-
ing greater accuracy: "Organisms resembling siphono-
phores."

Several hundred feet lower they saw a swarm of
medusae : those fantastic jellyfish which resemble minia-
ture umbrellas with short shafts (with mouths at the end

16

INTO THE DEPTHS

of them) each carrying a fringe of stinging tentacles.
They swim by rhythmic pulsations of their bell-like
shapes, sucking in and driving out the water in a kind of
"jet-propulsion". What was the nature of such creatures'
lives, over two miles below the surface of the sea? How
could their soft bodies withstand the terrific pressure of
the water above them — pressure so great that the wall of
the bathyscaphe's steel sphere had to be at least three
inches thick to withstand it?

At 12,000 feet they were sinking fast. They shed ballast
for twenty-five seconds, and then again for fifteen
seconds, until the bathyscaphe was descending very
slowly. Their echo-sounder told them that the sea-bed
was near. They watched anxiously for it to appear, shed
ballast again for ten seconds to slow them down even
more. Suddenly, at 13,125 feet, Willm shouted, 'T can
see the bottom!"

The echo-sounder registered twenty metres — fifteen —
ten. . . .

The guide chain had touched down. The bathyscaphe
came to a stop. Under perfect control it had reached the
bottom of the sea, after a journey downwards of 13,287
feet — the greatest depth ever attained by man.

In the great circle of light cast by their searchlights the
ocean floor seemed to be composed of fine white sand,
covered with ridges and mounds, and with holes at
intervals. They switched on their two motors and cruised
around horizontally for thirty-six minutes. Sixty-eight
thousand tons of water now pressed upon them, doing its
utmost to crush the walls of the steel sphere in which they
knelt — yet their extraordinary habitation stubbornly
resisted the enormous pressure and safeguarded their
lives. They saw sharks down there, swimming lazily
near the ocean floor — creatures which they afterwards
described as quite unlike any sharks seen on the surface :
monsters with enormous mouths, swimmers which
seemed quite undisturbed by the light. They saw a

17

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

colony of small animals grouped together and attached
to the sea-bottom — strange creatures not unlike sea-
anemones. They watched a queer animal that looked
like an enormous flower — resembling, perhaps, a tulip
more than anything else — a plant-animal about a foot
tall, spreading its leaf-like arms and swaying gently in
the current.

Suddenly the sphere shuddered as though some huge
creature had struck it. Something was happening in the
float over their heads. The bathyscaphe started to
ascend, and they realized what had happened — the
battery cases had fallen off, and the craft, 2,700 pounds
lighter, was soaring upwards.

The electro-magnets had cut out, releasing the bat-
teries. Houot and Willm had the satisfaction that their
safety devices were working efficiently, but this seemed
poor consolation for the enforced curtailment of their
cruise over the ocean floor.

They rose through a multitude of phosphorescent
lights — luminous fish in myriads.

Breaking the surface at 3.21 p.m., they opened the
air-blast, and for a quarter of an hour the sea water ran
steadily out of the float. When the air-lock was empty
they raised the hatch, and went quickly up the ladder.
Three turns of the hand-wheel released the hatch and
they emerged into the open air, to find the Elie Monnier
a few hundred feet away, and the Tenace making ready
to take them in tow, while the Beautemps Beaupre, with its
load of journalists, was bearing down on them. The
F.N.R.S.3 had accomplished its sensational task success-
fully.

Despite the thickness of its walls it might well be
described as a bubble — a man-made one which had
penetrated the skin of this spinning bubble which we call
our world.

How little we know of the world's seas may be appre-
ciated when we realize that the descent of the F.R.N. S. 3

18

INTO THE DEPTHS

was a mere ''pin-prick" of exploration, so minute that it
examined only a square mile or so at most of the
141 milHon square miles of the world's sea-beds. Yet
even so limited an exploration can convince us that the
sea is truly overwhelming — physically, because it covers
seven- tenths of the earth, and mentally as we ghmpse the
wonderment and mystery concealed in its deeps, reflected
from its surface, and expressed in the milhons of living
creatures which inhabit its shores.

19

CHAPTER II

ARE THERE OCEANS IN
OUTER SPACE?

THE deeps of the world's oceans are easily accessible
when compared with the appalling abysses which
separate us from the stars, or even those which
stretch between our world and the nearest planets in our
solar system. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is so
remote that light, travelling at 186,300 miles per second,
takes over four years to reach us. Mars and Venus, the
two nearest members of our sun's family, are very roughly
40 million miles away. Compared with such distances a
journey down into the ocean deeps of a few miles seems a
mere step.

Any kind of exploration of the 4,000 miles of solid
earth or rock that separates us from the centre of the
earth would indeed be a formidable task — perhaps even
more impossible than a voyage across space to Proxima
Centauri. The internal regions of the earth may forever
remain unknown to us, save for anything we may learn of
them by the use of seismographs and similar appliances.

But if these considerations give us an impression that
the accumulation of knowledge regarding the world's
oceans is a comparatively easy matter, we should pause
to reflect that any voyage upward towards the planets or
stars must be one through space, while a journey down
into the ocean takes us through vast multitudes of living
creatures — untold millions of them in every foot or so of
sea water that we pass through.

Before we begin our imaginative voyage — across the

20

ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE?

ocean's surface, along parts of its coastlines, and down
into the deeps — we must have some conception of man's
relation to the world's seas, and a mental picture of the
oceans as compared with our world, and with the solar
system.

Man is a creature dependent upon the earth (his
natural habitat) for his daily life and substance. He
depends upon air for the purification of his blood — and
no artificial expedients can make him independent of it
for long. He also depends upon fire for his existence —
that mysterious phenomenon which is conditioned by the
sun, directly and indirectly. But he is most intimately
dependent on water, for his body is mainly composed of
it. In fact, by a curious coincidence, the percentage of
water in man's body roughly approximates to the seven-
tenths preponderance of the world's water surface as
compared with its land area.

Man's natural habitat, earth, is one across which fire
and water wage incessant warfare. In this warfare the
air is an instrument, or weapon used by the protagonists,
rather than a field of action. Water — whether in the form
of the world's oceans, or as rivers or streams, or merely
in the form of torrential rains — attacks the earth,
crumbling and eating away the world's coastlines, in-
cessantly changing the shapes of countries and con-
tinents, and killing millions of humans through the
centuries by wrecking man's ships and smashing his
dwellings with devastating floods.

Fire retaliates by destroying man's dwellings and
forests whenever he relaxes his watchfulness. Man enlists
the aid of either of the protagonists as it suits him, but he
is forever menaced by both, despite the paradoxical fact
that they are his natural friends as well as enemies.

Man is curiously situated in relation to this incessant
warfare. He lives upon a spinning globe, slightly flattened
at the poles — a globe which has often been compared,
quite appropriately as regards shape, with an ordinary

21

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

orange. But the comparison fails if we imagine the tiny
irregularities on the skin of an orange as representing the
mountains, valleys and ocean beds of our world. Even the
smoothest-skinned orange would be too coarsely surfaced
to represent them — an orange-sized ball with an appar-
ently smooth surface would be a better representation.

The earth's diameter is nearly 8,000 miles. Compare it
with the heights of the world's loftiest mountains, and
the deepest depths of its oceans. Twenty mountain peaks
are over 20,000 feet in height. Of these the highest is
Everest — 29,028 feet. One of the deepest spots in the
oceans was discovered south-west of Guam in 1951 by
the British survey ship Challenger — named after the
famous oceanographic vessel that circled the globe in
1872-76. Known as the Challenger Depth, this is six and
four-fifths miles down into the earth, and might seem to
be more than a scarcely-visible prick in the skin of an
orange. But even if we increase the Challenger Depth a
little, calling it, for convenience's sake, seven miles, it is
still less than a thousandth of the diameter of the earth.

There can be little doubt that human beings will one
day descend to the deepest points in the world's oceans —
probably exploring chasms many hundreds of feet deeper
than those known to us at present. But enough explora-
tion has already taken place to give us a rough idea of
the downward limit of ocean penetration. We can accept
seven miles as a reasonable figure. But the average depth
of the world's oceans has been calculated at very con-
siderably less than this : 14,200 feet, or roughly 2f miles.
Some authorities make it somewhat less.

All man's normal activities take place within the
twelve and a half miles range indicated : that is, in the
superficial ''thickness" lying between the top of Everest
and the lowest depth in the ocean. The use of the word
"normal" is essential in this age, for men occasion-
ally pass upward, far above Everest, making their alti-
tude records, such exploits being exceptions, however, to

22

ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE?

the normal life of man. And although the altitude figures
in international aircraft records have crept up and up,
from 38,419 feet in 1927 to the record height (as I write
these words) of 100,000 feet attained by Major David G.
Simons, in a manned freed balloon, of more than nine-
teen miles, in August 1957, yet the limit of man's physical
penetration into the world's atmosphere probably still
falls short of thirty miles.*

The clearest and most accurate conception of the
three ''elements", earth, air and sea, that we can possibly
create is one which needs a pictorial representation of the
world with a diameter of five feet. Any smaller scale
makes it impossible to show the average depth of the
oceans as a perceptible line. Many books which attempt
to give pictorial representations of the earth, surrounded
by its atmosphere and its oceans, are compelled to
exaggerate the depth of the oceans for that reason.

If you can find a convenient surface — an appropriate
one would be a smooth stretch of sand when you are
next at the seaside — you can get a rough idea of the
average depth of the world's oceans as compared with
the earth itself by tracing a circle with a diameter of
five feet. If the line you have drawn is not thicker than a
fiftieth of an inch you will have some idea of the thinness
of the film of water that covers our world. Yet film-like
though it is compared with the diameter of our world,
its depth is formidable for us, as we send down our bathy-
scaphes into it, and its volume is truly overwhelming.

For the total weight of the world's waters has been
calculated as amounting to one and a half million million
million tons, a figure which may perhaps be better
appreciated if we realize that, shared among the 2,500
million human beings who constitute the present popula-
tion of our world, it would give every man, woman and
child 600 million tons of sea- water each.

♦Even if we allow a margin for aircraft flights, details of which have not been
officially released.

23

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Statistics regarding the world's oceans abound in such
paradoxes, even as the knowledge man has gained of
them sparkles with countless facts, sonie of them so
amazing that they seem miraculous.

The diagram on the following page should now be
easily understood. It emphasizes in pictorial form the
fact that the world is not ''three parts water" as some
people imagine, using loose terminology, but mainly
covered with water, and that so superficially that we live
upon a sphere which is almost entirely dry (almost com-
pletely waterless) when its bulk is compared with the
film of water overwhelming its surface.

Because we are surface creatures we necessarily obtain
a very distorted impression of the volume of the ocean as
compared with the mass of the earth, and with our con-
ception of the solar system itself.

We are microscopical life-forms in a planetary system
which may seem vast to us as we circle our parent sun,
but which is actually a minute speck compared with the
Cosmos itself.

If the world were completely smooth it would be
flooded to a depth of two miles, so that ''dry land life"
as we know it could not possibly exist upon it. Even
now, if we consider the significance of the fact that the
world's dry land has an average elevation above the
surface of the sea of only 2,500 feet (a film of dry land so
thin that it cannot possibly be represented by a line thin
enough in our diagram) our position as dry land
creatures is precarious.

A disturbance of sufficient severity in any of the ocean
beds could raise the level of the world's waters that
slight fraction, proportionately, which would result in a
flooding of its entire land surface.

Fortunately for us the waves of the ocean scarcely rise
above its average surface level. Yet the total volume of
the waters resting on the world's sea beds is 324 million
cubic miles — fourteen times as great as the volume of the

24

MILES

ABOVE
EXTREME
LIMIT OF
RAREFIED
ATMOSPHERE

NOT TO
SCALE

600

500

^0

THE SOAP-BUBBLE SKIN

which we know as the world's oceans in
relation to outer space

25,757 million miles: Nearest star (Proxima Centaur!)
93 million miles: Mean distance of our sun
35 million miles: Mars at nearest

238,860 miles: Mean distance of the moon
4,000 miles: The Farside rocket

Limit of extremely rarefied 2itmos£here

300

"200
150

Areai of the S£utmk. orbits

Limit of dense aLtmo6£Kere

Limit of ma.nned freed-baiUoou flight

THi WORLD'S OCEANS

Average depth: 2^3 miles

THE EARTH (near/y 8.000 miles diameter)
REPRESENTED ON THIS SCALE BY 5ft CIRCLE.

U

25

SOLAR SAHARA

Compared with our world, the rest of our solar system {the sun and its other
major planets) is almost waterless. Our world oceans, a mere film of water,
comparatively, covering our planet, may be unique among the billions of solar
systems in the known universe.

MERCURY: water/ess

VENUS: may hove water, hut no oceans

OUR EARTH: has a filn) of water one three-
thousandth of its diameter

OUR MOON: other planets also have satellites
MARS: has water, canalized and scarce, but no oceans

JUPITER: no water

SATURN: woter/ess

URANUS: woter/ess

NEPTUNE: woter/ess

PLUTO: waterless

SEGMENT OF OUR SUN: a blazing
furnace a million times the mass of our world

26

THE WORLD'S OCEANS

A water-film covering three-quarters of its surface

WESTERN
HEMISPHERE

EASTERN
HEMISPHERE

Depths of 600 feet
and less

27

Depths averaging
12,000 feet, Includ-
ing the greatest
known deeps

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

dry land above sea level. Incidentally, these figures give
us a far better idea of the relative proportions of the
world's seas and lands. ''Seven-eighths of the world's
surface" gives us a seven-to-one ratio, because it merely
compares the land and sea surfaces. Taking the sea as an
occupied world or realm, and generously allowing the
entire dry land surface above sea-level, vertically as
well as horizontally, as man's habitation, the ocean's
dominion is fourteen times greater than that of the
land.

Compared with the enormous volume of the world's
oceans, the waves of the sea are microscopically insig-
nificant disturbances. Atlantic gales may produce waves
which are truly enormous from any human viewpoint —
waves often thirty feet from trough to crest, and some-
times a quarter of a mile from crest to crest. Double the
average height — thirty feet — often attained by waves in
furious gales, and you have the figure (sixty feet) some-
times given in books as the greatest possible height of an
ocean wave. One was officially recorded in 1933, how-
ever, which actually exceeded that height. It is the
world's record wave.

On the night of the Gth-yth February that year, the
U.S.S. RamapOy proceeding from Manila to San Diego
during a 68-knot (78.3 m.p.h.) gale, measured that
highest-of-all waves as 1 1 2 feet from trough to crest.

Terrifyingly high though such waves must appear to
seamen menaced by them, any such disturbed area of
the sea is actually tranquil and flat in comparison with
the vast area of the ocean surrounding it. So with the
entire volume of the world's waters. To us they are
inconceivably immense. In truth all the water in the
world's oceans is so minute in comparison with our solar
system that, to grasp their real cosmic significance, we
must see our sun and its nine major planets as a scorched
and almost waterless desert.

Water in its various forms is at present our ally and

28

ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE?

faithful servant — our sure defence against our solar
system's greatest menace, subjected as it is to the in-
cessant bombardment of the sun's rays. It is not an
immediate threat, like the atomic bomb. But although
the menace of the latter may well be cancelled out and
removed by international understanding, there is nothing
that mankind can do, ultimately, against the mightier
menace of aridity, which must at last destroy all life on
our world, even as it has (most probably) destroyed all
life on some of the other planets.

Our sun has now lived approximately half its normal
lifetime. Dr. Allan Sandage, astronomer of the Carnegie
Institute (probably the world's greatest authority on
this particular subject) has reached the conclusion that
before our sun dies — doomed by the accumulated ashes
of its fires — it must necessarily compensate for the
change in its internal chemical composition by increasing
its radius and luminosity. In other words it must expand
and brighten if it is to remain stable. This increase in its
size and in the power of its activity must, says Dr.
Sandage, become far more pronounced and drastic
when the sun has consumed twelve per cent of its fuel.
Until now it has consumed about six per cent. In
another six billion years the sun will appear as a dull
red globe in the sky and will be burning out at a tre-
mendous rate, declining in brightness until it will die
out like an ember in a neglected fireplace. But long
before this happens the temperature of the earth's surface
must go up until the oceans have boiled away. Having
reached a maximum temperature of 158 degrees Fahren-
heit, the surface of the world will slowly cool again, but
all life will have ceased and another arid and desolate
planet will have been created in the Solar Sahara.

Whether fanciful or factual, such speculation on the
future of our world can at least make us realize the vital
preciousness of water. A quick survey of the solar system
must inevitably deepen that realization.

29

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Nearest to the sun, yet actually revolving 36 million
miles from it, we see Mercury, with a diameter of
3,100 miles: a planet not much larger than our moon.
Keeping one hemisphere forever turned towards the sun.
Mercury has no day or night, and one side is therefore
fiercely scorched, blazing with intense light and heat,
while the other is forever shrouded in darkness. Although
Schiaparelli and Antoniada imagined they saw clouds
on Mercury's darker side, Dolfus, in 1953, dismissed the
idea. It is now certain that water-droplets on Mercury
would be as short-lived as snowflakes in a blast-furnace.

Moving away from the sun we come to Venus, with a
diameter (7,575.4 miles) only slightly less than that of
our own world. It is 67 million miles from the sun, and
sometimes approaches to within 25 million miles of our
earth. Astronomers have thought that the clouds which
continually obscure its shining face might be composed
of water- vapour and that parts of its surface might even
be covered with water. But such probabilities have been
shown in quite recent years to be very remote. Exhaustive
investigation of the planet's atmosphere by means of the
spectograph has shown neither water-vapour nor oxygen
in detectable amounts. In fact recent researches have
detected the presence of several hundred times as much
carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as the amount present
in our own.

That the surface of Venus is desert-like, and that high
winds may easily account for clouds (which are not of
water-vapour but of dust) seems as good a guess as any.
Certainly there is no evidence whatever, as the result of
investigations to date, of the existence of lakes on its
surface, much less oceans.

Mars, on the other side of our world, outward from
the sun and 142 million miles from it, is 35 million miles
from our earth at its nearest. It certainly has water, but
it seems certain that it has no oceans and that any water
it possesses can only be present in limited quantities — in

30

ARE THERE OCEANS IN OUTER SPACE?

carefully conserved quantities if there are intelligent
beings on Mars.

Those who argue for the existence of artificially con-
structed canals on Mars rightly point out that nowhere
in Nature do we find long straight lines, and that only
man produces such projects as railways and canals,
which follow essentially straight lines for long distances.
Hence, they argue, the markings on Mars must be
caused by intelligent beings. Whatever may be the
answer to the centuries-old problem of the existence of
life on the red planet, we can be sure that water is very
scarce there.

If the strange markings seen through our powerful
telescopes are actually the irrigated regions bordering
artificial water courses, then they certainly do not
indicate the presence of large bodies of water like our
own oceans. Some of the world's most efficient observers,
using its most powerful telescopes, have failed to see the
fine straight markings described in detail by Schiaparelli,
Perrotin, Thollon, A. S. Williams, Lowell and others.
But careful examination of the recorded evidence com-
pels any impartial investigator to belief that the canals
have been seen, so that there is at least 2i prima facie case
for the existence of water in limited quantities on Mars —
but not, in any sense, oceans as we know them.

Beyond Mars, keeping our backs to the sun, we see
Jupiter, a huge giant out there in space, revolving in its
orbit at a distance of 484 million miles from the sun, and
nearly 400 million miles from our earth. It has a diameter
over eleven times that of our own planet, and possesses a
deep atmosphere, 1 7,000 miles thick, composed of methane
and ammonia — dense and poisonous to life as we know it.

If Jupiter has any kind of ocean it is probably one of
soHd ice. Certainly not water ice, the frozen stuflf which
we know, but frozen ammonia or methane. Nor are its
clouds water-vapour clouds, but vast misty masses of
ammonia crystals.

31

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

All our human investigations fail to detect the presence
of any water on the planet — not even pools of it. Jupiter
definitely has no oceans.

Beyond Jupiter lie Saturn (with its amazing ring
system), Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. We need not con-
sider the three outermost planets in detail. Very little is
known of them, and anything we do know suggests that
conditions on them resemble those on Saturn — con-
ditions quite waterless. The rings of Saturn may be
composed of vast clouds of dust, or grains of sand, with
larger bodies among them. The average density of
Saturn is less than that of water.

There can be no oceans on the surfaces of the four
outermost planets — most certainly none containing
animal or plant life. Their enormous distances from the
sun — the nearest of the four outermost planets is more
than nine times farther out from the sun than our own
planet — clearly indicate that they are waterless, frozen
worlds.

We have found, in our rapid survey of the sun's nine
major planets, that water only exists in any quantity in
our own world.

In the light of all these facts, how infinitely precious is
this film of water which covers our spinning globe ! It
may be that the ocean, with its hosts of living creatures,
is absolutely unique, not merely in our solar system, but
in the entire Cosmos, with its millions of millions of
systems.

Earth, air and water — each designed to support multi-
tudinous forms of life on our planet — are three distinct
worlds. Of the three, water is by far the most densely
populated. As we survey the surfaces, fringes and deeps
of the ocean we become increasingly convinced that it
constitutes a wonderland of singular beauty and fantasy.
We go *' through the looking-glass" of its sky-reflecting
surface to find, in Alice's own words, that it gets
"curiouser and curiouser".

32

CHAPTER III

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

THE ocean can again be divided into three in-
habited areas or ''hving spaces". The highest of
these consists of the surfaces of the seas, together
with the atmosphere immediately above them. Below
this "world" of surface creatures lies an area known to
oceanographers as the Neritic Province. This consists of
the shallower waters fringing the world's coasts — the area
lying above the great continental shelves. Below this area
and beyond the shelves He the vast ocean basins, the
abysses — teeming with living creatures known and un-
known to us — comprising the Ocean Province.

But any survey of the oceans, surfaces, and the creatures
which move upon them and often rise above them, must
include the surfaces of the Ocean Province : the greatest
of our oceanic sub-divisions and one which extends from
the sea-beds right up to the wave-crests of the sea.

Among the larger and more active animals which
inhabit the surface-waters of the Ocean Province are
flying herrings, flying gurnards, flying squid, tunny
fishes, dolphins, turtles, sharks, sun-fishes, sauries, horse-
mackerel, salmon and whales. Some of these go down to
great depths — others spend their lives near the surface.
It might seem that whales and flying-fishes have Htde in
common, yet they share a liking for spectacular leaps
into the air. In this chapter we shall consider some of the
marine creatures which live near the surface of the sea,
move upon it, or are actually able to rise above it. These
surface gymnasts include some of the most extraordinary
creatures in the ocean.

33

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Salmon — the Latin name salmo means ''the leaper" —
inhabit mostly the temperate and arctic zones of the
world, and are found both in the salt seas and in fresh
waters. The question has often been discussed whether
the salmonids — so many of which live in the sea, yet
resort to rivers for breeding purposes — were originally
marine or fresh-water creatures. The balance of scientific
opinion, however, is in favour of the marine theory,
which is strongly supported by the fact that the over-
whelming majority of the fishes in the sub-order of which
the salmonids form part, inhabit the sea permanently.

Owing to fishery restrictions, salmon are no longer
among the largest families of fishes, but (in the words of
Dr. D. S.Jordan, one of the eminent ichthyologists of the
last century) ''in beauty, activity, gaminess, and quality
as food, and even in size of individuals, dififerent members
of the group stand easily with the first among fishes".

Some of the species, especially the larger ones, are
marine creatures, living and growing in the sea, and
swimming to fresh waters to spawn. Others live in run-
ning brooks, occasionally travelling to inland fresh-water
lakes or outward to salt waters. Others again are lake
fishes, approaching the shore, or entering brooks in the
spawning season, or at other times retiring to waters of
considerable depth. Some kinds of salmon are voracious
and venturesome, while others are modest and cautious
and will not take the hook. Salmon are a comparatively
recent development among fishes — none of them occur
as fossils, unless it be among quite recent deposits. The
fact that they have so quickly adapted themselves to live
in both salt and fresh water is therefore little short of
miraculous.

The Atlantic salmon feeds avidly on crustaceans, small
shrimps and young crabs, and their eggs, while it re-
mains in the sea or in brackish estuaries. As an adult,
a little more than four years old, it enters a river and
works its way towards the river's source. It has probably

34

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

not been very far from the river where it was born, but
there are striking exceptions to this. In fact the Hfe of the
salmon during the time it spends in the sea — at least one
year and very often considerably longer — is still a
mystery. We continue almost completely ignorant of
what salmon do, and where they go in the sea. Yet salmon
have been studied far more than most fish.

They normally swim at an average rate of eleven miles
per hour. But experiments have been carried out which
show that salmon can swim far faster than this, in fact
that they hold the speed record for inland fish. Emer-
son Stringham, in the American Naturalist, showed that
computations made on the basis of the height that a
salmon leaps above water were proof that the fish can
attain a velocity of over twenty- two miles an hour ; while
an English writer, Ernest Prothero, says: "No current is
rapid enough to daunt it; it can dart along at thirty
miles an hour, easily surmounting obstacles such as falls,
by leaps of ten to fifteen feet." The truth probably lies
between these estimates. Frank W. Lane, who has given
exhaustive study to the speeds attained by living creatures
of all kinds, gives the salmon a maximum speed of
twenty-five miles an hour, timed with a stop-watch.

Wonderful migrations are made by Pacific salmon.
The Chinook, or ''king salmon", which is the largest of
these (it has been known to weigh as much as a hundred
pounds) may travel i,ooo miles up the Columbia river
to its parent stream, or even farther up the Yukon river
of Alaska. It recognizes its original home by some
instinct unknown to us.

On their upward journeys into rivers salmon eat
nothing, so that their stomachs shrink to negligible pro-
portions. They enter the rivers in magnificent condition
and fight their way up-stream with extraordinary per-
sistence and force. Each male chooses his mate for the
perilous journey, and he and his "wife" keep together
all the way. The jaws of the male fishes develop fanged

35

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

canines for fighting their rivals. So, faithful to each
other and with the male fighting off any interfering
rivals, the couples battle their way onward against swift
currents, often tearing their flesh against sharp stones,
climbing cataracts and leaping unbroken falls of con-
siderable height.

The shrinking of their stomachs from the time they
leave tide-water is accompanied by a narrowing of their
throats. These remarkable changes are gradual, but they
increase until all desire for food is gone, and any tempta-
tion to turn back to the rich feeding grounds of the salt
waters vanishes. The great reserve of flesh and blood
which they bring with them from the ocean enables them
to keep their vital organs active until their strange mission
up the fresh-water streams is accomplished.

This is one of the ocean's greatest mysteries. The fish
face colossal hazards. They fight against the strong
currents. They climb cataracts and are dashed back
again and again — yet still they persist. As they ascend
the American rivers, and those of other countries, they
are caught by gill nets, fyke nets, pounds, weirs, seines,
wheels, and other devices.

Before they enter the rivers they are fiercely attacked
by seals and sea-lions, and many other natural enemies
meet them on their way up-stream, apart from their
greatest enemy, man, with his fishing rods and ingenious
traps.

The force which drives them onward is the sexual
instinct. But this fact deepens rather than lessens the
mystery, for it does not explain why they have to go such
long distances up-stream to the places where they were
born to gratify it — nor how they remember the locations
all their lives and are able to identify them again. We
only know that they do return to their parent streams.

After their arrival, the female salmon pours out her
eggs in vast quantities, and while this is happening the
eggs are fertilized (outside the female's body) by the milt

36

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

of the male, so that impregnation takes place imme-
diately. The male then guards the impregnated eggs —
which are unusually large compared with those of
some other fishes — and fights ofif any other males who
approach. The number of eggs deposited is enormous. It
has been calculated that over 150 million salmon ova are
annually deposited in the Scottish river Tay alone. Other
fishes, birds and insect larvae devour quantities of the
eggs, so that only a small proportion hatch out.

The young salmon lies coiled up in its egg, which it
finally bursts in its struggle for freedom. It issues with a
slender snout, semi-transparent and extremely delicate.
Suspended under its belly is a conical bag — the "yolk-
sac" — which contains the red yolk of the egg and oil
globules. For about six weeks the maturing embryo takes
no food save that which it obtains from this portable
larder. During this period it hides in crevices among
stones, and keeps up a perpetual fanning with its pectoral
fin.

When the yolk-sac has gone the young salmon feeds
greedily on small creatures and puts on a mottled coat
which makes it resemble a young trout. At this stage it is
usually known as a parr, or samlet, though in some places
by the names pink, brandling or fingerling. Many
anglers have argued that the parr is no salmon but a
distinct species, but Mr. Shaw of Drumlanrig, between
1834 and 1836, made experiments on the Tay which
have convinced naturalists for all time that the parr is
nothing else than the young salmon.

The parr stage lasts until the fish assumes the silver
mail of the smolt, and is ready to descend to the sea.
It cannot do so until the change has taken place — a parr
will die at once in salt water. But when it becomes a
smolt, perhaps six inches in length, it develops an im-
perative hunger for the sea. It may go to the sea when a
year old, or two or even three years old.

After two months in the sea the salmon has gained

37

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

several pounds in weight and is known as a grilse. From
that stage onwards, and until the time comes when the
salmon feels the urge to fight its way up-stream through
the same river, it may or may not voyage out into the
ocean wastes. Some certainly travel enormous distances.
As recently as the autumn of 1955, a salmon tagged in
Ross-shire eleven months earlier was recaptured off the
coast of Greenland, having travelled 1,700 miles. This
incident is regarded as one which affords an important
clue to the problem — nevertheless the habits of the fish
while it passes through the salt-water stage of its amazing
existence still constitute one of the sea's most baffling
mysteries.

The salmon's leaps over rapids may seem to be a kind
of flight, but they are not flying fishes in any sense — their
mighty jumps are empowered by initial propulsive efforts
through the water, and not by any motion of their fins as
wings.

But some fishes have appendages closely resembling
wings, and use them with extreme rapidity as they travel
through the air, although they manipulate them to main-
tain height rather than to propel themselves forward.
Most flying fishes glide, rather than fly with ''wing"
motions. Frank W. Lane, in his Nature Parade, "^ describes
how a flying-fish "flies". He says that the fish uses its
abnormally large pectoral fins as supporting surfaces,
while its initial impulse, which empowers the entire flight
after it has caused the fish to leave the water, comes from
a rapid "sculling movement" of the lower lobe of the
caudal fin or tail. He gives the underwater speed as
only thirty-five miles an hour, but this speed is fast
compared with a shrimp's "speed" — a mile in four
hours. Swimming creatures of the sea vary amazingly in
their rates of progression. Between the lazy crawl through
water of the shrimp and the flying-fish's flashing leap lie
the bream's mile and a quarter an hour and the four

♦Jarrolds (London) Ltd., 1946.

38

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

miles an hour amble of the octopus, which approximates
to the walking speed of a man. These are of course speeds
taken at random from the rising scale of fish progression.

The flying-fish's underwater speed is greatly exceeded
when it takes to the air. In fact the common flying-fish of
the larger variety (Catalina) holds the record for the
fastest speed through the air authentically recorded, of
any flying creature of the sea : fifty miles an hour in a
favourable wind. This particular fish has been known to
travel a quarter of a mile through the air before falling
to the surface again — easily the record air distance
travelled by any creature which rises from beneath the
sea.

Considering that the best authorities agree that the
fish is literally shot through the air by the "sculling move-
ment" of its tail, what must be the enormous force of that
initial propulsive efifort? The speed attained by that
terrific thrust of the fish's tail-muscles exceeds the speeds
of such birds as the lapwing, the curlew and the starling
which travel by wing propulsion. It is seven miles an
hour faster than the fastest speed ever attained by a race-
horse on land,* and equal to the speed of a charging lion.

Common to the sub-tropical trade-wind belts of the
world, flying-fish often take to the air to escape the
attacks of their enemies, such as bluefish, albacore,
bonitos, tunas, swordfish and porpoises; but they also
shoot into the air when disturbed by ships, and for other
reasons unknown to us. Several authorities suggest that
they sometimes do it for sheer joy of living. While in
actual flight through the air they are often chased by
birds — who probably resent the invasion of their own
realm.

Of the two types of flying-fishes, the true flying-fish and
the gurnards, the latter are the more curious. The
gurnard is an armoured fish, for its large bony head has

*43 m.p.h., by the famous American racehorse, Man o' War, who on one
occasion did the J mile in 21 seconds.

39

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

hard keeled scales, two dorsal fins, and other peculiar
characteristics, making it a grim, aggressive creature.
Some have long barbels on their chins, making them look
even more grotesque.

The flying gurnards are less numerous than the flying
herrings (which are more closely allied to the gar-pike
than the herring, despite their name), there being only
three or four species of the former compared with nearly
sixty of the latter, which are found in numerous shoals —
often thousands in a shoal.

Flying-fish cannot turn or guide themselves in their
flight, which is parabolic, like the flight of shells fired
from guns — appropriately enough, for they resemble pro-
jectiles more nearly than do the majority of fishes. It
would be wrong to think of them as jet-propelled. That
word can be more appropriately applied to animals
which propel themselves through the water by exhaling
jets. Of about 300 species of swift- travelling fish which
have been examined, 270 species possessed gill-clefts at the
right positions, potentially, for efficient jet-propulsion.

All the fast-swimming types of fish in the ocean are
streamhned, and have full control of their water-ejection
systems, so that they can increase or decrease speed at
will and make efficient turns. Many fish have had an
''induced stream-line system", using jet-propulsion in
highly eflficient ways.

Although the flying-fish holds the record for the fastest
speed through the air of any creature normally living in the
sea, it is by no means the fastest fish in the sea. The sail-fish
has that distinction. Although it is not a true swordfish
it is closely related — it diflfers in having teeth, scales,
ventral fins of a few rays, and a very large dorsal fin.
The latter may give it the advantage in speed over the
true swordfish of a few miles an hour.

The sword of a swordfish, although solid and as hard
as ivory, is not so strong that it could be forced through
the hulls of wooden ships unless the speed at the moment

40

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

of impact was at least sixty miles an hour. There are
instances of such powerful penetration that the sword of
the fish has been forced through twenty inches or more
of hard wood sheathed with copper. Such instances
clearly indicate an enormous speed at the moment of
impact, so that (considering the nature of the "sword"
and the depths of penetration) sixty miles an hour is
evidently no exaggeration.

The shape of the sail-fish's body is admirably adapted
for its high-speed, torpedo-like actions. Its sword is not
as long as that of the true swordfish, but the fish itself
reaches a total length of over six feet, has a stream-Hned
flexible body, sloping back to its great deeply-forked tail :
a body covered with elongated ''scutes", or horny plates.
The huge dorsal fin, deeply notched, simulates the
appearance of a ship under sail as it appears above the
water.

Swordfish may be classified among surface creatures of
the sea, and only the fact that its occasional leaps into the
air are not prolonged into ghding flights (for which it is
not naturally adapted) prevents some of its species from
challenging the flying-fish's above-water record. But the
sail-fish's under-water record of seventy miles an hour
(vouched for by unimpeachable authorities) makes the
flying-fish's over-water record of fifty miles an hour seem
insignificant, when the resistances of the media are com-
pared. To fully appreciate the underwater speed of the
sail-fish, and the extraordinary efficiency of its stream-
Hned structure, one should compare the speeds attainable
by man's inventions : the submarine and the aeroplane.
Seventy miles per hour would be an extraordinary speed
for a submarine — ^yet the sail-fish is not a mechanism but
a living creature.

Whatever creatures may be found on the ocean floors
— or may remain to be discovered — one cannot imagine
that any will be more fantastic than those we are now
examining on the surface of the world's seas — yet space

41 B*

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

forbids mention of more than a few of the numerous
varieties which hve in that vast area where waves and
atmosphere meet.

Swordfishes and their near relatives might be hkened
to torpedoes, but any such comparison, however pic-
turesque, would be inadequate. It is in fact difficult to
conceive how such macabre creatures could possibly have
evolved by any of the processes usually associated with
nature. Superficially considered, the fearsome projection
from the swordfish's head may seem to be a weapon of
defence, but in the long process of evolution, and before
it became efficient, the fishes possessing it would surely
have been at a serious disadvantage in the struggle for
survival. And why should living torpedoes survive, any-
way? The devastating eflfect of the sixty miles an hour
impact of a swordfish on the hull of a wooden vessel
could only be equalled by man if he used some kind of
explosive, a super-ram in the form of another vessel
striking the hull at high speed, or a long series of blows
with a heavy hammer. The force involved seems wasted
when applied to smaller fish than the swordfish itself
(which the creature depends upon for food) yet it is
ridiculous to assume that swordfishes developed their
powerful weapons to attack ships, long before ships
existed !

Most of the fast-swimming fish use principles applied
in man's most modern submarines. For instance, numbers
of them have a sac-like chamber (the swim-bladder)
which contains gas. When the fish sinks into lower depths,
gas is extracted : when it rises towards the surface, gas is
pumped into the swim-bladder. The fish can therefore
rise or sink or remain at any depths it chooses.

All man's inventions are foreshadowed in lower
creatures in one form or another. The ant uses a comb,
the earwig uses tweezers, the aphis has a vacuum-
cleaner, the ichneumon-fly its own drill, the snail its
file. But apart from land animals and insects, and

42

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

creatures of the air (all of which were using man's
''inventions" in principle long before he appeared on the
earth) we could possibly find all man's ideas and devices,
in embryo, in the ocean.

There are about forty species of the gurnard, which is
one of the most extraordinary fishes in the sea. We are
considering it among surface fish, but most of the
gurnards live near the bottom, feeding on crustaceans,
molluscs and small fishes.

The head of a gurnard is mailed and cuirassed, while
the gill-cover and shoulder-bones are covered with spines
having trenchant blades which give the fish its hideous
appearance, and account for some of its names : such as
sea-devil, sea-scorpion and sea-frog. Yet its glorious
colours — as beautiful as those of any fish in the sea —
have given the gurnard other names, less opprobrious,
such as sea-robin. The sapphirine gurnard, for instance,
is so named from the exquisite blue of its pectoral
fins.

The most marked peculiarity of the genus is the
presence of three freely-moving finger-like rays in front
of the pectorals. These are furnished with elaborate
nerve-systems, and are organs of both locomotion and
touch. In the seas around Britain the commonest species
is the grey gurnard. The flying gurnard is somewhat
similar to this, but differs in having the fin-rays of the
pectorals connected by membranes or ''webs", by which
it is enabled to support itself in the air.

The flying gurnard can walk on land, swim in the sea,
and fly in the air, so that it resembles a tank, submarine
and seaplane, all in one.

Having given the gurnard so many extraordinary
qualities, its range of glorious colourings being not the
least of them, it almost seems that Nature decided to "go
the whole hog" and looked around for some other queer
faculty to bestow upon it, and chose (of all things) the
faculty of "speech", enabling the creature to make hog-

43

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

like grunts ! For gurnards do emit such sounds, and boat-
men who have heard them out at sea have often described
them as not merely hog-like but uncannily human. Some
authorities say that the grunts are emitted only when the
fish are handled, and that they are caused by air escaping
from the air-bladders. But there is some evidence that
the gurnard often makes the noise when swimming.

One authority suggests that the sudden little bellow,
which sounds alarming even to human ears, has some
purpose in enabling the gurnard to frighten away its
foes. This theory implies that many creatures of the sea
have hearing — an idea which was once thought unten-
able, but is now gaining a measure of acceptance. The
noises made by one species of gurnard has gained it,
locally, the name of ''piper".

The flying squid is another extraordinary creature
among those which shoot themselves into the air, or leap
upward from the waves. Its body is long, cylindrical,
and pointed towards the rear end, and it has two
triangular fins which it uses to project itself from the
water — sometimes to such a height that it will fall to a
ship's deck, a circumstance which has given the fish the
name among sailors of "sea-arrow". The flying squid is
one species of a genus of decapod (ten-legged) cephalo-
pods. Like other cephalopods it swims by ejecting water
forcibly from its mantle or gill cavities — jet-propulsion
again.

Flying squid are included among those cephalopods
which, have the cornea of the eye open, so that sea water
is in contact with the lens. The internal shell, or ''pen",
of the flying squid is a very interesting structure. It has
three diverging rays and a hollow conical appendage.
The species vary in length from one to four feet, yet to
this family belong the giant squids which inhabit the
arctic and sub-arctic seas, and are occasionally stranded
on the shores of Norway and Greenland. All the species
are fish- eaters.

44

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

''In attacking the mackerel," says Verrill, ''they sud-
denly dart backward among the fish with the velocity of
an arrow." The name "sea-arrow" may therefore have a
dual origin — it may have been bestowed on the flying
squid by fishermen who have known of its method of
attacking mackerel or other fish, apart from the use of the
name by mariners who have seen "sea-arrows" fall on to
the decks of their ships.

The flying squid shows uncanny skill in attacking
mackerel and other fish. Once among them it will sud-
denly turn obliquely to the left or right, seize a fish, and
instantly kill it by biting it in the back of the neck with
its sharp beak. This is an amazingly efficient operation,
and is performed with such rapidity that it reminds us of
the practice of the spider, which cuts a nerve of its victim
so quickly and skilfully that it is not killed but para-
lysed : the spider needing the helpless victim alive and
with its blood circulating, for its larder.

Tarpon are acrobatic fish which grow to a length of
seven feet or more, and may weigh anything up to
350 pounds. Any over a mere twenty-five or thirty pounds
can tow a spearman and his boat with ease.

The fish has a peculiar modification of its dorsal fin :
the last ray is drawn out in a whip-like filament, which
seems to aid the tarpon in its sensational leaps. Before
jumping, the fish whips this filament to the side of its
body and clamps it there : an action which has the effect
of holding the dorsal fin rigidly at an angle. This angle,
remarkably enough, is prearranged by the fish in accord-
ance with the course of its leap — to left or right as the
case might be. A few authorities doubt the truth of this
prearranged fixation of the dorsal fin, but all seem to
agree that the "whip" is used in some way in relation to
the leap, and if it is not used to hold the fin rigid there
seems to be no purpose in it as an appendage, while the
creature's movement before leaping remains mysterious.

Tarpon are provided with very large gills by means of

45

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

which they extract the enormous amount of oxygen
required for their tremendous exertions. They have been
known to leap as high as eighteen feet into the air,
across a distance of thirty feet.

The finest tarpon-fishing in the world is carried on
near the coasts of Florida, where spearmen in some areas
are not allowed to shoot the fish. In other areas, fierce
struggles often take place if the tarpon is not killed with
the first shot, for tarpon will fight to the death, even
though badly wounded. Yet despite the incessant war-
fare carried on against them by man they are surprisingly
tame if not attacked.

In contrast with the tarpon, the marine sunfish is a
lazy creature, and prefers to move slowly about on the
surface. It is often seen sleeping on the sea, quite motion-
less, or perhaps turning round and round like a wheel.
It is almost circular in form, as its name implies: the
posterior part of its body looks as though a part of the
fish had been cut squarely off and the tail replaced on the
line of severance. Some naturalists say that this actually
happens in its early development : that it loses part of its
posterior and grows a new tail afterwards.

The gills of the sunfish are arranged in comb-like
fringes. The fish may attain a length of four or five feet,
and a weight of several thousand pounds. While floating
and slowly revolving on the sea, the sunfish keeps its eyes
just above the surface, so that it surveys the entire
horizon as it makes one revolution.

Among the great game fishes of the seas the tunny is
king — a monarch who survives and reigns despite the
determined attacks on his kingdom by sportsmen of
many nations. He is a royal and magnificent fish — in size,
courage, fighting skill, and in his kingly contribution to
the food of mankind. Immense numbers enter the Medi-
terranean by the Straits of Gibraltar in May and June,
and immediately divide : one royal cortege following the
shores of Europe and the other those of Africa, in search

46

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

of places to deposit their spawn. But the tunny is found
in all warm seas. It is one of the largest fishes of the
mackerel family, sometimes attaining a length often feet
and a weight of a thousand pounds.

Tuna-fishing — the tunny of the Pacific coast bearing
the specific name of ''tuna" — has been a fashionable
sport for many years oflf the coasts of southern California
and elsewhere, but fishing for tunny has actually been
carried on since the days of the Phoenicians. Immense
numbers have been caught through the centuries off the
Spanish coast and in the Sea of Marmora, but in recent
years the main areas of tunny-fishing have moved else-
where, to the north coast of Sicily and other places.

The tunny had the honour, over one hundred years
ago, of being the fish which led John Davy (brother of the
eminent Sir Humphrey Davy) to a discovery which pro-
vided an exception to the time-honoured division of all
vertebrate animals into warm-blooded and cold-blooded.
John Davy examined the tunny and found that its blood-
temperature could be considerably higher than that of
the surrounding water. Until then it was assumed that
all fish were cold-blooded.

The variations and movements of tunny and albacores
were given royal attention when King Carlos of Portugal
( 1 889-1 908) studied the fish for many years, and finally
wrote and published a compendious monograph on the
subject, illustrated by remarkable charts and figures : a
study of the king of surface fishes by a monarch who was
anything but superficial in his researches. His political
activities were not so successful as his labours in natural
history. With his eldest son, Louis, he was assassinated
in the streets of Lisbon.

It is an amazing fact regarding many surface fishes that
the energy which drives even the largest of them (and
even the energy which empowers that monstrous mam-
mal the baleen whale) comes mainly from planktonic
food, most of which consists of tiny organisms.

47

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

The word ''plankton" does not merely mean "wander-
ing", as it is usually translated, for the word has a dis-
tinctly passive sense, suggesting ''that which is made to
wander and drift". It therefore does not merely define
the tiny creatures which form its greatest bulk, but all
those creatures of the sea which float and drift with its
tides and ocean currents (the animals and plants which
are passively carried about) in contrast to whales and fish
which swim and move at will through the waters. This
means that the babies of all kinds of fish must be classed
as plankton, if they are small enough to be borne help-
lessly along by the sea.

Tunny fishes consume large quantities of plankton,
being quite indiscriminate regarding the nature of it,
while flying-fishes also consume countless millions of
planktonic creatures, particularly Copepoda.

These copepods constitute the large order of minute
crustaceans (found in both salt and fresh water) which,
by their abundance, provide food for all kinds of larger
sea creatures. In typical copepods (the name means
"oar-feet") the body is distinctly segmented, the abdo-
men is limbless, and the thorax bears four or five pairs
of branched appendages. All of the tiny creatures are
one-eyed. The appendages are truly oars rather than
feet, for they are used for "rowing" by free-swimming
copepods, but they can also be used to throw the
creatures into the air with a kind of kicking action,
resulting in multitudes of them falling to the surface
again like rain.

Apart from the free-swimmers, which people the sea
in vast numbers defying computation, many forms are
parasitic, and these are usually larger than the free-
swimming kind. One of these larger forms is the Pennella,
a parasite on the whale, sometimes exceeding a foot
in length. Many of these parasitical copepods will
attack any host, but some specialize in fastening on to
one kind of animal.

48

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

A curious feature of the parasitic copepods is that the
male is often a mere pygmy attached to the female. He
may in fact be as tiny compared with her as she is com-
pared with the animal upon which she preys. Their
''attachment" is a fantastic instance of the "little-fleas-
have-lesser-fleas-and-so-on" principle in nature.

Free-swimming copepods, making up the greater
part of planktonic life, are (despite the ugly habits of
their parasitic relatives) among the most beautiful
creatures in the sea. Their feathered antennae often
exceed in length the dimensions of their bodies, and their
lovely tail extensions have been compared with peacock's
feathers. In some of these crustaceans an intense scarlet
will merge into a brilliant blue, while others have differ-
ent colour effects — many rivalling the rainbow in har-
mony and brilliance.

Copepods and other small sea organisms are filtered
out of the flying-fish's inflowing respiratory stream by a
series of fine ''rakers" set on its gill arches. So with
numerous other creatures which consume quantities of
plankton — filters of all kinds are used to retain the
essential food and strain off the water.

Even the massive ocean sunfish, which grows to as
much as a ton in weight, feeds on small creatures like
jellyfish and tiny crustaceans, with masses of other kinds
of plankton, as it drifts lazily on the surface. In the North
Atlantic the sunfish also consumes millions of the leaf-
like larvae of certain eels, but always its staple diet is
plankton.

Curiously enough, there is a tendency among the
largest sea mammals and fishes to live on herbivorous
planktonic animals (the "vegetarians" in the plankton),
which means that they come as close as they can to an
assimilation of "living energy". The vegetable plankton
is the start of the various food-chains in the ocean
and it seems to give the creatures who are the greatest
consumers of it enormous power. Marine turtles, for

49

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

instance, some of which get their energy from con-
suming large quantities of planktonic creatures, can
weigh over 400 pounds, and have been known to drag
an eighteen-foot saihng boat for two or three miles.

Numerous living species of Chelonians (turtles and
tortoises) are known. The limbs of a Chelonian may be
either of two types — limbs, with free toes, for walking,
in the land tortoises, or flattened paddles for propelling
themselves through the water in the turtles. Some aquatic
forms have additional respiratory organs.

Globe-fishes are the hedgehogs of the ocean surfaces.
They are found on all the warmer coasts of the world,
particularly within the tropics, and their extraordinary
characteristics have earned them such picturesque
names as "puffers", ''swell-fish", ''bellows-fish", and
"rabbit-fishes" — the latter because of their rodent-like
teeth. Globe-fishes are oval, spinose, small-finned fishes,
which nibble barnacles and crunch other small crus-
taceans and molluscs found along the world's warmer
coasts.

Looking ordinary enough when deflated, the globe-
fish changes its appearance in a remarkable manner
when danger threatens. It immediately sucks air or
water into a large bladder-like membrane covering its
abdomen until the fish becomes as round as a football,
while its sharp spines arise from their normal position
and stand up as stiffly as soldiers on parade with fixed
bayonets. It has changed from what may have seemed a
tempting morsel to one of its enemies to a most disagree-
able mouthful, so that one can imagine a fish many
times the size of the inflated globe-fish turning away and
seeking a snack elsewhere. Yet sometimes a shark or
other monster of the deep may swallow one.

If this happens the globe-fish takes a terrible revenge
for the indignity. Having teeth as sharp as a rat's, and a
beak as formidable as a parrot's, it bites its way to freedom
through its enemy's stomach. There are stories of eels

50

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

which have escaped to freedom in a similar manner, from
the stomachs of herons and other creatures which have
swallowed them.

Some tropical ''puffers" are a foot long, but the fishy
footballs most frequently seen are much smaller, includ-
ing those which sometimes become comical additions to
aquaria. The flesh of puffers is poor, and in some cases
poisonous: as though they had become not merely
assassins but Borgias in their determination to avoid
being peacefully digested.

When fully puflfed out, globe-fish turn over and float
upside-down, carried here and there by the waves in
nonchalant "touch me if you dare" attitudes.

The trigger-fish is seldom referred to in popular books
on the sea, but is well worth examination. It has eight or
ten genera and about one hundred species, all of which
inhabit warm seas. A single species, however, wanders
northward on the Atlantic coast as far as Gape Cod. It is
a rather handsome fish, encased in heavy scales like a
knight in armour, and has three stout dorsal spines or
rays. When the dorsal fin is raised (it is very thick and
strong) it holds its elevated position and cannot be
pressed down. It has ''locked" itself in its extended atti-
tude. But if the second ray is depressed (or pufled, as a
trigger is pulled) the first ray instantly falls flat — released
as the hammer of a gun is released when the gun is
fired.

Closely related to the trigger-fish is the file-fish, or
fool-fish. The former name has been given the creature
because of its rough and prickly skin, which is so abrasive
that it can easily take the skin from a man's hand if the
creature is carelessly handled. The latter name derives
from the fish's large, expressionless, staring eyes, which
give it a vacant, idiotic expression.

Despite their coarse skins and vacuous, foolish ex-
pressions, file-fishes are often most beautifully tinted.
They have jaws of enormous strength, and can perform

51

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

curious tricks with them. They can bite off chunks of
coral which would blunt an ordinary chisel, crunching
the stuff in their jaws as though it were pieces of candy.
They can even crack the tough shells of oysters and
devour the contents.

The file-fish is truly a clown, for he takes part in an
extraordinary series of happenings, as though he were
one of a group of comedians scoring off each other in a
stage turn. For the file-fish preys on the oyster, but the
game doesn't stop there — the ray preys on the file-fish,
so that there is a kind of predatory merry-go-round. A
certain thread-like parasite plays its own part as one of
the actors in this ''crazy gang". It passes the first phase
of its existence in the body of the file-fish. Along comes a
ray and devours the file-fish so that the thread-like
parasite passes into the body of the ray. There it enters
its next phase of existence and lays its eggs. When these
little parasites hatch out they pour out from the body of
the ray and enter the open shells of oysters, where they
really begin their brief lives. The sensitive oyster protects
itself against these unwelcome parasites. The irritation
created by their presence causes the oyster to pour out
the smooth, shining, iridescent substance which we call
''nacre".

Of course any foreign body in the oyster may produce
such irritation, but we are considering the life-cycle of a
parasite which has just left the body of a ray in consider-
able numbers. The little worm pays a terrible price for
its temerity in trespassing into the oyster's sanctuary — it
is literally buried alive in the nacre as it hardens around
it, and becomes a pearl. Some of the most costly pearls
which adorn the throats of lovely women are the tombs
of long-dead parasites.

Dolphins are not fishes, but mammals. They are often
confused with porpoises, in fact one popular encyclo-
paedia says : "more commonly called porpoises". But the
nose of a porpoise is a blunt, rounded snout, and is not

52

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

produced into a ''beak", as in the dolphin's case. Dol-
phins are found in abundance in all seas, while some
species are inhabitants of large rivers, such as the
Amazon.

The food of these animals is chiefly fish, and the
dolphin's long and narrow ''beak" is admirably adapted
for this purpose as a weapon of offence. The muscular
power of the dolphin is enormous. It has been calculated
from its resistance to a towing-line that its muscles are
capable of generating energy at least seven times greater
than the muscles of other mammals.

The common dolphin usually measures from six to
eight feet in length, tapering from the centre (where its
dorsal fin rises to a height of about ten inches) to both
extremities. The "beak" is about six inches long, and the
mouth is armed with sharp, curved teeth — about forty
or fifty on each side of its jaw. The ear aperture is ex-
tremely small, the eyes are of moderate size, and the
"blow-hole" through which the creature breathes is
crescent-shaped.

Dolphins occur in all seas, and feed mainly on fish,
but they will eat lower creatures such as molluscs and
crustaceans. They are greedy eaters and will on occasion
consume cuttle-fish. The mother dolphin bears one baby
(or very rarely, two) at a time, and she watches over her
infant, or infants, with extraordinary care, even when
they have grown to a considerable size. Her milk is rich
and abundant, and she suckles her progeny with all the
tenderness of a human mother, floating in a slightly side-
long position while doing so.

Calculated from the known speed of vessels, dolphins
and porpoises travel at anything up to thirty-seven miles
an hour. Dolphins, being the speedier of the two, may
even exceed this speed on rare occasions. Dolphins have
been watched by the crews of destroyers, doing over thirty
knots — zigzagging from side to side in front of the vessels.

Dolphins and porpoises exhibit such amazing agility

53

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

that they might well be called the acrobats of the ocean's
surface. They live in herds or ''schools", and are often
seen by ocean voyagers playing around the vessels as
though they were ''showing off" to the passengers. They
will leap in graceful curves into the air, emerging and
descending into the sea rhythmically, creating tracks of
foam. Then they will reappear, displaying their slender
back-fins before plunging below the water again, to rise
from the surface again, almost before one has missed
them, on the other side of the ship.

One member of the dolphin family, the blackfish (not
to be confused with fishes of other families given the same
name) travels in herds in which one fish acts as a leader
or pilot. Hunters of the blackfish use this habit of the
fish to their advantage, concentrating on the leader and
knowing that wherever it goes the others will surely
follow, with the result that numbers of the fish are cap-
tured because of their blind faith in their leaders.

Mariners of all ages have told stories of the amazing
leaps and whimsical tricks of dolphins and porpoises, so
that many fables and superstitions have developed about
them. The structure of a dolphin's ear renders its sense
of hearing very acute, and extended observations have
led some authorities to the conclusion that the animal
can appreciate musical sounds and is strangely attracted
by them. It has a peculiar lowing cry, almost like the
mooing of a cow. It is one of the most curious sounds
uttered by those creatures of the sea which are able to
give vocal expression to their feelings.

The most remarkable genus of the porpoise tribe, the
narwhal or sea-unicorn, is the subject of many sea stories
and superstitions. It inhabits the Arctic Ocean, and is
remarkable for the possession of a very long, spirally-
grooved tusk, which, in a narwhal twelve feet long, may
measure as much as eight feet in length : two-thirds the
entire length of the creature's body. This tusk is one of
the most grotesque appendages possessed by any of the

54

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

fantastic animals which froHc upon, skim over or leap
from the ocean's surface. Composed of ivory, without
enamel, it has a central cavity reaching almost to the
apex, and the spiral grooves and ridges upon it run in a
sinistral (turning from right to left) direction.

This massive, formidable and in many ways frighten-
ing weapon is developed only in the male narwhal, and
(with very rare exceptions) only on the left side of its
jaw. If it ever happens that a tusk develops on the right
side of the jaw it never achieves the size of the huge one
on the left of the jaw, but becomes one of a pair of
approximately equal length. No case has ever been
known of the development of a full-sized right-hand tusk,
in association with a smaller left-hand one. In females
neither tusk is visible. All other teeth are completely
lacking in the male narwhal : all the ivory is used up in
its two tusks, with the left-hand one monopolizing by far
the greater amount of it. The enormous tusk is a second-
ary sexual characteristic of the narwhal — like the antlers
of a stag, or the spurs and comb of a cock.

It has been suggested that the narwhal uses its huge,
lop-sided, cumbersome instrument to break ice, and also
to transfix its prey — but these suggestions have never
been confirmed. For the ice-breaking theory has never
been justified by any sight of a narwhal using its huge
tusk in such a fashion, while the fact that the creature
feeds on cuttle-fishes, small fishes and crustaceans dis-
poses of the second suggestion, for the tusk would appear
to be valueless as an instrument for attacking its victims
or assimilating them.

Some authorities say that the males do battle with
their tusks. William Scoresby and his son (of the same
forename), the famous Arctic explorers, described the
narwhal as a sportive rather than an aggressive creature,
and said that the males were ''extremely playful, fre-
quently elevating their horns and crossing them with
each other as in fencing".

55

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

The narwhal has never been known to charge and
pierce the hulls of ships with his mighty weapon, as the
swordfish does, although the narwhal's tusk might seem
to be as well-adapted to the purpose. When first intro-
duced into Europe as trophies, the tusks of narwhals
were accepted as the horns of mythical unicorns, and
as proof of the existence of such creatures. For a con-
siderable time they were highly prized as talismans, and
for their supposed medicinal qualities.

It is probable that more ''magic" has accumulated
around the sea-unicorn's tusk than around the appendage
of any other animal of land or sea. Queen Elizabeth I
was graciously pleased and delighted to accept a nar-
whal's tusk from Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from
a valiant though vain dash into the Arctic regions. That
it was apparently the only trophy he brought back
seemed to make it all the more precious as a souvenir of
that unsuccessful voyage.

We have examined only a few of the wonderful
creatures which perform their antics on the sea's surface.
The entire surfaces of the vast oceans, and of the world's
lakes, rivers and streams, are alive with fishes, birds and
insects in continuous motion: millions upon millions of
living creatures whose lives and habits are curiously
inter-related, and whose combined activities contribute
to the mysterious progress of mankind itself

Despite the nose-protrusions of sharks into the atmo-
sphere, and the occasional cavortings of whales above
the waves of the sea, such creatures are really under-
water ones, and cannot be done justice to among surface
creatures. They will receive special attention in later
chapters, as will planktonic creatures — at the other ex-
treme in size — when we go down into the deeps of the
oceans, and (as far as we can) into the knowledge that
has accumulated about such life-forms through the ages.

By far the larger proportion of such knowledge, how-
ever, is concerned with fish and other creatures which

56

SKIMMING THE SURFACE

come to the surfaces of the world's seas, with the innumer-
able forms of life which inhabit the world's coastlines,
and with the natural conditions which affect such sur-
faces and fringes.

Among the natural forces which create the conditions
governing not merely the surfaces and fringes of the
oceans, but also the conditions obtaining for a consider-
able distance downward into the deeps, so that they
affect the life-forms and habits of myriads of sea
creatures, are the winds of the world : those invisible
currents of air, sometimes gentle and life-giving and at
other times horrific in their destructive fury, which have
pursued their complicated movements over the earth's
surface ceaselessly and uncontrollably from the beginning
of time.

57

CHAPTER IV

THE WINDS

FROM the dawn of human history until as recently
as the middle of the nineteenth century, when old
witches in Norway used to sell parcels of wind to
superstitious sailors to prevent their ships becoming
becalmed, the winds of the world have stirred the im-
aginations of men, and have breathed fables and super-
stitions regarding themselves in their ears.

Meteorology as an exact science treating of the motions
and phenomena of the atmosphere begins with Hippo-
crates, the Greek physician, who in the fifth century B.C.
wrote a work on Airs, Waters and Places ; but speculation
as to the physical causes of atmospheric changes began a
century later, when Aristotle's Meteorologica appeared : it
became the text-book of physical science for centuries
afterwards, right up to the Middle Ages and the Renais-
sance. Only gradually, however, did meteorology be-
come a specialized science. For more than a thousand
years the men who contributed to the study of the
world's winds, waves, whirlpools and other meteorological
phenomena were not necessarily scientists. Valuable
though their contributions were, they were men of widely
diversified occupations, from chemists and mathemati-
cians to lawyers and politicians. There were, of course,
astronomers and seafaring men among them — men
likely to be specially interested in meteorological con-
ditions— but some of the most noted names are those of
men whose occupations were in no way connected with
meteorology. Pliny the Elder, whose Historia Naturalis is

58

THE WINDS

an encyclopaedia of natural science, was a Roman pro-
curator and military leader. William Dampier, who
wrote ''A Discourse on Winds" (1699) and made invalu-
able contributions to meteorology, was a notorious
buccaneer. John Dalton's Meteorological Observations
(1793)3 ill which he maintained the electrical origin of
the aurorae, was published while he was a schoolmaster.
But the status of the meteorologist has undergone radical
changes during the last hundred years — the study of
wind and weather conditions demands the full-time
attention of numerous scientific experts.

The atmosphere which enfolds our earth is an invisible
sea which is constantly in motion. Forever striving to
attain a state of absolute rest and tranquillity, it is con-
tinually being disturbed and "moved on" by the tor-
rential, daily-renewed stream of solar energy which pours
upon the earth from the sun.

It is fortunate for us that no area of the atmosphere,
however limited, is absolutely at rest for long, for stag-
nant air over our heads and around us would soon
become foul and poisonous. So the sun keeps the world's
air in constant motion, distributing the moisture that
makes life possible; carrying dust (necessary to the
formation of rain) up to the cloud regions ; spreading
seeds of all kinds ; bearing away the smoke of our cities,
and other poisonous exhalations including the breath of
man himself; and so (in these and many other ways)
purifying the atmosphere and directing it to the advan-
tage of living creatures. Although solar energy is the
primary cause of wind motion there are many other
factors which influence the direction and force of the
winds. The atmosphere is held to the earth by gravity,
but this does not interfere with the fluidity or elasticity
of the air, nor with the effects of any pressures acting at
points within it, so that all parts of the atmosphere have
perfect freedom in their inter-relationships. If the entire
atmosphere were left undisturbed within itself it would

59

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

be carried round by the earth's spinning motion as
though it were a soHd shell. But it is in a state of turbu-
lent motion everywhere as the result of the complicated
interplay of several forces.

Most powerful of these is the sun's energy. Other forces
acting upon the atmosphere and supplementing the sun's
power are the gravitational 'Epulis" of the moon and the
sun (although the latter influence is slight) ; the centri-
fugal (or * 'throwing off") effect of the earth's rotation;
and the ascending and descending movements caused by
the natural law that heated air rises while chilled air falls
through the surrounding atmosphere. These up-and-
down movements contribute very largely to the hori-
zontal ones; for wherever the air ascends or descends
other currents rush in laterally to replace the rising or
falling columns.

As the surfaces of the earth and sea are heated by the
sun's energy, air rises from them which carries water-
vapour from the moister areas of the land, or from the
seas, rivers and streams, and this water-vapour rises until
it reaches colder zones, where it is chilled and forms
clouds. On the other hand, wherever excess volumes of
air may have piled up, or where the air currents may
have cooled and therefore become heavier, masses of
air may descend towards the earth's surfaces, again
causing lateral winds. Such falling masses of air grow
warmer by compression, and as they absorb more water-
vapour the clouds tend to dissipate as they are affected
by them, usually causing clearer skies. Rising and con-
verging (low pressure) air currents are therefore accom-
panied by cloud-accumulation and rain, while descend-
ing and diverging (high pressure) currents are associated
with lack of rain and cloud-dissipation.

The atmosphere is an invisible * 'ocean", and has its
waves and tides. The atmospheric tides are of two kinds.
One kind is due to the attraction of the sun and moon,
and is therefore similar to the oceanic tides. But this tidal

60

THE WINDS

effect is slight, and affects the atmosphere as a whole.
Its maximum effect on a column of mercury is only a
hundred and thirtieth of an inch. But the other kind of
atmospheric tide is a major influence in the world's
atmosphere. It is a ''heat tide" which follows the sun in
its apparent circling of the earth, and is an elevation or
crest of air along a meridional line, which moves steadily
around the earth. As with the twice-daily oceanic tides,
this "heat tidal wave" is related to a "cool tidal wave"
on the opposite side of the earth.

These tidal waves, one kind gravitational and insig-
nificant and the other kind caused by the sun's heat and
affecting the atmosphere powerfully, are periodic. They
merge with, or are affected by, wind modifications
caused by irregularities in the world's land surfaces, so
that the processes involved in the movements of the winds
are, in detail, infinitely complex. The entire atmosphere
is continually in motion, like the sea itself, as air currents,
moving in every conceivable direction, struggle for
ascendancy or battle for "right of way".

A curious phenomenon of air motion is called the
Coriolis effect, after Gaspard G. de Coriolis (i 792-1 843),
the eminent French mathematician who first investi-
gated it. Any wind flowing "downhill" in the northern
hemisphere tries to turn in an anti-clockwise direction,
across the isobars, moving towards the nearest "valley"
of low pressure available. But a new factor enters — one
which remained obscure and perplexing until Coriolis
explained it. The earth's surface in our northern hemi-
sphere is steadily turning in an anti-clockwise direction —
leftward around the pole. But the air above the earth's
surface (being relatively free) tends to move straight
onwards, urged by inertia, and this movement of the air,
seen from beneath it, appears to us to be clockwise, because
we, as observers, are on the earth's leftward turning
surface.

As we contemplate the extreme complexity of the

61

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

world's wind movements we can at least appreciate the
skill and research involved in those meteorological
observations which produce our weather forecasts.

The name ''trades" — short for "trade winds" — does
not come from their usefulness to commerce in sailing-
ship days, but from the nautical expression "to blow
trade", meaning to blow regularly. They are the steady,
faithful winds of the world, as opposed to the flirtatious
and fickle ones, and they occur in all open seas on both
sides of the equator, and to a distance of about thirty
degrees north and south of it. In the days of the old wind-
jammers they were certainly of the greatest value in
navigation.

When a sailing-ship came into a trade wind belt it
could depend on making steady progress. The trade wind
might be moderate, or no more than a breeze, but if the
ship was sailing with the wind full advantage could be
taken of it, by rigging extra sails at the ends of the yards,
giving a broadened stretch of canvas which caught every
capful of moving air.

Although seamen of a century or so ago had every
reason to appreciate the trade winds more than we do
today, the scientific explanations of the trades in those
days were often little short of ludicrous. One commonly
accepted hypothesis was that as the atmosphere was
carried round by the earth the lower layers managed to
keep pace with it, but the higher regions "dragged" or
were left behind altogether, so that disturbances near the
land and sea surfaces were caused by the "lag". Some
authorities, even as recently as a century ago, beHeved
that the "lag" caused a continual breeze from east to
west, along the equatorial belt. But such "explanations"
of the trades, erroneous as they are now known to be, are
practical and scientific indeed compared with one hypo-
thesis seriously put forward by a certain Dr. Lister, in the
Philosophical Transactions (Vol. 156) at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.

62

THE WINDS

Dr. Lister conjectured that the tropical or trade winds
arose, in great part, from ''the daily and constant exhala-
tions of a sea-plant, called the sargossa, or lenticula marina'^
— a weed which will be noticed in a later chapter —
''which grows in vast quantities from 36° to 18° north
latitude, and elsewhere upon the deepest seas. For the
matter of wind, coming from the breath of only one plant,
must needs be constant and uniform ; whereas the great
variety of trees and plants on land furnishes a confused
matter of winds. Hence it is that the winds are briskest
about noon, the sun quickening the plant most then, and
causing it to breathe faster and more vigorously." The
worthy doctor — and this was in the year 181 8 — went on
to say that "every plant is, in some measure, an helio-
trope,* and bends itself, and moves after the sun, and
consequently emits its vapour thitherward; so that the
direction of the trade wind is, in some measure, also in
the course of the sun."

Among other curious ideas about winds, commonly
held in the eighteenth century, was the belief that, in
England, the west wind was most frequent about noon,
the east in the evening, the south in the night and the
north in the morning.

Less than two hundred years ago, some authors on
diseases believed that winds could enter and remain
within various bones of the human body. A certain
Dr. Reyn, for instance, in his Discourse on the Gout, wrote
that "flatuses, or winds, enclosed between the periosteum
and the bone, are the true cause of that disease — this
wind being of a dry, cold and malignant nature". He was
also of the opinion that "headaches, palpitations of the
heart, toothache, pleurisy, convulsions, colics, and many
other diseases, are originally due to the same cause — the
various motions and determinations of the winds, which
denominate diseases from the places which are the scenes
of their action".

♦A name given originally to any plants with flowers which turn to follow the sun.

63

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

The spinning of the earth on its axis is the primary
cause of the complexities in the wind systems. If the earth
did not rotate, the heated air rising from the world's
equatorial belt would be constantly replaced by cool air
flowing towards the belt from the poles, which air would
be warmed and uplifted again by the sun's heat, and
again replaced by more cool air — thus a steady circula-
tion of air would be maintained. But any such ''merry-
go-round" circulation of the world's winds is interfered
with and made extremely comphcated by the fact that
the earth itself is a ''roundabout".

The air above the equator is carried round with its
spinning surface at i,ooo miles an hour — making a com-
plete revolution every twenty-four hours — while the air
above each of the poles is (theoretically) stationary.
Between the equator and the poles the air rotates at
varying speeds. The effect of all this can be seen in the
trade winds. If the world's vast globe were at rest the
winds would blow north and south from the equator,
under the influence of the sun's rays. The earth's spin
gives the main winds — the trades — a twist to the right in
the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern
hemisphere.

So the winds of the world "go like clockwork" and in
fact so much like clockwork that they are like a train of
geared wheels, all working together. The simile is fairly
accurate, for there are other influences on the working of
a clock than the gearing of its wheels ; so it is with the
winds.

There is, for instance, the pendulum-like effect of the
alternation of day and night, in its regular modification
of the "escapement" of the surface heat of the world's
land and sea areas.

The world's winds rage across both land and water
surfaces, so that they are affected by the great contrasts
of temperature between the continents and the neigh-
bouring oceans, which set up wind systems of their own.

64

Head of sawfish^ caught off
Ragetta Islands, near Mew
Guhiea. The formidable ''saw'''
has two uses : as a trowel to
grub out edible creatures from
the sea bed, and as a fearsome
toothed weapon of offence and
defence. The sawfish is often
confused with the swordfish
(below) but the creatures'
weapons should clearly indicate
the appropriate names : that of
the sawfish tears and fiays,
while the swordfish's weapon
thrusts and pierces.

.^fe£^.

p^-

m

{Black Star)

's Can)

«%'^

{Black Star)

Above: the curiously named ''chicken fish" — a weird sea creature avoided by other fish.
If touched by a harpoon the creature feels so sure of its dreaded armament that it moves away
slowly, as if scorning attack, and is easily captured. Below : the beche-de-mer, sea
cucumber or trepang — eaten as a luxury by the Chinese.

(E. 0. Hnphe)

THE WINDS

These are fairly well defined, especially in the southern
hemisphere which comprises most of the world's sea-
surface and so is free from the disturbances and irregu-
larities of the land areas.

At the equator there is a low-pressure belt, long known
to mariners as the doldrums. There are actually other
regions of the world where the winds are never very
strong, and where long periods of calm can be expected,
particularly at the poles and near the tropics, but the
calm belt near the equator has gained a reputation for
deadly calm and the name ''doldrums" has been asso-
ciated with it for more than a century and a half Yet a
companion word, "tantrums" would be more appro-
priate to describe the ''atmosphere" of the equatorial
area we are considering. For the doldrums do as they
please and are not only liable to fits of sulks but to out-
bursts of violent temper. It was in the doldrums that
the phantom ship of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner lay be-
calmed: "a painted ship upon a painted ocean", while
the pitch sluggishly oozed out of her heated seams and
food and water ran perilously short. In the pioneer days
of the Austrahan emigrant traffic, before steamers burst
their boilers on American rivers, the doldrums earned
the unhappy title of "the wayside grave"; for numbers
of passengers, becalmed in ships which had ineffectually
struggled to emerge from the merciless grip of the wind-
less calm, gave up the struggle and died in the placid
waters.

The doldrums vary in size as well as in character. They
are about lOO miles in breadth in February, as an area of
deathly stillness, and 300 miles in breadth in August. Yet
the area may change, treacherously, to a region of storm,
vicious squalls, thunder, lightning and torrential rain.
In the old windjammer days a ship might drive through
the doldrums in a single day, lashed forward by spiteful
winds and buffeted by raging seas ; or she might hnger
there for weary weeks, "ghosting" a mile or so now and

65 c

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

then as her cursing crew handled her lofty royals and
skysails to little effect.

Fortunately for the mariners of those days, they knew
where they were if they kept to the trades, north or south
of the doldrums. One of the first of the world's mariners
to discover the reliability of the trades was Columbus. It
was with their assistance that he was able to discover
America, even as Magellan used them later to sail across
the Pacific. But the steadiness of the winds, which helped
Columbus and his crew to gain their outward objective,
caused Columbus serious trouble after his ship had
turned round and was sailing in the other direction. For
the superstitious crew expected the wind to turn with
them and blow them safely home again.

When they found that it stubbornly refused to reverse
its direction to please them, they declared that the
Almighty was angry with them for having discovered
America and its secrets and was even using His winds to
show His displeasure. Columbus had all he could do to
control a crew so enthusiastic on the outward voyage,
when success was still a matter of risk and peril, and so
ungrateful and inconsistent on the homeward voyage,
with success assured.

In each hemisphere there are three wind zones — one
formed by winds which blow slantwise from the polar
regions to the equator, another by winds which blow
slantwise from the equator to the pole, and a third formed
by winds that blow mainly from west to east. In the
northern hemisphere these are north and south of the
horse latitudes, which lie between 30° and 35° north.
The name ''horse latitudes" (applied to a sea area
which, like that of the doldrums, is often becalmed)
has been passed down from the world's sailing-ship days,
when there was a considerable trade in horses between
England and Jamaica. It often happened that ships
loaded with horses were so long delayed in these regions
by lack of wind that water ran very short. To conserve

66

THE WINDS

it the crews would sacrifice some or even all of the
horses — overboard the poor creatures had to go, to swim
vainly for a while near the becalmed ships and then
drown. Seen as the light fades at eventide, charging
towards us across the ocean's surface, the white-crested
waves — often called "white horses" — remind us of
those tragic happenings in the horse latitudes of years
ago.

The British Isles lie in the region of the westerly winds,
which moderate the severity of our winters, owing to the
fact that the winds have to cross comparatively warm
stretches of the Atlantic. When the westerlies fail, which
can happen for various reasons, this country can be
invaded by cold easterly winds from across Europe. In
happier circumstances the horse latitudes (following the
sun northwards) can extend their calmer influence to
our coasts and bring us dry ''Mediterranean" weather.

But the westerly winds can be as pitiless as the easterly
ones, though in different ways. When they lash the
Atlantic to fury they can do considerable damage along
Britain's coasts — as they did in the terrible gales of 1824,
when gigantic waves tossed five-ton lumps of stone over
Plymouth breakwater as though they were children's
building blocks.

The winds of the world can be as gentle as little
children or as malevolently violent as bloodthirsty
giants.

In the northern hemisphere, the warm, moist north-
ward-flowing winds encounter cool ones from the wide
expanses of Siberia in a zone which lies just ofifthe coast of
Asia over the Pacific Ocean. This causes a vast south-west
to north-east disturbance, long known as the "Asiatic
jet". As a result storms originate in the zone about
every three days which pass on a rhythmic motion to the
overlying westerlies. These troughs and crests of pressure,
resembling sea-waves, move towards North America, but
before they reach it they are reinforced by disturbances

67

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

to the west of the continent, in a zone which extends
northward to Alaska.

On the continent itself is another zone of disturbance,
east of the Rockies, where warm, moist winds from the
Gulf meet cool Pacific ones, dried by their passage over
the mountains. There are other zones of disturbance, so
that the Asiatic jet, receiving its main ''drive" from the
sun, is affected by auxiliary forces arising in the other
zones. Complicated though it becomes, the process con-
tinues rhythmically in a kind of "wind routine" which
can be used as one of the permanent factors in the data
studied by experts in forecasting the world's weather.

Water-vapour is generally present in the air in greater
or lesser quantities. If pure, dry air — that is, air from
which all dust and traces of electricity have been removed
— is mixed with pure water-vapour, and the resulting
mixture cooled below the temperature of saturation,
condensation does not take place. But if fine dust is
injected into the pure mixture, without altering its
temperature or pressure, a fine mist is at once developed.
A charge of electricity introduced into the mixture will
also cause condensation. The colder the air, the less
water it can hold in the form of invisible vapour. A
pound of air at ninety degrees can hold as much as half
an ounce of water-vapour, but at freezing point it can
only hold a sixteenth of an ounce : the air is fully saturated
at that temperature with that amount of moisture.

The air may be chilled as it passes up the surface of a
mountain, or as a current rising from a warm surface,
or it may be forced up the sloping surface of a mass of
cooler, heavier air. If no dust particles were present
the rising air might become overloaded (or "super-
saturated") with water molecules without cloud forming
— but the dust particles are almost always present in
vast numbers. When the saturated air becomes too cold
to sustain the number of water molecules present, these
converge on the dust particles to form droplets — but still

68

THE WINDS

averaging only one three-thousandth of an inch in
diameter. These, in quadrilhons, are spaced so widely
apart that they form a misty veil in the sky which is just
visible.

More and more droplets are formed, and these gradu-
ally merge into actual raindrops which fall to the earth —
each drop containing anything up to a million of the
original droplets. We know that the whole process of
rain- or snowflake-formation is one of repeated associa-
tions. In one sense the water-droplets act like humans
who form small assemblies which join others to form
larger groups, and so on, until huge ''mass meetings" are
held — the process is one of widening co-operation.

Apart from the trades and similar winds which are the
''master mariners", ceaselessly engaged in their routine
voyagings over the surfaces of the oceans, there are
numbers of winds which confine their activities to local
areas.

Even as men and women are classified according to
their various occupations, so winds are classified accord-
ing to their speeds. Sir Francis Beaufort devised a scale
in 1805 which is still used for measuring wind velocities.
It allocates numbers to winds in accordance with their
differing strengths, from "light air" (i), upwards through
"slight breeze" (2), "gentle breeze" (3) — a wind of eight
to twelve miles an hour — to wind number 12, a hurri-
cane moving at "greater than seventy- five miles an
hour". Such terrific winds are only very rarely experi-
enced. Even wind number 10 — "whole gale" — blowing
at between fifty-five and sixty-three miles an hour — is one
seldom experienced inland, trees being uprooted and
considerable structural damage being caused; although
winds of this velocity were experienced at Weymouth,
England, as recently as May 1957.

Although the Beaufort scale ends with wind number
12, and winds over seventy-five miles an hour are cer-
tainly rare, hurricanes moving at speeds considerably in

69

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

excess of that figure have been recorded. The maximum
wind velocity recorded in the British Isles was 125 miles
an hour at Costa Hill, Orkneys, on 31st January 1953.
But calculations from the enormous destruction caused
by tornadoes show that they can easily surpass 500 miles
an hour.

A tornado which visited Mayfield, Ohio, U.S.A., on
the 4th of February 1842 struck with a fury that has
probably never been equalled in the history of modern
civilization. It was calculated by authorities of the time
to have a velocity of 682 miles an hour. Although the
figure has been disputed, there is no doubt that the wind
reached a velocity on that occasion many times greater
than that of ordinary tornadoes — if any tornado can
ever be described as "ordinary".

Compared with such a wind, the Mistral — a cold, dry
wind which blows from the north-west in the Gulf of
Lyons, and which has often been described as a plague —
seems but a gentle zephyr. It blows for varying periods —
sometimes for as long as ninety days, is confined to the
coastal districts, and is announced by white ''cottony"
clouds which suddenly appear in a serene sky.

The Bora is a wild, bleak wind that rushes down from
the Alps to the Adriatic and the Black Sea. It is a deafen-
ing, deadly wind, that has been known to overturn heavy
wagons and even carry horses and drivers great distances.

Of the hot winds the dreaded Simoom of northern
Africa and Arabia is best known. Heralded by an evil-
looking yellow hue on the horizon, the Simoom raises
great clouds of dust and adds serious hardship to a desert
journey. The Sirocco of Sicily and Southern Italy is a
similar wind, but is less dry, being tempered by its
passage across the Mediterranean. Another hot wind is
the Harmattan, prevalent along the coast of Guinea and
below Cape Verde and Cape Lopez at certain times in
the year.

Monsoons occur in the China Sea and the Indian

70

THE WINDS

Ocean, but the term can be applied to other seasonal
winds. Independently of their value in bringing rain to
countries which would otherwise degenerate into deserts,
they are, like the trades, useful for navigation. In sailing-
ship days, mariners would plan their voyages to take
advantage of them, and even in the early days of steam-
ships their captains would take them into account and
often achieve the feat of running before them : to the dis-
comfort of their passengers, but with good effect on the
times of their voyages.

The world's oceans and winds are in close sympathy.
They form an alliance in which it might seem that the
oceans are the sleeping partners, and the winds the active
ones who do nearly all the work regarding the transport
of countless millions of tons of waste matter to the sur-
faces of the sea, and the movement of innumerable clouds
which discharge themselves into the oceans.

Winds are forever moving over the world in numerous
directions, and currents of air are continually ascending
and descending, and in all that they do, they are helping
the sea to conquer the land, not merely in its erosions of
the world's coasts, but also in its reception of millions
upon millions of tons of surface soil and dust carried into
it by the winds. But the ocean contributes a vital share
to the partnership. It gives its surface moisture to the
winds, which carry its evaporations far over the world's
land surfaces. In exchange for the solid matter that it
receives from the land it returns a small percentage of its
surface water; the partnership is thus not entirely one-
sided. Nevertheless, the sea has the best of the bargain,
for the land does not retain the sea's water contributions
for long.

The erosive action of winds can be extremely serious.
To take but one example : The winds continually blow-
ing across the southern half of Australia are removing
hundreds of thousands of tons of top-soil every year.
Extending northwards from the Mallee district of north-

71

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

western Victoria is a large area, the surface of which is
covered with red dust as fine as flour. This dust is
constantly lifted into the air by winds, and deposited
again, but enormous quantities of it are blown about
the world — in the autumn the south-east trades carry
some of it as far as the Dutch East Indies, while westerly
winds often carry it far out over the Tasman Sea. Samples
taken from the sea-floor in that area show the presence
of it in deposits of red sludge. Storms have often
carried soil from the world's land surfaces far out into
the ocean.

Transporting material is one of the principal tasks of
the world's winds. As ''dustmen" they seem determined
to get as much "waste material" from the earth's land
surfaces into the sea as possible. The sea is their ultimate
dumping ground. The material they carry (dusts and
pollens of all kinds) may go up to the skies and come
down again, but at long last the insatiable ocean must
receive large quantities of it, taking it down to the sea-
beds.

The dust thrown into the air by the eruption of the
Krakatoa volcano, in the Sunda Strait between Java and
Sumatra, in 1883, when the resulting tidal wave drowned
36,000 people, caused brilliant sunsets in all countries for
years afterwards as it drifted around the world, most of it
coming to rest at last in the world's oceans.

72

CHAPTER V

THE MOVING WATERS

^LL disturbances of the world's waters, whether
/-\ caused by a stone tossed into a pond, by the prow
jL JLof an ocean hner, or by a mighty seismic upheaval
of the sea bed, are subject to uniform laws. Ripples,
waves, rollers, tides, bores and tidal waves are classifica-
tions of sea and river movements which help us to under-
stand them better, but they are all governed by the same
inflexible principles.

The world's winds are the primary causes of surface
disturbances of the oceans, rivers and streams, and they
constantly build up minor movements into larger ones.
But although one would expect that the slightest breath
of air would ruffle a water surface with very small waves,
this does not happen : there is a limit to what the wind
can do. A breeze moving at two knots (12,160 feet an
hour) or under cannot raise even the tiniest waves on
any water surface. But when it is moving at just over two
knots it produces the very smallest waves that can exist
on the sea. These minimum wavelets always have the
same wave-length — three inches from the crest of one
wavelet to the crest of the next — they cannot measure
less. Nor can they travel at a slower speed than fourteen
inches a second. But from that basic size and basic speed
they can be built up by the wind, which does not merely
push them but also pulls at them, so that ripples can
become formidable waves, which can again be merged
into larger movements — breakers, tidal waves and so
on.

73

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Seamen have a rough and ready method of forecasting
the size of the waves which may be expected under gale
conditions. They call the uninterrupted distance over
which a wind has been building up the 'Tetch". Short
fetches produce small waves — long fetches can produce
enormous ones. Taking the square root of the fetch
(measured in nautical miles) seamen multiply it by one
and a half, and this gives them, in feet, the height of the
waves which the wind is building up across the fetch.
This simple formula proves remarkably rehable in fore-
casting the approaching wave heights on widely varying
stretches of water — even up to fetches several hundreds of
miles in extent.

Those who go down to the sea in ships have many
other methods of estimating the height and force of
waves. So with inland waterways. Canal navigators
know that there is a certain speed at which a canal boat
may be propelled, for it rides on a wave and is carried
forward by it, and if a calculation is made which
takes all factors into consideration the speed can be
maintained with the least additional expenditure of
power.

The mathematical formulae covering wave motion —
whether in aeroform bodies, in solid bodies, or in liquids
— are vastly complex, but there is a simple, straight-
forward relationship between sea waves and their speed
which is not hard to understand. In this relationship the
height of a wave, strangely enough, does not come into it.
The formula is simply this : That the speed (in feet per
second) of any wave is equal to the wave-length (the
distance from one wave-crest to the next) divided by the
time that elapses (in seconds) between successive waves
as they pass any fixed point. Using this formula — which
is easier to apply in practice than might appear as you
read it — you can calculate the speed of any wave when
you are by the sea.

The infinitely complicated movements of the sea's

74

THE MOVING WATERS

surface waters are constantly breaking up the world's
coastlines and carrying material away from the shores,
but the breakers and rollers are only responsible for a
part of the land material which the sea receives. It has
enormous power, infinite patience, and an insatiable
appetite — an appetite which is fed not only by its own
efforts, but by its numerous allies. Forever and forever,
growing in size and strength as they labour, the world's
streams and rivers carry sediment down to the sea,
robbing the land — sediment which the sea greedily
swallows, its monstrous appetite unappeased.

The Mississippi alone carries down the Gulf, day by
day and every day, over a million tons of sediment.
Professor Salisbury, in his great work Physiography,'^ says :
"It would take nearly 900 daily trains of fifty cars each,
and each car carrying twenty-five tons, to carry an equal
amount of sand and mud to the Gulf All the rivers of the
earth are perhaps carrying to the sea forty times as much
as the Mississippi." This estimate gives us a mental picture
of sediment being carried into the oceans every day
amounting to over forty million tons.

Professor Salisbury makes the significant statement
that "Every drop of water which falls on the land has for
its mission the getting of the land into the sea". He is
not exaggerating when he says that this is the main task
of the world's rivers.

Perhaps the Yangtse Kiang and the Hwang Ho are
the two rivers which are the most active levellers of the
world's continents. The former carries to the sea three
times as much sediment as the Ganges. Fabre, in his
fascinating work This Earth of Ours,] estimates that the
matter carried into the sea by the Yangtse Kiang is
even greater than that carried into the sea by the Mis-
sissippi. He uses shiploads, instead of trainloads, to illus-
trate his statement: "For conveyance by vessel of this

♦Murray, 1907,
fFisher Unwin, 1923.

75

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

immense mass of silt there would be required a fleet of
2,000 ships, each with a capacity of 1,400 tons, and they
would have to descend the river daily and throw their
cargoes into the sea." Fabre, in all his books, was a
careful and reliable investigator, and he evidently gave
much painstaking research to this question of the amount
of sediment carried into the sea by the Yangtse Kiang.
Of the Hwang Ho he said : "It amasses at its mouth every
twenty-five days enough sediment to make an island a
kilometre square, and it threatens to fill up the vast gulf
into which it empties."

Despite these facts, the rushing influx of water from
the world's streams and rivers overwhelmingly exceeds
in volume the amount of soil and silt that the ocean
receives. The sea returns the land's gifts so munificently
that it makes the land look like a poor relation. In-
credibly old, it has all the time it needs as it crumbles
and batters the world's coastlines. Cliflfs break away,
boulders and rocks crash down, rocks become pebbles
and pebbles are broken down into sand. Fossils of
creatures which once lived in the sea deeps have been
found in rocks 15,000 feet above the surface : but the sea
has only loaned them to the land, knowing that they
must be repaid with interest.

The sea has allies other than its rivers and streams
and currents. It has its ice-caps. Every 100 years the
melting of these releases such a vast volume of water into
the world's oceans that it raises the sea another eight
inches. The melting of the ice-caps is a natural process
which is being considerably accelerated by mankind's
use of oil and gas as fuel, the burning of which is dis-
charging gases that are warming the atmosphere around
the earth to a height of as much as sixteen miles. Some
authorities calculate that, if this acceleration continues,
the ocean levels will rise at least forty feet and flood
huge areas — particularly such low-lying areas as South
Florida, parts of New York City, downtown San Fran-

76

THE MOVING WATERS

cisco, and much of Tokyo, where there is Httle or no land
forty feet above sea-level.

The sediment brought down into the sea by rivers,
together with the water continually delivered into it by
melting ice-caps (in fact everything received by the sea)
is forever churned and widely distributed by the currents
of the ocean. Little is known of the forces which originate
the deep-water movements. The layering of the under-
water surfaces, and the directions in which their water
masses travel may be determined by heating, cooling,
evaporation and rainfall. There is much uncertainty
about the speeds of the deep currents — some authorities
give them speeds a hundred times as great as those of
other authorities. Human knowledge is built up, like a
coral reef, laboriously and slowly.

Countless millions of tiny creatures contribute their
individually insignificant efforts to the building of a reef.
They labour unseen and their task might, in its earliest
stages, seem impossible. Yet their co-operative eflforts
bring the reef to the surface at last, and far above it.
So the labours of innumerable humans (many of them
fated to live and die unknown to the world) result in an
accumulation of knowledge which at long last emerges
into the light.

There are many similarities between ocean and at-
mospheric conditions, and of these one of the most sig-
nificant is the existence of rotatory movements in both.
There are wheels within wheels in the atmosphere and
wheels within wheels in the sea.

The currents of the Atlantic may be roughly simplified
into two circling streams : one turning clockwise in the
North Atlantic and the other spinning anti-clockwise in
the South Adantic. The Gulf Stream is part of the North
Atlantic ''whirlpool", a system of currents called by the
ancients "Oceanus" or the "Ocean River". The word
"river", appHed to the North Atlantic stream is a com-
monplace one concealing a fact which challenges the

77

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

imagination, for seventy-five million tons of water are
transported past any given spot in the vast circular
stream in every second of time.

The Gulf Stream is a section of the largest ''water
wheel" in the world. As the earth turns on its axis at a
thousand miles an hour, the Ocean River, moving within
the vast envelope of water which clings to the spinning
earth, is also turning, but far more sluggishly, for the
average rate of its revolution is three or four miles an
hour only. Yet it spins, day after day and century after
century : a mighty river of water carrying thousands of
ships on its surface and countless myriads of living
creatures within its swirling depths.

Complicated by the entrance and exit of innumerable
currents and counter-currents, eddies, tributaries and
other forms of moving water, the great Wheel River of
the North Atlantic, under the lash of the trades, runs
towards the American continent in a westerly direction,
and might girdle the globe itself if its flow were not
checked and channelled by the interposed land-masses
and sent spinning clockwise by the earth's rotary
motion.

There are surfaces below the sea's actual surface. These
are formed by layers of water of different densities in the
ocean deeps — the upper area of each layer being a sur-
face in contact with the lower area of the layer above it.
These concealed surfaces are — like the more generally
known surface of the ocean itself — traversed by waves.
The waves are caused by rhythmic undulations which pass
over the concealed surfaces, and they dwarf the greatest
waves ever recorded on the actual surface of the sea
above them. Exhaustive temperature measurements have
shown that the ocean's concealed surfaces are rising and
falling incessantly as waves which often reach heights of
as much as 300 feet. The cause of these submarine
waves, far down in the deeps, is quite unknown to us,
but we do know that their movements affect the com-

78

THE MOVING WATERS

plicated inter-relationships of the currents nearer the
surface, and the tides and tidal waves of the oceans.

In all the world's seas, currents are wheeling slowly in
movements which have carried the waters round and
round incessantly for countless centuries. Taken over a
long period, the precision of such complicated move-
ments justifies the use of the phrase: "like clockwork".
The ''mainspring", empowering all the complicated
movements, is the sun's heat, but the ''escapement",
controlling the power, is the tidal and current system of
the oceans, for the winds, transmitting the power, can
only be likened to a carefully calculated "train" of clock-
work wheels, of which the trades are the largest. In this
analogy, the Gulf Stream fits in as the escapement wheel
itself, which steadily releases the power transmitted by
the wheels from the mainspring.

Using six ships, which zigzagged, 150 miles apart, in
and out of the surface of the Gulf Stream, an expedition
organized by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office in
1 95 1 surveyed a part of the course of that enormous
body of water as it swept between Cape Hatteras and the
Grand Banks.

The Gulf Stream issues from the Gulf of Mexico under
tremendous pressure, caused by its confined passage
through the Florida Strait, runs parallel with the
American coast as far as Newfoundland and then sweeps
on in the direction of Europe and Africa, sphtting into
four separate branches of the main river of water. Until
the U.S. Navy's expedition, the course of the Stream
had not been accurately checked for any considerable part
of its length. The survey elicited some fascinating facts.

The ships used radar to check their positions, and the
flow and varying temperature of the moving waters were
carefully measured at intervals. The maximum speed of
the Gulf Stream over the area was found to be six miles
an hour — higher than the average speed of the Stream
over its entire course. The great pressure imposed upon

79

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

the waters before they emerged from the Gulf is evidently
the cause of this. Off Cape Hatteras the Stream wriggled
around like a snake released from a box, enjoying its
newly-found freedom, sometimes getting off its course
as much as eleven miles in a day's wandering. In the
surveyed area, the Stream was found to have a tempera-
ture of seventy-five degrees, and to be about fifteen miles
wide and a mile deep, carrying over a thousand times as
much water in its course as the mighty Mississippi.

We have followed the south equatorial current over
one part of its journey only. Before the vast body of water
is forced onward into the Atlantic it twists and turns and
doubles back in a curiously sinuous course. In the Gulf of
Mexico the pressure of its volume is so great that its level
is eight inches higher there than it is on the Atlantic
coast of Florida. Through the ninety-mile gap between
Florida and Cuba this irresistible ocean river pours more
than 100,000 million tons of water every minute.

Its beneficent influence on the climate of Western
Europe, without which Britain would suffer ice-bound
winters, must not blind us to the potential malevolence of
this mighty equatorial current if its waters were reinforced
by the melting of the ice-caps in any considerable measure.

Before we consider the extraordinary whirlpool of
weeds, populated by all kinds of interesting creatures,
which lies in the centre of the Gulf Stream's circular
course and is known as the Sargasso Sea, we must exam-
ine some of the ocean's tides and tidal waves.

Tides are caused by the co-operation of the gravita-
tional influences of the sun and moon on the world's
waters. The partnership is a strange one. Our earth and
the moon, separated by (roughly) a quarter of a million
miles, are of course mutually attracted, and in their
mutual attraction they waltz like a couple on a dance
floor, circling each other and also moving in a vast circle
around the sun, which is pulling at them both.

It is a well-known fact that the gravitational force of

80

THE MOVING WATERS

the sun and moon attracts the earth's waters which He
closest to them. This pull, however, is so small compared
with that of the earth's pull on those same waters that
they are not pulled vertically away from the earth's
surface. The further we move away from this nearest
point, however, the more horizontal does the joint pull
of the sun and moon become. Obviously it takes far less
force to make the water move horizontally over the
earth's surface than to draw it up vertically, and so the
water is drawn from all directions to this nearest point
until it is piled up. This bulge is high tide. It is not so
easy to see why the water on the opposite side should bulge
outward, away from the sun or moon. Realize that the
earth itself is pulled away from those far-side waters and
the matter becomes clearer. It should now be obvious
that the highest tides will occur when the sun and moon
are on the same side of the earth, pulling together, and
when they are directly opposite each other with the earth
between.

Such conditions occur only at intervals, between
which the sun and moon are pulling at constantly vary-
ing angles. The movements of the tides are also com-
plicated by the fact that (as seen from our point of view
on this earth) the sun and moon do not go round the
earth in unison but at different speeds. The lunar day is
one of 24.84 hours, compared with the solar day's 24.
This apparent ''lag" of the moon compared with the sun
causes the difference in the daily times of high tides.

When you spend your holiday at the seaside and get
up before breakfast for a swim, you find the sea further
and further out as mornings pass. As a rule the high
tides around Great Britain are about fifty minutes later
each day.

That there are two tides each day, and not one is due
to the rotation of the earth so that each place experiences
high water when it is nearest and furthest from the moon ;
and so, through all its phases, the tides are duplicated,

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

one on each side of the earth, with the result that any
part of the world's coastline affected by tides has two
tides a day. As the moon's phases take a lunar month to
go through, the large spring tides occur fortnightly.

Sweeping round the world, the tides caused by the sun
and moon in this strange triangular association with the
earth, are influenced by land configurations and many
other factors. In confined channels the rushing currents
of water may be terrifyingly powerful. Where any strong
current races over rough, shallow ground, or where two
currents meet, the fierce and noisy condition known as
"tide-rip" may be created, or actual whirlpools may
occur, menacing shipping and human life.

So many factors control the movements of tidal waters
that calculations designed to predict their future be-
haviour need to be so complex that they might seem, at
first thought, to be mathematically impossible. Such
calculations can only be compared with those made by
astronomers in forecasting the movements of stars,
planets and comets, yet oceanographers in the world's
meteorological observatories and institutes — particularly
at Liverpool and Birkenhead — have used tidal informa-
tion collected in past centuries with such good effect that
their calculations enable them to predict with accuracy
how tides will run in various parts of the world for many
years ahead. Unexpected happenings may disturb some
of their calculations and produce tidal waves causing
considerable damage, but the fact remains that ships of
all nations are able to time their movements by reference
to tide-tables which are- a monumental tribute to the
patience and intellectual skill of meteorological experts.

The waves which break rhythmically on seaside
beaches in calm weather are subject to laws which have
been studied and analysed by man, even as the huge
tidal waves which swoop down upon coastal places at
rare intervals and cause great damage and loss of life are
also subject to known laws, although the movements of

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THE MOVING WATERS

the former may be to some extent predictable, while
those of the latter are erratic and cannot be forecast.

The fearful velocities of surface storms might be
instanced with numbers of cases. One of the most remark-
able in recent years was the cyclone which hit Belsize,
the capital of British Honduras, in 1931. Striking the
town at 2.30 p.m. on loth September, the hurricane
destroyed the town in half an hour — all the churches
were wrecked and not a building was left undamaged.
The wind sometimes reached a velocity of 150 miles an
hour. A 200-ton dredger was lifted from the sea and
dropped squarely on the roof of the Customs House.
That single incident exemplifies the force of storms
over the sea, although, mercifully, few storms are as
violent.

Tidal waves may be caused by mighty winds, or by
earthquakes or settlements of the sea-bed, deep down
under the waves. On loth November 1932, a tidal wave
twenty feet in height swept inland over Cuba and other
West Indian islands. The cyclone which accompanied it
raged with a velocity of 200 miles an hour, destroying
houses, stores, crops — almost everything in its path. Some
3,000 people were drowned or otherwise killed at Santa
Cruz del Sur, and the town was completely destroyed.
The tidal wave carried numbers of bodies and a con-
siderable amount of wreckage back into the sea.

The Humber and the Mersey are examples of Britain's
tidal rivers. In some instances, where the tide comes in
swiftly and the river runs rapidly, the water moving
inland from the sea may be heaped up to several feet in
height, instead of moving up the river steadily and with a
gradual increase in the height of the water. Such a wave
— which can be a most exciting thing to watch — is para-
doxically called a ''bore", meaning a billow. In France
the name eau guerre is given to it (appropriately, for the
term means ''water war") while in South America it is
C2i\\td proroca, "the destroyer".

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

One of the most notable bores in Great Britain is the
one which periodically occurs on the Severn, near the
head of the Bristol Channel. The tide, which rises to a
height of forty feet, making a most impressive spectacle,
rushes up the funnel-shaped Channel in a continuous
wave ninety yards in length, and with a crest averaging
four or five feet. But the height of the bore's crest varies.
In 1932 the moving wall of water was nearly eight feet
high. As the bore rushes up the Severn it makes a curious
noise, as though it were a living thing speeding forward
to capture its prey.

Bores on British rivers include a remarkable one which
rushes up the Trent, forming a wave from three to five
feet high, and others on the Solent and Dee. In France a
wave seven feet high races up the Seine at spring tide, to
a distance of forty miles up the river. Another of similar
height travels up the river Hooghly in India, while an
even higher one — twelve to fifteen feet high — appro-
priately called the amassona^ meaning "boat destroyer",
sweeps up the Amazon with a roar that can be heard
over five miles away.

The world's most remarkable bore occurs on the
Tsien-tang-kiang in China. A tidal wave from the Pacific
rushes into the estuary, and as the water piles up a bore
is created which may be as much as thirty-four feet in
height. Its approach can be heard for more than an hour
before its arrival, and as it passes the sound has been
likened to the roar of Niagara Falls. It rushes by Haining
at a speed of over fourteen miles an hour, and it has been
calculated that nearly two million tons of water pass that
place every minute when the bore is in full spate. The
mighty wall of water dies away at last about forty-two
miles from the river's mouth.

Although the Tsien-tang-kiang bore is rightly regarded
as the world's greatest, there is an area even more remark-
able for the great rise and fall of its tides, and for the
number of its bores. This is the Bay of Fundy, an inlet

84

THE MOVING WATERS

of the North Atlantic, separating New Brunswick from
Nova Scotia. Its length up to Chignecto Bay is 140 miles
and its extreme breadth forty-five miles. The peculiar
formation of the bay gives it the greatest tidal range in
the world. Its dimensions and shape are exactly right, as
a basin which shelves and narrows gradually for the first
100 miles and then divides into two long inlets, to give
its waters extreme depth ranges.

All it needs for these is a series of rhythmic impulses —
even as the water in a bath, resting upon a curved and
sloping base, can be made to swill in rhythmic waves
high up on the shallow end by sweeping it regularly with
the hand. The ocean tides of the Atlantic coast give the
water in the bay the required rhythmic impulses. Rising
and falling at the entrance to the bay in twelve-hour
periods, the Atlantic tides keep the waters within the bay
swinging up and down, so that it really has its own
internal tides, which are kept in motion by the regular
pulsations from outside.

At one time the remarkable tides in this area were
attributed solely to the passage of the water into the
narrow cul-de-sac, but it is now known that they are due
to the Atlantic's rhythmic impulses, and the peculiar
situation of the bay upon one of the ocean's cotidal lines,
where the tidal periods are practically stationary and
periodically regular. It is paradoxical that the Atlantic's
regular impulses should create such wide variations in
tidal range within the bay. At Passamaquoddy Bay, at
the southern end of the Bay of Fundy, the rise and fall is
about twenty-five feet. But at the northern end, in the
narrow upper reaches, the world's greatest tidal heights
are reached, averaging sixty feet and sometimes rising as
high as seventy- two feet. Yet just across a narrow isthmus,
in the Bay Verte (outside the Bay of Fundy) less than
twenty miles from where these world's-highest tides
occur, the tide rises only four or five feet.

The estuaries of some of the rivers in the northern

85

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

reaches of the Bay of Fundy are often completely drained
by the falling tide, so that vast areas of red mud are dis-
closed. Areas of fertile marshes are situated at the head
of the bay. The remains of a submerged forest show that
the land has subsided there, in the latest geological
period, nearly fifty feet.

The Petitcodiac, which empties into Chepody Bay, at
the extreme north-west of the Bay of Fundy, is navigable
up to twenty-five miles for ships, and for twelve miles
farther at high tide. It is but one of many rivers which
empty into the Bay of Fundy which has a tidal bore — a
crest varying from three to six feet in height which
rushes up the river at certain times. Because of its high
tides and the many bores in its rivers, the bay is noted
for its navigational perils, especially in its upper
reaches.

The gravitational pull of the earth upon its own waters
is millions of times greater than the pull of the sun and
the moon combined, yet the sun can draw the earth's
waters a little way towards it with a force which operates
across ninety-three million miles of intervening space,
while the moon (infinitely smaller than the sun, yet more
powerful in its pull because it is so much nearer to the
earth) exercises its invisible power across a distance of
nearly a quarter of a million miles.

In the open oceans the water piled up into a tidal wave
by the moon's attraction (affected to varying degrees by
the pull of the sun) follows the moon as it apparently
circles the earth. This true tidal wave (which must not
be confused with tidal waves caused by earthquakes or
other ocean-floor disturbances) must be measured not in
feet or miles but in hours. It is a tidal wave roughly
twelve hours and twenty minutes in length (half the time
that it takes for the moon to circle the earth — the
''circling" being from our viewpoint, of course). The
height of the heaped-up water is called "the tidal range".
Over the wide oceans this averages about three feet high,

86

THE MOVING WATERS

and the tidal wave travels at the formidable speed of
500 miles an hour.

Science can only guess how the lives of countless
millions of creatures in the world's oceans are affected by
the monotonous pulsing of the tides.

Their life durations, their periods of gestation, their
habits : all these and many other factors in their multi-
tudinous existences are influenced by the tides on the
ocean's surface, and those deeper and more mysterious
movements of the undersea waters. Down to the utter-
most depths of the world's oceans, through miles of dark
water, such tidal influences continue, even as the lives
of creatures on the world's land surfaces are influenced
by the movements of the distant stars.*

Even as no man lives to himself, so the ocean does not
exist as an isolated entity. It is related to the land, the
sea and the sky in numerous ways, many of them com-
plicated relationships and some of them very mysterious.

The rains which fall upon its surface do not merely
affect the sea's volume as they assist the rivers to replace
its continual loss by evaporation: they affect the lives
and habits of countless creatures near its surface, and,
more remotely, the lives of vast numbers of animals in its
depths. So with land erosions, and with the millions of
tons of top-soil which are carried into the sea. And so
with the winds — they intimately affect life in the oceans.

The tidal waves which follow the moon are not uni-
formly three feet high — that is the range as the piled-up
waters sweep across the oceans under normal conditions.
We already have some idea of the tidal range in the Bay
of Fundy. As we have seen, it varies throughout the Bay.
Other parts of the world — parts of Mexico and Australia,
northern France and south-west England — have tidal
ranges of as much as twenty feet. Such variations in tidal

*Flammarion and other authors have suggested that ants are guided in their
wanderings by the stars ; not merely by the Hght from them, nocturnally, but by
mysterious rays, beyond the range of our present knowledge. Birds, bees and other
creatures may be guided in their migrations by invisible rays from outer space.

87

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

ranges may not seem to have any practical significance.
Does it matter to us in our daily lives whether tides in
various parts of the world rise only a few feet or to great
heights?

The answer is that even today, before man has har-
nessed the power of the tides to any extent, the world's
commerce is considerably affected by tidal ranges.

Vessels of all nations are dependent on the power of
the moon to enable them to enter their harbours, for it
raises the water for them to cross the harbour bars or
dangerous shallows. And so it is wherever industry and
shipping have partially harnessed the power of the sea :
the rising and falling tides are important factors.

Only a very small part of the sea's enormous power is
at present being utilized by man. It is available to him
in countless ways, and he is beginning to realize its
potentialities, even as he is beginning to harness the
world's rivers. Tidal power is already being tapped in
many countries. But the power in the world's ocean
currents still runs to waste. A single fact can help us to
appreciate the volume of that power. The world's strong-
est ocean currents are those in the Saltfjord, Norway,
where they race at nearly nineteen and a half miles an
hour. It does not require much imagination to picture
the benefits which could be enjoyed by mankind if only a
fraction of the power of the ocean's currents could be
harnessed.

Man is turning to the peaceful use of atomic energy,
realizing that it can eventually produce power so cheaply
that the lives of millions can be transformed by it.
Coincidentally with the application of atomic power to
industrial and domestic uses, men in many nations are
devising schemes for using the sun's energy, and —
increasingly — the power stored in the world's rivers and
waterfalls, and in the sea itself

We of this generation are therefore watching the incep-
tion of a strange partnership — an alliance between the

88

THE MOVING WATERS

atom, the sun, and the waters of the world, in the service
of man. As years pass the alHance will be strengthened by
the invention of new devices which will interlink their
respective fields of power.

In this alliance the atom is the senior partner; for its
inconceivably vast power — creatively and destructively
— is the basis of the sun's energy and the fundamental
driving force behind all the movements of the waters.

Future generations will probably reap the full benefits
of the atom-sun-sea association, as it brings more and
more power into man's service — provided always that
the senior partner can be subjected to international
control.*

The atomic energy stored in the world's oceans is, of
course, vast beyond all human comprehension. There are
untold billions of billions of ultra-microscopic whirlpools
of energy in a pailful of sea-water : each atom being a
miniature solar-system with ''planets" revolving around
a central "sun"; although the analogy fails when we
consider the terrific speeds of the electron "planets" as
compared with the relatively slow motions of our sun's
planets in their orbits.

Enveloping a spinning earth, the world's oceans have
whirlpools in myriads within whirlpools : ranging from
atomic ones, through vast numbers of those vortices
which are so readily created by the world's winds and all
other surface disturbances, right up to the mighty whirl-
pools which spin steadily and permanently in particular
areas of the sea's surface. With the lore and magic of
these larger whirlpools, and some of the fascinating
creatures which inhabit them, we are now immediately
concerned.

*"The Harwell men are so certain of their findings that work on H-power is
already being farmed out to industry. They are certain they have achieved the
fantastic temperature of 12,000,000 degrees centigrade with a small-scale con-
trolled H-bomb reaction in an apparatus called Zeta Two. . . . These experiments
are likely to lead to the generation of electric power from a form of hydrogen
which can be extracted in unlimited quantities from sea water." — Daily Express,
1 6th December 1957.

89

CHAPTER VI

WHIRLPOOLS

OLD encyclopaedias and works on natural history
have very curious ideas about whirlpools. Until
about a century ago the idea prevailed that they
could be appeased. Ray's Cyclopaedia, published in 1819,
for instance, describes a marine whirlpool in these terms :

Wherever it appears it is very furious, and boats,
&c., would inevitably be drawn into it ; but the people
who navigate them are prepared for it, and always
carry an empty vessel, a log of wood, or large bundle
of straw, or some such thing, in the boat with them.
As soon as they perceive the whirlpool they toss this
within the vortex, keeping themselves out. This sub-
stance, whatever it be, is immediately received in the
centre, and carried under water; and as soon as this
is done the surface of the place becomes smooth, and
they row over it with safety; and in about an hour
they see the vortex begin again in some other place,
usually at about a mile from the first.

Presumably the same vortex, which has apparently
been appeased in one place, has gone down into the
sea and emerged in another place ! The Cyclopaedia does
not mention more than one "bundle of straw, or some
such thing", but it is evident that a number would have
to be carried if several whirlpools were to be appeased in
one boat trip.

One of the best known whirlpools is the Charybdis.

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WHIRLPOOLS

The word is now almost exclusively associated with the
mythological story of Poseidon and Gaea, in which
Charybdis stole the oxen of Hercules and was thunder-
struck for her offence by Jupiter, who changed her into
the whirlpool situated opposite the rock Scylla, at the
entrance to the Strait of Messina, thus originating the
phrase "between Scylla and Charybdis" : meaning be-
tween two opposing dangers. Some affirm that Hercules
killed her himself; others, that Scylla committed the
robbery and was killed for it by Hercules, but that her
father Phorcus put Charybdis into a cauldron and
stewed her in it for so long that she came to life again.
Another (the Homeric account) makes Charybdis a male
figure who dwelt under an immense fig-tree on the rock,
and swallowed up the waters of the sea three times a day
and threw them up again. In all these fables we find the
characteristics of actual marine whirlpools. Today, the
name of the whirlpool has been changed to Calofaro
("La Rema" is also used). The town on the rock, now
known as Scilla, was destroyed by an earthquake in
1908.

But the word "Charybdis" was also used a century or
so ago to describe any of certain openings supposed to
exist at the bottom of the sea — openings through which
its waters are received and conveyed by subterranean
circulation under land surfaces, to emerge as fountains
and springs.

It was held that if such undersea holes did not exist
then the Mediterranean could not be emptied of the
enormous quantities of water it receives, so that it would
overflow the land of Egypt and other adjacent coasts.
It was believed that the greatest of these holes in the sea
bed was an immense Charybdis near the Strait's mouth,
hidden deeply below the surface, which collected the
surplus waters and carried them inland to the spring and
fountain sources.

Dismissing such old legends and fables, modern

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oceanographic research has revealed facts regarding
Charybdis, which outrival any of the old mythologies in
fascinating interest.

As we know it today, this locality which we associate
with the old mythologies is an area in the Strait of
Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland, where
a rich store of marine life is periodically swept by fierce
rotatory currents and strong winds : an area inhabited by
myriads of weird creatures.

The whirlpool itself — or rather the series of whirlpools
which make up the stretch of turbulent water — turns far
more swiftly than the slowly-wheeling Sargasso, but in
normal circumstances it is not dangerous to modern
shipping, save to small boats and during the times of its
maximum tides. From time immemorial the tidal forces
of sun and moon have tugged at the waters in the channel
(which is not more than 300 feet deep) and moved them
northward and southward alternately: even, at certain
times and seasons, sideways. This to-and-fro motion of
the waters is characteristic of the Charybdis, and while
it proceeds rhythmically the lives of its underwater
creatures continue normally. But twice a month the
''daily round" of their existences is agitated into periods
of whirling violence, as the maximum tides turn the
flowing waters into raging torrents.

When this happens hosts of organisms are forcibly
dragged up from the deeps, and for a few hours numbers
of living, half-alive and dead creatures are either con-
sumed by alert sea birds or cast up on the beaches. The
forms of life which survive such tidal hammer-blows are
in numerous cases either toughened criminals of the deep
or animals which have adapted themselves to the
thunderous wave-pressures in curious ways, but there
are also numbers of creatures which have survived by
taking the line of least resistance as "opportunists" of the
ocean.

The sabre-toothed viper-fish is one of the most ex-

92

WHIRLPOOLS

traordinary fishes in the Charybdis waters. It has a face
far more frightening than any tiger's, with staring eyes
and a great gaping mouth which has long fangs resemb-
hng stalactites and stalagmites rather than teeth. These
are incredibly sharp, yet they bend under pressure.
Within the fish's cavern-like mouth are light organs
which create luminous patches inside the fearsome jaws.
Darting here and there among the smaller creatures of
the Charybdis, this sabre-toothed viper-fish, although
only fourteen inches in length, is a monster by com-
parison with other creatures.

Some of the shrimps and prawns tossed about in the
Strait are among the opportunists — never do they
attempt to go against the prevailing stream. They flaunt
a variety of colours — vivid shades of all kinds, including
purple and flaming red. Many of them can change their
colours very rapidly, in fact they are adepts at adapta-
tion. The chromatophores which enable them to make
their instantaneous colour-changes are wonderful de-
vices. They fulfil their purpose by expanding and con-
tracting— the contractions concentrate pigment at the
middle of the cell : the expansions disperse it again.

The colour-changing devices of such land creatures as
the chameleon act much more slowly. These, like those
of the shrimps and prawns of the Charybdis, are also
accomplished at the will of the animals, but the processes
are quite diflferent. The outer portion of the chameleon's
skin or epidermis is transparent, and is underlaid by a
system of cells filled with granules and oil-drops which
appear white or yellow. Beneath these again are large
irregular chromatophores filled with black and red
pigment granules. The entire mechanism is under
the control of the chameleon's nervous system and is
much more complicated than this explanation might
suggest.

Wonderfully efficient though it is, the chameleon
cannot change colour quickly — it requires a little time

93

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

to adapt itself to any background upon which it is placed.
What then must be the ingenuity, the wonderful crafts-
manship, displayed in the construction of the colour-
changing mechanisms of the shrimps and prawns of the
Gharybdis? For they can change colour — using a far
greater variety of shades than the chameleon — and much
more quickly: the shell of any of the creatures may
be one colour at one moment, then, in an instant, it has
assumed a different one.

Many of the crustaceans in the Strait have flower-like
patches on them suggesting varieties of flowers which
grow on land, such as asters, carnations, etc. Nowhere in
the world is violence and turbulence so intimately
associated with beauty as in the Gharybdis whirlpools.

Another queer creature found here is the silver hatchet-
fish. It has bulging eyes, set closely together in a head
that is actually transparent, and the lenses of its eyes are
telescopic. Silvery pigment makes the animal's sides blaze
with a tinsel-like eflfect. Seen from below, the hatchet-fish
shows only as a narrow blade studded with brilliant
lights. Strangely enough, these luminous patches point
downward, and cannot be seen from above the fish.

To get an accurate impression of the hatchet-fish's
"lamps" as they are carried under its belly, one must
think of a section of Indian corn, for they are packed
together in two rows much resembling such a section.

Myriads of tiny crab-like creatures, any one of which
could hide beneath a grain of rice, busy themselves in the
waters of the Gharybdis. During night fishing in the
Messina district the boats carry lights, and the tiny
crustaceans fly across the water in all directions, attracted
by the lights, and forming interlacing lightning streaks
on the sea's surface. They are attracted by anything
luminous: a fact which indicates the purpose of the
''lamps" carried by the hatchet-fishes, which consume the
tiny crustaceans in enormous quantities.

There is one fascinating creature of the genus Cyclothone

94

WHIRLPOOLS

which inhabits the Charybdis and is about an inch long,
transparent, and which seems (until it opens its mouth)
quite innocent and delicate. But when the mouth opens
it is enormous in relation to the animal's size : in fact it
has a ratio of mouth to body far exceeding that of any
other fish. Within its gaping jaws a complete battery of
tiny lamps or light-organs is disclosed. The creature can
reveal or conceal these lights at will, by simply opening
or closing its gigantic mouth. It swims towards its victim
in the gloom of the underseas and, facing it, suddenly
opens its mouth. Its victim is immediately attracted by
the bright lights, and in a split second is drawn past them
into the other fish's stomach.

There are small sharks in the Charybdis. One of these,
seven inches long when immature, can grow to a maxi-
mum length of several feet, although even when fully
grown it is still a pygmy compared with sharks of other
areas. It is a sea-bed feeder and lives in comparatively
shallow waters. Its scales are covered with tiny points
which can easily rasp the skin if the fish is handled
carelessly when caught.

Another weird creature of the Charybdis is the so-
called elephant-headed mollusc. This is a thumb-sized
animal which swims upside-down. Like many other
animals of the Strait it is transparent. Its head looks very
similar to that of an elephant, for it has a long ''trunk"
through which it takes its food. Its eyes, again, are
strangely like elephant's eyes, and from each of them a
small silvery appendage hangs which has the appearance
of a tear-drop.

The whirlpools of the ocean usually remain in rela-
tively fixed positions, but the Charybdis has moved since
ancient times, when it was the subject of so many legends.
It no longer swirls near the rock of Scylla, but rotates
just over a thousand yards ofif Cape Peloro Lighthouse,
towards the other side of the Strait. And it is now not a
single whirlpool but the largest of a series into which the

95

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

original Charybdis broke up, as the result of violent
earthquakes which shook the sea-bed under the Strait.

There are many other whirlpools, some of them of
considerable size, scattered over the sea's surface.

Of these the most notable is the Maelstrom, first
mentioned in Mercator's Atlas of 1595 and situated off
the coast of Norway.

An unquestionable authority — the Sailing Directions for
the Coast of Norway — says that the Maelstrom is "still the
most dangerous tideway in Lofoten, its violence being
due, in great measure, to the irregularity of the ground".
These are described by the document as "like so many
pits in the sea". It repeats the old tradition already
mentioned regarding the Charybdis, that if fishermen
have time to "throw an oar or other bulky body" into
one of the vortices "they will get over it safely : the reason
being that when the continuity is broken, and the whirl-
ing motion of the sea interrupted by something thrown
into it, the water must rush suddenly in on all sides and
fill up the cavity.

"For the same reason," the author o^ Sailing Directions
continues, "in strong breezes, when the waves break,
though there may be a whirling round there can be no
cavity. In the Maelstrom boats and men have been drawn
down by these vortices, and much loss of life has resulted."

The depth of the water in the vicinity of the Maelstrom
— supposed at one time to be too deep for sounding — has
been found to be no more than twenty fathoms, with a
bottom of rocks and white sand. The current runs with
the tides alternately (six hours from south to north, then
six hours from north to south) producing the whirlpools
of the area: unified and idealized by Poe and other
writers on the sea.

We have examined only two of the ocean's whirlpools
in any detail. In all of them myriads of strange creatures
have their homes, all of them with interesting life-cycles
and many of them using devices as wonderful in their

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various ways as the ones we have already considered.
Stories far more fantastic than any created by Poe in his
Tales of Mystery and Imagination are being enacted,
moment by moment, in all parts of the ocean. Ceaselessly,
day and night through the centuries, the tragedies and
comedies of the deep have been played, usually in utter
darkness, by billions of creatures, struggling against each
other, feeding upon each other, yet also co-operating
with each other in significant demonstrations of the
power of interdependence as a means of survival.

But such tragedies and comedies are not confined to
the ocean's surfaces and depths : they are matched by the
life-cycles of many other animals which throng the sea's
fringes and coastlines.

One movement of the world's waters is gargantuan
compared with all other movements of the sea: the
enormous, slowly-spinning "whirlpool" in the North
Atlantic which men have named (from the peculiar Gulf
weed, Sargassum bacciferum) the Sargasso Sea.

It is probable that more myths and legends have
radiated from it into the hterature and folklore of the
world than from any other area of land or sea. Its weed-
entangled stretches have spawned innumerable accounts
of wrecks, of web-footed tribes living in its mysterious,
impenetrable hinterland, and of weird and monstrous
creatures lurking in its floating islands. Even its area is a
mystery. Some writers give it a diameter of a thousand
miles, and an area of a million square miles, while others
declare that it is as large as Europe, which, by the most
conservative calculation, has an area of 3f million square
miles. The truth is that the Sargasso Sea is probably
larger than Greenland (839,782 square miles) yet con-
siderably less than the size of Europe.

This makes the Sargasso Sea the largest island in the
world — if it can be called an island, or even a floating
one.

It was discovered by Columbus on his first voyage,

97

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

when his ship was held in it for about a fortnight. There
are numerous stories of ships being imprisoned in the
Sargasso Sea — embedded in the floating weed and un-
able to escape — but such stories have been largely dis-
counted since the expedition of the Michael Sars in 1 9 1 o,
under the direction of Sir John Murray and the Nor-
wegian government, which found the surface covered
with patches of weed, with clear spaces through which
ships might navigate. It is now evident that the Sargasso
is neither a sea nor an island, but a spinning archipelago :
a group of many islands of seaweed revolving in a vast
whirlpool. These islands may mass together or separate,
so that their relative sizes vary continually. It may be
that some of the stories of ships being imprisoned in the
Sargasso are true, despite the findings of the Michael Sars
expedition, if (as seems quite probable) numbers of the
islands have packed together at various times in the past,
imprisoning vessels within the larger masses.

Despite the fact that many of the old legends and
descriptions of the Sargasso Sea can be safely dismissed,
any conception of it as an enormous mass of floating
weed (however distributed) and no more, would be
utterly inadequate. Very little is known about it, even
today ; and strange, inexplicable facts (legions of them)
are probably concealed beneath the surface of our accu-
mulated knowledge, even as multitudes of living creatures
definitely exist beneath the apparently lifeless surface of
the weed itself.

At one time it was thought that the peculiar Gulf weed
from which the Sargasso gets its name originally grew on
the Bahama and Florida shores, and that it was torn off
from the shores long ago by the powerful current of the
Gulf Stream. But this explanation of the source of the
weed has proved to be one of those apparently satis-
factory explanations of some of Nature's mysteries which,
in the light of later knowledge, are shown to be mere
guesses.

98

WHIRLPOOLS

It now seems very doubtful that the Bahama and
Florida shores were the original habitat of the weed,
which now propagates freely while floating on the ocean
surface^ although it is the natural habit of the larger
algae to grow from a base of attachment. Such a base —
although it normally provides such algae with no more
than an anchorage for its roots — seems absolutely neces-
sary to the existence of such weeds in normal circum-
stances, so that it is difRcult to understand how Sargassum
bacciferum could have adapted itself to a freely-floating
existence, and this existence far from its natural habitat.
Torn from its natural home the weed would not survive,
much less travel a great distance and establish itself
again under conditions so dissimilar from those it had
known.

It is not found in the main current outside the Sargasso.
It grows only over the Yucatan and Musquito Banks, and
is swept from them to the Sargasso Sea by the Gulf
Stream — from the beginning to the end of its journey a
floating plant. Naturalists have estimated that no less
than twenty million tons of weed float upon the surface
of the Sargasso Sea, while at least another fifty-six
million tons lie below the surface.

Oviedo y Valdes, the Spanish chronicler, appointed
historiographer to the New World by Charles V,
described the Sargasso as ''the seaweed meadows", and
the name is as appropriate as any. Humboldt was
among those who believed that actual land existed in
the Sargasso region, or at least a 'Tucus-bank", but
although chroniclers and naturalists of earlier times had
often written of the Sargasso as an area peopled with
mermaids and strange monsters, including sea-serpents,
science has grown more sceptical in recent years.

H. H. Johnston, in the first part of his work Wonders
of Land and Sea (19 13), says that ''the Michael Sars ex-
pedition disposed of the credibility of these legends" —
of strange creatures in the Sargasso — he adds, "or at

99

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

any rate it is thought to have done so." Perhaps Sir
Arthur Shipley, in his book The Voyage of a Vice-chancellor^
sums up the situation adequately when he says: ''An
amazing amount of fiction and nonsense has been written
about the sargasso-weed, but the truth is actually more
unbelievable."

For the more we learn of this vast rotating wilderness
(or garden) of weed the more mysterious does it become.

Although we have termed it a whirlpool it revolves
very slowly, and as imperceptibly to those who come
upon it as the starry heavens in their apparent motion
around the pole star. Astronomical comparisons come
to the mind as we try to get a mental picture of it. As the
vast size of the Nebula in Andromeda makes that sky
spectacle seem motionless when viewed through our
telescopes, so the size of the Sargasso Sea makes its
motion inappreciable, even to those who approach it —
the rate at which the vast whirlpool of weed and debris
turns is so extremely slow. Yet the currents keep it
gradually turning — a surface mass of weed, laced by
innumerable channels and populated by multitudes of
creatures : a wheeling archipelago at least eight times the
size of France.

The weed is extremely buoyant, being the most highly
organized of the marine algae, Fucaceae — ''the rock
weeds". They are seaweeds which are usually attached
to stones by a discoid hold-fast. But when floating, as the
Sargassum bacciferum^ the weeds have long filiform stems,
much branched and with narrow, leaf-like fronds with
distinct midribs, and small air-bladders. These are like
solitary grapes, and have given rise to the common
names, "tropical grapes" and "grape-weed". The stems
were much used in South America at one time under the
name "goitre-sticks" for the cure of goitre.

Although the weed is so buoyant it loses its buoyancy
after a period of from three to five years, when it sinks
and disintegrates. But even before that period expires an

100

WHIRLPOOLS

unusually large wave may sweep the weed down thirty
or more feet under the surface, in which case the
increased pressure will weaken the walls of the bladders
so that they are deflated and cannot rise again. The weed
is affected by changing temperatures and is thickest in
August.

The bladders are truly amazing devices — tiny "life-
belts" which, in their untold millions, literally sustain the
life which teems in the vast Sargasso archipelago, holding
up the colossal tonnage of its floating islands.

The phrase "wheels within wheels", which applies to
the world's oceans in all kinds of ways, is peculiarly sig-
nificant regarding the Sargasso. For it is a slowly spinning
wheel containing within it innumerable smaller ones —
miniature whirlpools at the junctions of the numerous
channels of clear water which lace and interlace the
floating weed. The channels are really streams of water,
running in many directions, and wherever they meet,
small whirlpools are formed which are worthy of the
name, for they are often swift enough to be dangerous
to small craft.

There can be no doubt that the Sargasso Sea is chang-
ing its position. Maps of eighty or one hundred years ago
show that the weed was met within seven degrees north
of the equator, and in fifteen degrees W. longitude.
But Sargassum is not seen today within six hundred miles
of these positions. The weeds, which migrated as indi-
viduals across hundreds of miles of ocean and formed an
enormous colony, have been moving as a colony ever
since. Although large stretches of the whirlpool are still
unexplored, and very little is known about such areas,
there are now trade routes right through the heart of the
Sargasso Sea, mostly traversed by battleships and tramp
steamers, for passenger services very rarely pass through
it.

Some writers have described the Sargasso as resembling
a vast garden, full of ever-multiplying weeds. The

lOI

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

analogy is a loose one and only superficially correct, for
the ''soil" of the Sargasso is the tangled weed itself, and
no garden on land is peopled with such great numbers of
living creatures. Amid the masses of seaweed there are
untold myriads of them — fantastic creatures in swarming
millions — busily engaged in their own peculiar activities
among the tangled stems and the tropical ''grapes", and
breeding in the rotting wreckage that has been steadily
drawn into the maw of the mighty whirlpool.

Yet contrary to general belief the Sargasso is not
inhabited by vast varieties offish : the species are remark-
ably limited, as if numerous types avoid the area. The
fishes that are found among the weeds are limited to a
comparatively small number of species, and are usually
smaller in size than species of similar kinds swarming in
other parts of the ocean. It has been suggested that the
small fishes which are the natural food of sharks have
found sanctuary in the Sargasso. Captain C. C. Dixon,
an authority on such matters when he made the state-
ment, declared that sharks are never found within the
area of the weeds, and that certain types of fishes,
realizing this, have escaped into the Sargasso, where they
are safe from their chief enemy.

Some authorities estimate that ninety per cent of the
wreckage of the oceans eventually finds its way into the
Sargasso Sea, making it the world's greatest rubbish tip.
Under every piece of partly-submerged wreckage is to be
found a creature appropriately called the wreck-fish.
This is another name for the stone bass {Polyprion
americanus) which makes all kinds of flotsam its head-
quarters, emerging for feeding purposes. It is a brownish
fish, of ghoulish appearance as it lurks like a footpad
near the sea alleys of the whirlpool, and only two species
are known.

Certain varieties of file-fish and flying-fish are also
found — the latter often seen skimming over the surface
of the weed, and (according to mariners) much more

102

WHIRLPOOLS

easily caught than other flying-fishes. One particular
species of flying-fish, pecuHar to the Sargasso, is a small
creature only two or three inches long, yellowish-brown
and therefore practically invisible against the weeds. It
lays its eggs in strings resembhng pearl necklaces, which
are securely attached to the Sargassum leaves and
branches.

The hatchhngs soon make themselves at home in their
jungle home, and drift round with the enormous round-
about as it slowly revolves.

Mixed among the weeds of the Sargasso Sea are
hydroids (relatives of jelly-fish and sea-anemones, which
grow into branching colonies by budding), snails, the
larvae of various open sea fishes and of course of fishes
inhabiting the weed, and many kinds of crustaceans in
their protective armour.

The ocean pipe-fish — a relation of the sea-horse and
having the same curious ''horse's head" appearance —
is another inhabitant of the "sea garden". Pipe-fishes
have gills which are disposed in curious tufts on the
branchial arches : the gill-cover is a simple plate, and the
gill-aperture is very small. The attenuated body is covered
with bony plates. No ventral fins exist, and the jaws are
united to form a tube or pipe, bearing a small toothless
mouth at the tip — the fantastic mouth which gives the
fish its name. Its expression can be described as that of
a child pursing its lips in expectation of a kiss, or per-
haps more accurately as that of a whistling school boy !

But the most remarkable feature of the pipe-fish,
strangely enough, is not its curious mouth but the pouch-
like fold possessed by the males of some species. This fold
is situated on the under side of the abdomen and
resembles the pouch of a kangaroo, not merely in appear-
ance but in its purpose — ^for it carries the pipe-fish's
babies around for a little while after birth. The eggs
formed in the female fish are delivered into the male
fish's pouch. There they hatch out, after which he retains

103

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

them for a while and then permits them to have separate
existences from their curious parents.

All the pipe-fishes are feeble swimmers, in fact their
progress through the weeds might best be described as
crawling rather than swimming. If greatly enlarged
motion-pictures of them could be taken they would
appear as horses, moving slowly through the jungle.

The king of the weed jungle is most certainly the
Sargassum Fish — a monarch bearing the impressive
Latin name of Histrio histrio. This extraordinary fish is a
rapacious cannibal. He crawls on arm-like fins through
the "undergrowth" like a fearsome monster of the land-
surface jungles. He camouflages himself like a bunch of
Sargassum weed — branches, leaves, bladders and all. His
fore fins are modified into jointed armlike appendages
like crab's claws. His face is one of the most frightening
of all fishy countenances. He stalks his prey with the
cunning of a cat. If fishes are indeed terrified by horrific
monsters of their own element, then those which meet
this crab-like, cat-like bunch of weed with its ghastly
face must be paralysed with fright.

One explorer captured three of these gruesome
creatures and kept them for a brief while in a running-
water aquarium. A day or so passed and (after the
fashion of the nigger-boys in the nursery rhyme) "then
there were two". Another interval and there was only
one. Another extraordinary fact about this fish is that it
actually attracts its victims, after stalking them and
petrifying them with its appearance, by dangling a fleshly
bait (the remains of a previous meal) before its victim,
jiggling it about to whet its victim's appetite, before
suddenly pouncing and swallowing it.

Although the fishes which have been found in the
Sargasso suggest that the varieties are nothing like as
numerous as those of the open sea, yet those which do
inhabit the Sargasso appear to be unusually strange
kinds, justifying the weird legends associated with the

104

WHIRLPOOLS

vast whirlpool, not in supernatural manifestations but in
natural phenomena. There is the marbled angler, for
instance, a nightmarish animal which challenges the
sargassum fish for Rightfulness and is only (literally)
beaten by a head : the sargassum fish's uglier death's-
head.

The marbled angler is thick in proportion to its length
— it is in fact fearsomely squat. Its main peculiarity is
that the extremities of its fins and tail are like beautiful
fronds of maidenhair. These waving fringes do not give
the fish a graceful appearance. They only emphasize its
ugliness and give the impression that the creature is a
denizen of another world than our own.

Crabs, shrimps and prawns abound in the Sargasso, as
also do many varieties of snails and mussels. There are
numerous varieties of snails among the weeds, extra-
ordinarily beautiful in colour and (according to epicures
who have tasted them) far more delicious than land
snails.

Some of the most curious facts regarding the ''garden
whirlpool" are those concerned with eels.

For untold centuries — probably since the world's first
humans took to the seas in their primitive boats — men
have disputed the details of the life-history of these
wonderful creatures. They arrive as tiny wriggling shapes
in our estuaries, swim up our rivers, and when fully
matured return to the wide expanses of the ocean, where
— until quite recent years — they have vanished : passing
beyond human investigation.

It was the Danish zoologist, Johannes Schmidt (1877-
^933)5 ^ naturalist who spent most of his life studying
flatworms, sponges and other forms of marine life, who
discovered that the eels of European rivers make journeys
of incredible length through the waters to the Sargasso
Sea, there to spawn and die after accomplishing their
amazing mission. What mysterious instinct guides them
through the trackless wastes, so that they do not wander

105 D*

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

and lose themselves but arrive, time after time, at their
destination?

When eels are born they are such tiny threads, and so
transparent, that they are practically invisible : only their
minute eyes can be seen. They are lilliputian ghosts,
hairs of living light, made from a substance more efficient
in its optical qualities than Incite : the modern plastic
which man uses for his aeroplane windows, reflectors and
beautiful ornaments.

Great colonies of fresh-water eels spawn in the salt
seas south of Bermuda, in close proximity to the Sar-
gasso, according to the latest available evidence, but this
does not mean that other swarms may not spawn within
the gigantic wheel. All the evidence, old and new, shows
that the mature eels have the Sargasso as their objective
as they leave the rivers.

The vast jungle-growths of that area are distinguished
from the surrounding sea by their rich, unexploited
chemical products, such as iodine, chlorine, bromine and
sulphur. Can it be that eels sense these chemicals, by the
use of modifications in their nervous systems quite un-
known to us?

All forms of migration in nature are mysterious and
probably insoluble from any materialistic viewpoint.

Many ichthyologists have told the sensational story of
the eel's travel-cycle. The elvers — baby eels — reach the
coasts of Europe in autumn or winter, when they have
grown to a length of about two inches. In many places
along the European coasts they are caught with sieves,
boiled in salted water, and eaten, usually with a sauce or
vinegar. Those that escape penetrate the rivers into fresh
water, where they seek and prefer an area of hard ground,
rock or flint, to one of tangled seaweed : a remarkable
practice in view of the fact that it involves a preference
for surroundings so completely different from the Sar-
gassum environment in which it was born. The change
from salt to fresh water is but one of the drastic changes

1 06

WHIRLPOOLS

they have survived. They remain for three years near the
mouths of the rivers, swelhng and growing in length all
the time. Then, while their thyroid glands are develop-
ing, they move farther and farther up the rivers, until
they have attained a length of as much as three feet,
and a weight up to thirteen pounds.

During their progress up the rivers there has been no
differentiation in sex — they have been sexually un-
developed throughout the journey. At last — seven or
eight years have elapsed since they left the Sargasso —
they become distinct sexes.

They are now far up the rivers, and the males have
become sexually mature, but (unlike salmon) the eels do
not have their young there at journey's end. Why have
they come so far — struggling through the waters of the
ocean, resting awhile in the estuaries, and battling
against the river's seaward currents to these places? As
these are not their breeding grounds the driving impulse
cannot be sexual.

But now — first to the males — comes the home-hunger
which takes them all the long journey back again. FeeHng
the compelling force of the Sargasso call, the mature
male eels leave their fresh-water homes high up in the
rivers and swim back until they reach salt water again,
plunging into it in their shining myriads and battling
their way unerringly outward — farther and farther out-
ward— through the ocean wastes until they reach their
objective. There is no explanation of this apparently
senseless separation of the males from the females at the
very climax of their sexual development. For the females
wait, back there up the rivers, not weeks or months but
years, before following the males. They are between ten
and fifteen years old before the Sargasso call comes to
them. When the moment arrives they, too, go down the
rivers, through the estuaries and out to the open sea —
anything up to eight years later than the males who have
preceded them.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

After the voyage of the females, reunited near the
Sargasso, the mature eels lose their appetites and their
golden hues. While this is happening the sexual organs
of the females — which have been organically perfect for
years — develop excessively.

The eels have travelled at great depths to reach their
spawning grounds, particularly in passing through the
Straits of Gibraltar. They have taken about six months
in their journeys — both males and females, with that
wide interval between — from their temporary homes far
up the rivers. During that time their eyes have developed
into great lenses capable of piercing the turgid darkness
of the deeps, while their skins have developed a brilliance
amounting almost to luminescence, so that they have
been able to keep together — each voyager's position
known to the others, each migratory swarm intact. Only
when they reach their spawning grounds do the eels rise
to the surface, here, there and everywhere — each
migrating colony adding its numbers to the swarming
masses darting in and out of the weed fringes.

They now approach the climax of their existences. For
this they have made the enormous two-way journey.

Having fertilized the females the males soon die, not
long after their return to the Sargasso. But the females
survive for several years more — some of them adding as
much as ten years to their life-spans. They lay their eggs
— averaging no fewer than five million from each mother-
eel. But they do not lay them on the surface. The
mother-eels go down into the depths to give them birth —
down, down to an average depth of no less than three
thousand two hundred and fifty feet: roughly three-
quarters of a mile below the surface. Vastly increased
pressures operate at that depth. The eggs spawned by
the mother eels are barely a fifth of an inch in length,
yet what bathyscaphes they must be, tougher than steel, to
withstand such pressures ! From the eggs tiny creatures
emerge, bearing the lengthy name: ''preleptocephali".

io8

WHIRLPOOLS

Lacking mouths, these larvae grow until they are
twice the length of their egg-cases, but they are still only
two-fifths of an inch long. Fifteen months have now
elapsed since they were born, and they are still three-
quarters of a mile below the surface. They are now
termed "leptocephali" by man. The moment has arrived
for them to rise through the 3,000-odd feet of water to
the surface. Many have died down there in the icy
currents. Why did the mothers go down, seeing that eels
naturally love the warmer water? Science has no
explanation. Why did migrating eels, in their long home-
ward journeys to the Sargasso, go down into the colder
waters and the far greater pressures? Again, there is no
explanation.

The leptocephali are now on the surface again, where
they mingle with the plankton, and — with their mouths,
which they have so miraculously developed — begin to
feed voraciously. As they feed they penetrate outward
from the Sargasso into the Gulf Stream, and are slowly
swept by it towards the European coasts, so that one of
the most remarkable life-cycles in all natural history
begins all over again.

Is it all the work of blind chance? It surely requires
more credulity than any observer possesses to believe that
the entire complicated, ingenious process can be ex-
plained from any mechanistic, materialistic view-point.

In their long journeys from the Sargasso whirlpool
across vast stretches of water to their mating-places high
up in many of the world's rivers, and back again to their
Sargasso breeding grounds, eels link distant reaches of
the oceans with areas of the world's coastlines. We now
journey with them in imagination, inward from the
spinning whirlpools to the shores, to find new fields of
fascinating interest awaiting us.

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CHAPTER VII

COASTLINES

THE oceans of the world, waging incessant warfare
against its land surfaces, meet the land areas along
a series of twisting, receding, advancing coastlines
which are not ''no-man's-lands" of lifelessness and desola-
tion, but thronged battlefields of infinitely-varied activity.
Such shore-lines, extending around the world, are (by
reason of their complicated convolutions, their bays,
promontories and irregularities generally) hundreds of
thousands of miles in total length. Men have ''walked
around the world" but no human has ever contemplated
the colossal task of walking around the world's coastlines.
Such a journey would need many lifetimes.

Picturing the coastlines as a vast net, with great breaks
and no regular meshes, or as a tangle of strings enveloping
the earth, it must be appreciated that no section of the
"string", however short, is without its teeming life. In
any single square mile where sea and land meet, through-
out the entire meshwork, countless myriads of creatures
live and die. No one has ever attempted a census of them.
Ignoring for a moment the creatures which live on the
ocean surfaces, and the enormous number which live in
its deeps, the tens of thousands of varieties of shore
animals comprise a "coastal population" which must be
millions of times greater than the world's human popu-
lation.

From such an overwhelming multitude of living
creatures we can select only a few typical specimens.
The eyes of humans, aided by microscopes, behold only

no

COASTLINES

a tiny fraction of the coastline populations. Darwin
realized that he could occupy several lifetimes in the
study of earthworms. One would need as many to study
the anatomy, habits and life-cycle of any single coastal
species, selected at random from among the tens of
thousands of distinct kinds which inhabit the world's
sea- fringes.

The tides of the sea, conspiring with the world's
rivers, continually deposit living animals and organic
matter upon the ocean shores, but such living and
(apparently) dead material is not left anywhere where it
is deposited. The word "apparently" is a necessary
qualification, for even the waste matter and debris
deposited by waves on the shores, and by land and ocean
rivers in their tidal interplay, swarm with microscopic
life.

We must therefore begin our survey of the world's
coasts with this basic conception : that they are not
merely areas of rock formation, or stretches of sand and
pebble, subject to breaking and receding rollers, but
worlds within worlds of living creatures, and that the
waters which beat against them and flow inward and
outward across them are inhabited — every cubic inch of
them — by untold millions of microscopic life-forms.

Corals in infinite variety, shells in almost inconceivable
profusion, crustaceans of every imaginable kind, and
enormous multitudes offish, are here along the coastlines
for our selective examination. Those that we consider
will serve to illustrate the magic, beauty and wonder-
ment of the multitudinous shapes which rest and move
along the coasts, and float or swim in the waters that
cover the ocean shelves.

There are three main divisions of the living creatures
of the sea, if they are classified according to their life-
habits. The term nekton comprises the swimmers — fishes
of all kinds, squids, whales, and so on. Plankton may be
described as including those free-swimming creatures

1 1 1

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

which drift or wander with the tides and currents. The
third division, benthos, comprises all those forms which
crawl over or burrow into the sea-beds, and also those
which are fixed in location, such as barnacles and
sponges. But the sea will not be tamed — not even by
man's classifications, so that even this "life-habit" classi-
fication is not definitive — the nekton, plankton and benthos
compartments are by no means distinct, for numbers of
creatures drift to and fro across the lines of demarcation
as though the ocean itself was determined to erode or
wash away arbitrary terminologies.

Even if we attempt a simpler division of sea creatures,
into plants and animals, the ocean seems determined to
mix them. For there are plant-like animals and animal-
like plants. Plants often resemble animals so closely that
it is difficult to distinguish them, while the same applies
to animals which look like plants. There are seventeen
hundred species of the Bryozoa alone. The name means
"moss animals", and they are to be found in their
myriads : moss-like and lichen-like creatures attached to
the rocks, stones and pebbles of the world's sea-coasts; to
pieces of seaweed and other natural growths, and to the
shells of crabs, lobsters and other crustaceans.

The phrase "a fish out of water" is often used to
describe a state of discomfort among incongruous or
unnatural surroundings. It can, of course, be used with
reference to the majority of fishes if any of them are
taken out of their element, and even with regard to those
which make occasional visits to the surface or brief flights
above it : they cannot live out of the sea for long : they
must soon die unless they return to the waters. Yet there
are some sea creatures that seem anxious to get out of
the water, and which live much of their lives away
from it.

Among them are the mud-skippers, which inhabit the
river mouths of various parts of Africa, Asia and Aus-
tralia.

112

COASTLINES

Other names given to the mud-skipper are "bommi",
'Valking-fish", and "jumping-fish", the scientific name
is Periophthalmus — a reference to the fish's prominent
eyes, which are set close together somewhat below the
line of its profile, and are not only capable of protrusion
and retraction, but are furnished with well-developed
eyelids. The long body is covered with curious scales;
the mouth-cleft is nearly horizontal, with the upper
jaw protruding beyond the lower, while the teeth are
conical and vertical — all this giving the fish a fatuous
yet pugnacious expression. The first dorsal fin has a
number of flexible spines, while the breast or pectoral
fins are hand-like appendages. With these the creatures
walk about over the mud-flats and climb on to the roots
of mangrove trees and other forms of vegetation, where
they will bask in the sunshine for hours at a time, dang-
ling their tails in the water.

The mud-skipper has an excellent reason for this par-
tial submersion of its tail. The tail is freely supplied with
blood-vessels, and acts as a second respiratory organ
which extracts air from the water — the fish takes in air
from both ends. It is a matter of chance whether it
breathes through the front end or both, but the fact that
it has a habit of tossing itself into the air has nothing to
do with this. It may be walking over the surface of the
sand, hitching itself along about an inch at every ''step",
or ''double step" — when suddenly one of its enemies may
appear. It instantly becomes an expert acrobat. It curls
its tail to one side and sharply straightens it out with a
flick, therefore hurling itself upward and forward to a
distance of three or four feet.

One species, Periophthalmus schlosseri, performs its antics
along the shores of the Burmese rivers. At a distance they
look like large tadpoles as they rest in the sun, occasion-
ally snapping at flies or other passing insects. Suddenly
they are startled by something, and off" they go, each
making its own hop, skip and jump across the mud, or

113

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

perhaps leaping on to the water and skimming across it
like a flat pebble thrown by a schoolboy.

Mud-skippers often chmb trees, chnging to the rough
bark until they reach a projecting stump or branch
where they can perch and survey the strange world in
which they live. While resting, a mud-skipper will often
plant its "arms" firmly — using them as organs of support
as a man places his elbows on the table.

The eyes of these creatures are most ingeniously
devised. Not only can they be drawn in and pushed out :
they can also be swivelled in all directions hke the eyes
of a chameleon. After death the mud-skipper's eyes sink
to the level of the surrounding scales, losing their charac-
teristic prominence.

It is beheved that these fish have been driven from the
sea by their numerous marine foes: the unpalatable
nature of their flesh giving them some measure of protec-
tion from land animals.

The name ''walking-fish" is shared by some of their
near relatives, particularly the serpent-head, a fish of the
East Indian and African genus, Ophiocephalus. These are
able to live for long periods out of water, as they travel
by wriggling through moist grass from one pool to
another. They are from two to three feet long, and are
covered with medium-sized scales — those on the flat-
tened head being plate-like. Some thirty species of
serpent-heads alone are known to us, inhabiting many
parts of Asia ; the commonest being a species which is
sometimes found in a torpid condition in dried-up pools,
as though the water had evaporated while the fish dozed
— too lazy to find a better resting-place.

When living in muddy water, these fishes are com-
pelled to rise to the surface at intervals or they die — they
are not so acclimatized to the shores as the mud-
skippers.

The serpent-head or snake-fish breathes atmospheric
air instead of that dissolved in water ; although, as we

114

COASTLINES

have seen, the mud-skipper takes in both kinds: from
the atmosphere into its gill-chambers, and from the
water through its partly-submerged tail. Unlike the
mud-skipper (which can survive for as long as thirty-six
hours out of water if it submerges its tail at intervals,
but only for half that time if it breathes through its gills
alone) the serpent-head has no rigid time limit for
remaining on land, provided it has access to moisture in
grass. It seems to have adapted itself to gill-breathing of
atmospheric air without discomfort.

The climbing-fish, or climbing perch, is another fish
which can remain for long periods on the shore. It is a
spiny-rayed fish, and is characterized by the enlarged
and peculiarly labyrinthine structure of its superior
pharyngeal bones — those of the cleft, or cavity, forming
the upper part of the gullet. These bones are wonderfully
formed of infinitely delicate plates, enclosing the air-
spaces between them in a microscopically complex
mesh.

This labyrinthine organ is also found in other fishes,
but is far more elaborately developed in the climbing
perch, in which it serves as a breathing organ of in-
credible complexity and efficiency. To a fish like the
climbing perch, which inhabits small stagnant pools
(where the water contains only a small amount of dis-
solved air) when not climbing, such an apparatus is
indispensable, for the creature breathes free air regularly
like any land animal with lungs. Its habit of leaving the
water and climbing trees is an extraordinary one which
usually occurs during rains, when it will ascend the
trunks of palm-trees to a height of six or eight feet, to
catch insects. The habit is so well known to the natives
of the West Indies that the animal has been known to
them as "the fish that climbs trees" from time im-
memorial; but the stories were regarded as travellers'
tales until quite recent times.

The truth of the story was finally established by the

115

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

German explorer Lieutenant Daldorf some years ago,
when he was fortunate enough to observe one of the
fish making its way up the trunk of a Palmyra palm.
Since then many naturahsts and other observers have
witnessed to the truth of the fact that fishes do climb
trees.

The late Dr. Nelson Annandale, of the Indian Museum
in Calcutta, described another climbing-fish, which often
hitches its way up the supporting posts of wooden houses
built over the shore-waters of lakes, in the following
words : "This little fish moves slowly up the post, brows-
ing on encrusting plants and animals. It seems to use its
tail in climbing, after a fashion which recalls the wood-
pecker's way of pressing its stiff tail-feathers against the
roughness of the tree-stem. When the little fish wishes to
rest on its ascent, it takes a firm hold with its lips."

An official of the Madras Fisheries once trained some
climbing-fish to ascend a nearly vertical sheet of cloth
dipped into the water of the aquarium in which they
lived. Indian jugglers sometimes use the snake-head in
their performances : the antics of the fish being calculated
to preserve their reputations as "miracle men" and
amuse their audiences.

There are other authentic descriptions of the way fish
climb trees, in addition to the one given by Dr. Annan-
dale. It is now certain that such fishes make use of their
gill-covers, besides their spiny anal fins and tails, in
making their ascents. These gill-covers are peculiarly
constructed, so that each opercular bone has a serrated
edge, which clings tenaciously to surfaces yet can be
instantaneously released : a perfect device for its purpose.
It works like a leg, being first extended by certain
muscles and attached to the tree, and then (after the
fish's body has been raised a little) the other parts of the
fish take hold and the opercular bone is released, ready
for attachment again.

This is an extraordinary instance of the use of an

ii6

COASTLINES

organ designed for one purpose being used for a com-
pletely different one : the gill-cover made for breathing
being employed for climbing !

The majority of fishes are egg-laying creatures. But a
comparative few are viviparous — that is, their babies are
born alive and not hatched from eggs previously formed
and shed by their mothers. Among these few, some of the
most notable are the viviparous blennies {Zoarces vivi-
parus), one or two kinds of dogfish, most of the sharks,
and the sawfish.

The blennies are small fishes — the largest, Blennius
gattorugine, may grow to a foot in length, but this is excep-
tional— of which some forty species are found in the
northern seas, the tropical Atlantic, the coasts of Tas-
mania, the Red Sea, and along the coasts and shallows
in most parts of the world. Their elongated bodies, some
of which are scaleless, are remarkable for the abundance
of slimy matter with which they are covered. It is also
remarkable for the fact that it possesses only one dorsal
fin, which in some species is deeply divided, and for the
way the coastal varieties use their ventral fins as "feet"
to enable them to climb about among the rocks and sea-
weed of the shore.

The blennies depend upon crustaceans for their main
food. If they are stranded on the shore by the ebb of the
tide they can subsist for many hours, although their out-
of-water endurance is nothing like that of the serpent-
head. Some species, however, have adapted themselves
to fresh water. Among these is the Blennius vulgaris, which
inhabits inland lakes in Southern Europe. Blennies like
to attach themselves to floating objects — coastal varieties
have been found far out at sea clinging to "rafts" of one
kind or another — while they will often deposit their eggs
in strange places and keep watch over them afterwards.
One species — which is not viviparous — has been known
to lay its eggs inside a bottle cast up on the shore, get into
the bottle itself, float away with it, and when dredged

117

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

up by a net be found inside its buoyant glass nursery
jealously guarding its babies !

The viviparous blennies produce small fry at birth
which are perfectly transparent, and which are so fully
developed as they leave their mothers that they can swim
about freely. The mother blenny will give birth to from
two to three hundred at a time; these distending her
body so much that when they are ready to emerge
(invariably head first) they may be extruded by the
slightest pressure on her body.

The butterfish is a blenny, although its body is usually
long and flattened from side to side. It guards its eggs —
not being viviparous — by coiling itself completely around
them, as it lies compressed into a ball in a hole or empty
shell — almost like a cat curled up around her kittens.
Because of its small head and fringe of fins the butterfish
is sometimes mistaken for a young eel, but it is nearly
twice as long (about six inches) as the elvers which swarm
up our estuaries at certain times.

The butterfish has other picturesque names. The two
best varieties in American waters are found along
America's Atlantic coasts. One is the dollar-fish of the
coasts of New York, Massachusetts and Maine. Others
are the sheeps-head of Cape Cod, the pumpkin-seed of
Connecticut, and the starfish of the Norfolk coasts. Some
of these fish swim in company with large jelly-fishes,
which protect them from other fishes. But jelly-fishes are
the sea's gangsters, with their "stick-'em-up" streamers,
threatening other forms of life, so that it is not to be
wondered at that their ''protection" of butterfishes often
results in the latter getting ''stung", and eventually
"liquidated" in return for their misplaced confidence.

The harvest-fish, however, is one of the butterfish
which seems to enjoy special immunity. It is found from
Cape Cod southward to Brazil, but is more abundant
about the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, where it is called
"whiting". It is a delicious little fish for the frying-pan:

Ii8

COASTLINES

about six inches long in the Chesapeake Bay district,
ahhough it may be as long as ten inches in others. The
"gangster" with which it associates is the Al Capone of
all jelly-fish : that most fantastic many-individuals-in-one
creature so studiously avoided by swimmers and known
to mariners as the Portuguese man-of-war.

This extraordinary creature (or, more exactly, colony
of creatures) belongs to that enormous group of life-
forms known as the Coelenterata, ranking next above the
sponges and their relatives in the ascending order of the
animal scale, yet contrasting strongly with them. The
creatures of the group are distinguished from those in
other groups by the fact that each individual has a central
digestive cavity, communicating with a system of canals,
while it has prehensile organs around its mouth. The
Coelenterata include corals, sea-firs, sea-pens, sea-anemones
and jelly-fish — to give but a brief and inadequate list.
The range of species within the group is vast and varied,
ranging from tiny animals scarcely visible to the naked
eye to monsters several feet across.

There are innumerable soft-bodied forms in the
Coelenterata, composed almost entirely of water. There
are — at the other extreme — the reef-builders, almost a
hundred per cent limestone. There are species which
burrow in the mud and trail tentacles, and (again going
to the extreme) grotesque shapes like the Portuguese
man-of-war — gangster-like "protector" of the American
harvest-fish — ^floating on the surface and trailing their
tentacles a little below it. But whatever their form, nearly
all the Coelenterates — small, large, soft, hard, mud-
burrowing or surface-floating — possess nematocysts :
small stinging cells.

There have been many philosophic mariners through
the centuries who have believed that every conceivable
device found on land has its counterpart somewhere in
the world's oceans, and writers of sea books have often
shown tendencies to agree with the "old salts" in their

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

speculations. Certainly one could make out a case for
the belief by instancing contrivance after contrivance —
and even creature after creature — on the world's land
surfaces which are foreshadowed or duplicated in the
oceans or along their coastlines. In many ways the world
of dry land is one which is reflected in the world of
waters.

The stinging cells of certain land organisms, such as
nettles and thistles, are matched by the stinging cells of
the Coelenterates. There is, superficially, nothing ex-
traordinary about the resemblance. It seems quite natural
and reasonable that stinging cells should be found both
in the sea and on the land, as protective devices. The
Portuguese man-of-war is not a duplication of a land
creature, but a weird and sensational caricature of some-
thing made on land and launched by man into the sea,
something indicated in its name : a ship.

It is a singularly beautiful creature, despite its almost
nightmare-like grotesqueness. It is usually found floating
— sometimes singly but usually in "fleets" — in tropical
seas, but in the latter part of the summer it is often seen
off the coast of New England. It is a jelly-fish of the
genus Physalia^ but any such brief and conventional
description does the man-of-war injustice. In all the
realm of nature there is no creature more curious and
fascinating.

Bearing the likeness of a ship, it might more accurately
be described as an armada. For it comprises the parts and
features of many ships. It is less like a single life-form
than a community, yet all the "individuals" which com-
pose it are united in an organism which moves as one and
lives with a common mysterious purpose. It can be called
a "ship", and it has a crew — yet it has no captain. It is
less like a democracy than a totalitarian state — save that
it has no dictator: the "citizens" act as one, yet no indi-
vidual controls them. Each man-of-war is a lovely vessel
of rose, blue, purple and gold. It is a rainbow-hued,

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COASTLINES

bladder-like float, which bobs about on the surface of
the waves. From its "hull" masses of multi-coloured
streamers descend below the surface. These may be as
much as fifty feet long, and though they look harmless
enough they are stinging tentacles.

The "hull" or "float" is a bag, sometimes a foot long,
filled with gas which serves to keep the colony on the
surface. By contracting itself it can discharge some of the
gas, so that it can sink a little below the surface; or it
can expel most of its gas through a pore (or "valve")
enabling it to submerge completely.

The streamers, or tentacles, have various duties. Con-
trary to many superficial descriptions of the man-of-war,
they are not all stinging tentacles : in fact only a few of
them, comparatively, have stinging contrivances. Those
which serve as "marines" or "guards" are so armed, and
these have lasso-like devices which cling tightly around
their prey and draw it towards a number of squirming
siphons. Thousands of stinging barbs have been released
— as though the "ship" had fired numerous torpedoes —
which poison the victim and render it helpless. The
mouths are sticky and cling to the prey on all sides, until
it is at last enclosed, as though in a tight bag. It is then
digested and carried into the stomachs of the siphons.

The stinging barbs need special mention. Each barb —
and the "ship" carries thousands of them on its fighting
tentacles — resembles an inverted tube, coiled up like a
spring in a microscopically small box, which is covered
by a lid. Attached to each box is a trigger-hair. Imme-
diately this is touched it is stimulated chemically : the lid
flies open and the inverted tube within the box shoots out
with lightning-like rapidity, turning inside out as it flies,
and so exposing the vicious, pointed spines which had
been concealed in the inverted form of the tube. Im-
agine the finger of a glove, with spikes on the outside.
Turn it inside-out and you have the spikes pointing
inwards — the position of the stinging barbs before release.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Imagine the glove-finger instantaneously restored to its
normal position, and you have the action which takes
place as the tiny tubes shoot out. The tiny thread-like
barbs can be used only once. After they are discharged
they are replaced with new ones.

We have seen that the barbs are released by triggers
which operate when stimulated in two ways — by contact
and by chemical action. The most extraordinary fact
about the man-of-war is that the process is not strictly
automatic. For the fishes which swim in and out among
the tentacles, and are apparently given permission to do
so by the man-of-war, continually brush against the
triggers — yet they are not released. This implies that the
man-of-war has some kind of control over the chemical
stimuli of the triggers and can restrain their action.

Besides its ''fighting units", the man-of-war has "indi-
viduals" which perform very different duties. Some are
flask-shaped bodies which do nothing but eat. Others,
resembling clusters of small berries, are continually occu-
pied in producing more and more eggs, to develop into
more and more ''ships" for the "fleet". Other organisms
are solely occupied in repairing any damage caused to
the "vessel". There are also organisms which control the
man-of-war's speed and direction.

The man-of-war is a "ship" that sails — propelled by
wind-power. It has a huge float (the "sail") extending
along its upper surface. The "hull" itself is much larger
and blunter at the stern, to which all the tentacles and
organisms of the "ship" are attached, leaving the "bow"
free to force its way through the water. The sail has a
shell-like appearance. The course of the "ship" is steered
by the longest tentacles — which lie outside the others.
They serve as living rudders, for they trail backward as
the vessel moves, acting as a controllable "brake" or
"drag" on the vessel's movement. If the wind impelling
the vessel forward is too strong, the rudder-like streamers
are lengthened considerably, reducing its speed. If there

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is only a light wind then the streamers are shortened so
that there is little or no "drag" and the vessel gets the
utmost benefit from the available wind.

To alter the vessel's course, the streamers change both
size and position. Those on the starboard side may-
shorten and adjust themselves to the ''ship" so that it can
turn to port, either sharply or slowly — and vice versa.
The streamers can also prevent lateral drift and keep the
vessel on a steady course. Lengthened considerably they
can make the vessel "heave to" and "anchor," even in
mid-ocean.

One investigator of the man-of-war's extraordinary
habits, took one of the creatures — holding it by a special
device, to prevent it stinging him — and lowered it slowly
into a bucket. As he did so the streamers — touching the
bottom of the bucket — shortened and shortened, until
they were only a fraction of their original length.

The man-of-war does not attempt to control its move-
ments when the surface of the sea is too rough — it allows
itself to drift with the wind and tide, so that it is some-
times cast up on beaches. Bathers who have come across
the dead bodies of these creatures have often learned, too
late to prevent acute discomfort, that even after the
"vessel" itself is dead, the "fighting units" may still live
on — releasing their poisonous barbs when contacted.

There have been cases of people killed by the man-of-
war. One of the most recent was a strong and healthy
young Filipino, nineteen years old, who was gathering
firewood while working waist-deep in the water of a
Philippine Island mangrove swamp a year or so ago.
He was stung by a man-of-war concealed in the waters.
His fellow-workers rushed him to the shore and he was
examined by Dr. H. W. Wade, Chief Pathologist of the
near-by Culion Leper Colony. The only mark on his
body was a purplish discoloration encircling his right
knee. Dr. Wade concluded that he had died from drown-
ing, through being rendered helpless by the stings.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Several years before this, Dr. E. H. H. Old, in the
Philippine Journal of Science^ reported the death of a boy
of fourteen, who was stung by a man-of-war and died
in a state of hysteria.

There are many other jelly-fish which are harmful, and
some of these resemble the man-of-war, although none
possess all its fighting and sailing qualities. There is, for
instance, the Velella jelly-fish, which is very abundant in
tropical waters, and may often be found washed up in
its thousands on the Florida beaches. It is sometimes
confused with the man-of-war, for it also has a raft-
like float, but it is quite distinct in shape, being long and
flattened, while it is vividly blue in colour.

Apart from the fact that both the man-of-war and the
Velella have floats there is little resemblance between
them. The man-of-war's tentacles, as we have seen, are
capable of extension to fifty feet, but the Velella' s are short
and thread-like, while the animal (or "polyperson", to
use its more accurate name) has a "hull" which is
divided into watertight compartments, which is an ad-
vance on the man-of-war's one-compartment structure.
Another striking diflference is that the Velella has a well-
developed triangular sail placed diagonally across it.

Despite the fact that the Velella is an abundant and
widespread polyperson, scientists know little about it.
Yet from the time of Haeckel, who studied the Hydro-
medusae exhaustively, an enormous amount of human re-
search has gone into the investigation of the anatomy and
habits of this group of marine animals. There are vast
varieties of them, and even the single order of Siphon-
ophora, to which the man-of-war and Velella belong, has
so many diflferentiated kinds, some of which merge into
each other, while numbers of them present problems of
classification, that scientists cannot agree among them-
selves in their theories regarding the life-cycles and
anatomical devices of numerous members of the group.
Many jelly-fishes, in fact, which are much simpler in

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their structures than the Siphonophores, are still baffling
scientific explanation, while of the origins and habits of
some of them scientists know little or nothing.

New and hitherto unknown species of jelly-fish may
appear suddenly along a particular section of coastline.
The animals may simply swarm in the sea and be
washed ashore in great numbers. Then, with similar
suddenness, they will vanish as mysteriously as they
appeared. Whence they come and whither they go no
one knows. Sometimes they will reappear after a lapse of
many years ; sometimes a completely new species will come
out of the sea, disappear into it again, and be seen no
more.

Nor are they always tiny creatures which may have
been overlooked on past occasions : some of the creatures
performing the appearing-disappearing act may be
several feet in diameter. But whether they are produced
by monstrous hydroidal forms completely unknown to
us, moving in the depths of the sea, or are the offspring
of other free-swimming Medusae in the surface waters,
no one knows.

To many people the word "jelly-fish" conjures up a
picture of a sea creature of fairly simple construction :
the average person has seen a few forms at the seaside
or in aquaria and has no conception of their stupen-
dous variety and vast differences in structure. Fortu-
nately, the jelly-fish most frequently found along British
shores are quite harmless. It is not unusual in summer to
see numbers of them stranded on flat sandy beaches, by
the combined action of tide and onshore wind. Or you
may go for a row on a warm and sunny day and glimpse
many of the Amelia (the jelly-fish most common to our
coasts) drifting lazily just below the surface. Those
stranded on the beach may appear flabby, nasty-looking
objects : those seen over the side of the boat look very
different — colourful, graceful, like flowers of the sea. But
in neither case do the jelly-fish seem extraordinary.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

You may examine a specimen left in a pool on the
shore, probably the handsome Aurelia aurita, with its four
violet loops clearly visible within its almost transparent
body. The loops are the creature's organs of reproduc-
tion, but its anatomy, habits and life story seem common-
place enough compared with those of the man-of-war, so
that Aurelia aurita seems a creature of this world, and the
man-of-war a monster from another — yet they are close
relatives among the myriads of living creatures which
throng the world's shores and coastal waters.

Nothing in nature is commonplace. Darwin, who spent
years of his life studying the earthworm, confessed that
he knew very little about it. Lubbock devoted most of
his life to the study of ants, bees and wasps, yet frankly
admitted his ignorance of them. The life story of the
Aurelia aurita is simply told. But it is only superficially
simple. You might spend a lifetime studying it and still —
like Darwin and the earthworm — know very little about
it.

It is typical of the life stories of numerous jelly-fishes.
The creatures are male and female, but their breeding
process superficially seems more plant-like than that of
other members of the animal kingdom.

The male jelly-fish release their sperm into the water,
and the females, swimming nearby, contact it and are
fertilized. The mother Aurelia aurita is much more
devoted to her babies than most jelly-fish : she retains her
tiny eggs in a membraneous "pocket" until they hatch
out. They have no resemblance to their parents as they
drift about and eventually fasten themselves to rocks on
the sea-bed near the shore. Time passes and each infant
gradually assumes the appearance of a tiny sea-anemone
with a mouth that never closes, and four rudimentary
tentacles grouped around it. These lengthen and increase
in number until it possesses thirty- two writhing feelers.
Side-shoots are then developed until the creature looks
more like a vegetable than an animal, and remains like

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COASTLINES

this for several years — as though nature had made a
mistake and the creature was destined to end its hfe as a
carnivorous underwater plant, quite unlike its parents.

But at last the ''plant" begins to throw off dozens of
small transparent discs, none of them as large as rain-
drops. Each of these is a freely-swimming jelly-fish, com-
plete with a fringe of microscopic tentacles — a tiny disc
that pulsates rhythmically as it swims.

Most of the larger jelly-fish are the medusa-stage of the
Coelenterate class Scyphozoa. Our description of the
life-cycle of one applies to one species of Amelia, but
there are Aurelia of many kinds and sizes. There is, for
instance, the large jelly-fish common to the coast of New
England, Aurelia flavidula, which sometimes reaches a
diameter of ten inches. All the Aurelia are miniature
umbrellas, but the Aurelia flavidula is one of the ornate
ones, with ornamental additions of its own. Its convex
body is smooth on its upper surface, while four thick
lobes hang from it which unite to form the creature's
mouth, also giving off four tentacles. The margin of the
"umbrella" is fringed and carries eight eyes, each covered
by a lobe. Just under the surface are the water-vascular
canals, radiating from the stomach. When in motion, the
entire ''umbrella" contracts and expands rhythmically
at an average rate of twelve to fifteen pulsations a
minute.

A less common jelly-fish on the coast of New England
and in some parts of the North Atlantic is the monstrous
Cyanea arctica, or "blue jelly", which sometimes grows to
three or four feet in diameter, and has long tentacles
(sometimes extending to lOO feet) filled with stinging
lasso-cells which are poisonous to fishermen and bathers.
In exceptional circumstances the Aurelia do not pass
through the intermediate "plant-like" stage, but develop
their true jelly-fish characteristics more directly. The
Hydrozoa are more numerous in tropical seas, where they
comprise forms of extraordinary beauty and coloration.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Scientists find it extremely difficult to make cut-and-
dried classifications of the habitats of the creatures of the
sea. The lower deeps merge into the middle deeps and
these into the surface waters, while these again blend
with the waters over the continental shelves, which yet
again pass without rigid demarcation lines into the
borders of the sea : its shallows and shore-edges. So with
the creatures themselves, for classifications tend to be
arbitrary, and the countless species, from the lowest forms
up to sea-mammals merge together with imperceptible
graduations, like the colours of a rainbow.

There is one region which can be treated as a sharply
defined area, capable of simpler classification : the shore
between tide-marks. In this area the conditions of life are
unique, so that it is to be expected that the plants and
animals inhabiting the area will not be found elsewhere.
Jelly-fish are, in a sense, invaders of this clearly defined
area — they are stranded upon it rather than inhabitants
of it.

Shore life presents animals and plants with peculiar
problems. These are mainly due to the fluctuating con-
ditions obtaining between tide-marks. Covered and un-
covered twice every twenty-four hours, by the ebb and
flow of the tide, the shore creatures live surrounded or
lapped by sea water when the tide is in, and subjected
to the influence of the local climate with its air conditions
when the tide is out. Rocks on the shore often become
extremely hot — even hotter than the air above them —
as when some rocks near Plymouth, England, during a
recent summer, showed a temperature of 120 degrees,
too hot for human feet. Yet sea creatures such as limpets
and barnacles on the rock, which had been chilled by
the sea some hours before, were alive and well. Rain is
another challenge to the hardihood of intertidal animals
and plants.

As a general rule — although a few creatures like eels
and salmon are the exceptions — land forms die when

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COASTLINES

submerged in water (salt or fresh) while aquatic forms
of many kinds cannot survive dry land conditions. Yet
the numerous plants and animals between tide-marks
survive drastic changes without ill effects. They are
deprived of their watery medium as the tide recedes,
when they are exposed to the air, the heat of the sun
and sometimes fresh water due to the rain.

The pounding of the waves on the world's sea-shores
has affected the general shape of all plants and animals
in the intertidal areas. Most of the creatures which live
fully exposed to the action of the waves have been flat-
tened down from above: crabs, starfish, etc. But there
are some which are flattened laterally, such as sand-
hoppers : they "lie down" to the sea's merciless blows.
Limpets living in sheltered crevices are rounded. Those
which live in exposed places are oval and flattened.

Myriads of creatures resist the sea's tearing and driving
percussions by burrowing in the beaches, or clinging
tenaciously to rocks — yet there are always a number that
get carried away and swirled about in the waters. Shore
creatures cling to rocks in all kinds of ways. Most mol-
luscs hold on, by suction, by adapting their muscular
'Teet" to every microscopical roughness of the rock's
surface. But the mollusc evidently finds that this is not
enough, for it uses the edge of its shell like a file and works
it a little way into the surface of the rock to get a firmer
hold. The anemone is unable to supplement its hold
with the rasping action, so it presses its body so closely to
the rock that its flesh is adapted to every minute indenta-
tion over as wide an area as possible. The common
barnacle cements itself to the rock with a secretion which
securely fixes the box in which it lives to the surface of its
dwelling-place.

Mussels hold on by their beards. Each beard — technic-
ally called the ''byssus" — is a cluster of brown threads.
Each thread is furnished with a terminal device, some-
thing like the ones used by creepers to attach themselves

129 E

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

to garden walls or the walls of houses. A gland within
the substance of the mussel's 'Toot" produces the material
for the threads, and it issues in a thick fluid which runs
along a groove extending down the hinder surface of the
"foot", which plants the threads wherever they are
required.

The threads are arranged with consummate skill, first
in one direction then in another, the fluid running along
the groove and spreading out into a rounded disc at the
point where it touches the rock. There it becomes a
terminal sucker, at the end of an extremely strong thread,
which has been formed by the hardening of the fluid.
When the fastening operation is complete the mussel is
held in position by a mass of threads which diverge from
it like the guide-ropes of a tent — and no tent ever erected
by man was ever put up more efficiently. The threads are
directed forwards, so that (unless the mussel is tightly
packed in with others) the animal is able to swing round
slightly, with its narrower end facing the force of the sea,
thus enabhng it to resist wave action from any direction.
If the threads are broken the mollusc forms new ones
readily, and can move about for a while before attaching
itself again — it can even raise itself above mud and sedi-
ment.

Mussels live on plankton, which they strain out of the
water that continually passes through their gill-plates,
which are enormously enlarged in proportion to their
size. The muscular power of mussels is amazing. When
one closes its shell tightly it uses force equivalent to lifting
132 times its own weight.

Eider ducks are very fond of shellfish. As they are
feeding it may happen that one of them will pick up a
mussel in such a way that the animal will close its shells
firmly on the bird's beak or tongue. Holding on like
grim death the mussel may be fixed in such a manner
that it cannot be swallowed, or broken against the rocks.
If the bird tried to rid itself by dipping its beak in salt

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COASTLINES

water the action would have no effect on the mussel — it
would continue to cling tenaciously. Who has taught the
eider (which is a sea creature) the only way to release
itself from the mussel's grip? For there is only one way,
and this the eider takes. The bird is a sea-living creature,
and rarely except in the breeding season does it visit
fresh water. Yet if it gets a mussel clamped tightly on its
beak it will get away from the sea to the nearest stretch of
fresh water. There it will keep ducking its head : for the
mussel, which thrives in salt water, is killed by fresh water.

So rich are the beds of mussels in many parts that it
is not thought necessary to cultivate them, although
experiments on the Lancashire coast and elsewhere have
shown that small, stunted mussels from overcrowded
areas grow to large marketable ones if transplanted to
other areas.

On the west coast of France, in the shallow bay called
Anse de L'Aiguillon, they have been cultivated for
centuries. The system of breeding them goes back over
seven hundred years to the time when an Irishman
named Walton, voyaging in a small ship carrying sheep,
was wrecked there, in 1235. ^^ ^^^ the sheep were the
only survivors, and in trying to catch fish he discovered
that mussels covered his nets thickly because the nets
were raised above the mud, in which they would other-
wise have been smothered. Walton then began the
method of cultivation which has been carried on ever
since— using twigs fastened to stakes, to which the
mussels attach themselves. This is the "bouchot" system
— the boucholeurs pushing themselves out to the bou-
chots (stakes) in flat-bottomed boats with the help of one
foot encased in a large sea boot and swung over the side
of the boat.

Mussels are no friends of oysters. They menace them
in a curious way, sometimes literally smothering oyster
beds with their accumulated masses, which bury the
oysters alive in a rock-like tomb.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Many creatures of the shore which seem stationary
have some power of movement. The sea-urchin and the
starfish, with their myriads of tube-Hke feet (somewhat
resembhng the rubber "dummies" with which Victorian
mothers pacified their babies) are almost agile animals as
they move from place to place. When compelled to do so,
the limpet can move house by simply walking away with
it. But all these ambulatory exercises are limited in area
and most encrusting animals cannot do otherwise than
"stay put". If danger threatens them, all they can do is to
"shut the door" and hope for the best.

But the common barnacle does better than this — it
takes a supply of air into its house before locking up. It
is a tiny crustacean which, when the tide is in, stands
upside-down in its box-like dwelling, which is made of
plates of lime, and switches food towards itself with
its slender legs. The tide recedes, and it shuts the doors —
four of them, which are tightly-fitting valves. But as it
does so it is careful to entrap a bubble of air and also
sufficient moisture to keep its gills damp.

When you are walking along the shore, just after the
tide has turned from the rocks, you may hear (all around
you, if there are sufficient barnacles in the area) the
"whispering" of the little creatures: a faint crackling
sound. You may have precipitated it by the vibrations of
your walking feet. The sound comes from the closing of
countless thousands of those doors in the tiny houses,
combined with the rupture of the air-bubbles as the
barnacles make themselves snug. Sealed in their homes,
they may remain shut up for days or weeks, not taking
any food and conserving the air by "breathing" hardly at
all.

We cannot leave the armoured hosts of the sea-shore
without hearing what the oyster has to tell us about itself,
although its name has become proverbially associated
with reticence. It is an amazingly prolific creature. For
instance, the American oyster may produce hundreds of

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COASTLINES

millions of eggs in its lifetime. Near the oyster grounds
the sea may be literally crowded with myriads of free-
swimming larvae, which, when they settle on any hard
surface available, may entirely cover it with tiny oysters
(each smaller than a pin's head). Observers have counted
as many as i ,000 oysters on a single square inch of hard
surface : they may be compared with the star-dust of the
sky for numbers. One remarkable fact at once emerges —
all the tiny creatures lie on their left sides.

As they spend their lives in their beds they must have
their food brought to them. The sea obliges them, taking
them microscopic food of all kinds — minute plant life,
the bacteria of decaying plants, food in abundance, for
oysters' ancestors have chosen their resting-places well:
estuaries rich in edible organisms. They have their
regular feeding times, and the food is intercepted by the
tiny oysters' gills and filtered out as the sea water passes
through them, and digested in their gut.

There are various kinds of oysters, but we will first
consider the American variety {Ostrea virginica). The
female delivers her eggs — about fifty million at a time —
into the sea. They float : the male has already released his
sperm, which fertilizes them. He is very casual and un-
concerned— only a few of the eggs may be fertilized. The
rest die — but more than enough have begun their strange
life-cycles.

We now turn to the European oyster [Ostrea edulis).
The female lays only a hundredth of the number of eggs
produced by the American oyster — about fifty thousand
at a time — but their chances of survival are more than
compensated by parental care. For after they have been
fertilized within the shell of the mother with sperm collected
by her from the water, the little ones swim around, im-
prisoned, until she is ready to release them. She literally
shoots them out like shots from a blunderbuss when they
are about a fortnight old. They now swim freely in the
sea and find their own food. After ten days of this free

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

existence they sink to the sea-bed, or on to the netting,
brush or lattice-work provided by man as he prepares to
take advantage of their forthcoming change to a state of
immobihty.

Oysters are distributed as the result of their free exist-
ence in infancy, for drifting spat (as the larvae are
called) may travel long distances. No one knows how
long oysters may live if undisturbed. Some authorities
say they can live for as long as thirty years. But when
artificially reared they are allowed only four or five years
of life before being collected for human consumption.

The oyster is a highly developed creature. It has a
liver, intestines, and a heart with a blood-circulating
system (although the blood is colourless) and it even has
a complicated nervous system and a brain. None of these
organs resemble our own, but they are as described.
Although the common scallop has eyes — a hundred of
them, each with its lens, retina and optic nerve — the
oyster is eyeless. Its enemies include rays, starfish, boring
sponges, certain marine leeches, octopuses, and those
most deadly foes of the oyster the bloodthirsty insatiable
Dog whelks and oyster tingles.

Although these are burdened with a heavy shell they
roam about seeking whom they may devour. They are
ruthless housebreakers and nature has obligingly pro-
vided them with a file, to rasp its way into the shells of
other organisms. The file is called a radula, and is a
ribbon of closely-set teeth.

The surf-scoter, a bird that lives in the northern
oceans, is not provided with a beak suitable for opening
oyster-shells, so it simply swallows them whole. They
open inside the bird's gizzard, in which plenty of stones
are lodged to grind the shells to pieces.

In Jamaica the lower branches of mangrove trees are
often covered by water at high tide. Oysters suspend
themselves from the branches, so that it would be true
to say that they "grow on trees" in that country.

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Oysters die strange deaths. One of the most curious is
when their own descendants pile upon them in such
prodigious numbers as they he on the sea-bed that those
underneath are stifled in their enforced imprisonment.

Of the innumerable battles which take place incess-
antly in shore waters, the struggle which ensues when a
starfish attacks an oyster is one of the most remarkable.
The starfish opens the attack by straddling the oyster and
attaching its feet to the upper valve of its shell-case. It
tugs and tugs at the upper shell, using all its strength
against the oyster, who tries desperately to keep its door
shut against the marauder. Eventually, no matter how
long the struggle, the starfish wins the unequal battle.
The oyster shell-case is forced open and the starfish turns
its own stomach inside-out and forces it into the shell. In
that position, with the stomach inside-out and the oyster
helpless, the contents of the shell-case are quickly ab-
sorbed and digested. The starfish crawls away at last,
having withdrawn its stomach, leaving the empty shell.

For every curious or pretty shell, preserved in some-
one's home, countless millions lie crushed and broken on
the shores of the world, or pressed down by the weight
of the waters, on the sea-beds. Yet every shell was once
the armour of a living creature which was born wrapped
in a transparent mantle of singular beauty. Each mantle
has the power of extracting lime from sea water, which
it builds up into the creature's adult shell, usually colour-
ing it with rainbow-like hues in the process.

This wonderful mantle which nature has given to the
Mollusca — the name means ''soft-bodied" — may be seen
in any common animal that wears a shell, such as the
oyster or periwinkle. The way the mantle builds up the
protective armour is instanced in the periwinkle's
development. When it was very small it was no larger
than a pin's head. As its body grew it needed a larger
home. So the creature pushed some of its soft mantle
out of the aperture of its shell, where it spread out a

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

little and shell material deposited, forming a larger
extension of the first shell, which was only a tiny trans-
parent bead. So the building process went on, each
extension of the shell being larger and generally thicker
as more and more shell material was laid down.

The varied shapes of sea-shells are all built in this way :
the creatures within them having their own inherited
''blue-prints" of the houses they patiently build. Molluscs
with heads, like the periwinkle, the snail and the whelk,
have their mantle all in one piece and so grow single or
univalve shells. The oyster (like other headless molluscs)
lays down separate shells with each half of its mantle,
so that it becomes a bivalve.

The periwinkle, like the whelk, has its own rasp, which
it uses to scrape pieces off the seaweed it passes over,
leaving tiny indentations in the weed as it goes. The rasp
wears away, but the periwinkle has its own method of
replacing the worn section. If you could look into its
mouth you would find the lower part paved with sharp
teeth, as though a number of tiny nails had been driven
into it, with their points outwards. This rasp — sometimes
called a tongue, though radula is the more appropriate
name — is only the end of a strap (often two and a half
inches long) furnished with six hundred rows of teeth,
three in each row, which is coiled up in a fold of the
periwinkle's body. Its edges are folded together at the
back of the animal's mouth, and from that point it goes
backward, folded, as a reserve of gristly, spiked strap.
As the front portion becomes worn so it is broken off and
the back portion feeds in to the periwinkle's mouth,
furnished with new teeth, ready-sharpened for use.

Shelled sea creatures may be said to live within their
skeletons : the hard parts of their bodies which form a
protecting armour, properly described as an exoskeleton.
But there are many different kinds of structure and
material used by Nature to support and protect the softer
and more vulnerable parts of inhabitants of the sea, and

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among them all there are none more ingenious and
remarkable than the skeletons of sponges.

Almost all of these are supported by loose or firmly
fused spicules of lime or silica, or (as in the case of the
common bath sponge) ''over-all" skeletons consisting of
interwoven horny fibres.

Occurring in great profusion, from the shores of many
countries outwards and downwards into the great deeps,
sponges are such curious animals, in their manifold struc-
tures and strange habits, that they remained insoluble
puzzles for centuries. In early times they were thought to
be "worm-nests" ; in later centuries they were classed
with seaweeds ; and it was not until a little over a century
ago that our real knowledge of them began. Even today
they remain baffling and mysterious — life-forms which
are among the queerest of all the extraordinary creatures
to be found in the world's oceans.

137

CHAPTER VIII

SPONGES AND CORALS

WHEN men put on diving-suits, or use similar
devices to descend into the sea, they are imme-
diately aware of the fact that many underwater
animals seem to accept them as creatures not unlike
themselves. Some creatures show a little curiosity per-
haps, as they swim slowly past the diver's camera or
the "window" of his helmet, yet none of the creatures
exhibit the kind of wild panic that our human popula-
tions might fall into if strange monsters larger than our-
selves (or in any case shaped very differently from our-
selves) suddenly descended to our world through the
atmospheric "ocean" which enfolds us.

Many centuries ago, sponges of the Mediterranean
coastal waters were used to pad the helmets and shields
of Greek warriors. At Ermioni, a town of the Argolide,
and at other places, diving sports were held. All swim-
mers of those days were divers, and nearly every diver
was a sponge fisherman. Sponges were used for many
purposes by the Greeks, and although many sponges were
washed ashore, the fishermen, centuries before Christ,
had learned to go down into the sea and pluck them from
the reefs. They went into the water naked, taking nothing
with them except marble weights : the diver carried one
in his left hand to carry him down to the sea bottom.

Heavy stones were undoubtedly the first devices used
by men in penetrating the coastal waters to collect
crustaceans, sponges and so on — they could be instantly
released, enabling the divers to surface again — but such

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SPONGES AND CORALS

diving, with or without stones, cannot be called ''sea
exploration". To early man the sea was a monster,
inspiring fear rather than curiosity, and he had to
develop confidence in himself by exploring his land sur-
faces before he ventured far across the oceans, or down
to any considerable depth in the coastal waters.

Although the Greeks were the first to realize the value
of the sponge as an article of commerce and develop it
into a large industry, employing thousands of people and
sometimes entire towns, the fact that it is of use to man
in an infinite variety of ways suggests that it must have
been known to primitive peoples, and that it must have
been one of man's first incentives to explore the sea.
The sponge thrives amongst marine grass and on flat
sea-beds and is often thrown up on the shore, where, by
the action of the waves, it is rolled in the sand and freed
from its outer skin and sarcode, so that it was literally a
gift to primitive man, inviting him to venture into the
waters and find more.

The Egyptians and Phoenicians are believed to have
discovered this natural throwing-up and cleansing pro-
cess of the sponge, and it is probable that the latter intro-
duced it to the Greeks, who began the sponge industry.
Then for centuries the Dodecanese became the centres of
sponge fishing — islands which included Kos, where Hip-
pocrates, the father of medicine, lived ; and Patmos, where
John, the exiled mystic, wrote the Revelation of the Bible.

Sponge fishing spread to other parts of the world — to
the Gulf of Mexico, where millions of sponges had multi-
pHed in the warm waters, unmolested and commercially
unexploited. Key West was the centre of the sponge
industry there, but it was not until John K. Gheyney
organized it in 1890, and began to buy and send out
hooker boats from Tarpon Springs that the Gulf chal-
lenged the Dodecanese Islands as a sponge market.
Divers came to Key West from the islands, and from
Greece, bringing diving-suits and plans for diving boats,

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

and also their families and family customs, their dress,
language and dances, and their passionate love of colour
and music, and of the sea itself More than three thousand
Greeks are now living in Key West, gathering great crops
of sponges from the nine thousand square miles over
which the industry now extends, and using boats which
are little changed in shape — but equipped with Diesel
engines — from those employed in sponge fishing for
centuries in the Mediterranean.

Aristotle mentions the sponge as a ''zoophyte" — an
animal-plant akin to corals and sea-anemones — but it is
now known to form a very distinct phylum or sub-
kingdom, the Porifera, because of the water-pores with
which it is provided in abundance.

All the sponges are aquatic, and most of them thrive
in the sea. They vary widely in size from tiny sponges
scarcely visible to the naked eye to great compound
masses several feet in circumference. They also differ
considerably in shape, because of their power of bud-
ding. They are many-celled, but the individuals in a
colony (like the man-of-war, each sponge is a com-
munity) retain a considerable independence in their duties.

It is important to distinguish sponges from the Coelen-
terates — comprising jelly-fish, sea- anemones, corals, etc.
The Coelenterates consist essentially of two main cell
layers, although these may be elaborately folded, and the
nervous system of one is always a net — never a central
nervous system. The nerve net, however, may be especi-
ally well-developed around the mouth.

The sponge has no nervous system. Some authorities
believe it has evolved from the Protozoa, along a
separate line of descent from that of the other Metazoa
(many-celled animals) but there is no evidence of any
change in the sponge throughout its known history. It
has always been as distinct, so far as human knowledge
goes, as it is today.

But although the sponges must be sharply distin-

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SPONGES AND CORALS

guished from the Coelenterates, they have many super-
ficial resemblances to corals, and often share the same
habitats. Sponges are found in great abundance along
coral reefs in tropical waters, in fact such reefs have
corals for their main structure and sponges are one of the
most outstanding features. Sponges and their extraord-
inary natural behaviour will therefore be better under-
stood if an account of them is preceded by an examination
of corals.

The sponges we handle in our bathrooms are skeletons.
The world's coral reefs consist of skeletons of countless
millions of polyps, so that sponges and corals have that
in common — they are skeletons of living creatures. In the
vertebrates (including man himself) the skeleton form is
based upon a backbone. Corals have ''all over" skele-
tons : the creatures live inside structures which branch in
various directions. Crustaceans like crabs wear their
skeletons outside like armour. Sponges are interpene-
trated by their skeletons. When they die the hard
structure remains : in the corals such skeletons build up
the reefs; but in the sponges the structure (although
tougher and firmer than the gelatinous ground-sub-
stance) can be softened considerably so that the substance
is kind to our skins.

True corals may be roughly divided into two kinds.
There is the simpler, more primitive type of coral, form-
ing a single calicle or coralite, as in the early Palaeozoic
cup-corals and certain existing species which live buried
in mud or extend in deep cold water over the sea-bed,
never rising to the surface. These corals are found in all
seas, from Greenland to the tropics.

The reef-building corals are more complex, and occur
in encrusting masses. But both types are polyps with
skeletons which interpenetrate them, strengthening their
bodies while they are alive, having fulfilled their rein-
forcement functions, remaining in the sea after the polyps
have died.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

The coral polyp's building patterns are manifold.
About 2,500 living, and 5,000 fossil, species are known.
It secretes lime under its base, around its sides, and in
radial ridges. Living polyps can withdraw themselves
almost completely into the connected chambers formed
by these ridges. It might be said of the creature, when it
is inside, that it is living in all the rooms of its house at
once. The shapes of the structures give the polyps their
various names, and are self-explanatory : star coral, rose
coral, organ-pipe coral, mushroom coral, and brain coral
are some of them.

In most corals the sexes are separate, and even the
reef growths may have areas entirely male or female.
Hermaphrodites may occur, and there are even corals
which have male and female branches in the individual.
Semper says that there is at least one species in which
the sex changes from male to female in alternate genera-
tions.

The richest and most impressive areas of the world's
seas are the coral reefs, and of these the chain of shoals,
shelves and islands along Australia's north-east coast,
which forms the world's greatest coral structure and is
known as the Great Barrier Reef, is our planet's finest
''show-case" of the wonders of the sea.

Captain James Cook, whose ship was beached and
damaged on a submerged reef one night in June 1770,
at a place now known as Cooktown, was too anxious to
repair his ship and sail on to Batavia, to appreciate the
beauties of the island shores.

Even today the vast labyrinth of coral formations
remains almost entirely undisturbed by man's explora-
tions. Over five hundred of the Great Barrier Reef's
sand-banks and islands remain unpeopled, while hun-
dreds of thousands of coral grottoes have never been
approached by divers. Because the visible surfaces of the
mighty Reef are generally flat, they never drain dry
between tides. Under skies of brilliant blue, untold multi-

142

SPONGES AND CORALS

tudes of tiny sea animals are still building the Reef up-
wards, generation after generation leaving their limy
skeletons behind as they die, to add their extremely thin
layers to the deposits of countless ages. These are the
years (a microscopic period of time in the eons during
which generations of these amazing organisms have lived
and died to produce the Reef) which mark the emergence
of the vast structure from the sea. In other parts of the
world many other coral reefs have already emerged or are
slowly coming to the surface.

Coral reefs can be built only when the animals are
washed by waters warm enough to assist the secretion of
the calcareous substance which forms their skeletons. The
living reef-structures, with all their associated life forms,
must therefore be confined to waters with temperatures
which do not fall below seventy degrees for more than
very brief periods. They therefore occur only in the area
bounded by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and
mainly on the eastern shores of continents, bathed by
currents of warm water carried towards the poles by the
world's wind and tide patterns, under the influence of the
earth's rotation.

Taking North America as an instance of this principle :
the Pacific coast lacks corals, because they are aflfected
by uprisings of cold water, while the north-eastern shores
of Australia, washed by warmer currents, are the site of
the Great Barrier Reef The only coral coast within the
United States is the two hundred-mile group of islands
(actually two groups) known as the Florida Keys —
second only to the Australian Reef itself for strange and
beautiful corals in vast profusion.

Although coral reefs^ consisting of the more massive
kinds of coral, are confined to the sea's warmer waters,
the more primitive kinds, already mentioned, are very
widely distributed and are found at all depths, both in
warm and cold waters. Certain varieties form dense beds
oflf the coasts of Scotland, Norway and Portugal — but it

143

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

must be reported that these are not the reef-building
types.

There are three classes of coral reefs. Fringing reefs are
platforms which extend to no great distance from the
shores of a continent or island. Barrier reefs are fringing
reefs on a large scale, with their outer edges much
farther from the shores, and with deeper water separating
them from the land. Atolls are ring-shaped reefs, either
awash at low tide or crowned by several islets — some-
times by a strip of dry land ringing a central lagoon.

It was at one time supposed that coral was a calcified
portion of the soft parts of the polyps. But this was dis-
proved by Bourne and others, and it is now known that it
is the solid support or skeleton, already described. The
calcareous septa (or partitions) are deposited by the
embryo polyp before it becomes firmly fixed to the sea
bottom, or to other polyps' skeletons beneath itself. In the
very young polyp of the Mediterranean Astroides, twelve
calcareous partitions are deposited, and these, becoming
fixed, are joined to the external walls (theca) of the coral,
forming a groundwork or pedestal, a kind of limestone
foundation on which the young polyp rests. Upon this
the lime-structure grows as the polyps die and leave their
skeletons behind them as part of the multiple structure
which slowly builds up — in some cases spreading over the
sea-bed and never approaching the surface, while in the
case of the reef-building polyps rising, layer by layer,
towards the surface of the sea through untold centuries.

Little is known, even today, regarding the rapidity of
growth in corals. A specimen of Meandrina labyrinthica
was taken from a block of concrete at Fort Jefferson,
Tortugas, some time ago, which had been in the water
only twenty years. It measured a foot in diameter and
four inches in thickness. Another outstanding case of coral
growth was examined on the wreck of a ship by the
naturalist Verrill, who found that it had grown to a
height of sixteen feet in sixty-four years — showing the

144

SPONGES AND CORALS

extraordinary rate of three inches a year. But most
authorities give the average rate of coral growth as about
half this : one and a half inches a year, upward, over
comparatively small areas, and a very much slower rate
when the polyps spread out. Many centuries have elapsed in
the building of the great reefs from the sea-bed.

Corals are free-swimming creatures only as embryos,
and then for brief periods. They quickly imprison them-
selves in their limestone structures, secreted usually on
their ancestors' skeletons. As time passes the individual
structures are firmly cemented into masses, and these are
even more firmly bound together by certain coralline
algae. In the daytime, those living corals which are on
the surface shrink into their stone fortresses. When
darkness falls they extend tentacles to catch and
poison planktonic creatures, which are carried to their
mouths.

In every pool over the thousands of square miles of the
Great Barrier Reef a kaleidoscopic variety of sea life
swarms — gaudy coral fishes, tube worms gently waving
their plumed gills, sea-stars, spiny urchins and countless
other animals.

Clams of the genus Tridacna up to three feet long occur
over the entire Reef Although clams are eyeless they
have organs which are sensitive to light, so that they can
detect a man's moving shadow. When they sense that
humans are passing near them in this way they close their
shells quickly — the action in some cases being so violent
that a stream of water may be shot several feet into the
air. When they feel that danger is past they open again,
and their gorgeous mantles emerge over the edges of
their valves. Clams along the Great Barrier Reef are of
many colours and sizes. Some of them have mantles of
brilliant green, which, as they emerge from the valves,
look like squirming snakes. Starfishes abound on the Reef
— moving with hundreds of suckered feet, which are
fixed in grooves running along each arm. Together with

145

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

sea-urchins and other relatives they are known as
echinoderms, meaning spiny skin.

Other Hfe on and in the Reef are: hermit-crabs,
which borrow the shells of other creatures for their
houses ; sea-wasps (a venomous kind of jelly-fish, the
sting of which can be fatal to humans) ; cowries, with
their brilliantly coloured mantles ; and all kinds of crus-
taceans. Sting-rays lurk in the shallows, as obscure,
ominous patches. Wedge-tailed shearwaters, called mut-
tonbirds locally, burrow and build their nests under-
ground— to mention only one of the extraordinary birds
which fly in myriads over the Reef. Enormous crowds of
soldier crabs — as large as a shilling — may suddenly in-
vade a particular beach : only to vanish, if frightened, as
suddenly as they appeared.

The warm waters of the world's coral reefs encourage
the prolific breeding of all kinds of creatures, and
numbers of these — like the giant Crocodilus porosus — reach
dimensions far exceeding those of their normal relatives
in colder waters. There are, for instance, the moray eels,
which lurk in the coral crevices of many reefs, resenting
the intrusions of divers and often snapping at them with
their slit-like mouths, which are armed with long needle-
sharp teeth. These have small heads and bead-like eyes,
and are sometimes six feet in length. Clams weighing up
to fifteen ounces are considered large specimens among
the long (or soft-shelled) varieties, and the gaper {My a
arenaria) is among the moderately large British bivalves,
although it is usually no more than four inches long and
two and a half inches broad.* But the clams of the coral
reefs are commonly ten, twenty or even a hundred times
larger, while one species, Tridacna gigantea, may weigh as
much as several men. One specimen, taken in Australia
and now exhibited at the American Museum of Natural

♦The largest British bivalve is the fan-shell, Pinna fragilis; specimens up to
fifteen inches long and eight inches wide have been found.

146

SPONGES AND CORALS

History, weighs no less than 579^ pounds — over a quarter
of a ton.

These are but few of the fantastic creatures which
inhabit the coral reefs, and are the companions of the
sponges.

For a long time sponges were thought to be plants, but
we now know them as skeletons — each one the frame-
work of a slime-animal. The sponge you hold in your
hand may have come from the warm deep waters of the
Grecian Archipelago, or it may have grown to maturity
in the Red Sea. But the waters of the Mediterranean,
the Dodecanese Islands, and the Gulf of Mexico, are
the ideal environment for sponges — owing to their free-
dom from strong currents, and the favourable tempera-
tures. Sponges are so prolific and of such fine quality in
the Gulf of Mexico that it is now the world's largest
sponge market.

Sponges are woven of a material that resembles the
material spun by silk worms. When alive, the cells on
the outside of the skeleton procure food and oxygen
for the organism. They do this by using flagella — fine
hair-Hke appendages — which whip the water into the
canals, driving streams of it through them, so that the
food and oxygen can penetrate through the whole
system. Thomas Huxley described the sponge as a kind
of submarine Venice, "where the people are ranged
about the streets and roads in such a manner that each
can easily appropriate its food from the water as it
passes along".

As it grows at the bottom of the sea, on the ocean
shelves, the living sponge is covered inside and out by a
gelatinous substance which absorbs particles of floating
matter as they pass through the canals. Those particles
which are not nutritive are eventually rejected, passing
out into the sea again. The creatures may be perpetuated
by gemmation — the formation of new individuals by the
protrusion and breaking away of parts of the parent. The

147

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

little gemmule, or ''bud", is carried out by the emerging
water and swirled about until it at last fastens itself to a
piece of rock or weed. This is but one of the sponge's
methods of reproduction : by the breaking away of com-
plex buds, asexually, each one protected by a spicule-
sheath and capable of developing into a complete struc-
ture.

But most sponges reproduce sexually by the union of
spermatozoon and ovum, resulting in the development
of a free-swimming larva (planula) — this method serving
not only to reproduce the species but to distribute it.

The pores, with which the surfaces of the sponge is
furnished in abundance, are ordinarily of two kinds — the
large ones (oscula) which are few in number, and are
often guarded by special protective devices, such as
circles of spicules or muscles capable of contracting the
orifice ; and the far more numerous inhalant pores every-
where perforating the wall-surfaces of the canals. The
complicated "mechanism" of the sponge is still a mystery
— how it is able to select nutritive substances and reject
others ; how it is able to create and cast off its gemmules ;
how it digests its food; how it controls its continually-
waving flagella, so vital to the circulation of water
through its canals: everything about the sponge is a
baffling problem, challenging man's investigation.

In the higher flint-building sponges the structure is
exquisite, for the spicules become complicated in the
extreme and are bound together with fine, transparent
flint threads which create a pattern resembling that of a
valuable piece of lace. The sponge known as Venus's-
basket is an example of this fine weaving. It seems
incredible that it has not been woven by an artist in lace-
making. It has all the beauty and transparency of finely-
spun glass, or crochet- work created after years of patient
labour by an expert in such a handicraft.

Like the Portuguese man-of-war, the sponge is a com-
munity structure, in which each tiny individual does its

148

SPONGES AND CORALS

duty. Yet the flagella, as they whip the water and entice
it into the canals, are apparently no more than simple
appendages of the sponge itself, controlled by the sponge
as our arms and legs are controlled by us. But they are
really semi-independent individuals, and if we term them
''devices", for want of a better name, we must be pre-
pared to regard them as living, self-acting ones. They
also occur in the Flagellata, motile unicellular organisms
present in numerous plants and bacteria ; in the sperma-
tozoa (minute active gametes in the semen of multicel-
lular creatures which serve to fertilize the ovum) ; and,
as cilia, covering the respiratory, excretory, and repro-
ductive systems of numerous animals, including our-
selves.

Although some zoologists distinguish between flagella,
which occur singly or in very small numbers as ''whips" on
unicellular creatures, and cilia, which occur in large
numbers, the distinction cannot be justified. For the cilia
are never simple "hairs" like eyelashes (the name derives
from the Latin cilium, eyelids or eyelashes) but in all
respects — structure, size and activity — are similar to
flagella: both cilia and flagella are "whip-like" and
usually in incessant vibratile movement.

In all such organelles — perhaps the best name for
them, for they are both organisms and small organs —
energy is somehow used to produce motion, but biologists
find it extremely difficult to explain the nature of the
process. One of our best authorities on the subject says
simply, "We do not know." Flagellated cells are found
in all the main divisions of the plant and animal king-
doms, with a few exceptions, and these cells serve either
of two purposes : to move the cells through the water,
when they are free-swimming creatures, or to move
water past the cells, when they are the organs of larger
organisms, like the sponge.

Protozoa of all kinds live as parasites in the sense that,
even if they are not attached to larger creatures or (as

149

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

cilia, which have all the characteristics of protozoa) ful-
filling various purposes as parts of organs belonging to
them, they live at the expense of other living animals.

As an instance of this ''independent parasitism" we
have the free-swimming flagellates of the sea.

Chief among ocean plants are the diatoms, which
comprise more than half the oceanic plants, and are
microscopic plants of the group Diatomacea, with cells
composed of two symmetrical valves. They multiply
by spontaneous separation. There are more than four
thousand species of these tiny plants, scattered over the
waters of the world, and their structures show an infinite
variety of designs of great beauty, rivalling the diversity
and perfection of snow crystals. Besides the diatoms there
are certain species of blue-green algae and the flagellates,
which compensate to some extent for their dependent and
independent parasitism by manufacturing vegetable food
in the sea. But when they exhibit malevolent qualities
they can foul the waters so badly that they poison large
numbers of fish.

They caused what was termed the ''Red Tide" that
washed the shores of Florida in 1947 and killed — it was
estimated — over fifty million fishes, large numbers of
which were washed up on the shores in such states of
decomposition that they stank disgustingly. So thickly
did they swarm in the sea on that occasion that a single
pint of sea water was found to contain over sixty million
flagellates.

The free-swimming flagellates of the ocean, therefore,
present us with the paradox, that they can be enormously
beneficial to ocean life, as creatures which are half plant,
half animal, manufacturing protoplasm as the life-giving
substance upon which myriads of fishes and other sea
animals feed; and they can be life-destroyers when, by
an excess of breeding, they poison vast numbers of other
creatures of the sea.

All those forms of Protozoa classed as flagellata —

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SPONGES AND CORALS

having cell-bodies provided with whip-like tails — are
extremely complicated in structure and exhibit a vast
range of designs, often singularly beautiful. Every con-
ceivable pattern appears among them — circular shapes,
oval ones, elongated forms, and others — numbers of them
having radial and other designs which rival those of
stained-glass windows.

Methods of feeding are variable. Food may be taken
in at well-defined spots, sometimes but not necessarily
oral, or it may be absorbed in solution through the
general surface of the body.

The body structure is apparently simple in most cases,
but this only makes the movements of the flagella more
mysterious. Among the free-swimming flagellates we
have enormous swarms of living creatures which, like the
thread-slime, have no brains or nervous systems, yet
control their activities as though they possessed either or
both ; have no stomachs, yet can digest their food ; have
no true eyes, yet can move about and direct themselves as
though they can see ; and have no sexual systems yet can
reproduce themselves prolifically and perfectly.

Many spermatozoids and free-swimming algae cells
have been observed moving at speeds which (considering
their microscopic size) are comparatively far greater than
any speeds attainable by humans using cars or aircraft.
One species of the ciliated protozoa, using its flagella to
attain the speed, has been scientifically timed at two
thousand microns per second — nearly six inches a
minute. Comparing the relative size of the creature with
the distance, man would need to travel at thousands of
miles a minute to attain comparable speeds.

Realizing that the flagella and the cilia are so
similar in their structures and characteristics that it is
impossible to classify them separately, the wide range
of their activities can be generally listed. They run right
through the plant kingdom from single-celled algae and
mosses and ferns; through the animal kingdom from

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Protozoa to invertebrates and upwards to such weird
creatures as squids, and upwards again from them,
through fishes of many kinds, to mammals hke ourselves.
Everywhere, through countless myriads of life-forms are
these waving "hairs" which are organs which baffle the
most detailed examination.

The cilia tracts — hairy surfaces — around the throats of
such protozoic creatures as Paramecium and Vorticella are
specialized filter-feeding mechanisms — so are the ciliated
rings around the mouths of rotifers, which get their name
from the curious "spinning" eflfect caused by the rapid
movement of the whip-like hairs as they flash rapidly
around each pulsating ring.

Oysters and mussels use these microscopic whips, for
their gills are covered with a ciliated epithelium or outer
layer, over which a constant stream of mucus flows,
catching particles of food and conveying them to the
creature's open gullet.

Few people realize, when they clear their throats of
phlegm, that they are only able to do so (saving their
lungs from accumulations of mucus) because their
throats are lined with cilia similar to those which carry
particles of food into the gullets of oysters. We call
these microscopic "hairs" which line our throats cilia,
but, like all cilia of the types we have been considering,
our "throat-hairs" have all the characteristics of flagella.
The oyster's "whips" wave the food particles into its
gullet ; the sponge's waving flagella beckon microscopic
planktonic sea creatures into its canals ; and the whips
which line the throat of a man are continually in action
passing particles of injurious dust upwards until they
reach his nose and mouth, mixed with the mucus without
which the flagella cannot act (for they always operate in
liquids) and so being carried out of the human organism,
even as food particles are carried into the organisms of
sponges, molluscs and other creatures.

So in the process of conception, ciliated tracts, also

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SPONGES AND CORALS

covered with mucus, possess flagella which *'wave" the
egg-cells onwards and downwards, so that they may be
fertilized by the spermatozoa, which ascend towards
them by using their own flagella — their whip-like tails.
Neither the larger egg-cells of the female, nor the tadpole-
like spermatozoa, of the male, could manage their ex-
traordinary journeys unaided, although the spermatozoa
have a kind of semi-independent motion as they oscillate
their flagella : they both need the propulsive help of the
waving ''whips" which line the female Fallopian tube.

Whether we consider them as devices, plants or
animals — and all three terms are applicable — we are
compelled to believe that flagellates are baffling and
mysterious, in all their diversified forms, from those
which create the light in the water (wrongly described
as "phosphorescent") when disturbed in their myriads
by the passing of a steamer, to those which may break
away from a human throat, be ejected in mucus, and
swim for some time (Hke living protozoa in the sea, with
independent life and action) within that discharged
mucus.

We have apparently travelled a long way from the
sponge, but it is here a case of the longest way round
being the shortest way home. For no appreciation of the
real nature of a sponge's flagella would be possible with-
out some idea of the enormous diversity of cilia and
flagella in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

Sponges in millions occur in the world's coral reefs.
Others thrive in areas where there are no corals. Some
sponges are non-aggressive: others are almost ferocious
as they bore their way into solid rock. All sponges have
their flagella, linking them with plants and animals and
with man himself in curious relationships which indicate
the underlying unity of all living creatures.

153

CHAPTER IX

THE FISHMEN

MAN'S first penetrations of the sea were confined
to wadings, dives and underwater swimming in
shallow waters. His first boats — hollowed-out
tree trunks — were used on rivers, and countless centuries
passed before any attempts were made to cross the
world's seas, for they were regions which early man, in
his imagination, peopled with dragons, centaurs, venge-
ful deities, and fabulous beasts of all kinds. The sea itself
was often personified as a monster, vested with enormous
powers of destruction, and subject to fits of anger and
sullen treachery — a being to be propitiated and never
offended by undue curiosity regarding its fearsome
secrets.

Sponges were certainly among the very first creatures
of the sea which attracted primitive man into the shore-
waters, and they were probably among the first artificial
aids used in his diving ventures. It may be difficult to
realize that the sponge was one of the primitive, crude
progenitors of the bathyscaphe, but such was un-
doubtedly the case.

A stone held in the hand was probably the very first
''diving appliance" ; one which was used by the divers of
Greece countless centuries later (as noted in the last
chapter) and is still used today by uncivilized peoples.
But a sponge held in the mouth was also a very early
device to assist submarine exploration.* It was a step

♦Several old writers say that sponge-divers were able to use the air trapped in
the sponge. A modern author suggests that the diver bit the sponge when under
water, and that this released oil which calmed and cleared the water around him.

154

THE FISHMEN

nearer the diving suit and the bathyscaphe, although a
very elementary ''invention", for (dipped in oil of some
kind) it helped him to breathe under water. This practice
continued through the centuries until quite recent times,
particularly among sponge divers of the Mediterranean.

Dr. Halley, the noted astronomer and naturahst,
writing while modern exploration of the sea was still in
its infancy and before cumbersome diving suits and
''diving bells" had reached any degree of perfection, said
that "without a sponge, a naked diver cannot remain
above two minutes enclosed in water; nor much longer
with one, without suffocating". He added, "Nor without
long practice near so long : ordinarily persons beginning
to be suffocated in less than half a minute. Besides, if the
depth be considerable, the pressure of the water in the
vessels makes the eyes blood-shotten, and frequently
occasions a spitting of blood." A contemporary of Dr.
Halley, writing in confirmation of his statements, said :
"It is found by experiment that a gallon of air included
in a bladder, reciprocally inspired and expired by the
lungs, becomes unfit for respiration in little more than a
minute of time."

Dr. Halley achieved immortality by the brilliance and
accuracy of his astronomical observations. His suggestions
inspired Newton to write his Principia, He made the first
complete observation of a transit of Mercury. He was
Astronomer Royal towards the close of the eighteenth
century. He accurately predicted the return of the comet
which was named after him. But his knowledge of divers
and diving was ludicrously inadequate.

Marine products used by ancient peoples provide
abundant evidence that divers in many countries had
become highly proficient in naked underwater explora-
tion for many centuries before Halley used the words
quoted. Red coral was regarded as a mystical substance
and exported from the Mediterranean shores to places as
far away as China, over two thousand years ago : quite

155

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

recent history when related to the sea explorations of
primitive man, but old enough, when considered with
other historical facts, to set us wondering at the naivete
of Dr. Halley's statements.

The ancient Greeks used many products which could
only have been obtained from the sea-beds of the coastal
waters. A certain shellfish contributed a dye for the Im-
perial purple. Roman soldiers used sponges as canteens
on their marches. A sponge soaked in vinegar was offered
to Christ on the cross. Shells from the shores, numbers of
which could only have been obtained by divers, were
built into medieval cathedrals, particularly those of the
great Tridacna clam, which were often used for fonts.
Dr. Halley must surely have known some of these
historical facts and of the exploits of pearl divers ; and
other naked underwater swimmers of his own times. Yet
he specifically states the limit of underwater endurance
* 'ordinarily" as half a minute, and of experienced divers
as two minutes.

The main problem of naked diving without appliances
was always that of holding the breath long enough to
accomplish some task under water or on the sea-bed.
Pearl divers, from earliest times, have always been able
to stay under water for periods exceeding three minutes,
and there are numerous well-authenticated instances of
divers going down to a hundred feet or more, and re-
maining under for longer periods.

One of the most remarkable cases in recent times — on
account of the depth attained, apart from the period of
endurance — is that of a Greek sponge diver named
Stotti Georghios. Wearing no breathing apparatus, fins
or eyeglasses (and not even carrying a stone or a sponge)
he went down to a depth of two hundred feet in 1 9 1 3 to
attach a line to the lost anchor of the Italian battleship
Regina Margharita. At that depth the pressure on his lungs
was enormous — they were squeezed by seven atmospheres
of pressure, which should have been enough to collapse

156

THE FISHMEN

them to half their diameter. His breath control was little
short of miraculous, not only in remaining under for
over four minutes, but in resisting the pressure at that
depth until he had accomplished his task.

The Amas of Japan, professional divers attached to the
Mikimoto culture-pearl industry of today, make as many
as eighty or ninety dives daily and (wearing nothing but
their goggles) frequently go down to depths exceeding
120 feet, and remain under water without breathing
apparatus for periods exceeding three and a half minutes.
The world's record for remaining under water far exceeds
four minutes. It was set at San Rafael, California, by
Dr. Robert Keast, thirty-four years of age, on i8th
March 1956. The previous world's record, which Dr.
Keast tried to beat, was 6 minutes 29.8 seconds: made
forty-four years earlier in 191 2.

Dr. Keast shattered that record by remaining under,
conserving his breath, for 10 minutes 58.9 seconds — only
one and a tenth second under eleven minutes.

Depth pressure is not the handicap to diving that one
might imagine. The human body has almost the same
density as salt water itself, and the flesh of man resembles
that offish in its power of resisting compression. Only the
hollow organs in man, such as his lungs, are in danger
when subjected to pressure in the depths. Naked divers,
by long practice and intensive training, can develop
their lungs to resist enormous pressures for brief
periods.

In his naked diving feats, without any kind of appara-
tus, man's nearest competitors have always been certain
birds : among them a family of swimming birds popularly
known as Divers, the Colymbidae. On land these birds are
awkward creatures, shuffling along with their breasts to
the ground, as though embarrassed and made awkward
by contact with solid surfaces. They seldom take wing,
and rise with difficulty, but when they are air-borne they
sweep along very rapidly, especially when they migrate

157

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

or change their abodes from the sea to inland lakes or
vice versa.

The term "diver" is often applied, vaguely, to birds
which have no right to the name, such as several of the
sea ducks, some of the mergansers, and certain auks and
grebes; but British ornithologists agree that the word
should be restricted to the Colymbidae, a clearly defined
group possessing considerable powers of submergence.

In common with the grebes — but thereby differing
from other birds — the divers possess curious anatomical
structures which help them to swim. The wings are small,
concave and composed of stiff feathers, so that they can
use them as oars when underwater and giving chase to
submerged fishes, or escaping from their underwater
enemies.

In the diver, the crest of the tibia is prolonged up-
wards to unite with the kneecap (patella) , so that a spike-
like projection is formed at the extremity of the bone,
which gives the bird a considerable advantage in the act
of swimming by reason of its efficient leverage. The limbs
are placed as far back as possible, and the tarsus is
flattened laterally to cleave the water. The toes, which
are either lobated or webbed, are so formed that they
close into a small compass when drawn towards the body
in preparation for a stroke. The plumage is close, silky
and very glossy. The tail is either short or wanting alto-
gether. The body is flat, oval and ''stream lined", and
from its rather depressed contour appears to float more
deeply in the water than it actually does.

The great northern diver {Colymbus glacialis) is the
largest species of the genus, and may attain a length of as
much as three feet. It is met chiefly in the Arctic regions,
but comes farther south with the approach of winter. It is
a beautiful bird, characterized by its glossy black head
and neck and the presence of two gorgets (or semi-
collars) of velvet-black and pure white vertical stripes on
its throat, and belts of white spots contrasting sharply

158

THE FISHMEN

with its dark back, the under parts of the bird being
white.

The commonest species is the red-throated diver
(C septentrionalis) , which has an elongated colour patch
on its throat as an adult, when in its summer dress, which
gives the bird its name. It inhabits the north temperate
zone of both hemispheres.

C. glacialis has been said to breed in Scotland and in
Norway, but (with the exception of Iceland) it is doubt-
ful if it is indigenous to the Old World.

Two remarkable occurrences in connection with the
great northern diver may be of interest. According to
J. Vaughan Thompson in his Natural History of Ireland,
one of these divers was shot off the Irish coast some years
ago, and was found to have ''an arrow headed with
copper sticking through its neck'^' ; while another diver of
the same species was found dead in Kalbaksfjord in The
Faeroes with an iron-tipped bone dart fast under its
wing. Considering that both birds had apparently crossed
the Atlantic, and that darts or arrows in birds are not
common occurrences, it is remarkable that these things
should have happened to birds of this one species, out of
the thousands of species of known birds.

The divers go under water without exertion, and,
when swimming, their bodies are almost entirely im-
mersed— only the head and neck appearing above the
surface. After swimming for some time hke this they
will suddenly submerge completely and travel under
water for considerable distances without coming up
again. In contrast with their clumsiness on land they
show great agility both on the surface and when sub-
merged, and may be regarded as serious rivals to human
divers in their feats of underwater endurance. There are
well-authenticated cases of the great northern diver
remaining completely under water for eight minutes and
longer.

Frank Lane in his Nature Parade gives some remarkable

159

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

facts regarding swimming birds. He mentions the gannet
as being one of the most efficient of all feathered divers.
It sometimes makes a precipitous dive into the sea from
a height of over one hundred feet, at an estimated speed
of one hundred miles an hour. The force with which the
bird strikes the water may be estimated from the fact
that a diving gannet, coming in contact with a board
sunk to a depth of six feet, has driven its beak so firmly
into the wood that its neck has been broken.

Gannets have copious supplies of oil in their glands for
water proofing their feathers. Bird plumage always
offers some resistance to water, but the water proofing is
more efficient in aquatic birds. Sooty terns, which some-
times rest on water, become waterlogged in a few hours
if they remain on it, but ducks can sleep on the surface
for a whole night.

Birds can control the resistance of their feathers to
water, probably by manipulation of the muscles at the
feather roots. Batten, in Inland Birds says that wild ducks
may swim and dive with their under-feathers quite dry,
but if one is shot and falls into the water the plumage is
immediately saturated. Dr. Bastian Schmid has told an
extraordinary story of some Indian runner ducks which
he kept: the birds had never seen a pond, having been
reared by a hen. Dr. Schmid sprinkled them lightly with
a watering-can one day, and this caused them to go
through all the motions of swimming and diving.

Some diving birds have been observed to leave the
surface of the water flapping their wings, showing that
they had been using them to ''fly" to the surface, and
had then continued to use them, without a pause, to
ascend through the air.

Closely allied to diving birds are the penguins — which
form the very distinct order Impennes^ and family Spheni-
scidae. The penguin has many resemblances to the diver
in the structure of its softer internal parts, and in the
backward position of its short legs and upright posture

1 60

THE FISHMEN

when on land. The penguins of the southern hemisphere
differ from all other members of their class in two im-
portant features : the wings, in which the quills are rudi-
mentary, are transformed into paddles; and the short
metatarsus (the group of five long bones of the foot lying
between the tarsus and the toes) is of great width, with
its three longitudinal elements fused together. The young
are quite helpless when born and are tended with remark-
able care by the mothers.

They exist in enormous numbers in the Antarctic seas
and on the South African and American coasts, being
found in large communities at Tierra del Fuego and on
the Pacific Islands ; also in Australia and New Zealand.
They are gregarious creatures and have the habit of
standing in long, regular lines, resembling files of soldiers
on parade. The female Adehe incubates the eggs, which
she protects by holding them between her thighs. She
carries the eggs in the same peculiar fashion when dis-
turbed or alarmed. The father penguin supplies both
mother and baby with food during the period of incuba-
tion, and both parents feed the young when hatched.

The nests are formed in the hollows of rocks, and the
eggs are deposited on the thick layer of excrement which
— accumulating over long periods — constitutes some of
the valuable guano of commerce.

Despite its waddhng gait, which might suggest that it
is a clumsy animal, the penguin is the most expert
swimmer of all birds. Everything in its structure con-
tributes to this: its ''cutwater" beak; its close-fitting
feathers, which might almost be called scales ; its power-
ful flippers, which can move independently ; its tail and
legs which can act together both as rudder and brake ;
and its streamlined body.

Penguins can attain twelve miles an hour easily, and
can reach eighteen when pursuing a fast fish. Murphy,
in his Oceanic Birds gives the speed of the gentoo penguin
when going "all out" as twenty- two miles an hour. That

l6l F

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

they possess unusual agility and strength is shown by the
fact that they have been observed to shoot up out of the
water and land on ledges of ice more than five feet high.

The penguins of Tristan da Cunha migrate about
April and return in July or August, but where they go
remains somewhat of a mystery — it seems incredible that
they should remain at sea for such a protracted period.

The emperor penguin is truly a royal bird, for he
normally stands three feet tall and weighs ninety pounds.
But there are outsize ones. One captured by Captain
Scott's men in 191 1 was four feet tall and weighed
seven stone. In the autumn this penguin heads south
towards the pole and the coldest weather. The female
hatches out the single egg after her arrival, and then
father, mother and child head south again, into a less
frigid climate. There is much commonsense in this hatch-
ing of the chick during the long Arctic night, for only in
this way is it possible to rear the infant to the point where
it is able to resist the rigours of the following winter.

The emperor penguin may be one of the most primitive
birds. The growth of the embryo within the egg recapitu-
lates the history of the species, and this history seems to
suggest that the emperor has certain features in common
with those of some reptiles.

Nearly every feature of a penguin caricatures some-
thing human : its black back and (usually) immaculate
''white shirt front", which suggest man's evening dress;
its sleek flippers which look like the arms of well-pressed
but overlong sleeves: its drilling and marching habits,
and the way penguins gather together in small groups, as
if they were gossiping or discussing the political situation.

The penguin's resemblance to a human being is height-
ened by its ''spectacles" — a white ring around each
quizzical "black shoe-button" eye. Penguins walk
quickly, despite their characteristic "waddling" — at the
rate of about one hundred and twenty steps per minute.

Of the seventeen known species of the penguin indi-

162

THE FISHMEN

genous to the southern hemisphere, only two are found
in the Antarctic. The king penguin, not so large as the
emperor, is found over a wider area. Closely allied to
these is the smaller Pygoscelis toeniata, a gentle creature
distinguished by its pointed red beak and with a stouter
and more feathered body. It is commonly known as the
''Johnny".

Still smaller and more numerous is the AdeHe, which
grows to about two feet tall and weighs only twelve
pounds. This is the penguin with the best defined
"spectacles". Of all the penguins the Adelies are the
greatest travellers. In spring they journey five hundred
miles back to their Antarctic homes, and have been
observed nearly a thousand miles from them. Such dis-
tances are enormous for penguins to travel, most of the
way on foot. But when penguins have long distances to
go they conserve foot energy by turning themselves into
sledges, especially down gradients. They flop on their
stomachs and paddle themselves over the snow and ice
by using their flippers like oars.

It is generally known that the male penguin makes
gifts of pebbles to his lady, but less well known that he
prefers to steal these from other birds' collections rather
than search for pretty ones himself. Leaning forward,
feathers drawn close, he tries to make himself incon-
spicuous and sneaks up to another penguin's wife as she
broods on her nest and steals a stone from under her tail.
If noticed by the husband before he gets to the nest he
fluflfs his feathers and strolls up and down with a non-
chalant expression, looking very innocent.

As many as fifty thousand penguins have been counted
in one area, crowded on pebble-cluttered nests, only a
foot or so apart. Remarkable facts about the penguin are
as prolific as the bird itself — it would require hundreds
of pages of print to exhaust them — but mention must be
made of the fact that, while some creatures (such as the
bee and the ant) show uncanny skill in sex-determination,

163

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

the penguin sometimes confuses the sexes of his own
species. Male and female are indeed difficult to dis-
tinguish, but one would imagine that the penguin him-
self would possess discrimination. Yet he will sometimes
take a pretty pebble to another male, mistaking him for
an eligible young lady.

The jackass penguin is perhaps the most extraordinary
of them all. Darwin says that when crawling on ''all
fours" on the shore it possesses an agility of motion in
that attitude which is denied to all other penguins. It can
run on all-fours, even along the slope of a grassy cliff, and
at such a speed that it might well be mistaken for a quad-
ruped. This species derives its popular name from its
habit of throwing back its head and braying like a
donkey.

Man's nearest competitors in underwater exploration,
the divers and penguins, can put up good performances
against his efforts as long as man uses no appliances. But
man is a tool-using animal, a fact that distinguishes him
from all others, and he has left his diving rivals far behind
by his invention of appliances during the centuries, par-
ticularly in the more recent developments of undersea
exploration.

The Portuguese man-of-war and a few other creatures
have used their dependent tentacles or streamers as
''sounding lines" for untold ages, but there has been no
development in them — they are appliances which can
only be used to "sound" any shallow shore areas in
which such creatures find themselves. The man-of-war's
tentacles cannot reach down beneath the surface beyond
a hundred feet at the extreme limit.

Man's use of the sounding line — the third of his most
primitive devices for sea exploration : the other two being
the stone (held in his hands and later tied to his feet)
and the sponge — was very probably an extension of its
use for fishing.

The history of soundings is lost in antiquity, even as the

164

THE FISHMEN

earlier records of sea explorations of all kinds are lost.
We surmise that man's knowledge of the sea was limited
to depths of about two hundred fathoms until recent
times, but we know practically nothing of man's adven-
tures or inventions in the long centuries before the
Christian era.

The destruction of the Alexandrian libraries (begun by
a mob of fanatical pseudo-Christians in a.d. 391, and
completed at the taking of Alexandria by the Arabs
two hundred and fifty years later) deprived mankind of
an enormous amount of recorded knowledge of earlier
sea exploration : with it, no doubt, numerous accounts of
attempts to penetrate the sea's surface, by the use of
sounding devices, and underwater appliances of all kinds.
Four hundred and ninety thousand volumes or rolls
(some authorities estimate that the collection contained
nearly 700,000, with some duplicates) were lost for-
ever.

There are many museums and other institutions which
contain specimens of old-time sounding, dredging and
diving devices, notably a fine one at Monaco, but ex-
planations of their use in the form of accounts or records
are rare and unreliable before the burning of the Alex-
andrian library. Herodotus mentions ocean soundings,
and there are such references to them as those which
occur in the account of St. Paul's shipwreck, in the Acts
of the Apostles (where they took soundings and "found
it twenty fathoms") but as we recede in history we
realize that there must have been numerous soundings,
divings and explorations (of which we have only isolated
accounts) for thousands of years after primitive man had
overcome his fear of the sea.

Mother-of-pearl, which cannot be picked up in any
quantities on the shore, and must be sought for by diving,
has been found in excavated ornaments of the Sixth
Dynasty Thebes — about 3,200 e.g., and even in earlier
excavations, in smaller amounts, going back a thousand

165

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

years. But such finds tell us little of the explorations of
the sea which produced them.

There are innumerable legends regarding early sea
exploration : stories of underwater caves, and treasures
brought out of the sea, and of devices used in exploring
the sea. We have, for instance, the legend (one of many)
regarding Alexander the Great (356-323 e.g.), found in
the old script known as the Pseudo-Kallisthenes, in which
it is stated that Alexander descended into the ocean
depths with two companions in a vessel made from some
transparent material and the skins of asses, and that they
remained deep under water for ninety-six days and
nights, observing the wonders of the ocean, seeing,
among other strange creatures, a monstrous fish, of such
length that it took four days to swim past their hiding
place. As an account of early sea exploration the legend
— like many others of the kind — is worthless ; but it has
some value in its implication that men were probably
concerned with penetrating the sea's surface, even in
those days. For the phrase ''skins of asses", used to
describe some of the material of the fabulous "diving
bell" seems to be satirical and indicative of the existence
of real devices, however ineffective.

The history of underwater exploration can be sharply
divided into three sections : Accounts of divers who
have gone down, either naked or with appliances, simple
and complex, to help them descend and ascend, and to
help them to breathe : humans who may have been
encased in suits, but who have not used "diving bells" or
similar vessels for their explorations — and accounts of
humans who have gone down in contrivances which they
have occupied, as pilots or "passengers". Divers in the
first classification range from naked divers with no appli-
ances whatever, to our modern frogmen and divers who
use the aqualung or any similar device to assist breath-
ing; and of course men wearing the older types of diving-
suit with tubes connecting them with surface pumps are

166

THE FISHMEN

included. For convenience we term all these ''fishmen".
Those in the other classification, who occupy vessels
within which they have freedom of movement — such as
diving bells and bathyscaphes — will be considered in a
later chapter, for these divers go down to far greater
depths. The fishmen — both skin-divers and those who use
diving-suits — are compelled to operate in shallower
waters, for their bodies could not withstand the tre-
mendous pressures of the greater depths.

Man must have air to breathe, but if that was his sole
requirement in going down into the sea, and his body
could stand the increasing pressures, it might be possible
to send divers down (with tubes connecting them to the
surface) to far greater depths than those which are now
traversed by men in diving-suits. But the crushing pres-
sure of the waters — increasing by nearly half a pound
(actually 0.445 pounds) per square inch for every foot of
depth — operates like a stern command : "Thus far shalt
thou go and no farther." The deeper chasms of the
oceans go down for miles, but the diver who is not pro-
tected from pressure by a shell of some kind — of steel
several inches thick if he wants to descend thousands of
feet — must confine his activities to the shore-waters of
the continental shelves.

Perhaps the earliest reliable reference to unassisted or
natural diving occurs in the Iliad, where Patroclus com-
pares the fall of Hector's charioteer with the action of a
diver diving for oysters.

Thucydides was the first to mention the employment
of divers for mechanical work under water. He describes
how divers were employed during the siege of Syracuse
to saw through the barriers which had been constructed
under the surface to obstruct and damage any Grecian
vessels which might attempt to enter the harbour. There
can be no doubt that divers, even in those early times,
had so trained themselves that their lungs could resist
the increasing pressures — doubled at thirty-three feet

167

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

down, tripled at sixty-six feet, quadrupled at ninety-nine
feet, and so on. We must accept the evidence of modern
times, that naked divers can descend without apparatus
to over a hundred feet, steeling themselves against the
tremendous pressure at such depths.

Men had no knowledge of the real depths of the ocean
until quite recently. Not until 1504 were soundings —
made in shallow waters — first shown on a map: one
drawn by Juan de la Costa. Deeper soundings were
shown on Mercator's maps in 1585; after which it be-
came the practice, increasingly, to incorporate them in
most maps. Captain Cook, in his voyagings round the
world, was the first to employ them systematically —
using pieces of lead or cannon-balls. Captain Ross followed
his example by using them in his Antarctic explorations.

The last use of hempen cord for soundings on an ex-
tensive scale was on the famous Challenger voyage of
1872-76. This Admiralty ship, in her explorations of the
under waters in many parts of the world, often trailed
her sounding line — sometimes as much as eight miles of
it dragging behind her.

Lord Kelvin, the noted British mathematician and
physicist devised the modern sounding apparatus in
1872, using piano-wire, which superseded the use of rope
and enabled mankind to plumb greater depths more
efficiently. Less than one-twentieth of an inch in diameter,
the wire has tremendous tensile strength, more than ten
times that of the finest hemp.

Sounding lines are supplementary aids to both classes
of divers — fishmen and "sphere passengers". They have
two purposes. They register depths and they also disclose
the type of life below, and the nature of sediments, etc.,
samples of which they can bring to the surface for inspec-
tion and analysis. That is why fathometers (echo sound-
ing devices) can never entirely replace the use of the line.

Countless centuries elapsed between primitive man's
use of his fishing line to measure the depth of the shore

168

THE FISHMEN

waters and Kelvin's piano-wire. Those early men had
lines made from creepers or grasses, only a few score
fathoms in length, which they lowered slowly into the
water and withdrew as carefully again. Kelvin's inven-
tion enabled navigators to unreel six hundred feet of wire
in a minute, and to rewind it almost as rapidly.

The devices used by fishmen in these modern times are
innumerable. Goggles were among the earliest modern
inventions. They were quickly followed by extensions of
them into masks of all kinds, one of the latest in use being
the full-face type, with a snorkel built into it : a breathing
device consisting of a tube, generally plastic, leading from
the mask to a position above the head. With all the
smaller goggles and masks (without compressed air
supply or oxygen) the wearer has to hold his breath
every time he looks down into the water. Using the
snorkel mask there is no feeling of air-starvation — the
breath is held only when preparing to dive. A valve
attachment closes the tube immediately on diving and
opens it again on returning to the surface.

All kinds of fins have been invented — some with closed
heels, for instance, for protection against sharp coral.
Swimmers can travel faster with ''web-feet" fins, without
using their arms, than if they were using all four limbs
without fins.

There are also many types of under-water gun. The
original ''spear-gun" used in the Pacific was a simple
contrivance — -just a piece of steel tube or bamboo about
a foot long, with a set of rubber bands attached to one
end, often taken from an old inner tube. The "spear"
might be any piece of metal with a barb on one end —
perhaps an old bicycle spoke. The gun was "loaded" by
passing the "spear" into it. All that was needed to fire
it was to pull back the elastic, holding the end of the
"spear" in it, and then — let fly.

There are all kinds of spear-guns, some spring-
powered developments of the elastic-band type, and more

169 F*

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

powerful ones using cartridges. Some of these fire fifty or
sixty shots from a magazine.

Spear-points may be explosive. One type, the Bel-
Aqua Thunderhead is an impact powder-head which
enables the user to kill big fish. There are also many
kinds of knives, and a variety of gloves. Many diving
spearmen wear only one glove — on the hand not used for
firing the gun. Some gloves are not merely protective
but webbed, serving a double purpose: enabling the
wearer to hold on to coral, or grab a poisonous fish,
and also giving him a little extra speed through the
water.

Special waterproof flashlights are used for night diving.
There are underwater compasses specially made for
divers, with luminous dials; spectacle frames for divers
with poor sight, which fit inside the masks; waterproof
watches; and even underwater scooters! These are
strapped to the body and have paddles operated by the
feet. They are said to increase the diver's underwater
speed by as much as three hundred per cent.

Underwater cameras have reached a high degree of
perfection. There are now, in many countries, some
thousands of underwater photographers, from amateurs
using Brownies in football-bladders to professional movie
cameramen using hundreds of miles of film a year as they
record the habits of sea creatures and the adventures of
the divers who are investigating them.

Weighted belts are sometimes used to facilitate faster
and deeper descents, even by divers operating without
self-contained oxygen appliances. These are so devised
that they can be released instantly in emergencies.
Fathometers are now available in many sporting goods
stores. The appliance is strapped to the knee, and registers
the depth of the diver. For those on the surface, watching
the diver as he goes down, there are many new inven-
tions, including waterscopes (developed from the old-
fashioned glass-bottomed boxes used by the natives)

170

THE FISHMEN

which contribute to the high efficiency of modern sea
exploration.

Underwater photography has become a speciaHzed
science. Cameras are dangled on cables, towed on sleds
and taken down to the depths in bathyscaphes. Some of
these, and the latest deep-sea underwater lamps, will be
described in a later chapter.

Many pioneers in underwater exploration have been
credited with the invention of the first self-contained
breathing apparatus, including Giovanni BorelH in the
seventeenth century and several inventors in recent
decades. Lieutenant Philippe Taillez, who has many
brilHant inventions to his credit in connection with sea
exploration and who forms a distinguished trio of sub-
marine explorers with Cousteau and Dumas, was one of
the first of the mask divers to devise an efficient breathing
tube. He made it from a heavy garden hose, and it had
the decided advantage that it could be struck while under
water without damaging it or imperilling the life of the
diver — it was resilient and therefore simply regained its
upright position. Some of the hook shapes are easily
fouled by underwater obstacles. The basic principle of
the Taillez invention has not been superseded by a more
efficient one.

But even Borelli, over two and a half centuries before
Taillez, was not the originator of the self-contained
breathing apparatus. The first historical mention of any
such invention is by Aristotle (384-322 e.g.). In his
De Partibus Animalium he states that divers of his time
were provided with instruments of respiration through
which they could draw air from above the water, to
enable them to remain for some time under the sea.
In another work {Problem 32, 5) he says that divers were
able to breathe by letting down a vessel which did not
get filled with water, but retained the air within it.
Pliny (a.d. 23-79) wrote of divers engaged in warfare,
who used tubes through which they drew in air and

171

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

expelled it — the upper end of the tube floating on the
surface. Aristotle's words have often been quoted, and
no doubt contain the earliest detailed descriptions of
breathing mechanisms. But there were earlier pictorial
representations. The London British Museum contains
what may well be the earliest : two Assyrian bas-reliefs,
dated about 900 B.C., which came from the palace of
King Assur-Nasir-Pal at Nineveh. These show a number
of men wearing inflated goatskins at their girdles. Each
diver has a short tube in his mouth, connecting with a
goatskin, through which he breathes air. Although some
archaeologists have suggested that the appliance depicted
was used to support soldiers swimming across rivers, the
explanation does not account for the tubes, which would
have had no purpose if the bags were merely early
''water-wings" ; in fact if the breathing apparatus idea is
dismissed one might as well believe that the soldiers are
playing bagpipes.

Roger Bacon is credited with the invention of an
underwater breathing device in 1240.

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608-79) ^^^ the first to
introduce an eflScient means of forcing air down to the
diver. Modern authors have various misdescriptions of
his apparatus. One says the gear was never tested and
that the helmet was of brass or tin. But descriptions of
Borelli's diving-suit, much nearer to his own time — some
of them exhibiting considerable detail — show that it was
far superior to the diving bells then being developed.
One account says that it was devised for diving under the
water to ''great depths" — but the phrase did not in
those days imply what it does today. The vesica or
bladder (actually the headpiece) was of brass or copper —
certainly not tin — and was about two feet in diameter.
It was fixed to a goatskin suit, "exactly fitting the body
of the person". Within the headpiece were pipes by
which a circulation of air was contrived.

The diver was connected with a bellows on the surface,

172

THE FISHMEN

SO that he was independent of helpers above him. He
carried "an air-pump at his side", and by manipulating
this he could not merely supply himself with air but
"make himself heavier or lighter, as do fishes by contract-
ing or dilating their airbladders".

One account says that "the objections of all other
diving-machines are obviated, particularly those regard-
ing the air, the moisture of which is clogged in respira-
tion, and by which it is rendered unfit for use again,
being taken from it by its circulation through the pipes,
to the sides of which it adheres, leaving the air as free
as before". Other accounts say that the diver inhaled
through his nose and exhaled through his mouth into a
short pipe which led into a leathern bag. BorelH was
certainly the pioneer of our age in self-contained breath-
ing mechanisms, with all respect to pioneers of past ages.

Even if (as some assert) BorelH's apparatus was never
adequately tested, it certainly contributed a great deal
to the perfection of the diving-suit. Numbers of other
inventors in various countries began experimenting with
underwater apparatus as a result of his labours. One of
these, a Devonshire man named John Lethbridge, seems
to have had unusual success, contemporaneously with
BoreUi.

Lethbridge's suit was of strong leather, and various
accounts agree that it contained "a hogshead of air",
and was so contrived that none of it could escape. Glass
was used for the front of the helmet. It was said that
when he had put on the suit he could not only walk
along the sea-bed near the shore, completely submerged,
but could also enter the cabins of sunken ships, "to
convey goods out of them at his pleasure". Lethbridge is
credited with carrying on all kinds of salvage operations
over a period of more than forty years, and with having
made a considerable fortune from the use of his invention.

Borelli's ideas were materially advanced by Freminet,
a Frenchman, in 1772; and there can be no doubt that

173

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

his dives were successful. He used a leather suit with a
copper helmet, and the air supply — from. a small reser-
voir connected to the helmet — was water-cooled and
circulated back to the diver. With this apparatus divers
were able to stay under water for short periods, but if we
dismiss accounts of Borelli's and Lethbridge's inventions
as inadequately substantiated (and some of the accounts
credit Borelli with the perfection of a boat that could be
rowed under water!) the diving-suit was still not per-
fected.

Kleingert of Breslau, in 1 798, incorporated much of
the experience of his predecessors in the completion of
what might well be regarded as the first practical and
self-contained breathing mechanism. The diver was
weighted for his descent, and released his weights when
he wanted to rise, being hauled to the surface as he held
on to a rope. Two pipes from above the surface gave him
fresh air and carried away the foul air from his lungs.
His apparatus was repeatedly used for depths up to
twenty feet.

William H. James is sometimes credited with having
invented the first self-contained diving-suit supplied with
compressed air, in 1825. ^^^ Augustus Siebe, intro-
ducing his first diving-suit six years earlier, forestalled
him, and James's invention was never tested. Siebe's
first diving-suit was the ''open" one in which the air
escaped from under the diver's tunic around his waist,
but he modified his original suit in 1837, by making it the
now familiar ''closed" dress of deep-sea divers, with air
pumped under pressure from the surface. In 1878, H. A.
Fleuss, in association with Siebe, Gorman and Company,
brought the diving-suit to a state of perfection that has
ensured its use ever since.

As first introduced it provided a continuous supply of
oxygen from the helmet, where it was stored in a com-
pressed state, the supply being regulated by the diver.
The carbonic acid exhaled was absorbed by caustic soda.

174

THE FISHMEN

The diver required only one attendant. He was enabled
to move freely among wreckage, and he could signal to
the surface efficiently. The suit became the standard
equipment for all kinds of underwater operations, and
was given rigorous tests — at the flooding of the Severn
Tunnel, for instance, and on various occasions when
mines were flooded, as at the Killingworth Colliery in
1882.

Many improvements have been effected in diving-suits
since. A modification of the closed-circuit type of breath-
ing apparatus used by frogmen in World War II pre-
vented bubbles ascending to the surface, which might
have been detected in enemy harbours, either visually or
by sound-devices.

A Frenchman named Le Prieur designed a device in
the 'thirties consisting of a tank of compressed air worn
across the chest by a naked diver, and connected to a
mouthpiece by a rubber hose. But he had to keep adjust-
ing a valve every time he ascended or descended, and so
precious air was wasted. Developing this invention, in
1942, Commandant J. Y. Cousteau and Emile Gagnan
designed an automatic regulator which became the
essential basis of the Aqualung system.

It supplied breathable air at any depth that the
human body could endure. Le Prieur's apparatus could
only be used down to depths of twelve or fifteen feet.
Cousteau's first automatic compressed-air diving lung
enabled him to go down to twenty-five feet. It was an
oxygen rebreathing apparatus made from an oxygen
cylinder, a gas-mask canister containing soda-lime, and
a motor cycle inner tube. The gunsmith of the Suffren^
on which Cousteau was serving, helped him to build it.
The soda-lime filtered the carbon dioxide from the
wearer's breath, and the equipment was worn on his
back, the air-tube ending in the transparent face
mask.

Cousteau continually improved the Aqualung in the

175

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

after years — he had been working on it since his pre-
war skin-diving days, when (as Gunner Cousteau) he,
Dumas and Taillez had formed a diving team. They had
hunted fish with slingshots, spears and rubber-propelled
harpoons, wearing no better underwater equipment than
goggles.

On one occasion they gave Professor Piccard a shock.
The adventurous three had watched the Professor descend
on an experimental dive in his bathyscaphe. They waited
until he had evidently reached a good depth, and then
went down after him, wearing their goggles and foot fins
and with a board, carried by one of them. They came
upon the bathyscaphe at a depth of sixty feet and
hovered for a few seconds in front of the observation
window, displaying the board, on which these words
were painted: ''Come up when you want to!" Piccard
said afterwards that it was one of the greatest surprises in
all his underwater experiences.

Before the perfection of Cousteau's Aqualung only
highly-trained experts could explore the coastal waters
to any depth. But now, with but little cost and very little
training, any swimmer can explore the waters, diving
among the wonders of the sea unhampered by encumber-
ing pipes or lines. The Aqualung wearer has no trouble
with his eardrums, which are exposed to equal pressures
— air within and water without. The air supply is
adjusted to the diver's normal breathing rhythm. Control
of the breathing can conserve the air, but it is never
wasted in any case.

Seeing and breathing are provided for by separate
devices. A mask covering part of the face, including the
nose (to equalize pressure within the mask) is fitted with
a glass eyeshield. The mouthpiece for breathing, held in
the jaws, is separated from the mask for this reason : if
the glass of the latter is broken the diver does not risk
suffocation as with older types of mask. The diver in an
Aqualung can breathe comfortably in any position, even

176

THE FISHMEN

upside-down. The fool-proof automatic valve takes care
of everything.

Cousteau went to infinite trouble and experienced
numerous periods of discomfort, risking his life on several
occasions, to perfect the Aqualung and ensure the com-
fort and safety of its wearer.

On one occasion sailors from the Suffren rowed him out
for a test of his equipment. This was in the earlier stages
of its development and he had been given to understand
that the depth-limit of the apparatus he was testing was
forty-five feet. Cousteau went down to that depth, and
then became interested in some fish, which seemed quite
friendly. He saw a huge blue bream and followed it
down beyond the safety limit, so engrossed in the fish
that he forgot his own position. Suddenly, oxygen
poisoning developed and his spine was bent back like a
tensed bow. Just before he became unconscious he tore
off the ten-pound weight he was carrying, and rose to
the surface, where the sailors saw him floating and pulled
him, still unconscious, into the boat.

He recovered after a painful few weeks of muscular
trouble, and had scarcely regained his normal health
when the war came. Later, transferred to Naval Intelli-
gence at Marseilles, he was able to resume his experi-
ments. He was soon working on the Fernez system, trying
to improve on it. It was a simple type of apparatus,
using a surface pump with an air line down to the diver.
One day Cousteau was forty feet under water when the
air tube broke. Dumas was even farther down — seventy-
five feet below the surface. Cousteau saw his friend's air
pipe rupture and knew that he was suffering a pressure
treble that of the surface. The two men reached safety,
but it was a near thing.

As time passed they went down to sixty, eighty and a
hundred feet, and began to wonder what the boundary
limit of their dives would be.

During the summer of 1943, using Cousteau's inven-

177

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

tion, he and his two friends were diving into the waters
of the Mediterranean repeatedly. They and their famihes
hved in a house near Marseilles. They carried out more
than five hundred experiments with the Aqualung, and
their underwater adventures then and since, recorded in
a number of books and magazine articles, make fas-
cinating reading. The day came when Dumas, testing
his Aqualung, went deeper than any skin diver before
him. Cousteau, from his "observation post" a hundred
feet beneath the waves, watched him disappear. Dumas
went down to two hundred and ten feet, and returned to
the surface safe and happy — in his own words, ''as merry
as a bubble". Representing the greatest advance to date
in diving equipment, the Aqualung has been used for
years, safely and comfortably, as standard equipment of
the British, French and U.S. Navies; also by shipping
companies, life-guards, harbour commissions and cinema
organizations. It is also used by the Universities of Wash-
ington, California, and Wisconsin, and many Fishery
Investigations.

Salvage companies use them continually for heavy
underwater work, and French submarine crews have
used them successfully to escape from their vessels.
Thousands of yachtsmen and sporting fishermen use
them. Doing field work in a scarcely explored realm,
marine biologists, archaeologists, hydrologists and other
scientists find them invaluable. The police have used the
services of local Aqualung owners on a number of
occasions to recover bodies.

The ultimate depth to which divers will descend wear-
ing Aqualungs is still a matter for conjecture. The count-
less investigations and experiments which have been
made to date have revealed some sensational facts. Man-
kind lives and learns, and the barriers of yesterday are
the easily-cleared hurdles of today. Dr. Halley, who
sincerely believed (a little over two hundred years ago)
that the absolute time hmit of a diver's endurance under

178

THE FISHMEN

water was two minutes, would have said that it was im-
possible for a free-swimming diver to descend a hundred
feet. But since his time scientists have found that the
human body can stand greater underwater pressures
than were once thought possible.

The human body is now believed to be no more com-
pressible than that of a fish. Modern science tells us that
a mammal may even be able to survive pressure equal
to a depth of 450 feet, although no free-swimming diver
had yet attained half that distance. Far below that record
depth of 210 feet attained by Dumas in his Aqualung lies
the world's record for the greatest descent ever made in a
flexible diving-suit, encasing the human body : 535 feet
attained by Petty Officer Wilham Bolland, R.N., on
28th August 1948. He went down into the dark water
equipped with one of Siebe, Gorman and Company's
diving-suits and helium-oxygen apparatus, at Loch
Fyne, Scotland. So the skin-divers have another 315 feet
to go to equal the full-diving-suit limit.

Common-sense tells us that no skin-diver will ever
reach such a depth. But the history of underwater ex-
ploration is one in which common-sense has frequently
retreated, overwhelmed by the advancing tide of factual
science.

Cousteau and his fellow fishmen have created a new
realm of adventure in which almost anything can happen.
The world's frogmen, contributing a vast accumulation
of knowledge and experience to the new science of under-
water exploration, endured hazards during their strange
war-time activities which equalled the perils of their com-
rades far above them in the atmospheric ocean.

But peace-time provides the fishmen with adventures
almost equally hazardous, and more humane — as when
a group of divers may go down into the shore waters
armed, not with explosives, but with implements for
severing the stinging tentacles of certain jelly-fish for
hospital research; or when Aqualung divers may help

179

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

yachtsmen to recover their anchors; or perhaps assist
technicians in laying electric cable across a river, with
swift currents running, struggling with difficult tasks
sixty or eighty feet below the surface.

Sunken vessels have provided sanctuary for countless
myriads of fish since the first primitive ships made by
man contributed some of their number, wrecked by gales
or shattered on submerged reefs, to the treasures that
rest on the world's sea-beds. For a number of centuries
all kinds of sea creatures, lurking among the submerged
wrecks, have been undisturbed by man. Thousands of
sunken ships now rest on the ocean floors, their cabins
and holds and state-rooms peopled by swimming, crawl-
ing and encrusting creatures. They hide in the nooks
and corners of the wrecks, and feed on the corals and
other marine growths that lie around or press upon the
decaying hulks.

The fishmen are now evicting the fishes — sending them
scuttling and writhing from the submerged decks, as they
regain control of the ships and send up parts of them,
and their cargoes, to the surface. Diving into the har-
bours and shore-waters of many countries, the fishmen
go down, reclaiming mankind's lost property.

The divers are using electric scooters in some places
to make explorations of sunken reefs. Huge sea-turtles
turn aside as the scooters travel at three or four miles
an hour through an element eight hundred times as
dense and heavy as air. The electric scooters are bullet-
shaped and can haul divers over considerable distances
so that they experience little fatigue. What scenes they
must see ! The sea-beds of the shore-waters are seldom
still — creatures burrow into them or break out of them :
sometimes there are a number of upheavals in a limited
area, like the eruptions of small volcanoes.

Plant-like animals cover the sunken rocks. Wrasse,
groupers and squirrel-fish lurk under the coral. Tiny fish
— red, yellow, green, blue and black — are everywhere

1 80

THE FISHMEN

along the reefs. Butterfly-fish move among the sponges
and many-coloured sea-anemones: some of the sea-
anemones, in thirty or forty feet of water, being as much
as two feet across.

Numbers of colourful fish rest on branches and sprays
of coral like birds in trees. Crustaceans of all kinds hide
among the coral bases, like little land creatures among
tree roots.

The wrecks are encrusted with coral growths. Sponges,
oysters and other creatures cover the ship's bridges and
wheelhouses and decks. Inside the more modern ones
electric wires hang in festoons. Bottles, full and empty,
swirl about with the motions of the sea or ride high under
the encrusted ceilings. Everywhere chaos and decay are
mercifully covered by the beauty of corals and under-
water plants. In these sunken ships, costly chronometers,
sextants, binoculars and other instruments, broken, cor-
roded and ruined, lie about in the debris as if they were
as valueless as the rotten pieces of wood or cordage upon
which they rest.

Silent for so long, the waters within the wrecks may
suddenly be alive with strange sounds. Quiescent for so
long, save for the rippling movements of sea animals, the
waters may suddenly be disturbed by violent con-
cussions.

Down into the dark hold, into the submerged com-
panion-ways, and through into the water-filled cabins,
come these strange shapes — men with strange lumps on
their backs and queer appendages hanging from their
jaws. As they loom and recede, or set the submerged
walls of the sunken ship shuddering with their knockings
and scrapings, hosts of sea creatures swim to and fro in
panic, or make for the outer sea.

After untold centuries the fishmen are entering the
deeps — claiming the sea as their own.

i8i

CHAPTER X

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

WORKING twenty-five feet under water, on a
coral reef midway between the Tuamota and
Phoenix Islands, during the 1936 American
Museum-Crocker Expedition to Tongareva (the name of
the reef) Dr. Roy Waldo Miner was suddenly con-
fronted with four sharks.

Wearing his underwater apparatus. Dr. Miner was
otherwise naked and vulnerable, but he remembered
some advice that had been given him by a native.
Instead of retreating, he took several plunging steps
towards the sharks, making violent swimming motions
as he walked across the sea-bed. The sharks remained
motionless for a few seconds and then turned and swam
leisurely away, perhaps frightened a little by his menac-
ing attitude. Dr. Miner returned to his work of photo-
graphing various creatures in the undersea gardens of the
lagoon.

The crevices of the coral around him concealed many
other perils. Dangerous moray eels, six or eight feet in
length, lurked in the encrusted passages of the coral
jungle. Sea-stars, immense creatures whose leathery
bodies were covered with scarlet spines which were ball-
socketed so that they could penetrate from many direc-
tions, crawled over the sea floor, sucking up animals
through their powerful central mouths, as they crawled
along, each using the countless tube feet on its sixteen
arms to make progress. Swimming around Dr. Miner's
head as he worked with his underwater camera, were all
kinds of brightly coloured fishes.

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TIGERS OF THE DEEP

He had learned by experience how to avoid or deal
with most of the dangerous creatures of the lagoon
bottom, and was afraid only of sharks. For as he said
later, there is no infallible recipe for dealing with them.
The native's advice was effective on that occasion, but,
in Dr. Miner's own words, ''Another day they might not
be so accommodating."

In his account of this incident Dr. Miner, an intrepid
and experienced explorer of the underseas, admits that
he felt fear as the sharks approached him, but does not
express an opinion one way or the other regarding this
very debatable question : whether sharks will attack men
except in self-defence. It is a problem which can only be
examined properly if the views of experienced fishmen
are compared, and this we shall do later in this chapter,
after learning something of the shark's structure and
habits.

In view of their enormous diversity fishes have been
divided into numerous sub-classes and orders, but there
are only three main divisions. These are, the Cyclosto-
mata (fishes having pouched gills, the smallest of the
three classes, comprising lampreys and hag-fishes) ; the
Teleostei, which are the bony fishes; and the group
Selachii, which includes the sharks and their allies.

The main difference between the Selachii and the other
two classes is that sharks, rays and skates have a skeleton
of cartilage or gristle, while the bony fishes have rigid,
bony skeletons. Other differences are that the skin of
a shark is covered by millions of tiny teeth. They actually
are teeth — each one has its coating of enamel and its
pulp cavity — so that they are rightly named ''dermal
denticles". They are microscopic compared with the
shark's true teeth, but are extremely sharp. Each one is a
scale with a sharp point projecting through the skin and
attached to a plate in the dermis. These placoid scales^ as
they are termed, neither overlap nor touch one another.
They are spaced in symmetrical rows with the utmost

183

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

precision, and directed backwards. Sharkskin, com-
mercially known as shagreen (although the term covers
many kinds of grained leather prepared from the skins
of animals, including wild asses, camels, sea-otters, and
seals, besides sharks) is used in the manufacture of hand-
bags, purses, spectacle-cases, etc.

Our own teeth are embedded in the bone of the jaw,
but shark's true teeth (those in their mouths) are set in
their gums. They may be sharply pointed and separate,
or blunt and articulated together, so as to form pave-
ment-like structures.

In some species the teeth roll over each other as the
shark's mouth closes, like the cylinders in a crushing mill,
producing a grinding effect of enormous power. The
sharks known as the smooth hound, ray-toothed dog and
skate-toothed varieties have these peculiar grinders,
which are rendered necessary by the food on which they
live: such as hard-shelled molluscs and crustaceans,
whose armour is ground under the bony rollers.

Sharks' teeth resemble those of the whelk in the fact
that they are replaceable, but while the whelk has its
teeth on a ribbon the shark's are individually renewable.
Each tooth has other teeth beneath it, so that a con-
tinuous succession is provided for every tooth as it wears
away or breaks off. A single tooth may be renewed more
than a hundred times in a shark's lifetime. One might
think that because the teeth are set in the creature's gums
they would not be so strong as if fixed in their jaws; but
there cannot be much wrong with the arrangement con-
sidering that sharks can bite through steel hawsers and
tear the flesh of dead whales to ribbons as though they
had been ripped by circular saws.

The white shark's teeth form one of the most ex-
traordinary structures possessed by any animal for tear-
ing and grinding its food. Crocodiles and other creatures
can renew their teeth, but the white shark is far more
efficient. If the shark is an adult it has in its upper and

184

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

lower jaw six rows of renewable teeth, and these can take
different motions according to the will of the animal. It
has an arsenal of fearsome weapons for the destruction of
its victims and enemies, and it uses them economically.

The rows of teeth are obedient to the muscles round
their bases, by means of which the shark can erect or
retract any of its rows in accordance with its require-
ments. It can even erect a portion of a row, while the rest
remain depressed in their beds. Thus the tyrant of the
ocean can measure the number and power of its weapons
and use the requisite rows or parts of rows. For the
destruction of the weak and defenceless one row of teeth
may suffice. As it snatches at its prey it may be in such a
position that certain rows of teeth are better placed to
deal with it. For formidable adversaries it can bring its
entire arsenal into play.

It has other offensive weapons. It can use its skin
aggressively and effectively. Its tail is possessed of im-
mense power and is capable of breaking a man's arm or
leg in one swift lashing stroke.

The shark again differs from the bony fishes in that it
has no air-bladder; while it is distinguished from the
rays and skates of its own group by the position of its
branchial clefts, which are always lateral, by its fan-
shaped pectoral fins, which (with few exceptions) have
restricted bases, and by the shape of its body, which is
rounded and elongated and which tapers to its tail. This
is heterocercal — unequally lobed.

Sharks breathe by gill-sacs or pouches, which open
externally on the neck by gill-slits, of which there are
from five to seven pairs. Water may also be admitted
through the spiracles : a pair of openings on the upper
side of the head which contain a rudimentary gill, and
communicate with the mouth.

The majority of sharks are viviparous, and in some the
embryos are nourished in a placenta-like structure. Those
that are oviparous, like the dogfish, which is usually

185

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

selected as typical of the Elasmobranchii (the sharks most
nearly resembling bony fish), lay their eggs in capsules
or cases of horny material, within which the embryos are
protected. The dogfishes are spread over most of the
temperate and tropical seas. They lay oblong eggs. At
each corner of the tgg a long thread is attached, and
these serve to fasten the eggs to fixed objects. Those of
some of the tropical species are beautifully ornamented
and coloured. The two British species of the dogfish shark
— the lesser and the larger spotted dogfish — belong to the
most common fishes around our coasts, and are often
confused with each other. The latter (which may attain
a length of four feet) may be identified by its larger
rounded spots, which are merely dots in the lesser kind.

During the mating season, the males and females of
the viviparous sharks seek each other and approach the
coasts, in pairs, forgetting their ferocity for a time. The
eggs are hatched at intervals in the female's oviducts ;
and the little ones issue two or three at a time. As soon
as it is born the shark becomes the scourge of the sea.
It eats all kinds of molluscs and fishes, cod-fish, flounders,
cuttle-fish — almost anything that swims or crawls in the
sea. Yet if it has been feeding well for a time it will dis-
criminate. Sometimes, if hungry, it will eat the carcasses
of men and sea-creatures — at other times it will spurn
them.

Some writers insist that sharks discriminate regarding
human food, preferring white to yellow men and both
to the negro. Whatever their tastes in the under-waters —
where they may or may not attack divers — they cer-
tainly make ferocious attacks on any humans when they
meet them on the surface. They will follow ships for
miles, greedily swallowing any food thrown to them or
dumped overboard, and immediately attack any persons
who fall into the sea. They have been known to leap into
boats when attacking fishermen, and one account
describes how a shark hurled itself into the air and

1 86

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

snapped its jaws within a few inches of the corpse of a
negro, suspended from a yard-arm twenty feet above the
sea's surface.

Many authorities say that because a shark's mouth is
placed in the lower part of its head, it becomes necessary
for it to turn over on its back before it can seize any
swimmer on the surface ; and that natives, knowing this
habit of the shark, take advantage of it and plunge their
knives into the killers as they turn. But other authorities
claim that the shark is too shrewd to make itself vulner-
able by any such action, and point out that it continually
devours creatures of the sea-beds while remaining in a
normal position, with its mouth pressed downward. The
truth may be a compromise between the two view-
points. Sharks certainly do turn over as they attack — but
not always.

The white shark — known the world over as the man-
eater — is white below and brown on its upper parts. It is
almost a stranger to Britain's shores, but stray specimens
sometimes appear, particularly in hot summers. This is
one of the largest sharks that range the oceans, and in
some seas they are so numerous that they are the terror
of natives and sailors. One specimen, whose jaws are still
preserved, measured no less than thirty-seven feet in
length. Specimens twenty feet long are fairly common.

This tiger of the deep is rivalled, in its destructive
habits, by the blue shark — another monster that has
earned the name of man-eater. It is slaty-blue on its
upper, and white on its under parts. Exceedingly destruc-
tive to shoals of food-fishes, it will pursue them even into
fishermen's nets.

The thresher shark, another variety, ranges from
twelve to fifteen feet in length, and is known by its
elongated upper tail lobe. This it uses to stun and kill
hosts of smaller fish — numbers of threshers suddenly
rushing into a school of them and herding their victims
into a mulling panic-stricken circle as they furiously flail

187

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

them before darting in and devouring them in enormous
numbers.

Having teeth somewhat different from other sharks,
the five species known as hammerheads, or hammer-
headed sharks, form a group unique among fishes, in
view of the extraordinary conformation of the head.
Instead of retaining its usual more or less pointed form,
the front part of the head of these sharks is broadened
and expanded on each side to form a hammer-like (or
more accurately, mallet-like) structure.

There is nothing in the habits of the creature that
accounts for its strange shape. The eyes of this shark are
placed at either end of the projecting extremities, and
are therefore abnormally wide apart, so that the ham-
merhead's bifocal vision must give it a remarkable im-
pression of all that it sees. The mouth is set centrally and
between the two projections, so that its corners coincide
with a line drawn centrally through them.

The hammerhead produces its young alive. From the
interior of a very fine specimen, captured near Tenby in
1839, which measured more than ten feet in length,
thirty-nine young ones — all perfectly formed and aver-
aging nineteen inches in length — were taken. The flesh
of the hammerhead is hard, coarse and uneatable, but
that of some sharks is very palatable.

All over the world — in the United States, China, India
and other places — ^shark fisheries have developed in recent
decades for the purpose of securing and marketing the
twenty-one products which can be obtained from the
bodies of sharks. For centuries the animal had been
regarded as a loathsome creature with disgusting habits
which made it a pariah and an outcast with no redeem-
ing features, commercial or otherwise. According to
travellers' accounts it was a cannibalistic brute — devour-
ing its own babies ; a gross and filthy feeder ; a treacherous
killer — Nature had certainly gone crazy in creating the
shark : a verminous abortion that was no use to man. But

188

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

advancing science has shown many of the accounts to be
old wives' tales, and numbers of the "facts" collected
about the shark mere superstitious fancies.

In some Eastern countries the natives used the fins as
food and considered them delicacies — but the flesh was
regarded as worthless and only fit for the very poorest
classes. Certain peoples of the South Seas, it is true,
covered the handles of their weapons and oars with
sharkskin — but no attempts were made to cure the
material properly, so that it was thought to be unfit for
much else, being dry and hard.

The scientist Dr. Ehrenreich was one of the first to
change all this. His researches in the early part of the
present century have contributed towards turning what
was regarded as a worthless scavenger of the seas into a
benefactor of mankind, for he showed that every particle
of a shark's carcass has some commercial value. Today,
sharkskin leather is barely distinguishable from any
other. It is in fact far stronger than cowhide and much
more durable. Strands of sharkskin are longer than those
of cowhide, and the leather from some species can be
split into as many as fourteen layers without depreciation
of its qualities. The soft skins of unborn sharks make an
excellent substitute for doeskin.

The shagreen often seen on cigarette boxes and other
articles has been specially treated. The ''teeth" have to
be removed — those tiny scales already mentioned, which
are so tough that no needle can penetrate them — before
the leather can be used for articles which have to be
handled. Shark meat, once regarded as almost uneatable,
is now consumed in thousands of tons by civilized peoples,
few of whom realize what they are eating. In London
alone, before the last war, nearly two thousand tons of
shark meat was eaten annually. Some of it was of the
dried variety from sharks, but most of it came from the
dogfish. It is probably being consumed in even greater
quantities today in most cities and towns of this country,

189

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

and in all parts of the world, and has the popular name
of ''rock salmon". But the phrase ''shark and chips" has
not yet become colloquial.

Another highly important product of the shark fisheries
is shark oil. Most of it is extracted from the fish's liver,
yet many of the encyclopaedias published in the nine-
teenth century described the liver of the shark not merely
as "uneatable" but as "very poisonous". Much of the oil
is used for mixing with cod liver oil — not as an adulterant
but because shark oil contains twice as much iodine as
any other, so that cod liver oil is greatly improved by its
addition. As much as eighteen gallons of oil have been
obtained from the liver of a single shark. The oil is also
used in many other ways — for cooking purposes, in
leather dressing, and as a lubricant, etc. The liver itself
is ground into poultry food. Apart from the liver, the
flesh of sharks yields an extract which compares favour-
ably with extract of beef for nutritive purposes.

Dyes of many kinds are manufactured from sharks'
bodies. The bones are ground up to make meal for cattle
and chickens. Glue is yet another substance that comes
from their carcasses. Some idea of the value of the shark in
the world's markets may be gained from the fact that the
shark-fin trade of other nations with China alone, in pre-
war times, necessitated the capturing of over a hundred
thousand sharks annually.

Skates and rays are among the most hideous and
repulsive of all fish. Some of them attain enormous
dimensions, while many are dangerous because of the
wounds inflicted by the spines of their tails. The true rays
lead a sedentary life, moving slowly over the floors of the
sea-shelves and seldom rising to the surface. The tail of
the ray has almost entirely lost its function as an organ
of locomotion — it acts as a simple rudder. The fish pro-
gresses by means of its pectoral fin, which maintains an
undulating motion. Nearly all rays lay eggs. Many of
them ascend rivers to a considerable distance.

190

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

The thornback is a common ray in the coastal waters
of Great Britain, and is taken plentifully along our shores.
It is so called from the number of thorny projections
scattered over its back and along its spine.

Known also by the sinister name of devil-fishes, the
eagle rays include some of the largest representatives of
their tribe, and are characterized by their flatness and
extreme width. The tail is slender and whip-like, the
mouth-cleft straight, and the teeth, when present, form
a mosaic or pavement, perfectly adapted for crushing the
shells of molluscs and other hard substances. The teeth
are arranged in seven longitudinal rows, those of the
unpaired middle row being much elongated, while the
other rows form irregular hexagons. Some of the fossils of
this genus show that the living creatures of prehistoric
times must have had tusks five inches in length. Our
modern ones may attain a length of ten feet and weigh
several hundredweights. When captured these eagle rays
lash out fiercely with their tails, the spines of which may
inflict considerable damage.

But there are even bigger devil-fishes. The largest
existing members of the family belong to the genera
Dicerobatis and Cephaloptera, and are mainly confined to
the tropical seas. In the former the pectoral fins do not
extend to the sides of the head, which is cut away in
front and furnished with a pair of appendages which are
directed forward, Hke horns, the nostrils being widely
separated, so that the creature's appearance is certainly
devilish. One of the Indian representatives of this genus
is known to measure eighteen feet across its disc, while a
weight of 1,200 pounds — over half a ton — has been
recorded. Sir W. Eliot, who gave special study to this
fish, stated that the horn-hke appendages "are used by the
animal to draw its prey into its mouth, which opens like
a huge cavern between them. The fishermen in India
say they see these creatures swimming slowly along with
their mouths open, and flapping these great sails (the

191

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

fin-rays) inwards, drawing in the smaller crustaceans on
which they feed".

There seems to be hardly any limit to the size of this
creature. Reading through numbers of accounts of them,
their dimensions are given again and again as "the
largest known" — and then exceeded again and again in
further accounts. One authority says "Swimmers very
often perish in them, or at best lose an arm or a leg".
There can be no doubt that humans have often been
bitten in two by these devil-fish, with their terrible
triangular teeth, roughly 144 in number and furnished
with saw-like edges.

A French naturalist, M. le Vaillant, was a passenger
in a sailing-ship towards the end of the last century,
crossing the warm waters of the Mediterranean, when he
saw three of these huge fish sporting around the ship.
After some persuasion the captain was induced to order
his crew to efifect their capture. They secured what M. le
Vaillant later described as "the smallest of the three".
When it was brought on board it was found to measure
twenty-eight feet in width, and to weigh over a ton. Its
mouth was easily large enough to swallow a full-grown
man.

Despite their ferocity the male and female devil-fish
show the utmost affinity towards each other and will
defend their little ones with their lives. It has happened
on numbers of occasions that one fish has been harpooned
or otherwise fatally wounded, and its mate has hung
about the boat until it shared the same fate. In one
instance where the female had been caught in a tunny
net, a male devil-fish was seen wandering about the net
for days and was at last found dead in the partition of the
net where his mate had been captured, although her
body had been removed. The sentimental words used by
the authority who records this story — "the name devil-
fish ought not to be applied to so loving and faithful a
creature" — may have some semblance of sense.

192

(Black Star)

The odds against getting the above photograph with an ordinary {^'stiW') camera were a
tnillion to one. After watching porpoises playing in the Caribbean for several hours, the
photographer suddenly snapped this seven-foot monster as it leaped into the air. Below :
another spectacular leap — by a salmon, on the River Tummel in Perthshire ; indicating
the amazing muscular power of these fish.

'I-^I.

H ' I y^t^<

■^^

:S4^

4^

M

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

Another ferocious member of the shark group is the
sting ray, called in some places the fire flaire, on account
of the bright red colour of the flesh when the fish is cut
open. These are some of the most speciahzed members of
the entire group. The pectoral fins are continued right
round the extremity of the muzzle, so that they form the
entire margin of the fish. In the centre of its very wide
disc the head and body are elevated. The typical genus
contains no fewer than twenty-five species of sting rays,
but the term should be restricted to those species with
armed tails. These tails are long, flexible and whip-like,
and even if they had no stings they could inflict a sharp
vicious blow like the cut of a horse-whip. But the
destructive efficiency of the weapon is increased by its
projecting spine, extremely sharp at the point and
double-edged: each edge being furnished with a series
of razor-keen teeth. When the sting ray is attacked or
even disturbed it can use this frightful weapon with such
strength and rapidity that the flesh of its victim can be
lashed to ribbons. Owing to the fact that aggravated
inflammation often follows wounds caused by the sting
ray in hot countries, the notion prevails among native
peoples that the creature's tail is suppHed with poison,
and some modern reference works perpetuate this error.
But there is no poisonous substance in the tail — any in-
flammation in wounds caused by it is due to other
factors, such as unsterilized dressings.

Some of the savage inhabitants of the Pacific Islands
have used the sting ray's barb in the past as a barb for
their own weapons. Affixed to a shaft it makes one of the
cruellest weapons ever fashioned by man. For its chief
merit in the eyes of the savages who have used it has
not merely been the terrible wounds it inflicts but the
fact that the jagged blade is practically certain to snap
asunder at the point where it enters the body of a foe,
leaving the barb in the wound : its peculiar shape ensur-
ing that it is virtually impossible to get it out again.

193

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

The electric rays (family Torpedinidae) are the most
curious and mysterious members of the ray group. In
common with the electric eel (Gymnotus) and the African
catfish [Malapterurus) it has the power of benumbing or
even killing its victims by delivering electric shocks. The
electric ray is represented by several genera, ranging over
the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian
Oceans, and is otherwise known as the cramp-fish, the
cramp ray, the numb-fish and the torpedo.

Dr. Albert Giinther (1830-19 14), the German-born
zoologist who, as a naturalized British subject was the
keeper of the British Museum's zoological department for
twenty years, exhaustively investigated the strange power
possessed by these fishes. He wrote: "The fish gives the
electric shock voluntarily, when it is excited to do so in
self-defence, or intends to stun or kill its prey; but to
receive the shock the object must complete the galvanic
circuit by communicating with the fish at two distinct
points, either directly or through the medium of some
conducting body. If an insulated frog's leg touches the
fish, by the end of the nerve only, no muscular contrac-
tions ensue on the discharge of the battery, but a second
point of contact immediately produces them. It is said
that a painful sensation may be produced by a discharge
conveyed through the medium of a stream of water.
The electric currents created in these fishes exercise all
the known properties of electricity: they render the
needle magnetic, decompose chemical compounds, and
emit the spark."

The torpedo is slow in its movements, quite unlike its
fellow ray the devil-fish, with its lightning-like lashing
movements. Without its power to use electricity as a
weapon it could not catch the swift and active fishes on
which it feeds. It has its mysterious power completely
under control. It does not always deliver the shock. If it is
not irritated or angered it may be touched and even
handled — contacting it at the two points which would in

194

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

Other circumstances cause the discharge of electricity —
without inflicting a shock. But if it is repeatedly irritated
or teased the discharge inevitably occurs. The shock
varies considerably in its effect on different individuals.
Fishermen may be made aware of the fact that they have
a torpedo in their meshes by a sudden shock through
their arms and chests as they are hauling in a net. An
angler may receive a discharge of electricity if the line he
is holding is wet and if it fouls one of the creatures.

In one particular experiment with a torpedo it was
placed in a vessel of water with a live duck, which at first
swam around without touching it. The torpedo became
excited, moved towards the duck and contacted it — and
the bird was instantly killed. A writer in Land and Water
in 1869, replying to Buckland the noted zoologist,
observed : 'T have taken two torpedoes in the estuary of
the Tees. You say the one you dissected had nothing in
its stomach. I was curious to see what those I caught
were living upon, so I put my knife into one, and took
from him an eel 2 lbs. in weight, and a flounder nearly
I lb. The next one I opened also, and was astonished to
find in him a salmon between 4 and 5 lbs. weight : and
what I was more astonished at was that none of the fish
had a blemish of any description, showing that your idea
of the fish killing his prey with his electrical force is quite
correct."

Experiments have shown that the upper surface of the
torpedo corresponds with the copper plate of a simple
battery, and the lower surface with the zinc plate. Among
numerous experiments which have been conducted with
electric fishes, one of the most remarkable was that of
Professor Ewart, who demonstrated the fact that the
common Skate — not included among electric fishes but
nevertheless a member of the Shark group — possessed a
rudimentary electric organ and could produce faint
electrical discharges.

It has been shown that all the electric organs of the

195

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

torpedoes, catfish and electric eels are modified muscle-
tracts. The associated nerve-endings are. comparable to
the normal terminations of the motor nerves on muscles.
But this fact contributes nothing whatever to the solution
of the problem. Nor does the structure of the muscle-
tracts shed the slightest light on the question: How do
these electric fishes produce and control their electrical
currents? The organs consist of a very large number of
rounded columns or chambers, each enclosed in a thin
membrane.

The entire structure is duplex. The columns are
separated by longitudinal and transverse partitions of
fibrous connective tissues. The nerves taper to extreme
thinness, branch considerably, and finally fuse with what
may be described as ''plates" or ''discs" of modified mus-
cular substance. Each of the columns or prismatic
chambers contains a jelly-like substance or fluid.

A rough model of the structure might be made by
making a number of piles of coins, with attenuated
bladders between them — in fact a kind of "voltaic"
group of piles. The length of the columns, and conse-
quently the number of discs in the various piles, varies
according to their position in the creature's body. The
columns extend right through the creature's body, from
the skin of the back to that of the abdomen, and are
clearly visible on both sides, so that those in the middle
of the animal are necessarily the longest and those at
either end are much shorter piles of discs.

In some large specimens of the electric fishes as many
as eleven hundred columns have been counted. A vast
amount of blood is circulated through its electric organ,
and the structure is permeated with complicated mazes
of nerves which run in every direction — far more com-
plex than any telephone switchboard's wires. How the
discs in the structure come to be charged with electricity
is still a mystery to which science has not yet provided
the complete answer.

196

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

Wiedersheim and Parker have stated : ''The side of the
electric plate on which the nerve branches out is negative
at the moment of discharge, while the opposite side is
positive." (This refers to each disc in the structure.)
"From the different arrangements of the parts the electric
shock passes in different directions in the three fishes.
In Malapterurus (the catfish) from the head to the tail;
in Gymnotus (the electric eel) in the contrary direction ; in
the torpedo from below upwards."

The organ's activity is entirely dependent upon two
factors — the nerve stimulus from the brain of the creature,
when it wills to send out an electrical discharge, and a
certain degree of freshness in the structure itself If the
nerve connections with the brain are severed there can
be no discharge — showing that it is not just a "battery".
Also, if the animal is tired, or there have been repeated
discharges, the power to produce the current temporarily
ceases.

It is a remarkable fact that the torpedo, gifted with
such exceptional power among fishes, should have one
tiny foe which is quite insensible to electric shocks. This
is the Branchellion, a parasitic creature classified with the
Hirudinea (leeches), which generally measures from an
inch to an inch and a half in length. It clings to the
torpedo and feeds upon its juices, yet remains completely
indifferent to its host's electrical discharges. The currents
must pass through this tiny creature's body, yet dis-
charges which are enough to kill fishes thousands
of times larger than Branchellion leave it quite un-
harmed.

The remora, or sucking-fish — a popular name for any
species of the family Echineididae and order Discocephali —
is a parasitic fish of a different kind, averaging two feet in
length, which specializes in its attachments to various
creatures larger than itself. Some confine themselves to
dolphins, some to swordfish, and so on. The common
species on the Atlantic coast of the United States is the

197

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

shark-sucker {Echineis naucrates), which is usually found
fixed to sharks, although it may be found attached to a
few other species. It seems to be a completely worthless
fish, for it has no food value and yields no commercial
products. Yet men have found a use for it.

When Columbus, the year after his first voyage of
discovery, returned to the Caribbean, he lingered among
the south coast islets, which he named "the Gardens of
the Queen" and watched the Indians using the remora
as a fishing device. They fastened cords to the tails of
remoras, threw them into the sea, and waited until they
attached themselves to larger fishes, which were then
hauled ashore. Columbus saw them haul in a huge
turtle, with the sucking-fish still clinging to it.

The remora's peculiarity, making it in the words of
one authority the "hitch-hiker of the sea", is its dorsal
fin, which is at first like those of other fishes, but changes
during its lifetime into a complex sucker, shaped like the
sole of a shoe. This gives it a powerful hold on any object
or creature to which it attaches itself It hangs on to
larger fishes until a meal is reached, which it shares with
its host and then digests as it is carried along. If it feels
that its host (being replete) is not likely to provide it with
another meal for a while, it will detach itself and look
around for another fish in a hungrier condition. Yet it
does not seem to have any power of discrimination be-
tween living and dead things, and will fasten itself to the
hull of a ship as firmly as to a shark's belly.

There are many old legends and historical accounts
which indicate that the ancients believed in the remora's
power of arresting and detaining ships in full sail through
their power of suction. Mark Antony's galley in the battle
of Actium was said to have been held fast by a group of
remoras, which defied the efforts of several hundred men
to free the vessel. Some old writers give the name
"reversus" to the sucker-fish, from the erroneous idea
that the creature swims upside-down. As it clings to a

198

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

bigger fish or object it may sometimes give that im-
pression, but it actually swims in the normal position.

It is a curious fact that the inherent laziness of the
sucking-fish should be linked with a form of laziness in
man — for using them to capture other fish is probably the
least strenuous way of capturing the creatures of the sea.
The Caribbean Indians — unlike the fishermen of China,
Australia and other parts — treat remoras as pets — even
as intimate friends. Before and after their hunting trips
they talk freely with their remoras, encouraging them,
cajoling them, and praising them; fully believing that
the animals are intelligent and can understand every
word they say, and that they like being caressed and
praised for their (entirely passive) eflforts.

Some of mankind's strangest customs and habits are
connected with sharks and their near relatives. Ofif the
Canary Islands, for instance, the naked divers once used
a peculiar method of disarming the stinging ray. The
native would go down into the water without a weapon
when he had learned that a stinging ray lurked upon the
sea-bed near the shore, and would watch his oppor-
tunity, circling the venomous creature, and then sud-
denly dart in and bite ofif the formidable sting just above
the jagged blade. Deprived of its weapon, the fish would
lash its tail in fury, but could be safely lassoed and
hauled to the surface.

The period from 1925 to 1928 was a time of shark
activity in the world's oceans which was probably
greater than any corresponding period for many cen-
turies— certainly it has not been equalled since. Innumer-
able cases of the capture of out-sized sharks in most of
the world's shore-waters were reported, and there were
many cases of fierce struggles between human beings and
the killers.

Attacks by sharks of exceptional size had been increas-
ing in the years immediately prior to the period. To take
but one of the earlier instances, recorded at the time by

199

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Mitchell-Hedges, the famous explorer, big-game hunter
and fisherman :

According to the London Daily Express dated 15th
June 1922, Mitchell-Hedges had been on an expedition
to South America since the previous December, and was
preparing to go to Panama via Kingston, Jamaica, when
he received news that a white girl of 15, Miss Adlin
Lopez, had been killed by a shark at Kingston. The
message begged him to stop there on his journey and
capture the monster.

The child had been bathing in Kingston Harbour with
a little boy of five. She was standing alone, in four feet
of water near a small wooden pier, when she suddenly
shrieked ''Father ! Father ! Help me !" Her father rushed
to her and found that her leg had been cut oflf at the
thigh as though by a razor. She told him she had felt
no pain, "only a tickling sensation", before she fainted
in his arms. Next day the girl died in a nearby hospital.

It was estimated that the pressure required to sever a
limb close to the body in that way, in a single snap,
would require a strength in the shark's jaws equivalent
to a pressure of one and a half tons. Mitchell-Hedges
made his preparations to capture the shark. He attached
five lines to gasoline drums and moored the drums to the
bottom with an iron weight. He baited the lines with
massive pieces of meat.

His first attempt was quickly successful in attracting
the shark, showing that it had been lurking near the
shore, with its appetite only whetted, awaiting another
meal. It struck at one of the baits, and the sea around
was immediately thrown into a state of turbulence as the
shark lashed and struggled among the bobbing drums.
A huge crowd assembled on the beach and watched
the shark's efiforts to free itself of the great steel hook.
With a final convulsive snap it actually buckled the
great steel hook, tearing its barb ofif — but too late to
escape.

200

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

This shark, a female, was abnormal in many ways.
Although only eleven feet long its girth was nearly nine
feet. It carried three young ones, nearly ready to be
born. It had a double fracture of its backbone, which
nature had repaired by forming a large cyhndrical
growth around the affected part. Experts reached the
conclusion that the shark was insane — insanity is by no
means confined to humans — through its injuries and
other malformations. So the incident ended: the shark
paying for killing the child with the loss of its own life
and the prenatal deaths of its young.

Between 1922 and 1925 sharks appeared along the
world's coastlines in increasing numbers.

Early in 1925 they began to invade Britain's home
waters. The Daily Chronicle, referring to a report that
sharks had been seen in Carmarthen Bay, told its readers
that they had no cause for alarm, and reminded them
that "there are sharks and sharks". It went on: "150
different species have been described. Those found in
temperate latitudes are quite unhke the tiger sharks and
man-eaters of the tropics." It admitted that sharks fre-
quenting home waters became troublesome to fishermen
on rare occasions, by taking their bait and driving away
fish, but this kind of shark was ''comparatively harm-
less".

The Birmingham Weekly Post of 2nd May recorded the
capture of "the heaviest skate ever caught", at Brighton
a few days before. "It weighs," the paper declared,
"250 lbs., or 50 lb. more than the naturalists of a century
ago thought it ever attained."

The Post writer then added a fact or two which made
the weight seem insignificant, giving an account of a
devil-fish "caught in 1823" which "weighed nearly five
tons" and was so monstrous that "three pairs of oxen,
one horse and 22 men all pulHng together could not
convey it far".

Only two days later a spectacular fight occurred be-

201 G*

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

tween a shark and a porpoise in the Firth of Clyde, end-
ing in the death of the porpoise after the shark had bitten
off its tail. Such fights are certainly not common around
British coasts.

Sharks, rays and skates appeared in various places
during ensuing weeks, until on 25th July a large sting
ray weighing over forty pounds was caught in the West
End bathing pool, West Park, Jersey, after killing a
young man named Gould.

Only the day before a large sting ray weighing slightly
less — thirty-six pounds — was captured and killed by boys
fishing in the Solent oflf Yarmouth. They were fortunate
in their avoidance of the ray's barbed weapon.

Around this time, a member of the crew of the Royal
Sovereign lightship, seven miles off Eastbourne, angling
for congers, hooked a shark of the man-eating variety.
He and other men hauled it aboard the lightship, after
it had fought fiercely in the water. A man had been
bitten by a shark near Weymouth, some time before
this, without serious injury, and a ten-foot hammerhead
had been caught in Carmarthen Bay.

Bathers around Britain were alarmed throughout the
1925 summer by the appearance of sharks and stinging
rays in numerous places. As late as October that year
a huge shark was caught oflf Lyme Regis, Dorset, by
some fishermen in a boat about a mile from shore. The
two men had a desperate struggle with the man-killer
before they were able to dispatch it and haul it into their
boat. A little later the catch of a drifter which reached
Ramsgate — the vessel had been fishing for herrings —
included no fewer than thirty sharks, some of them of
considerable size. So it went on through the summers of
1926, 1927 and 1928. On the South Wales coast the 1927
summer was a record one for sharks — six were caught at
Porthcawl, fourteen in Swansea Bay, and twelve in
Carmarthen Bay.

During these years sharks were killing numbers of

202

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

bathers in all parts of the world — and men were killing
sharks.

On 1 8th February 1928, the largest shark ever caught
on rod and line was landed by Mr. H. White- Wickham
of London — a gargantuan thresher which he fought for
hours at Whangaroa, New Zealand. The Auckland Weekly
Mews published a photograph of Mr. White- Wickham
standing beside his extraordinary catch. On the fish,
figures were painted showing its weight: 832 lb. —
nearly seven and a half hundredweights.

All these accounts — which might be supplemented
ad infinitum by others, describing battles with man-killing
monsters during those years and since, in the shore-
waters of all countries — are concerned with the activities
of sharks on the surface. They give us no impression of a
harmless fish that might be scared away by splashing
motions of the arms and legs. But (as some writers on
skin-diving and underwater exploration firmly assert) it
may be that the shark's attitude towards man is very
diflferent when it meets him several fathoms down, or on
the sea-bed itself.

We have now learned enough of the shark's structure
and habits to enable us to examine some of the state-
ments made by fishmen regarding this controversial
question : Is the shark harmless in the underwater regions
if left alone and not attacked by divers ?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes some varieties as
''dangerous" or 'Very dangerous" to man, but — in
common with many other reference works — states that
the basking shark is "quite harmless unless attacked".
Chambers's Encyclopaedia says that some of the larger forms
"sometimes devour men who swim incautiously in warm
seas" — but does not make it clear whether this applies to
surface or underwater swimming.

Captain Jacques- Yves Cousteau, universally recog-
nized as the leading authority on underwater explora-
tion and co-inventor of the Aqualung, has definite ideas

203

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

about sharks. In an article in the National Geographic
Magazine for October 1952 he describes one of his
numerous meetings with them. He is the leader of the
1951-52 expedition, on the Calypso, into the Mediter-
ranean and Red Seas ; has reached the objective of his
voyage — the island of Abu Latt — and is "down under"
in the coral kingdom clad only in goggles, trunks and
flippers. (The compressors they had been using for
Aqualung diving were temporarily out of order.) Under-
water with him are Professor Pierre Drach, Wladimir
NesterofF, the biologist, and Dr. de la Bruniere. Suddenly
a five-foot shark catches sight of the four men and rushes
towards* them at terrific speed.

''Fortunately," writes Cousteau, ''when he was only
three feet away, the shark slued around at twenty to
thirty knots and shot away. I did not wait for him to
make a second pass. I retreated to the barge." Cousteau,
safe above the surface, pondered the way the shark had
upset not merely their peace of mind but some of their
preconceptions about sharks. ''First, this fish had seen us
from as far away as we had seen him. His eyesight, or
some other sense, must have been very keen to permit
him to find my position instantly. Second, he had attacked
deliberately, at great speed, though we had expected
sharks, in these coastal waters, to be very cautious.
Third, he had veered away sharply and rapidly at a
moment when I was making a frantic and probably
futile eflfort to get out of his line of attack. In brief, he
could hardly be said to have manoeuvred poorly, as we
had often been told."

He goes on to describe his relations with sharks in the
weeks that followed. He says that sudden gestures would
drive them away, but they would quickly return ; that if
the divers turned their backs on them the sharks would
swoop at their legs at once ; that if they faced the creatures
and swam in their direction the sharks would retreat —
but only for a while ; so that Cousteau and his colleagues

204

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

decided that the important thing to do was to gain time
and get out of the water at the first opportunity.

When they had regained their Aqualungs they went
down to one hundred and sixty feet, into what Cousteau
describes as ''the sharks' merry-go-round", photograph-
ing the creatures and their surroundings. Below them
sharks were wandering over the sand shoal. Above them,
silhouetted against the shining surface, the long dark
shadows of the sharks moved menacingly. Watching the
ferocious beasts swimming around his naked companions,
who now included Dumas (whose ankles were actually
sniffed at by an enormous shark before Cousteau hooted
loudly through his mouthpiece and drove it away)
Cousteau reflected on the strange scene, and could only
conclude — in the words of his article — that they were
all mad.

His final conclusion on the matter was that sharks are
cowards — ferocious cowards, but still cowards — and that
they look upon the diver as a strange bubble-blowing
fish with two tails — "worth investigating but not quite
safe to charge".

Cornel Lumiere, an explorer, both of the world's land
and sea surfaces and of the under-waters as a diver and
swimmer, regards sharks as harmless unless attacked. In
his book Beneath the Seven Seas"^ he says : "Once I belonged
to the timids who visualize a shark stuffed with human
arms and legs, every time they see a few feet of ocean.
It took a little time and some special eflfort, but I now
share the ranks of those who maintain that it is a good
deal safer to play round with a shark under water than
with a blonde on Broadway." He adds that if you leave a
shark alone he will leave you alone, and adds : "Read
Hass, Craig, Cousteau and they will tell you, unless you
provide specific attractions for the shark, he will not
come near you."

Lumiere says that "of some forty varieties of sharks,

♦Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1956.

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

only one is classified as a man-eater", and gives its name :
the White Shark. One need go no further than the
Encyclopaedia Britannica to find that ''altogether some
hundred and fifty species have been described", with
references to many of them as dangerous. But Lumiere
defines the conditions under which they may be danger-
ous, and is no doubt right regarding the sharks he has
met personally. He says that sharks will certainly attack
if they smell blood. ''If you hurt yourself on a coral-
head," he writes, "or otherwise, and are bleeding, go
into the boat until it stops. If a fish you shoot is bleeding
badly, get the bloody thing in the boat fast!" He goes
on to say that most of the sharks met with close to the
shore are sand sharks, and cowards. But his statement
that "no shark will stand up to you if you swim to meet
him" seems a little sweeping. He has admitted that the
white shark is a man-eater — and there are evidently
many huge sharks outside Lumiere's experience which it
would be insane folly to approach.

Regarding rays, Lumiere makes some remarkable
statements. He says: "Rays are colourful and pleasant
playmates to the spearman." They have no mean streak
in them, he declares, so that "you may touch them
safely if you feel so inclined". He says regarding sting
rays that he actually touched them, yet in no instance
did they even try to strike : "Once I was surrounded by
half a dozen of these graceful creatures while they were
executing a perfect underwater ballet."

Lumiere has an interesting reference to the noted
fishman Hans Hass whom he describes as "moving about
amongst sharks and patting them with a fatherly hand".

Towards the end of his book he makes two further
references to sharks. In the first of these he tells us that
Cupric acetate has been discovered to be the most
effective shark repellent, and that it is now standard
equipment in the U.S. Navy and Air Force life-jackets.
In his final reference (p. 223) he asks "How harmless

206

TIGERS OF THE DEEP

are nurse sharks?" These are the dogfishes — sharks
quite distinct from the white shark, described earher by
Lumiere as being the only dangerous variety. He answers
his own question in these words: "Two young, but ex-
perienced, divers in Puerto Rico required a combined
score of twenty-five stitches to close up wounds inflicted
upon them by a shark less than five feet long. The little
nurse shark weighed only 35 lb." Nurse sharks (or dog-
fishes) are among the most abundant sharks found in
shore-waters.

John Sweeney in Skin Diving and Exploring Underwater'^^
attributes all danger from sharks to fear. He says (p. 123) :
'Tear of the unknown, the dark muddy depths, the black
inside of a wreck, the creepy light under a wharf, or the
ghoulish arena of lake water, must be recognized for
what it is and cast aside." He declares that "many
divers, even with years of experience, still fear sharks.
This is principally because they have read fanciful books
and articles by writers who have never had an encounter
with a shark".

Some might query Mr. Sweeney's statement and point
out that most divers would be inclined to trust their own
personal knowledge of sharks in preference to any gained
from fanciful books and articles.

Mr. Sweeney, in the same page, makes what is
probably the most extraordinary statement ever made by
a writer on the world's oceans. He says: "There is
nothing to harm you under the surface of the sea. You
take more chances on a Sunday-afternoon drive in your
car than you do swimming leisurely underwater." Some
of us will still hold to our opinions that men like Cous-
teau, Lumiere, Hass, Drach, Dumas and Doukan — to
mention only a few of the fishmen — need more courage
than Sunday-afternoon car drivers.

Marcel Isy-Schwart, an undersea explorer who has
killed hundreds of ferocious sea creatures, says in Hunting

♦Frederick Muller Ltd., 1956,

207

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Big Fish:^ *' Underwater hunting is evidently not a sport
without risks." He gives accounts of many of his fights
with big fish, and says of the harmlessness or otherwise of
sharks : "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the shark
has had enough (if he sees the menacing harpoon pointed
at him) and flees ; the hundredth time he is something to
be reckoned with. On the other hand, if this same shark
sees a bather breaking the surface of the water and wav-
ing arms and legs in ignorance of the dangerous locality,
he may be tempted to attack him." Yet splashing about
in the water is regarded by many as the surest way to
frighten away sharks !

♦Burke, London, 1954.

208

CHAPTER XI

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

THE whale shark has no special connection with
whales, except that it competes with them for
the title of the world's largest creature. The use
of the word ''whale" in its name is misleading — the word
simply means ''great", as it is often used in other con-
nections, and the term "The Great Shark", although less
often used to describe the fish, is the one that will be used
in this chapter to prevent confusion.

It is certain that either the great shark or the blue
whale (sometimes called the sulphur bottom) is the biggest
creature in the sea. Whichever holds the honour auto-
matically becomes the largest in the whole world, for the
largest land animal (the bull African elephant, standing
eleven feet at the shoulder and weighing seven tons) is
only a fraction of the size or weight of either.

Many authorities unhesitatingly vote for the blue
whale [Balaenoptera musculus) as the world's largest
creature. Specimens have been recorded up to a length
of 1 08 feet, weighing 131 J tons — figures which certainly
make those relating to the African elephant look insig-
nificant.

Specimens of the great shark have measured 100 feet
— but so little is known of it, that it is at a great disad-
vantage when comparisons are made between it and the
blue whale. Many thousands of observations of the blue
whale have been made to get the figure "108 feet", but
only a few of the great shark to get the figure "100 feet".
Taking available statistics, the average length of the great

209

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

shark is greater than that of the blue whale — which some
authorities give as seventy or eighty feet, and some as
only sixty feet. We cannot dogmatize — the question can
only be settled by further investigation.

Apart from size, the great shark and the blue whale
have little in common. The former is a fish, the latter
is a mammal. Both are regarded by zoologists as "harm-
less"— but again, we know so little of the great shark's
habits that the word, in its case, means nothing, while
the fact that the blue whale lives mainly on tiny creatures
and is apparently not aggressive does not mean much:
we should perhaps say "harmless if not attacked".

Sharks can remain under the surface for any length of
time without coming up for air. Both whales and sharks
are absolutely helpless on land, although the whale is a
breathing animal. But the whale, unlike the shark, is also
helpless if it remains too long under the sea — it suffocates.
So far as our knowledge goes — and it is of course limited
regarding the habits of whales when far from land or
shipping — whales can stay under water for as long as one
hour and forty-five minutes. When the whale rises to
breathe it "spouts" or "blows". This action is often
described as the expulsion of water taken in at the mouth :
it is nothing of the kind. The whale has a nostril on the
highest part of its head, and through this it breathes out
forcibly when it comes to the surface, expelling air, not
water, although the expulsion causes a jet of water
vapour to rise above the surface of the sea. Man's know-
ledge of the whale shark is so meagre that stories of its
harmlessness may one day be regarded as worthless
legends. Its huge transverse mouth is certainly capacious
enough to receive a man. Its throat is larger than those
of other sea monsters — even larger than the throats of
other sharks within whose stomachs the bodies of humans
have been discovered.

Whatever may be the truth regarding sharks and
their contacts with divers, even the most ferocious of

210

them are mild and gende compared with the killer
whales.

These are, beyond question, the most cruel, voracious
and bloodthirsty of all swimming creatures ; and we shall
see that their chief victims are other species of whales.
Man has waged ceaseless war against whales for centuries
but anything that he has done in attacking and killing
them cannot compare with the savage assaults of the
killers, which had been going on for eons before man
appeared on the earth, and which continue incessantly
with undiminished fury.

The killer whale is a large porpoise, of the family
Delphinidae^ and constituting the genus Orcinus — it is
sometimes called the orca or grampus. They reach a
length of about twenty-five feet and are therefore smaller
than many of the whales that they attack. The head is
rounded and the lower jaw a little shorter than the
upper. The dorsal fin is remarkably high in the adult
males, and resembles a huge broadsword, nearly vertical
and about six feet from base to tip — in the female it is
prominent but shorter. The colour is peculiar — black
above and on the fins and white below, but the white of
the belly extends forward to the end of the lower jaw,
and upward on each side where it forms a large, oblong,
white area. Above and somewhat behind each eye is
another conspicuous white spot, also oblong. In the
young the white areas are tinged with yellow. The upper
and lower jaws of the killers are armed with stout,
powerful, curved teeth — anything from forty to fifty-six
of them.

Other cetaceans — members of the whale family — feed
chiefly on plankton and do not eat other whales. But the
killers, hunting in packs, feed upon warm-blooded
aquatic animals, and mainly on young seals, porpoises
and the larger whales — in short they are cannibals, eat-
ing their own kind. In one instance the stomach of a
killer was found to contain the bodies of thirteen smaller

211

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

porpoises and fourteen seals. The best known species,
Orcinus orca^ inhabits all seas. Another species in found in
the South Pacific. Others have been described with
doubtful validity.

This preliminary description of the killer whale gives
us a mental picture of whales as monsters of the sea who
are attacked from without and within — by man, in his
continuous slaughterings of them for the valuable com-
mercial products which they yield, and by their own kind,
the killers, which are even more ruthless and blood-
thirsty.

Working in packs, like the wolves of the sea that they
are, the killers will chase a school of porpoises or a huge
group of eels and work their way through it, from the
rear to the front, voraciously eating numbers of their
victims as they proceed. They will violently attack and
smash small boats, and devour anything that falls into
the water from them. On some occasions they have split
ice-floes a foot and a half thick by striking them with
their heads and backs.

John Craig and Ernie Crockett, two fishmen with ex-
ceptional experience as underwater hunters, were shoot-
ing undersea pictures near a grotto coral formation in
fifty feet of water oflf Cedros Island, shortly before the
last war, with the aid of a Mexican named Antonio,
when they had an uncomfortable experience with a
killer. Crockett was down under, wearing a helmet which
gave him telephonic communication with the other two
on the surface. Suddenly, the Mexican turned to Craig
with an ashen face — he was wearing the phone head-
piece— and said, ''Johnee, he's got a killer whale!"
Craig, kneeling there on the deck, could hardly believe
it. Killers seldom came near the shore, except when very
hungry. But Craig looked down towards the beach and
saw a herd of seals there — he realized the Mexican's
words were true.

Crockett had gone into the cave, and had been explor-

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WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

ing it with his underwater torch when the mouth of the
cave had been suddenly darkened. He turned round.
Blocking the entrance was a full-grown killer whale. The
entrance was narrow and Crockett had only just man-
aged to squeeze through some minutes before. The killer
could only get his snout through, but he retreated again
and again and hurled himself forward, trying to smash
his way in ; and kept biting at the coral to try to enlarge
the opening.

Meanwhile Crockett discussed the situation with those
above. They told him to remain calm and wait for the
killer to go. After a while the beast did leave. Those on
deck saw him break water 150 feet away, to "blow".
He had a four-foot dorsal fin. Craig's worst fear was that
the animal would see Crockett's air tube, which led from
the sea on to the deck. If it had, it might have rushed
madly at it and bitten it through — killers have shown an
uncanny understanding of the purpose of air-tubes on
many occasions — resulting in Crockett's death under-
water or horrible mutilation if he had risen to the
surface.

But the killer seemed unaware of the tube — he dived
and came up to "blow" several times, and seemed to be
waiting for Crockett to emerge. Craig decided that if he
could only drive the seals from the beach into the water,
the killer might follow them. He jumped into a skiff and
pulled for the shore — not a little nervously, for he knew
the killer whale's fondness for upsetting small boats.
Others on the ship were waving frantically to distract the
killer's attention from Craig. He reached the shore and
the seals, panicking, threw themselves into the sea.

At that moment the killer came up for another "blow"
— saw the seals diving in and shot at them like a thunder-
bolt. In less than a hundred yards' run he had snapped
three of the seals in halves and had them inside him,
scarcely slackening speed as he gulped them down. The
herd of seals zigzagged desperately — curved, retreated,

213

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

rushed on — trying frantically to escape. The killer got a
few more as the herd raced out to sea, never relaxing the
chase until all had vanished towards the horizon.

They phoned down to Crockett and told him to come
up. He slipped the catches on his shoe-weights, inflated
his diving-dress, and rose to the surface, forgetting the
rule that he should not rise faster than his bubbles. He
hit a corner of the boat as he touched the surface, stunned
himself, and was unconscious when they got his helmet
off. His first words were — in gasps — ''Why the — h-hell
didn't you — send me down a camera?"

The killers have not the slightest fear of humans;
whether men are swimming naked on the surface, wear-
ing Aqualungs in the under-waters, clothed in diving-
suits, riding the sea in boats or standing on the shore.
They hurl themselves at man whenever they have the
chance. Compare their aggressiveness with that of some
(not all) species of sharks.

There are numerous instances of humans riding sharks
of the more harmless varieties. It is a common practice
along the shore-lines of some tropical countries.

Probably few people have come into closer contact
with sharks than John Brandon Siebenaler and his wife
Marjorie. When he married her he promised her that
they would have their own private sea. He fulfilled his
promise a few years ago, and built his dream aquarium
on a 600-foot stretch of Fort Walton Beach, Florida, as a
commercial proposition — the "private sea" being at
specified times open to the public. The venture, Gul-
farium Ltd., cost an initial half-million dollars. It was
stocked with 10,000 miscellaneous fish — an open-air pool
surrounded by wire fencing. The aquarium's battleship-
like structure was opened in August 1955.

The day came when Siebenaler wanted sharks. He
took his wife out in his catchboat, with a small crew, and
rounded up five sharks. Swimming among them, Sieben-
aler seized each shark by its fins, caressing it in his arms,

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WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

and Steered it into a holding tank, in which they were all
brought ashore and put into the aquarium.

Four of the sharks died shortly after. They had not
been injured in any way. Siebenaler said, ''They died of
fright — or maybe from the emotional shock of being
touched by a human being." Mr. and Mrs. Siebenaler
spent the whole of one night "walking" the fifth shark —
going to and fro with him the whole length of the tank,
caressing him and trying to coax him out of his state of
nervous shock. But they could not overcome his fear with
all their kindness — like the other four he died of fright.

Siebenaler declared that it was the usual story of
sharks in aquariums. Other fish settle down and get
used to their keepers and their surroundings. Sharks
never lose their fear of human beings and few last longer
in aquariums than several weeks.

Whales — and the term includes dolphins and por-
poises— belong to the order Cetacea. Dolphins and
porpoises (including the narwhal with its curious single
tusk) have been described in an earlier chapter, among
creatures which leap from the sea's surface. There are
three sub-orders of the Cetacea : Mjstacoceti, including
all those whales whose teeth are rudimentary and useless
and are replaced by whalebone, or baleen; Odontoceti,
which includes all whales having teeth — sperm whales,
killer whales, porpoises and dolphins ; and Archaeceti, the
extinct whales. Dismissing the third class as of little
interest to us in this chapter, we confine our survey to the
typical whales of the first two sub-orders, the baleen or
toothless whales, and the toothed ones.

Whalebone is the material in a whale's jaws which
enables it to strain its food. It is formed as a development
of the ridges, often horny in character, which are found
on the roof of the mouth in all mammals. It takes the
form of triangular plates, which diflfer greatly in size,
proportions and colour in various species. Plates to the
number of two or three hundred are attached to their

215

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

bases transversely on each side of the whale's mouth.
They are smooth and straight on the outer edges but the
inner ones are fringed with bristle. These bristles become
matted together, forming the meshes of the whale's
"sieve", with which it is able to strain from the sea- water
which floods into its mighty mouth the small fish and
planktonic creatures upon which it feeds. The water is
squeezed out through the baleen strainers by the action
of the whale's tongue.

Baleen is widely used commercially, owing to its great
lightness, strength and flexibility, the ease with which it
can be split, and its power to stand high temperatures
without change. ''Whalebone" is a misleading term, for
the substance is not bone ; nor is it fin, as implied in the
commercial term ''whale-fin". It is an epidermic (or
skin) substance closely resembling hair in its nature. One
of its most ancient uses was in the making of helmets.
In the course of history it has been used for whips,
surgical instruments, for adding gloss to certain kinds of
cloth, for umbrella frames, and in countless other ways,
not forgetting the use which its name immediately sug-
gests : for those compressive devices of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries which kept the feminine
figure within fashionable limits.

The tongue of a whale, which it manipulates so eflii-
ciently in association with its enormous strainer, is the
greatest of all tongues — those of whale sharks, elephants
and all other big animals are insignificant appendages
compared with it.

A whale killed in 1932, which weighed 119 tons and
was 89 feet in length was found to have a tongue weigh-
ing 3 tons 3 cwts.

Although the general form of the whale is fish-like, we
have only to consider the characteristics of fishes — in all
their diversified forms, sizes and colours — to realize that
it is not a fish but a mammal. It is as much a mammal as
a horse, a cow, or man himself. It is in fact a mammal

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WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

which has become adapted to hving in water, but it still
retains its mammalian characteristics : for it has warm
blood, breathes air with its lungs, suckles its young at the
breast, and has the hairy covering possessed (sparsely or
thickly) by all mammals. Its tail is not placed vertically,
as in fishes, but horizontally — a position which accords
better with the animal's need to keep rising to the surface
for air. Its external fish-like form is perfectly suited to its
life in the sea, but that does not make it a fish, any more
than an ape's general resemblance to a human form
makes it a man.

A bat is a mammal, not a bird — it has none of the
characteristics of a bird, except its bird-like shape. A
great part of its existence is spent on the wing, but it
remains a mammal in the air, even as a whale remains a
mammal in the sea.

If the whale was covered with hair, even sparsely, it
might interfere with its rapid movement through the
water. Its upper-lip and chin whiskers are among the
few hairs on its body which link it with mammals of all
kinds, from walruses with their bushy whiskers and
coverings of short, closely-compressed hair, and polar
bears with their thick fur coats. To keep it warm, even
in icy seas, the whale has, in place of hair, a thick layer
of non-conducting material — its blubber. Its fore-limbs
are mere paddles, with little power of motion except at
the shoulder joints. But beneath their smooth and con-
tinuous outer coverings they possess all the bones, joints,
and even most of the muscles, nerves and arteries of the
human arm and hand. Buried deep in the interior of the
animal, and now quite useless to it, are rudiments of
limbs corresponding to the hind-legs of the higher
animals.

Whalers recognize several groups of baleen (or whale-
bone) whales, to which they have given such names as
right whales, humpbacks, finners or finbacks, and
sulphur bottoms, although the latter is really a kind of

217

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

rorqual. The right whales are heavy and compact in
form, and are built for cruising about slowly in search of
the small floating invertebrates which are their main
food. The humpbacks are bulky but uncouth — heads
broad and rounded in front but flat on top, with rows of
hemispherical tubercles — they can attain a fair speed,
due to the length of their flippers.

The finners, or rorquals, which are built for speed, and
which prey largely on fish which they have to chase and
catch, are the ocean greyhounds of the baleen whales.
Their bodies are long and streamlined, and their necks
partially mobile. The typical finback — the most com-
monly observed and best known of the finners — ranks
next in size to the blue whale. Its shape is extremely
attenuated. The adult individuals sometimes reach a
length of eighty feet. Finbacks are remarkable for their
assymmetrical coloration: the whale's back is grey,
striped longitudinally with white, and the lower jaw is
also white on one side only.

The sperm whale {Physeter macrocephalus) is a member
of the toothed whales (Odontoceti), the second division of
the Cetacea, and the division which comprises porpoises,
dolphins (including the killer whales), and bottlenosed
or beaked whales.

Fully grown the sperm whale reaches a length of sixty
feet. The female is much smaller.

The head of the sperm whale is immense, although all
whales do not have large heads in proportion to their
bodies. It is shaped like a great elongated wedge, with
the thicker end uppermost and the edges and smaller end
rounded. The blowhole is single and situated at the end
of the snout on the left side, and the lower jaw is very
narrow and much shorter than the upper. The two sides
of the lower jaw are joined together anteriorly for about
one-half the length. It has rudimentary upper teeth. The
lower ones (forty-four in number and cone-shaped) fit
into pits in the upper jaw when the mouth is closed. The

218

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

face of a whale might be best described as that of a
creature with a left nostril only, at the top of its nose, a
receding chin, and something resembling a hare-lip.

The back of this whale with a small fin, is raised in a
series of low irregular humps posteriorly. The pectoral
fins are broad and about six feet long. Sperm whales
occur in all seas except the Arctic and Antarctic, but
they are essentially creatures of the tropics. Sperm whales
swim in herds or schools which are much diversified in
character. Some comprise only young males; others
females and their young led by one old bull, as a kind of
* 'schoolmaster" or mentor; others consist entirely of old
males. These old bulls do not always swim together. They
are often encountered wandering singly, as if they had
lost all interest in their fellow creatures. They are ill-
tempered and very pugnacious, and do not hesitate to
attack the boats of the whalers.

The sperm whale feeds mainly on big squids. Its
great strength and powerful under-teeth enable it to
dislodge them from their rocky retreats at the bottom
of the sea.

The bottlenosed whales comprise four or five genera
of small whales — none of them exceed forty feet in
length. They are toothed, like the sperm whale, but
never have more than four teeth (regularly implanted in
their jaws) although some species have numbers of tiny
rudimentary teeth, which seem to be useless, imbedded
in their lips. The head of all the forms, at least in the
young, is pointed. In the bottlenosed whale of the North
Atlantic the forehead gradually increases in size with
age, so that the creature literally grows a beak, strong
and narrow and somewhat resembling the shoulder and
neck of a bottle : a development which gives the animal
its name. The beaked whales of other genera are much
less abundant. They travel, both in groups and in pairs.

One bottlenose, described by John Hunter (the British
anatomist and surgeon who did valuable work in his

219

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

investigation of the structure of whales) was caught
above London Bridge in 1 798, having wandered far from
its native waters.

The beluga, or white whale, is another toothed whale :
one of the dolphin family, closely related to the narwhal.
Its body is only from twelve to sixteen feet in length, but
has graceful proportions, and a creamy- white colour : it
is in fact the most beautiful of all whales. The flippers are
short, the head is arched and sinks abruptly to the
creature's short, rounded snout. Its teeth are small and
conical, and number eight to ten in each jaw. This whale
has been successfully kept in aquariums.

The white whale's headquarters are around Green-
land, but they occur all over the Arctic seas, often going
as far south as the St. Lawrence. Only very rarely do
they appear near the British coasts. The Greenlanders
capture them by harpooning, or with strong nets. The
flesh is largely eaten, the blubber yields a very fine oil,
the skin is made into a tough and durable leather, and
other parts of the body are also used commercially. The
name ''beluga" is also applied to a great Russian stur-
geon, while the name "white whale" has been popu-
larized by Hermann Melville in Moby Dick. But the
great white whale which he describes as the object of
Captain Ahab's obsession is a sperm whale — a freak in
its colouring — and must not be confused with this much
smaller whale, the true white whale or beluga.

The great sperm whale sometimes performs gymnastics
on the surface of the sea which, considering its enormous
weight, are little short of miraculous. When it "breaches"
— the word used by whalers to describe its leaping from
the water — it shoots up twenty feet or more, and falls
back flat on the surface. Another whaling word is "lob-
tailing", which describes the way a sperm whale stands
on its head, which of course is submerged, and smacks the
surface of the sea sharply with its huge tail. The per-
cussions are thunderous and can be heard for miles

220

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

around. A third peculiarity of the sperm whale is called
''mining". The whale, suspended on the surface of the
sea with its head projecting, turns round very slowly,
again and again, with its small pig-like eyes scanning the
horizon as if watching for any approach of danger.

When whales put forth their full strength they are
capable of astounding feats. The explorer Captain H. G.
Melsom was once hunting whales off the coast of Siberia.
He harpooned a blue whale. The monster ran out three
thousand feet of line from the ship. This was the limit,
but the ship held fast and the captain ordered full speed
astern to try to hold the whale back. The great animal
scorned the power of the ship's engines. It towed the
vessel forward at a speed of never less than eight knots
(nine miles an hour) for over seven hours before it tired,
and was at long last dispatched.

Some of the sleigh dogs of the Scott Antarctic Ex-
pedition were standing on an ice-floe when they were
attacked by killer whales. The killers, fortunately,
launched their attack from under the ice, upwards to-
wards the dogs. The ice was two and a half feet thick,
but the killers broke right through it, and the dogs only
narrowly escaped destruction. The famous Antarctic ex-
plorer, H. G. Pouting, was once nearly killed by other
whales of the same species, which smashed at the ice on
which he was standing with terrific force.

Spermaceti is the solid constituent of the crude oil of
the sperm whale and some other cetaceans. It is a white
waxy substance which is extracted by draining off the oil
and then washing it again with boiling water and potash.
The head of the sperm whale, between the skull and the
integuments, is a large "reservoir" of semi-solid head-
matter which is rich in spermaceti, but the substance is
also contained in the oil of other parts of the body and
in the animal's humps. Mainly cetyl palmitate, sper-
maceti is white, pearly, semi-transparent, and lighter
than water, in which it is insoluble. It has no taste or

221

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

smell. It is used for making candles of standard photo-
metric value — that is, for comparing the illuminating
power of artificial lights — in the dressing of fabrics, in
medicine and surgery (particularly in the making of
ointments) and in cosmetic preparations.

Ambergris is a fatty gummy substance, the origin of
which was once much in doubt. It is usually found in
lumps, floating on the sea or cast up on the world's
shores. Much of it comes from the coasts of the Bahama
Islands, but it is also brought from the East Indies and
the coasts of Africa, Brazil, China and Japan. It gener-
ally contains black spots, which appear to be caused by
the presence of tiny beaks of the cuttle-fish Sepia octopodia,
the principal food of the spermaceti whale.

Some odd stories were told by the ancients regarding
the origin of ambergris. One ancient speculator on the
subject, Klobius, recites no fewer than eighteen theories.
Paludanus and Linschotten described it as a kind of
bitumen, which worked its way up through the waters
from the bed of the sea. They did not suspect any con-
nection with the whale, nor did numbers of other writers
seeking an explanation.

Some writers believed it to be the excrement of a bird,
named by the inhabitants of the Maldive Islands the
Anacangrispasqui, which had been melted by the sun's
heat, washed off the shore by the waves, and swallowed
by whales, who returned it to the sea as ambergris.
Others, particularly the orientals, imagined that it sprang
from the sea-beds in fountains. Others declared it to be a
sea-mushroom, torn from the bottom of the sea by
tempests. Others affirmed it to be a vegetable product
discharged into the sea by trees which had their roots
turned towards the water. Others again maintained that
it was formed from the honeycombs of bees which had
their nests among rocks of the shore.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Mr.
Neumann, chemist to the King of Prussia, investigated

222

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

all the theories and gave it as his opinion that the bitu-
minous one was the most strongly substantiated. One of
the very oldest theories, current among seafaring people
thousands of years before Neumann and his survey of the
numerous conjectures of his time, was much nearer the
truth : that ambergris was the excrement of the whale.

The truth is that it comes from the intestinal canal of
the whale, being thrown up from its stomach. It is also
taken from the bowels of sickly whales after killing them.
It then has a soft consistency and a disagreeable smell.
On exposure to the air, however, it gradually hardens
and acquires its peculiarly attractive fragrance, which
makes it an article so precious to makers of perfume. In
Europe it is now entirely confined to perfumery, but at
one time it was used both in cookery and in medicine,
in Britain and on the continent. It is still used in these
connections in the East.

Although modern reference books give one hundred
pounds as the hmiting size of the lumps of ambergris
which are found floating on the sea's surface, much
larger masses have been secured. The stuff fetches con-
siderable sums — even a hundred years ago it was priced
at five or six pounds an ounce. Reahzing that money was
worth far more two or three centuries ago, some of the
old finds were certainly fortunate ones.

One lump of ambergris, taken from the sea near the
Cape of Good Hope in the latter half of the nineteenth
century weighed three hundred pounds. Another, found
at about the same time, is recorded in books of the period
as having a weight of fifteen thousand pounds, but in this
case the size is quite evidently exaggerated, and rehable
details are not given in the various accounts. Allowing
for exaggeration it probably weighed several hundred
pounds.

The largest lump of ambergris found floating any-
where in recent centuries with a well-authenticated
weight, was bought from the native king of Tidore (an

223

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

island of the Malay Archipelago) by the Dutch East
India Company for eleven thousand, dollars in 1694.
Checked regarding its shape and size by many auth-
orities, it measured two feet in diameter and weighed
exactly one hundred and eighty-two pounds. Its subse-
quent history is obscure — the Company probably broke
it up and made a large profit. While it was still intact the
Duke of Tuscany offered fifty thousand crowns for it — an
immense sum in those times.

Classification of creatures of the sea has always been
more or less arbitrary, and a matter of convenience.
Some animals might be classed with those in a particular
group for excellent reasons, yet might, for equally good
reasons, be placed in another group. The seals and wal-
ruses have many characteristics which separate them
completely from whales. Seals are of the order Carnivora,
and so are walruses, but some authorities include both in
the sub-order Pinnipedia, while others separate them and
place the walrus in a family of its own, the Trichechidae.

It is all very confusing to the layman, who sometimes
finds it hard to understand why seals, as sea creatures
possessing resemblances to whales, should be sharply
separated from whales and classified with cats, dogs,
lions and bears, in the order Carnivora^ despite the fact
that many whales are carnivorous and have the rudi-
ments of land mammals in their structures.

Again, both seals and walruses are pinnipeds — having
feet resembling fins — and one might feel inclined to agree
with those authorities who keep them together in the
Pinnipedia sub-order. There is one way in which we can
cut this perplexing knot and get the whale, the seal and
the walrus together into one simple classification : They
form a group which distinguishes them from other
creatures of the sea, for they are all water-living mam-
mals : land creatures which have adapted themselves to
the sea. Seals and walruses find a place in this chapter
(despite the fact that they are not of the whale's order,

224

Future Fast Libia)\

A shark brought ashore at Keel Harbour, Achill Island. The size of this shark — and that
of its enormous mouth — can be appreciated by comparison with the man in the background.

A remarkable photograph
of a live octopus.

{James Carr)

A photograph of a dead octopus — the kind one would prefer to meet — showing the curious

funnel : used for expelling water for propulsive purposes, also for extruding clouds of

'''ink'', as the animal escapes its enemies.

c

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

Cetacea) because they are air-breathing animals, with
mammahan characteristics, which share certain common
similarities and characteristics.

Seals are excellent swimmers and divers, and are so
much at home in the sea, depending entirely for their
sustenance on living prey captured in the water, that
their universal habit of resorting to beaches, rocky eleva-
tions or ice-floes, to bask in the sun, sleep, or for the
purpose of bringing forth their young is a remarkable
one. Whales seek the shore-waters to copulate and deliver
their babies, but these acts take place in the water, and
it is in the water that the mother whale suckles her babies
at her breast. The seals, therefore, in their habits, are not
such marine creatures as the whales.

The Alaskan seals, Callorhinus alascanus, spend most of
the year in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Yet they travel
periodically to one specific place, far from their hunting
grounds, to bear their young : the Pribilof Islands in the
Bering Sea. They are guided there by the same mysterious
instinct that directs the eels to the Sargasso weed and the
salmon to their breeding places high up the rivers.

Unlike some other sea creatures, which are mono-
gamous, the large male seal forms his own harem of
several females, each of which presents him with one
baby yearly. The United States government rightly
controls the seal's breeding grounds, and only allows the
excess young males to be slaughtered for their fur —
otherwise fur-bearing seals would soon be exterminated.

The supraorbital processes of the seal's brain are well
developed, in fact it is a highly intelligent animal in
many respects. The external ear is either wanting alto-
gether or very small — ^yet the seal has remarkably good
hearing. The upper divisions of the limbs are shorter than
the lower, and do not project beyond the body's skin.
Each limb has five toes, and these are webbed. There is a
short tail. Some seals are habitual stone-eaters, and their
stomachs are often found to be partly filled with stones,

225 „

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

sometimes fairly large ones. The seal's breathing is ex-
tremely slow. When on land and fully active a period of
about two minutes elapses between each intake of breath
and the next. It can hold its breath for long periods — a
man would die in a quarter of the time that the animal
can completely suspend its breathing. This breath-
suspension power is of great use to the seal in pursuing
its prey. It has been known to remain under water for as
long as twenty- five minutes.

The seal's nostrils can be completely closed, making
them watertight. So with its small hearing orifices. Its
eyes have remarkable optical peculiarities, enabling them
to be used with equal efiiciency both under water and
above the surface.

Seals are usually grouped under two dissimilar types,
the so-called fur seals and the hair seals. The former may
remotely resemble bears, and are in fact often called
"sea-bears". The fur seal yields a valuable fur, but the
hair seal has no fur — its hide is used for leather and its
body yields a valuable oil. The hair seal inhabits the
Antarctic, North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, although
small groups are scattered over the globe. The fur seals
are more or less widely distributed throughout the
southern seas. The hair seal cannot walk or run on
land — it can only wriggle on its stomach — but the fur
seal can run or lope along the ground with considerable
rapidity.

The brown seal has a way of sleeping that is, to say the
least, extraordinary. R. M. Lockley, studying seals in
aquaria in Germany, watched a pair of seals of this
variety sleeping in a glass tank containing about six feet
of water. The female closed her eyes first and was soon
fast asleep, on the floor of the tank, her breathing sus-
pended. After some moments the bull fell asleep, closing
his eyes and nostrils and slowly sinking to the bottom.
The cow seal then rose to the surface, with scarcely per-
ceptible movements of her flippers. Her eyes were fast

226

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

closed as she surfaced and began to "blow". She took
sixteen deep breaths and then slowly sank again with her
nostrils closed. Lockley timed their periods underwater
and found that the seals often remained down for five or
six minutes. They took anything from twelve to twenty
breaths while on the surface. Sometimes they coincided
in their ascents and descents : sometimes they alternated
with each other. They slept soundly all the time.

Most seals are gregarious, and are usually quite harm-
less, timid, even affectionate animals, although the old
males will sometimes fight each other ferociously. They
are greatly attached to their young ones. They have all
their five senses remarkably well developed, and a sense
of balance far more sensitive than most other animals, or
even man himself They have a rudimentary speech
sense, and can express themselves in various ways, vary-
ing from harsh grunts and barks to plaintive bleats. They
are strongly attracted by musical sounds.

Probably no other animal, with the solitary exception
of the dog, shows such aflfection towards man, or is so
easily trained. They are the very opposite of sharks in
this respect. The Siebenalers did everything possible to
eliminate the deadly fear which almost paralysed their
sharks when they touched and caressed them. They were
using the only possible method of reassuring and taming
the animals. Birds feel fear when humans contact them ;
so do many other creatures. But such reluctance to make
friends can be overcome in all kinds of creatures by kind-
ness. With their sharks, the Siebenalers found it hopeless
— the fear gulf was far too wide to be bridged.

Right at the opposite pole are the seals. They respond
so readily to aflfection and love to be petted and fondled.
Sometimes their affection for man can become embar-
rassing. This was instanced as recently as July 1957, at
British resorts around the Norfolk coast.

During the warm weather which occurred in the early
days of that month, seals started coming ashore from the

227

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

breeding banks. Posters urging holiday makers "Don't
pet the seals" were put up by the R.S.P.C.A. at many
resorts. Mrs. Jean Mudie, R.S.P.C.A. secretary at Hun-
stanton, told the London Sunday Express reporter that no
fewer than fifteen baby seals had come ashore during the
previous three days, but did not want to return to the sea
again. Mrs. Mudie explained that ''On shore they don't
live more than a fortnight". As sea creatures they needed
to return to the sea. Yet the animals were so responsive
to the pettings that they would not leave the shores, and
so — with the sea waiting to receive them back again —
they died.

There are numerous stories of the sagacity and skill of
seals. They are often seen in circuses and stage-shows
performing balancing tricks. They have been trained by
showmen in many countries from time immemorial.
During the nineteenth century the French were particu-
larly successful in training them, and numbers of per-
forming seals were appearing in fairs in all parts of
France.

During the i86o's a very fine sea-bear [Otaria ursina)
attracted crowds to the London Zoo. It is not one of the
easiest seals to train, being one of the furred seals which
are "bearish" in both senses of the word, possessing some
of the characteristics of bears and also showing signs of
temper at times. This "talking fish" as it was called was
a bad-tempered, even vicious, brute before a Frenchman
named Le Blanc began its training. The animal, showing
none of the normal seal's inclination to friendliness,
savagely resented the training and attacked Le Blanc
again and again. He bore numerous scars until the end
of his life.

At last he won it over by persistent kindness, and it
became one of the finest performing seals ever exhibited
in any country. Its love for its master became unbounded.
It seized every opportunity of displaying its afifection,
and followed him everywhere. If separated from him for

228

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

only a few moments it evidenced signs of great distress.
It showed eagerness to obey his sHghtest whim ; and the
tricks Le Blanc taught it have probably never been
equalled — such as balancing balls, bottles and other
objects; climbing ladders, firing cannons, clapping its
fins, putting itself to bed, and many other feats of skill.
Its range of vocal sounds and intelligence in uttering
them certainly made it the nearest thing to a fish that
actually talked that has ever been seen. It died in 1867
through inadvertently swallowing some hooks which had
been left in the fish with which it was fed.

Walruses live among the ice of the Arctic coasts. The
name is a modification of the Scandinavian valross —
"whale-horse". A full-grown male measures from ten to
twelve feet, although specimens have been recorded of
fifteen feet and more. There is force in the old description
of the animal: ''As large as an ox and as thick as a hogs-
head." An aquatic mammal, allied to the seals, the
walrus differs from them in possessing an enormous pair
of tusks, corresponding to the canine teeth of other
mammals. These tusks are formidable weapons, but their
principal use seems to be in digging and scraping among
sand or shingle for the molluscs and crustaceans on
which the creature feeds; although it is said they also
use them to hook themselves up onto the ice. Like the
seal, the walrus is a stone-swallower — some writers say
that it is to give them a sense of fullness when very
hungry.

The greatest enemy of the walrus, next to man, is the
polar bear. Fights between the two beasts are frequent,
and many full-grown walruses carry marks of such con-
flicts. Yet the walrus is otherwise a quiet and inoffensive
animal, loyal to its mate, tenderly careful of its young — it
will fight to the death to protect them — and capable of
"domestication" if this is begun early enough.

To the Eskimo the walrus is a prime necessity of life.
There have been cases where hundreds of Eskimos have

229

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

died because the walruses have forsaken some particular
district. From its skin the Eskimo makes the coverings of
his kayaks, or canoes. The bones furnish him with the
runners for his sledges, and the heads of his weapons.
The tusks are used as points for spears and harpoons,
and also cut up to make bird-slings. The animal's in-
testines are made into light garments, or split into twine
of great strength. The flesh supplies the Eskimo with
food, and the abundant fat gives him fuel for his lamps.

The manati (often anglicized as "manatee") is the
most curious of all the whale's cousins. The Spanish
colonists of the West Indies called this aquatic mammal
the manattoui, and this became latinized as manatus, mean-
ing "furnished with hands", referring to the curious
hand-like form or hand-like usage of the Manati's fore-
flippers. The animal is somewhat whale-like in shape,
having an oblong head, a fish-like body, and a shovel-
like tail ; while it has a face which can only be described
as comical. Its upper lip is cleft and each of the lobes so
created is separately movable. The nostrils are two slits
at the end of its fat muzzle which resembles nothing so
much as the conventional "toper's nose" of cartoon
characters. The eyes are extremely small. The creature
has no external ears. It has no tusks — the face is babyish
although it has an odd suggestion of chronic alcoholism —
but it has about twenty pairs of peg-like teeth in each
jaw.

From the shoulder-joint downwards the manati's
flippers can be moved in all directions : its "elbows" and
"wrists" are peculiarly flexible. In feeding, the manati
is almost human in its actions, conveying its food to its
mouth with one "hand", or both simultaneously. It uses
its flexible lips in an action which recalls the movements
of a caterpillar's mandibles in nibbling a leaf.

All trustworthy observations show that the manati —
unlike other aquatic mammals such as the seals — has no
power of voluntarily leaving the water. It is a mammal

230

WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

which has gone into the sea in past ages, yet cannot leave
it again, even for brief visits to the shore.

Many authorities beheve that the sirens and mermaids
of legends and fables were what we now call manatis,
walruses and seals, to which the imagination of the
ancients gave irresistible beauty and charm, as half-
women, half-fish. But the manati — and for that matter
the walrus and the seal — are among the ugliest of mam-
mals, and it is difficult to imagine how it could be mis-
taken for any lady of exquisite beauty, as the typical
mermaid or siren was reputed to be, even if such a
charming creature had the tail of a fish.

The dugong, or duyong, is another of the "sea-cows".
It is a marine animal and feeds chiefly on seaweeds.
Some specimens attain a length of nine feet. Found along
the shores of Australia, of the Indian Ocean, and around
the Red Sea, it differs from the manati in having a
crescent-shaped tail, and a pair of tusks. Dugongs are
fond of basking on the surface of the water, or browsing
on submarine seaweed pastures, for which their thick
flexible lips and truncated snout fit them.

In the earlier Australian dugong-fisheries, natives were
able to harpoon the animals, but the dugongs, learning
by bitter experience, became wary and would not let
themselves be approached. So the harpoon method of
slaughter was abandoned in favour of nets. These are
spread at night, and in their meshes dugongs are caught
in considerable numbers.

The female dugong is proverbial among the Malays for
her maternal solicitude for her offspring, of which but
one is produced at a birth. Dugongs have been nearly
exterminated, owing to the demand for the fine oil,
which is used for medicinal and other purposes, yielded
by the Australian species.

There are such remarkable differences in the struc-
tures, habits and physical appearances of whales that it
is sometimes difficult to realize that they are all members

231

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

of one group : yet the underlying principles of their struc-
tures are identical, and their behaviour patterns and out-
ward forms have many correspondences. Between the
great blue whale and the dugong are a range of creatures
with very diversified characteristics, yet the basic rela-
tionship of them all becomes more and more evident as
they are studied. They are all aquatic mammals, and so
are more nearly related to man than they are to any of
the fishes.

The great blue whale is probably the most typical
whale of them all. Its gargantuan size is the factor in its
make-up which causes us to forget our close relationship.

Some writers of books on whales have said that when
they have first seen one it has been difficult to believe
that it is an animal at all. The men on the Kon-Tiki felt
friendly towards whales, seeing them at short range — but
as Georges Blond points out in The Great Whale Game,^
the conditions in which the men were conducting the
voyage had reduced them to something like a state of
primeval innocence, and they had a friendly feeling
towards the whole of creation.

Man's wholesale slaughterings of all the various kinds
of whales threatens them with extinction. International
conferences have not always resulted in whole-hearted
co-operation by the nations' whaling industries : agree-
ments have been ignored and some nations particularly
fail to adhere loyally to the international whaling con-
vention.

One authority, Dr. Gilmore, said only last year that
the California grey whale had become almost extinct
twice in the last hundred years, and this is but one of
numerous statements which might be quoted to indicate
the extent of man's butchering of whales for commercial
profit. Norwegian whaling operators particularly are
seriously concerned regarding developments in the in-
dustry. Reports of the National Oceanographic Council

♦Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1954.

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WHALES, SEALS AND WALRUSES

in recent years show that the world's whale population
is menaced by the increasing introduction of efficient
methods of whale catching. We can only hope that the
international whaling agreements governing the season's
catch are strictly adhered to by all parties.

Forty-five states, meeting at the International Tech-
nical Conference on the Conservation of the Living
Resources of the Sea in 1955, held in Rome, agreed that
measures to secure conservation should be based on
scientific information; that such conservation should be
brought about by conventions between states ; and that
there should be international co-operation in scientific
research — but in subsequent sessions jettisoned its own
proposals by agreeing that coastal states could adopt con-
servation measures unilaterally.

Strongly reminiscent of world conferences on dis-
armament, all such meetings fail to achieve their purpose
while individual nations persist in policies based on their
own selfish interests. The official world figures of whaling
results from 1946 to 1955 tell their own sad story. Man
is increasingly exploiting whale-slaughter for profit, blind
to the fact that he is gradually exterminating the animals
which bring him that profit.

During the year 1946-47, 23,043 Antarctic pelagic
whales were slaughtered ; 2,550 Antarctic South Georgia
whales; and 9,227 elsewhere than in the Antarctic. With
only two or three fluctuations, the figures have steadily
increased, until the latest available ones in each category
are Antarctic pelagic (1954-55) 34,388; Antarctic South
Georgia (same period) 3,266; and elsewhere than
Antarctic (1953-54) 16,391 — an increase of 19,125
whales in the total figures (over a third more whales
slaughtered) in the ten years.

The whale is now profiting man increasingly during its
lifetime, as scientific facts gained from its structure and
habits are applied to the welfare of mankind. A typical
instance of this is the scientific expedition which sailed

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

into the lonely waters of Mexico's Scammon Lagoon
(half-way down the Pacific coast of Baja, California)
early in 1956, with an extraordinary objective: the
venture was organized to record the heartbeat of a
whale.

The National Geographic Society, the Douglas Air-
craft Company, the Sanborn Company of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and many other organizations and indi-
viduals had given generous aid. The expedition's ulti-
mate purpose was to contribute something to man's
investigations of the mysteries of the human heart, which
is roughly the size of man's two fists and beats from fifty
to ninety times a minute, compared with the heart of a
whale, which weighs more than two hundredweights and
beats far more slowly — perhaps fewer than ten times a
minute.

In 19 1 6 a young Boston cardiologist. Dr. Paul D.
White, had dissected the heart of a sperm whale, and
published the first detailed scientific description of it.

The mammalian heart — in the mouse, the man, the
elephant and the whale — beats constantly because of the
electricity it generates within itself: its driving impulse or
current in the human heart being no more than a
thousandth of a volt. The Scammon Lagoon expedition
failed in its objective, but it had gained valuable know-
ledge regarding its shortcomings. Applying that know-
ledge towards the perfection of their investigational
methods, and not in the least daunted. Dr. Paul Dudley
White (who is President Eisenhower's heart consultant)
is returning with his colleagues to the Lagoon this year.

Man's contact with the whale is therefore not always
tinged with cruelty : it may be that his investigations are
in some way benefiting the animal itself.

234

CHAPTER XII

THE DRIFTING SWARMS

WHEN, in the middle of the last century,
Johannes Peter Miiller (1801-58), the German
physiologist and comparative anatomist, devel-
oped a method of straining plant and animal life from
sea water with a fine net, he was only doing what the
whale had been doing for countless centuries, and far
more efficiently. But Miiller opened up a new world of
teeming life : the world of plankton.

Naturalists in many countries were quick to realize the
possibilities of the new realm's exploration. It was as if
mankind had remained in almost complete darkness
regarding the constitution of the oceans and had emerged
into blinding light. To realize what had happened one
should try to imagine a world in which man knew nothing
of insects, having investigated the structures and lives of
all kinds of animals in complete ignorance of the fact
that ants, bees, butterffies and similar creatures existed :
and had suddenly discovered the insect kingdom, with
its swarming millions of curious and colourful life forms.
For the world of plankton is at least as large as the insect
world, and its inhabitants are at least as diversified.

Collections of plankton were at first made in the
more easily accessible shore-waters. Miiller's researches
attracted the attention of the scientific world, and stimu-
lated interest in the plankton, but he was not the first to
investigate them, nor even to use the tow-net in securing
specimens, although he is stated to be the first user of
the net in nearly all modern text-books on oceanography.

J. Vaughan Thompson, the brilHant British amateur

235

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

naturalist, had used a tow-net to collect plankton from
the sea off Cork, as early as 1828, when serving as an
army surgeon in Ireland. He was the first to describe the
zoea — the crab in its early planktonic stage. He dis-
covered the true nature of barnacles a little later, in 1833.
He was the first to reveal to the world that plankton are
not exclusively tiny creatures that are permanently
afloat, but contain many animals from the sea-beds in
their early larval stages, and that such sea-bed animals
send up their babies in clouds, to be scattered far and
wide by ocean currents, just as plants on land send their
seeds into the winds for distribution.

Darwin, eleven years before Miiller, used a tow-net on
his voyage in the Beagle — a fact recorded in his Journal of
Researches under the date 6th December 1833. T. H.
Huxley also used a tow-net on H.M.S. Rattlesnake within
a year or so of Miiller's use of the device. It was then a
simple enough appliance : a small bag of fine muslin or
silk gauze, usually attached to a collecting jar, towed
through the water on a line behind a boat.

Even as early as the middle of the eighteenth century —
a hundred years before Miiller's use of the tow-net to
catch plankton — two Italian zoologists. Count Luigi
Marsigli, pioneer in oceanography, and Vitaliano
Donati, naturalist and traveller, had invented and used
the naturalist's dredge : a coarse net on an iron frame
which brought to the surface from the sea-bed many
forms of life previously unknown.

Four years before Miiller's use of the tow-net, Edward
Forbes, who became the recognized pioneer in plank-
tonic research, had begun his dredging, in British waters
and in the Aegean Sea. All the nets used in these earlier
explorations, and all the devices which have developed
from them, are man's imitations of the whale's baleen —
the flakes or ''blades" of which, with their fine hair-like
filaments, are the most eflicient sieve for the collection of
planktonic creatures that nature has devised.

236

THE DRIFTING SWARMS

It may be difficult at first to realize that the micro-
scopic plants which are comprised within the plankton
form a vegetation which is sufficient to support the entire
animal life of the sea, but this is indeed the case. Invisible
to the human eye, although their presence contributes to
the colour of sea water, all the vast hosts of planktonic
creatures — numbers of them almost invisible to the eye
— depend upon such microscopic plants. So, directly or
indirectly, do all the invertebrate animals of the sea-beds,
all the myriads of shoals offish in the sea, in their infinite
variety, and all the aquatic mammals, including the
greatest sharks and whales.

One of the most remarkable facts in oceanographic
science is the paradoxical one that the whale — one of the
largest, or it may be the largest, creatures in the sea,
feeds on some of the sea's smallest creatures, using its
wonderful sieve to extract them from the water.

The microscopic plants in the plankton are largely
diatoms, dinoflagellates, blue-green algae and similar
lowly organisms. Victor Hensen (1871-1911), the Ger-
man physiologist, who is credited with devising the name
"plankton", began his study of the biology of drifting
life of the ocean with the theory that a conical silk net
with meshes of a particular size would catch all the plants
in the cylindrical column of water through which it
passed. He thought that if he counted, under a micro-
scope, all the plants in a unit of sea water it would be
possible to calculate the number living below a unit of
the sea's surface. But Hans Lohmann quickly pointed out
to him that very small, and highly important, members
of the phytoplankton (planktonic plants) were passing
through the meshes of the very finest silk nets.

From that moment special filters were devised, which
have been continually improved. Man searches deeper
and deeper into the infinitesimal, both in the structure
of atoms and in the world of planktonic creatures.

The microscopic plants known as diatoms are so

237

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

numerous that they are now recognized as the most im-
portant plants of the sea. Each diatom is a tiny pill-box —
or perhaps "jewel case" would be a better description.
They occur in an infinite variety of forms, numbers of
them singularly beautiful. The living contents of a
diatom are enclosed within two similar valves of silica,
which fit tightly together like the top and bottom of a
box. Myriads of the tiny siliceous "boxes" form the main
part of the oozes of the world's sea-floors, particularly in
the North Pacific and the Southern Ocean. You can see
and handle quantities of these microscopic cases if you
obtain some ordinary fuller's earth, which consists of the
cases of myriads of what were once the shells of marine
diatoms, deep in the sea.

Those diatoms — the majority — which are enclosed in
silicon, look like crystals under the microscope: some
are shaped like rods, some Hke discs, some are cubes,
some cylinders. Others have spines or other curious
adornments : all are complicated structures of ingenious
design, and many are exquisitely lovely. The smaller
varieties, called nannoplankton or ultraplankton, which
pass easily through the finest silk, are (according to the
most recent scientific pronouncements) among the most
important of all food providers.

Diatoms, like land plants, are quickened by the advent
of spring, come to their most prolific activity and abun-
dance at this time, and then decline in summer, having
exhausted the mineral salts held in solution in the water
around them. Eventually the surface waters of the sea
cool and sink, and are replaced by waters from below
which have not been exhausted of their nitrogenous and
phosphoric salts. These waters from below form the new
surface layer, in which new plants will flourish abun-
dantly (though invisible to our eyes) in the following
spring and summer.

Planktonic plants need to capture light energy from
the sun, like all green plants on land. For this reason

238

THE DRIFTING SWARMS

they float near the open sea where the rays of the sun can
penetrate to them. Owing to their microscopic size they
have a high ratio of surface in relation to volume, and
therefore sink very slowly although they are slightly
heavier than water. Small organisms, other things being
equal, sink more slowly than large ones. The same is true
of creatures which fall through air. As Professor Haldane
expresses it in his Possible Worlds : "You can drop a mouse
down a thousand-yard mine shaft, and on arriving at the
bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat
would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from
the eleventh storey of a building." Diatoms which have
spines — thereby increasing their surfaces in relation to
their volumes — can fall even more slowly, just as the
puff-balls of dandelions are able to float in the air
because their surface areas are so greatly disproportionate
to their volumes. Lead pellets of the same volume as the
puff-balls would fall quickly.

This is the basic principle which controls the level of
the diatoms in the sea, and affects their availability as
food for all kinds of sea animals.

Diatoms normally reproduce by simply dividing in
two, and this act of reproduction naturally affects their
distance from the sea's surface. Instead of one box there
are now two boxes, each containing a nucleus of living
matter — protoplasm — out of which develops the new
valves, or halves of the new box. The process of separa-
tion is baffling and inexplicable — as mysterious as the
division of cells which results in the creation of the
foetus within the womb of a woman. But there is this
vital difference in the two kinds of fission. Human cells
multiply as the infant is built up, but do not diminish in
size. But as the diatom "boxes" multiply, some of them
get smaller. The process of repeated division by forming
new half-boxes within the old ones necessarily causes
this diminution in size. Thus there is a wide range
in the size of diatoms of the same species, although

239

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

each individual soon attains maturity. After a certain
number of divisions, what is called an "auxospore" is
formed, by which means the diatom's original size is
regained.

What may be termed the ''pill-box" diatoms are only
one kind of planktonic plant. The ''boxes" are of all
shapes, and not all diatoms are planktonic — there are
numbers which are not "wanderers" but are motionless
on the sea-beds in shallower coastal regions where
light can penetrate down to them. The planktonic
(drifting) "pill-boxes" are far more varied in structure,
due to the vast variety of devices which assist their
flotation.

Apart from the box-like forms there are diatomic
plants which are suspended in the sea water by micro-
scopic "life-belts" — tiny globules of oil. Numbers of
species live solitary lives, but there are innumerable
forms which live in association: linked by their valve
surfaces ; or joined in flexible chains by fine threads of
protoplasm.

There are diatomic plants flattened like strips of paper;
others which are strung together like pieces of ribbon ;
others which are like twisted paper streamers; others
which are drawn out into very fine hair-like forms ; and
there are rigid needle-like forms, some of them pointed
at each end. There are planktonic plants — all invisible to
the naked eye — which resemble land insects, such as
caterpillars.

There is one form which roughly suggests the Praying
Mantis, and there are many which look like twig-
imitating insects — yet all these are plants. Numbers of
the microscopic plants resemble household ornaments
such as vases or cups, and many of these are beautifully
embellished. Myriads of the planktonic plants have
flagella with which they draw or propel themselves
through the water. Such creatures are enigmas, for many
of them are claimed by both botanists and zoologists, and

240

THE DRIFTING SWARMS

indeed, have the characteristics of both plants and
animals.

When we turn from planktonic plants to planktonic
animals we enter a vast world of drifting life-forms with
a teeming population of living creatures millions of
millions of times greater than our world of humans.
Enormous numbers of these plankton feed upon the
planktonic plants. The chief plant-eaters are the cope-
pods, which vary considerably in size, although the vast
majority are microscopic. Their numbers are so prodi-
gious that any small harbour or bay contains in its sea
water thousands of times more copepods than there are
human beings on earth. All kinds of fishes feed on plank-
tonic swarms which contain large numbers of copepods,
and (like the whale) use various devices to filter them
from the seawater.

Fishes cannot discriminate between the various forms
of planktonic food, but in some cases the size of the
planktonic animals eaten by them varies with the age
of the fishes. In the earlier stages of a herring's existence,
for instance, its "sieve" (the gill-rakers) is finely meshed,
so that numbers of the smallest diatoms are caught in
it. As the herring grows, its gill-rakers coarsen, allow-
ing many of the smaller varieties to pass through them.
When adult, the herring's diet consists mainly of the
larger copepods and plant-feeding plankton.

As a general principle in the "feeding chain", fishes
feed on copepods (planktonic animals), and copepods
feed on microscopic floating plants — diatoms or other
floating forms of planktonic life. A herring may have as
many as ten thousand copepods in its stomach, and each
of these copepods may have hundreds of planktonic
plants in its own.

Planktonic animals — free-swimming sea animals of all
kinds whose powers of locomotion are not strong enough
to overcome the transporting forces of tides and currents
— ^vary considerably in size. Many are microscopic, and

241

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

nearly all of them are less than an inch long, in fact most
of them are less than half an inch; but some of the
crustaceans measure several inches, and many authorities
include giant jelly-fish five or six feet across. For clearer
understanding of the creatures one might divide them
into temporary and permanent planktonic animals ; the first
class consisting of the babies of numerous sea creatures
which pass out of the planktonic stage as they become
adults and resist the tides and currents as burrowers,
crawlers or swimmers. The permanent planktonic animals,
on the other hand, spend their entire lives at the mercy
of the waters, drifting around unresistingly, so that they
never have fixed habitations or localities, and are only at
rest when the waters permit them to be.

The copepods are the main group in the second class,
although not all of them are planktonic, for some of them
attach themselves to the sea-floor, or to rocks or sea-
weeds.

Many early students of sea creatures did not realize,
as they studied the tiny babies of fishes and other sea
animals, that they were looking at the oflfspring of
creatures already known to them. So they sometimes
gave names to the babies of parents whom they had
already named. One of these they named ''zoea" — it was
a strange little shrimp-like creature, which developed
into something half-way between a lobster and a crab,
and was classified as two diflferent species. We know today
that both creatures are immature crabs in stages through
which they must pass to become adults.

Such mistakes in classification are easy to make,
especially when studying planktonic animals, for they
are extremely difiicult to keep alive in captivity and for
a curious reason. In the sea they are "cushioned" by the
waters themselves and seldom come into confined spaces.
But in captivity they often bump into the glass walls of an
aquarium or case and injure themselves. Others die
because it is difficult to know what food to give to

242

THE DRIFTING SWARMS

creatures, many of whom have mouths so small that they
cannot swallow anything bigger than two- or three-
thousandths of an inch across. For these reasons not all
planktonic animals have been watched through their
entire life cycles — and many varieties still remain un-
classified, their habits and histories almost completely
unknown to us.

One particular species of planktonic animal persists in
baffling zoologists. Fishermen's nets occasionally bring
up single specimens of this transparent, spherical animal,
which has been named planktosphaera because of its
shape. All attempts to fit it into any known animal group
have failed, although it suggests relationship with several.
For fifty years a solution of the problem has been sought,
but (although it has been argued that the creature is a
young crinoid or sea-lily) the half-inch ball of living sub-
stance has not been finally classified.

The copepod crustaceans vary considerably in size and
structure, but the typical copepod is divided into the
usual three regions of the crustacean-head, thorax and
abdomen. The pear-shaped head and forepart carries six
pairs of appendages, modified into a sensory and feeding
complex. It has two antennae — very long and with many
joints — ''arms" which, if the creature is imagined in an
upright position, hang down from its ''shoulders" to
below its forked or branched tail. Behind the head each
of the first five thoracic segments has a pair of jointed
and forked swimming legs, the movements of which
carry the copepod through the water in spasmodic hops
along what seem to be purposeful courses. The best
mental picture of a copepod is that of a creature which
looks something like an ant with no head, yet with a
branched tail and two extra-long arms something like
earwigs and a number of legs on either side of the fore-
part of its body which it uses in a series of jerks to propel
itself through the water.

Many of the copepods look like small fleas ; others are

243

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

the babies of jelly-fish and often resemble them; vast
swarms of them are tiny shell fish of every conceivable
kind. They must not be thought of as colourless, although
numbers of them are transparent, for their colours range
right through the spectrum. Blue copepods wear orange
aprons, consisting of eggs. Attempts have been made to
represent some of the ghostly, transparent forms on white
paper, but against any such background they look un-
natural, even when the colours are perfectly reproduced.
Other attempts to present their complicated designs and
remarkable colour harmonies against dark backgrounds,
such as black paper, have been more successful, but even
the best of them look somewhat artificial and harsh and
far too solid.

It is far beyond the scope of this book to give any
detailed description of planktonic creatures, whether
plants or animals. Any selection of them must necessarily
be very inadequate and quite unrepresentative. Investi-
gation of them is in its infancy, but is now making
progress because of the labours of numerous enthusi-
astic students. Among these. Dr. M. V. Lebour in Eng-
land is one of the few who have been able to build up a
number of life-histories regarding plankton which are
invaluable to the basic research which has already been
given to the creatures. But all the knowledge already
attained is but a drop in the ocean compared with what
remains to be known about these wonderful sea plants
and animals.

Hilary B. Moore, Professor of Marine Biology of the
University of Miami, U.S.A., and one of the world's
leading authorities on plankton, has said : "As usual, the
more we study these animals the more problems they
present."*

* Article on plankton in the National Geographic Alagazine, July 1952.

244

CHAPTER XIII

THE SINISTER CEPHALOPODS

UNTIL squids can be observed more closely in
their natural surroundings, man's knowledge of
them will necessarily remain limited, but enough
is known to justify behef that they are among the most
extraordinary of all sea creatures.

They are the most numerous of all cephalopods, which
are the most highly organized of all molluscs. Cephalo-
pods are therefore relatives of the oyster, the snail, the
winkle and the whelk. All molluscs are invertebrates —
backboneless animals to which the majority of all living
species belong: backboned creatures like man himself
forming only five per cent of the whole.

All molluscs have soft spineless bodies, partly covered
with mantles of skin. Nearly all of them are shelled
animals, and the gastropods have toothed ribbons which
vary considerably in structure but are similar to the
whelk's rasp strip with its replaceable teeth.

The cephalopods we know today are found in abund-
ance in all the world's seas, yet their numbers have
diminished considerably since primeval times, when
there were far more in the oceans. It is probable that
only a small minority of them became fossilized, so that
the fossil records, preserving vestiges of more than 10,000
species, give us only a partial and fragmentary concep-
tion of the enormous number of species which swarmed
in the oceans before man.

There are now only about 650 species of cephalopods
known to us. Considering their ancient lineage they are

245

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

appropriately blue-blooded, due to the presence of a
copper-containing compound in their blood which
causes the colour, even as the characteristic colour of
man's blood is caused by the presence of the iron com-
pound haemoglobin in the red corpuscles [erythrocytes) :
five millions of them in every cubic centimetre of the
fluid. Man's red blood corpuscles are individually a
pale greenish-yellow, but in dense masses, the erythro-
cytes colour changes to a distinct red, even as cephalo-
podan blood is a pale clear blue when deoxygenated and
a rich dark blue when oxygenated.

Squids are the most colourful of all cephalopods in
more ways than one. The bodies of some species are
covered with numbers of tiny pigment spots. When ex-
panded at the will of the squid, by the use of numbers of
microscopic, fast-acting muscles, the animal is given its
characteristic colour. But when the squid wants to make
itself inconspicuous it can use the muscles to contract
the pigment spots, with the result that the creature
virtually disappears from view without moving.

Although less efficient than that of the common cuttle-
fish, the squid's skin-mechanism outdoes the chameleon's
in the rapidity of its colour changes. The vanishing trick
just described is one of the two methods which the squid
uses to elude its enemies. The other is well known, but
seldom fully understood : its swift use of jet-propulsion.

Squids are masters of this vanishing trick — they draw
water into their body chambers, which are lined with
powerfully-muscled walls. Suddenly, the water is ex-
pelled so violently that the escaping stream makes the
squid's body shoot backward. This is one of the squid's
normal modes of progression, but if it wants to escape
from danger it can release a stream of blinding ink. This
extraordinary fluid is discussed at considerable length in
Frank W. Lane's authoritative and invaluable work
Kingdom of the Octopus,"^ the flrst book on the octopus and

♦Jarrolds, London. 1957.

246

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

similar animals to be published in the English language
for over eighty years.

The cephalopodan ink-sac is the subject of a classic
study by Paul Girod, published in France in 1882.
It is a small, pear-shaped organ situated between the
creature's gills, and ends in a long neck which leads into
the funnel-like aperture from which the ink is discharged.
The ink, or sepia, is possessed by nearly all cephalopods.
Only the nautilus and some octopuses that live in the
deep seas are without it. It is a thick, black gummy fluid
that has been famous for writing purposes from time
immemorial. Ink from cephalopods which died and were
fossilized millions of years ago can be liquefied from its
dry state and used for writing today. The substance owes
its blackness to melanin, the abnormal development of
a dark pigment in the hair, feathers, skin, etc., of animals,
as opposed to albinism. Thus the cephalopod's sepia is
associated with one of mankind's most crucial problems,
racialism, for it is related to the pigments in the skins of
the coloured races.

The colour of the ink varies with different species.
The late Ronald Winckworth, a British expert on the
Mollusca, described it as sepia-brown in squids, blue-
black in cuttle-fish and jet-black in octopuses, but its
basic substance in all cases consists of pigment granules
similar to those which develop in the melanocytes of the
human epidermis, and in enormous quantities in the
skin of the negro.

We read in the ancient satires that the Romans used
sepia as an ink. Cicero calls it ''atramentum". The
Chinese, many thousands of years ago, used it as ink,
and Chinese ink is still noted for its blackness today.
Pliny declared that sepia was the blood of the cuttle-fish.
Rondelet (1507-66), famous for his investigation of the
fishes of the Mediterranean, stated that it was the cuttle-
fish's bile.

Numerous writers in modern times have said that

247

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

cephalopods use their ink to create a kind of underwater
''smoke-screen" under cover of which the animal escapes
its enemies — but this is only a half-truth, or over-
simplification of the facts. Cousteau, who has witnessed
more cephalopodan ink-discharges than most men, says
in describing one of his experiences : "We found that the
emission was not a smoke-screen to hide the creature
from pursuers. The pigment did not dissipate : it hung in
the water as a fairly firm blob with a tail, too small
to conceal the octopus. . . . The size and shape of the pufif
roughly correspond to that of the swimming octopus
which discharged it."

Frank Lane rightly quotes the suggestion that the
octopus or other cephalopod discharges its ink, not as a
smoke-screen, but to confuse its attacker by creating a
semblance of itself We might take the squid as an
instance of what happens. Menaced by the approach of
an enemy, the creature suddenly paints a picture of itself in
the water — Gousteau's words show that this is no exag-
geration— and while its attacker's attention is diverted to
a "shadow squid" the squid uses its complicated muscles
to close the pigment cells on its body-surface, so that it
vanishes from sight and makes oflf, leaving its attacker
concentrating on "a fairly firm blob with a tail".

If necessary the squid can eject "ink forms" several
times in succession so that its attacker would be deceived
into rushing towards one phantom after another, while
the real squid, at a safe distance, quickly assumed its
normal appearance.

Eels are much excited by the presence of sepia in the
water. They dash wildly about seeking their ancient
enemy. Denis L. Fox, the American biologist, once
ofifered a moray eel, that he had in a tank, a mussel
removed from its shell. The eel refused it, but when
Fox dipped it in some octopus ink it was greedily
swallowed.

Two other experimenters — the MacGinities — put a

248

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

moray eel into a tank with a mud-flat octopus : one of
the eel's favourite dishes. The moray eel's sight is poor.
It started searching for the octopus, but the latter quickly
discharged its ink. Long after the ink had dispersed
(although traces of it remained, much diluted, in the
water) the eel persistently searched for its enemy, but
the ink in the water was evidently having a most remark-
able effect on the searcher. The eel would go right up to
the octopus again and again, touching it with its nose,
yet showing no excitement and obviously unaware that
it was in contact with its prey. It may be that one of the
purposes of the ink is to paralyse the olfactory sense of the
cephalopod's enemies, and that they are unable to attack
it without olfactory stimulation. Certainly large numbers
of octopuses and their kind are saved from destruction by
eels — which are their main predators — by discharging
their inky fluids. Yet in strong concentration the ink is
fatal to its owner : a fact proved by naturalists who have
caught small octopuses and put them into buckets ; after
which they have annoyed them so that they have dis-
charged their ink into the sea water in the buckets.
Every time the experiment has been made the octopuses,
surrounded by their ink in strong concentration, have
died in a few minutes.

Oceanic squids vary from small, luminous deep-sea
species to huge creatures many feet in length. The giant
squid [Architeuthis) may grow to a length of fifty-seven
feet, with tentacles extended. Squids have eight arms
(like octopuses) but also two tentacles. The terms
"arms" and ''tentacles" are often confused. The Octo-
poda have eight arms only. The Decapoda (which in-
clude squids and cuttle-fish) have eight arms plus two
tentacles.

The brain of the common octopus is well developed
(for the animal possesses far more intelligence than is
usually supposed). Certain nerves control the flow of
water into and out of a cavity in the mantle.

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THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

Relaxing and contracting these mantle muscles, which
bathe its gills, jets of water pass into and emerge from the
cavity. Using these streams of water the animal breathes
and moves. When lazily resting or moving slowly through
the water, the mantle circulation is gentle, rhythmic and
slow. But when alarmed or excited the mantle muscles
work rapidly, driving out jets which give the creature
quick and easy movement. When the squid points its
funnel forward it moves rapidly backwards, and when
it wants to move forward it turns its funnel back on
itself.

The funnel then shoots streams of water backwards
past its moving body, sending the animal forwards
quickly in bursts of speed. Cephalopods like the octopus
and squid are not the lazily moving creatures that they
are often thought to be. The speed of an octopus, swim-
ming steadily, has been timed as about the same as a
human swimmer — four miles an hour, but they can dart
about like lightning when chasing their prey or eluding
their enemies.

The quick movements of these creatures are due to the
high development of its giant nerve-fibre system. In the
mantle are comparatively large nerve-fibres as well as
numerous smaller ones, and down all these fibres pass the
inconceivably swift impulses from the brain which gal-
vanize the muscles into action. So well-developed is the
cephalopod's nervous system that reactions to external
stimuli are far quicker than those of many other sea
animals.

The suckers along the arms of the cephalopods are
marvellous examples of natural mechanisms. Each con-
sists of a muscular membrane, reinforced around its rim
in some species. The centre of each sucker operates like a
piston, so that as it is raised a partial vacuum is created
within the sucker giving it a powerful grip on anything to
which it is attached.

Carrying out tests with a spring balance, G. H. Parker

250

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

discovered that a sucker with a diameter of one-tenth of
an inch — sHghdy larger than a pin's head — needed a
pull of two ounces to detach it, while one with a diameter
of a quarter of an inch required six ounces. A large
octopus has about 240 suckers on each of its eight arms,
making a total of 1,920. This means that a force of
720 lb. (more than a quarter of a ton) would need to be
applied to break the hold of a common octopus with a
span of five feet, and even greater force to detach one of
the bigger creatures, the arms of which would probably
tear away first, leaving the suckers still attached.

Aquarium officials have sometimes under-rated the
power in an octopus's arms. On one occasion at the
Brighton Aquarium, before precautions were taken, an
octopus pulled up the waste-valve of a tank during one
night, releasing all the water, so that the tank contained
only a mess of dead octopuses in the morning.

The octopus uses its suckers to explore surfaces, or the
body of its victim, a fact which shows that they are not
merely gripping devices but sensitive organs. Having
gripped its prey, the animal can kill it in either of two
ways, by means of its rounded beak or by administering
poison. The former method indicates that the creature
has an uncanny knowledge of just the right place to use
its powerful sharp instrument as it holds any particular
animal.

When not in use the beak is retracted and hidden, but
as the octopus pinions a crab (for instance) in its deadly
stranglehold, it turns the crab so that its abdominal plates
are towards its mouth and dispatches the crustacean
quickly with a sharp crunching action.

With many octopuses poison is used, and when this
happens (again taking a crab as an example) the victim
is seized and drawn into the parachute-like mem-
braneous folds of the octopus's web, where the poison is
injected. The venom is mainly secreted from the
creature's posterior salivary glands, and kills the victim

251

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

in a few minutes. It is more virulent in the common
octopus than in the cuttle-fish and in common squids,
in which the glands are smaller. In eating a crab the
octopus shows some skill and discrimination, usually
pulling off the back first, eating the viscera and then
discarding the back, after which it pulls off the legs one
by one, cleaning them out and dropping them one by
one until the meal is finished.

Cephalopods do not always have it all their own way —
they are sometimes killed by the shellfish that they
attack. Even large octopuses may get one or more of
their searching arms gripped between the shells of a
clam. It has been said that fierce struggles sometimes
develop between cephalopods and giant shellfish. But the
chief enemies of many of the best known species of octo-
puses are eels — some of the morays and congers having
powerful bodies and stiletto-like teeth. When a large eel
finds a small octopus it swallows it whole. But if the
octopus is a big one the monster eel may use a different
technique: forming a loop with its tail, and sliding its
head (wrapped in its foe's arms) backwards through the
loop, thus forcing the arms off its slippery body — and all
the while gulping the octopus farther down its throat.
Sometimes a conger or moray eel may bite off one or
more of the writhing arms, if the octopus gives it an
opportunity.

Squids can apparently travel much faster than octo-
puses. Lane, who has assembled numbers of remarkable
facts regarding the speeds of all kinds of living creatures,
estimates that (judging by evidence available) large
squids can race through the water at speeds up to twenty
miles an hour.

The flying squids of the genus Onychoteuthis are so
described from their habit of leaping from the sea. They
pump sea water into themselves and release it in forceful
streams until they attain a considerable speed. The
flying squids of the genus Onychoteuthis are said to unfold

252

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

pieces of their webs like wings, and steer themselves up
to and through the surface of the water, sailing through
the air for considerable distances.

The American marine biologist, George F. Arata,
Jun., was on board the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
ship Theodore N, Gill when he made an unusually close
observation of a flying squid's "take-off". The squid was
only about six inches long, but observational conditions
were ideal. The squid was first seen just ahead of the
ship. It had just struck the water after a flight, and
rested motionless until the ship was only ten feet from
it — it then darted to one side, turned swiftly and leaped
backwards, sending out a jet of water from its funnel. By
this time its fins were fully extended, and its arms
bunched together to form a kind of hood. The creature
sprang into the air and flew diagonally across the ship's
bow for at least fifty feet before making a flat "belly-
landing" on the sea's surface. There was no wind what-
ever to assist its flight.

Squids often fall on to ships' decks. On one occasion
W. H. Rush was on a ship three hundred miles oflf the
coast of Brazil, when a shoal of hundreds of squids flashed
out of the sea, rose to a height of fifteen feet and landed
on the ship's deck, which was twelve feet above the
surface.

Numbers of the adult cephalopods seem to live (at
least during the day-time) some hundreds of feet below
the surface of the sea. Compared with the coastal forms
or the flying squids, which live partly above the surface,
the deep water squids and octopods show a reduction
and simplification of their bodies to withstand the enor-
mous pressure. In most deep-sea species the muscular
systems and ink-sacs may be only weakly developed, or
the ink sac may be entirely absent, but in all such
creatures there is a corresponding increase in the amount
of the gelatinous tissue underneath the skin.

This gelatinous tissue is a remarkable substance, for it

253

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

gives the cephalopods not merely the base for their
muscles but also the ''cushioning" that they need to
resist the pressures of the depths. It also has buoyant
qualities. It is found in many of the planktonic groups
and nekton, in nemertean and annelid creatures, in the
angler-fishes, and in the larvae of fishes like the eels,
apart from its presence in cephalopods. One of its ex-
traordinary characteristics is its compressibility. Cepha-
lopods might be appropriately described as the Houdinis
of the seas. They are not only performers of vanishing
tricks, but are escapists of no mean ability.

N. J. Berrill tells the story of a naturalist who had
caught a small octopus, about two feet in length, and had
confined it in a wicker basket, which he took on to a
street car with him. Ten minutes later there were screams
from the other passengers. The octopus had squeezed
itself through a crack only a half-inch wide and had
crawled on to the lap of a lady, who was in hysterics.

The word "compressible" assumes startling signi-
ficance when applied to cephalopods. Experiments made
with them have elicited facts regarding their remarkable
powers that really justify such adjectives as "fantastic"
and "sensational" — even that most misused of adjectives
of modern times, "fabulous".

Roy Waldo Miner, at one time the Curator of Living
Invertebrates in the American Museum of Natural
History, was collecting specimens with a companion near
some coral reefs in Puerto Rico, when he captured a
small octopus, the body of which was about two inches
long, although with its arms fully extended it measured
about a foot across. Miner had an empty cigar box handy
and he put the creature into it, tucking in its eight arms.
The octopus was a tight fit in the cigar box. Miner put
on the lid and secured it by hammering in a number of
tacks, and tying some stout cord around it several times.
Houdini himself was never fastened into a box more
securely or tied up more carefully than that octopus.

254

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

Miner put the box into the bottom of the dinghy which
he was using, and went on with his work, collecting
specimens. When he landed, he picked up the cigar-box,
which was still securely tied, and prized open the lid,
to show the octopus to his companion. The box was
empty.

Miner said later that he felt he had been tricked by
some piece of parlour magic, or that a miracle of some
kind had happened. But as he stood there, completely
baffled. Miner looked down into the boat, and there
among the bilge water was the octopus, looking up at
them with its almost human eyes, from under the blade
of an oar. They quickly recaptured it. The extraordinary
creature had inserted the sensitive tips of its arms into
the thin crack along one edge of the cigar box below the
lid, and — getting a purchase by gripping the outside of
the box — had, in Miner's own words — ''pulled its rubber-
like body through the crack by flattening it to the thinness of
paper:'

The account of this extraordinary incident might seem
incredible if related by anyone else, but Miner's reputa-
tion as a competent researcher in natural history pheno-
mena compels belief: and there are other incidents which
provide confirmatory evidence of this remarkable com-
pressibility of the octopus.

Frank Lane records the experience of C. W. Goates, of
the New York Zoological Society in this connection.
Coates sent ten small octopuses to New York in cigar
boxes — received from a collector for the Society in Key
West. What happened makes it abundantly clear that
the octopus definitely possesses the extraordinary power
indicated in Miner's account. Quarter-inch holes were
drilled in the ten cigar boxes, and each box was tightly
bound with fish-line before they were placed in the
shipping tank. The fish-lines tightened in the water — the
boxes were submerged in the tank — and when they were
tested afterwards it was found absolutely impossible to

255

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

prise up any lid as much as an eighth of an inch. Yet
every one of the ten octopuses squeezed itself through.
They were all found in the shipping tank, free of the
boxes. Coates has also stated that when common octo-
puses with a three-foot span were sent from Florida to New
York enclosed in wire netting with a half-inch mesh,
they regularly squeezed their way out to freedom — each
creature passing through one of the half-inch apertures.

The octopuses which effected their escapes in such an
amazing fashion were relatively small specimens of their
kind, but it is difficult to understand how they could
squeeze their two-inch bulb-like bodies, together with
their fleshy arms, through such thin cracks or small
apertures, for their organs are complex and their eyes are
sensitive instruments.

There are midget octopuses only two inches in length.
At the other end of the size scale are the common octo-
puses of European and West Indian waters [Octopus
vulgaris) which have arms five feet in length, giving the
creatures a spread of more than ten feet, while the
monstrous octopus of the Pacific [Octopus hongkonge?isis)
sometimes attains a diameter of no less than thirty-two
feet. When two octopuses fight, their arms become
entangled in seemingly hopeless confusion as they strike
at each other with their fearsome beaks. The excitement
which they suffer on such occasions causes their colour
patterns (which are normally mottlings of brown, tan
and yellow) to become more vivid, while waves of red,
violet, blue and purple successively suffuse their bodies,
sometimes creating violent colour contrasts. But when the
creatures are crawling over sandy stretches their colours
fade to greyish-white or pale tan, so that their bodies
harmonize with their backgrounds and they become
practically invisible.

There is a cephalopod which moves about in the
shallow water of the coral reefs of Bermuda which is
called the dancing octopus. Its brown body, spotted with

256

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

white, is gracefully balanced upon long slender arms, and
the creature waves these like a pirouetting fairy, only
occasionally touching the sandy floor with their tips.

Perhaps the most remarkable of all the cephalopods is
the argonaut, or paper nautilus [Argonauta argo) an
animal so exquisitely beautiful that it seems quite unre-
lated to the octopus, yet its eight arms and other charac-
teristics indicate their near kinship. Its delicate and fragile
paper shell, or ''boat", is famed in legend, song and story.

The poetical ideas which clustered around the nautilus
during classic times and in the Middle Ages were as
mythical as they were romantic. Until the middle of the
nineteenth century the argonaut or paper nautilus was a
baffling mystery, for although the creature was known
to be a lady, and always mentioned as ''she", no one had
the faintest idea how the animals reproduced themselves,
for no one had ever seen a male.

In 1827, Stefano delle Chiaje discovered a small
creature — it looked like a parasitic worm — attached to
an argonaut. A few years passed and the great naturalist
Cuvier examined five more worms and concluded that
they were parasites, constituting a genus quite unknown
to science. Each of these "worms" resembled the arm of
a cephalopod — it was about five inches long and had a
number of suckers, varying from about fifty to just over a
hundred. Cuvier named the new genus Hectocotylus — "the
arm of a hundred suckers". Other naturalists and
biologists examined the "parasite" in after years, but
none suspected the truth and the dual mystery remained :
"Was there a male argonaut?" and "How did the
creature reproduce itself?"

The Swiss biologist Albert Kolliker began an intensive
study of the "parasite" and pubHshed papers in 1845 and
1846 in which he pointed out that the "worm" had a
small cavity in which he had found sperm cells resembling
those of a cephalopod. By 1849 Kolliker had convinced
himself that he had found the male argonaut, for he pro-

257

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

fessed to find, and actually drew and described, the
digestive, circulatory and respiratory organs of the ''para-
site"— parasite to him no longer.

Kolliker's error is perpuated for all time in the Hecto-
cotylus octopodis, which is not an animal at all, for as was
subsequently shown it does not breathe or eat and has no
heart.

Heinrich Miiller (1820-60), the celebrated German
anatomist, solved the dual problem in 1853. While
working in Messina he examined a number of very small
argonauts which had no shells and were a different shape
from any he had hitherto seen. He found among the
arms of each specimen a sac that when opened contained
a coiled Hectocotylus . This was at last seen to be the
modified sexual arm of the male, which breaks oflf and
stays in the female.

The female's body measures up to six inches across,
with arms stretching out from it varying in length up
to eighteen inches long, so that the creature has a span
of anything from two to three feet. This means that the
beautiful shell which contains the body would also be
anything up to twelve inches across. But the male is a
tiny creature compared with its mate. It has a little
thimble-shaped body with a mantle less than a quarter
of an inch long, while its arms are about half an inch in
length. The body of the female often has a diameter
twenty times that of the male — a difiference in size which
might be illustrated by comparing a coco-nut with a
small marble. In the male argonaut the sperm duct is in
its third left arm, in a tiny sac. This eventually bursts and
from within it the Hectocotylus unwinds until it attains a
length of five inches — ten times the length of the male
argonaut himself. Very little is known of the details of
mating, but the elongated third arm certainly fertilizes
the female, either while attached to the tiny male or after
it has broken away. We do know that the female often
carries the male around with her, tucked away in her shell.

258

THE SINISTER GEPHALOPODS

After the male's third arm, the Hectocotylus^ has broken
away it certainly has power of free movement, for speci-
mens have been observed winding and twisting about in
water very actively. Kolliker's error was pardonable, for
the detached arm acts very much like a worm — much as
a living creature with its own individuality.

The ''shell" of the female argonaut is not a true shell,
but really an egg-case, formed between the oval expan-
sions terminating the creature's first pair of arms. The
arms are held together and a gelatinous substance gradu-
ally develops between them which is finely moulded on
the inner surface of its membraneous expansion and
which slowly hardens in the water to a spiral paper sub-
stance, exquisitely embellished with parallel ridges of
delicate texture. The two halves of the ''shell" are joined
along their lower edges to form a "keel" which is
decorated by a double row of brown knobs which are
spaced to correspond with the suckers of the arms.

During the lifetime of its owner the "shell" is elastic
and yielding. If carelessly grasped by anyone its extreme
thinness and fragility cause it to crumble like extremely
thin egg-shell.

Two of the female argonaut's arms are greatly dilated
at their extremities. It was once generally believed that
she used these arms as sails, raising them high above the
shell, so that the wind filled them and she was driven
along by it, while she directed the course of her lovely
ship by paddling with her remaining arms, which hang
over the side of the curious craft like oars. In consequence
of this belief the creature was named the argonaut.

Certainly she carries a precious cargo. For the female
argonaut herself, inside the shell, is a most beautiful
creature, despite her seemingly unattractive form. The
animal — called the "poulp" — is superficially no more
than a shapeless mass, but it is a mass of silver with
a cloud of rose-coloured spots. A long semi-circular
band of ultramarine blue is clearly marked at one of its

259

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

parts — along the ''keel". The lady is entirely enclosed in
her abode, and it has been doubtfully reported that she
leaves the craft to forage about in its neighbourhood,
propelling herself by her siphon like any ordinary
cephalopod.

Within the shell she lays her eggs, already fertilized
by the male, and these are suspended in a grape-like
cluster attached to the interior of the spire. If she is
swimming around outside the shell and is attacked she
gets back into her shell like lightning to protect her eggs,
curling herself inside her strange craft until almost hidden.

The real purpose of the expanded arms is to cover the
exterior of the shell, and to build up its delicate structure
and repair any damage to it : the substance of the delicate
shell being secreted by these arms. The lady uses them to
mould the substance into shape, so that (despite their
clumsy appearance and apparent simplicity of structure)
her arms are used like the hands of a sculptor.

To obtain a mental picture of the nautilus looking out
of her home, think of some large sea-shell that you have
seen — one with graceful ridges — and give it graceful lines
and artistic embellishments. Realize that this shell is
made of extremely thin material, and then imagine a
curious 'Tace", in profile, protruding from it — its main
characteristic being a perfectly round staring eye. Instead
of a nose or chin, imagine a number of slender, tapering
appendages projecting from the 'Tace", held closely to-
gether and rippling slightly as the creature stares at you.
There you have the paper nautilus guarding her eggs —
one of the sea's most beautiful creatures, on acquain-
tance, although not at first sight.

The paper nautilus, or argonaut, must not be confused
with the pearly nautilus — an entirely diflferent creature.
Many legends describe the pearly nautilus ''sailing the
seas", and how she will "spread the thin oar and catch
the rising gale". The fact is that (unlike the Portuguese
man-of-war) she is really a bottom-of-the-sea species that

260

THE SINISTER CEPHALOPODS

hunts for shrimps and other creatures on the ocean floor.
True, she has sometimes been seen on the surface — a
pearly, colourful ship of great beauty. But whenever this
happens she is in a weakened condition, and it is possible
that she only comes to the surface to die.

Monstrous squids certainly exist, but their terrifying
characteristics — their writhing arms, their cruel beaks,
their staring almost-human eyes — have created mightier
and even more malicious monsters in the imaginations of
seafaring men. One of these mythical creatures was the
kraken.

The term, of Norwegian origin, applied to a fabulous
creature of the sea, is now assumed to apply to a gigantic
squid which has risen above the surface again and again
in past centuries. It may or may not be a species known
to us, for there are probably more animals in the ocean
deeps than those described in our natural histories.

The kraken was first described by Pontoppidan, Bishop
of Bergen in Norway, but numbers of writers of older
accounts gave descriptions of similar monsters. Sum-
marizing details of many accounts, the kraken is sup-
posed to lie deep down in the sea '^in eighty or a hundred
fathoms of water", and always at some leagues from
land. Very rarely does he rise to the surface, but when
he does he looks like an island several miles in circum-
ference, with enormous mast-like arms with which he
wrecks ships as if they were floating match-boxes, and
creates enormous whirlpools. The kraken' s form has been
described as like that of a crab. His tentacles or arms are
reputed to be hundreds of yards in length : with them he
snatches up ships, or men who have jumped in terror
from them, and carries them down to his rapacious maw
under the waters. Sailors of many countries have
described him as larger than any whale, shark or octopus.
Time alone will tell whether there is any truth in the
suggestion that he and other monsters like him lurk far
down in the dark waters of the ocean deeps.

261

CHAPTER XIV

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

THERE are three main ways in which squids pro-
duce Hght: through bacteria in their bodies, by
secretion, and by means of photophores or
luminous organs.

There are many squids inhabiting shallow water which
have luminous bacteria living in glands beneath their
mantles. These amazing glands have lenses and reflectors
and exist for the sole purpose of producing light. Each of
these squids has a built-in rear-hght, with a magnifying
optical system — and it uses Hght-producing fuel for
hours without need of recharging. The Japanese auth-
ority on luminescence, Yata Haneda, states that "the
light is continuous yet controlled by a thin film of ink
about the glands".

Luminous bacteria are quite different from the
ordinary luminescent species of bacteria which live on
the skin of some marine animals. A creature known as
the lantern squid uses these bacteria, also the Spirula — a
cephalopod belonging to a genus having a flat spiral
shell in the hinder part of the body. Johannes Schmidt
observed a Spirula several times which emitted a pale
yellowish-green light. The spirula's lamp, unHke others,
burns continuously without fading. It is an organ which
has a diaphragm above it which automatically switches
the light on and off.

The squid Heteroteuthis dispar is sometimes regarded as
a deep-sea species, but it has been brought to the surface
from depths of only four hundred or five hundred feet.

262

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

These tiny squids (which are among the plankton) are
often caught up into surface waters by currents and
sometimes cast ashore. It is a squid which produces hght
by secretion. A gland near the ink-sac stores the sub-
stance in abundance, in a reservoir from which it is
extruded by muscular contraction whenever the creature
wills it. The animal usually produces no light until dis-
turbed, but immediately it is touched it shoots out a
stream of mucus, which is known as luciferine. This, as
it meets oxygen in the water, creates a chain of brilliant
bluish-green points of light — rod-shaped light-particles
which glow brightly for some minutes.

There are at least two other squids which produce
light by secretion. Cousteau and Houot were down 3,500
feet in the French Navy's bathyscaphe F.N.R.S.3, in
1953, when a squid about one and a half feet long
appeared in the field of their searchlight. It shot out a
blob of what appeared to be white ink, but when the
searchlight was switched off the extruded secretion
glowed with a phosphorescent light. As the men watched
they saw two other squids discharge similar luminescent
clouds.

The third way in which squids produce light is by
microscopic organs called photophores — organs which
are covered with a layer of chromatophores. These are
normally expanded so that they completely cover the
photophore, but when they are contracted at the will of
the squid then light is emitted. The number of photo-
phores possessed by squids varies with the species — some
have less than twenty. There is one species, Nemato-
lampas regalis, which measures only a few inches across,
and has nearly a hundred photophores : five on each
eye, ten within its mantle, and seventy on its arms and
tentacles.

One Mediterranean squid has nearly two hundred
photophores. Some squids have them only on their eyes
and on some of their arm-tips. Others have them over

263

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

many parts of their bodies. One squid, Vampyroteuthis
infernalis — one of the most sinister names given to any-
sea creature — has two near the base of its fins which
have eyehds or shutters which can be opened and closed.
Some squids have transparent windows through which
the hght from their photophores streams out. Other
squids have internal photophores, giving light within
their bodies. Others have photophores on eyeballs which
are on the ends of stalks — appliances which combine
range-finders with their searchlights.

The fire-fly squid probably possesses the most efiicient
light-producing equipment of them all. Although a deep-
sea creature it comes to the surface to breed, each year
from April to June, in Toyama Bay in the Sea of Japan.
It is only four inches in diameter, but it has three fairly
large photophores on each of its arm-tips, and on two of
its arms numbers of photophores along their entire
length. It also has hundreds of photophores scattered
over its mantle. Thus equipped the fire-fly squid flashes
its lights periodically, as though it were signalling to
other creatures. The flashes vary in length and rapidity.
The arm, mantle and eye photophores can flash together
or separately — they give out the brightest light. The
photophores on the arm-tips can flash all together or
separately. Science remains in complete ignorance re-
garding the purpose of the lighting equipments of some
of these squids.

The emission of light by living animals is a widespread
phenomena, which becomes limited to special parts of
the body in higher species. Many of the coelenterates
show tendencies towards such localization. In medusae
the whole body surface may be luminous, but the light
may be brighter along specific areas, such as the radial
canals, in the ovaries, or in the marginal sense-organs.
In certain polyps there are eight luminous bands.

Creatures of the genus Pyrosoma are joined in free-
swimming colonies in the form of hollow Qylinders, closed

264

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

at one end. Pyrosoma (a creature of tropical seas) is
responsible for some extraordinary displays of phos-
phorescence. Each creature in the floating colony has two
small patches of light-producing cells at the base of a
tube, which when stimulated discharges light. At the
point of irritation the individuals begin emitting light
and (as if the remaining members of the colony were
responding to the signal) the light spreads until all the
individuals are giving forth light, so that the whole colony
is ablaze.

Land creatures which emit light are beyond the
scope of this book — numbers of them are of course
well known. But the luminous land creatures form light-
giving groups which are not comparable, in numbers or
in the efficiency of their devices, with the inhabitants of the
sea which are able to emit floods, patches and flashes of
hght.

Numbers of theories have been propounded in
attempts to explain the working of the mechanisms — if we
can call them mechanisms — which produce the light
emitted by sea creatures.

Among earlier explanations was Mayer's theory that
the light from the sun is absorbed and given forth again
by the organic protoplasm — a theory which contributed
nothing. Brugnatelli advanced the hypothesis that the
food of the light-giving animal contains light energy
before being swallowed, and that, after digestion,
specialized organs convert the energy into light — but he
had no explanation of the functioning of the light organs.
Macaire enlarged upon the presence of phosphorous and
coagulated albumen. Spallanzi wrote about the oxygen
producing slow combustion within the creatures, but his
ideas comprised no kind of explanation.

So theories were adumbrated, modified and discarded,
until Todd and McCartney advanced the theory that
has been developed and generally accepted since — that
animal luminosity is solely dependent upon the vital

265

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

force or nerve energy acting through the nerve systems
of the Hght-producing creatures, so that it is, under
speciaHzed forms of structure, transformed through the
secretions and general tissues into radiant energy, some-
times chemically, sometimes mechanically.

Translated into more modern terms : the biochemical
basis of luminescence consists of the interactions of a sub-
stance called luciferin with an enzyme called luciferase ;
in most organisms the presence of oxygen being needed to
produce the light. It is therefore to be noted that the
latest "explanations" are made in chemical terms. Little
is known of the substances concerned. It is questionable
whether, after over a century's intensive research into the
problem, scientists are any nearer the truth of the matter.
Accumulation of data does not necessarily imply under-
standing of the way the light-producing mechanisms
work, or of their purposes.

It is of course obvious that some sea creatures which
possess light-producing devices use them as snares to catch
other creatures, while others use them as sexual lures to
attract their mates. But such obvious explanations only
account for a minority of the cases where creatures have
the power to produce light. Recent research has revealed
the startling fact that when numbers of mid- water nets are
towed at many levels in deep oceanic waters the proba-
bility is that no fewer than four-fifths of the fishes taken
will bear light organs. It therefore seems highly probable
that deeper and deeper research into the oceans will con-
firm this fact and that the percentage may well become
even higher.

Creatures near the surface which are reached by the
light of the sun obviously do not need such organs as
much as those which live lower down, where the sun's
light does not penetrate. Miles down in the deeps,
myriads of creatures may be using light-producing devices
in ways completely unsuspected by man.

Of the deep-sea angler-fishes, two species have an

266

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

extraordinary luminous gland which they use to lure
their prey. This gland, possessed solely by the females, is
at the end of an appliance which can only be described
as a fishing rod. The base of the rod is firmly fixed in the
snout of the fish. Along the rod are two sets of muscles
which are used by the fish to raise and lower the luminous
bait.

It is certain that the lights are often used as warning
signals to other fish. Some of the coelenterates, before
resorting to pitched battles with other sea creatures, in
which their weapons are their poisonous stings, use their
phosphorescence in this way : it not only illuminates the
surrounding region and enables them to see their foes,
but also warns away others of their kind, particularly
females who need to be kept out of the battles.

According to August Brauer, who made a special study
of the luminescent organs of certain fish, the chin barbels
of certain stomiatid groups are used as light lures. The
barbels (slender tactile appendages around the mouth)
are very diversified. Some are whip-like, some tassel-
shaped, and the luminous organs are also of many kinds.
Some have bulbs attached, which light up, others have
their luminous organs within the barbels; others again
have luminous traceries besides bulbs.

Brauer believed that many fishes having light organs
arranged in systematic groups use their light organs in
patterns to identify themselves to other creatures of their
own kind — signalling, in fact, in codes known only to the
members of the particular species. Such manoeuvres
would have special significance in the breeding season.
Such signals may also be used to signal information
regarding food to other fishes — the finding of food at a
distance being of vital importance to deep-sea fishes.

Astronomical research had a start of thousands of
years over oceanic investigation for men had been
studying the stars for centuries, and had learned how to
interpret the light signals from suns separated from our

267

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

own by billions of miles long before (only five hundred
years ago) explorers began voyages across unknown seas.
Even then the depths of the oceans remained unexplored,
and it was less than a century ago that science looked
down into the world's waters and, as oceanic research
really began, saw within them points of light which now
seem to challenge the known stars in number and fas-
cinating interest.

As we begin to realize the stupendous significance of
the fact that the world's oceans are not entirely dark, but
are populated, from the sea-floors of the great deeps up-
wards for miles, with countless millions of creatures
carrying their own lamps, rivalling the known stars in
number and far exceeding the lighting devices of the
world's land surfaces in diversity and ingenuity, our con-
ception of the oceans must necessarily change. They will
become vast areas of increasing illumination ; physically,
as more and more living species are catalogued by natural
historians, and imaginatively as oceanographic research
widens and deepens within them.

The success of undersea exploration will largely de-
pend upon man's use of increasingly efficient lighting
devices.

In a physical sense, and also (within limits) in im-
aginative senses, the sea is becoming more and more
penetrable. Down into hitherto unknown depths, where
myriads of points and patches of light move in all direc-
tions through millions of cubic miles of dark water, man
is taking his own light-producers and his own appliances
to record scenes which have been registered only upon
the optic retinas of fishes for eons of time.

The latest underwater lamp is one which has been
developed by the General Electric Co., Ltd., in colla-
boration with the Admiralty Research Laboratory. The
three main requirements of underwater lamps are : that
they must be light, easy to handle, and simple to operate.
The A.R.L.'s experiments have shown that these require-

268

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

ments can be met by free-flooded lamps, in which the
hydrostatic pressure is resisted by the glass envelope.

Operating in direct contact with the water, their
success depends on what is called the implosion resistance
of that envelope — implosion being the bursting of a vessel
inwards under pressure. Success has been attained with
this new lamp after numerous experiments. The proto-
types showed that the outer surfaces of the bulbs used
were cooled effectively by immersion in the sea, but the
inner surfaces were heated by radiation and conduction
from the filaments, operating through the gas fillings.
Bulb failures were soon found to be due to the severe
thermal stresses set up within them, rather than the
pressure of water from without. Using a wall thickness
of about a millimetre in conjunction with a specially
shaped bulb, the present lamp came into existence ; one
which can withstand a pressure of 650 lb. a square inch
— equivalent to a depth of 1,300 feet.

As the new lamp is operated only when fully sub-
merged, it has been possible to reduce the size of the bulb
and improve its resistance to implosion; for full advan-
tage is now taken of the cooling effect of the sea water.
The connections to the lamp are protected by a sealing
"muff" of moulded rubber, which helps to provide a
complete lighting unit for underwater use, in conjunction
with the light-weight fitting originally designed. The
units first used, of which the new lamp is the latest
development, were first operated in the search for the
Comet aircraft which crashed in 1954. During recent
trials by the diving ship H.M.S. Reclaim there were no
failures : the exhaustive tests showing that one diver can
handle four of these lamps during underwater inspection
work, while directing salvage operations. The lamp can
also be used for underwater television.

The lighting device just described is but one of
numerous inventions perfected in recent years for deep-
sea exploration, and may serve to indicate the enormous

269

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

progress made in a few decades with all kinds of devices
for illuminating the underwater world, and for photo-
graphing it in connection with such appliances.

Underwater cameras have been steadily and rapidly
improved in the last decade. In France an underwater
camera that requires no housing has passed the proto-
type stage and is going into production. Underwater
television is developing its own techniques, and progress
is rapid in the perfection of devices of all kinds to meet
the needs of what is virtually a new science.

Underwater television technicians have faced and
overcome problems which at one time seemed insur-
mountable. Making pictures under water, especially at
considerable depths, requires something more than ex-
pensive apparatus: it requires nerve, endurance, and
creative imagination to a degree not demanded in the
setting up of land surface studios. Pioneers in underwater
photography have dived to the limit of endurance to take
photographs with ordinary cameras: ordinary only in
comparison with motion-picture ones. Using diving-suits
and Aqualungs such divers have often had their own
ideas about underwater photography — ideas which have
contributed much to the latest developments in under-
water motion-picture equipment. Solitary cameras have
been lowered to a depth of 20,400 feet, and observers
using cameras have descended to 13,287 feet in what is
called "the dirigible of the sea" — the new bathyscaphe.

One of the earliest uses of the television camera under
the waves was in the atoll of Bikini in 1947, where it was
successfully employed to register the effects of the atomic
explosion. Four years later, in 1951, the underwater
electronic eye justified itself triumphantly when it dis-
covered the British submarine Affray, after a flotilla of
ships had searched for her in vain.

Yet another advance has been made in undersea
photographic equipment recently, in the perfection, by
Canadian technicians, of a television camera enclosed in

270

ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS

a Steel cylinder weighing no less than two and a half
tons, to resist pressure at great depths : the camera being
controlled by an operator who remains on the parent
ship, taking pictures under the water as the huge cylinder
moves about in all directions at a speed of about a mile
an hour.

Numbers of brilliant scientists like Dr. Edgerton —
inventor of the high-speed electronic flash lamp, which
is capable of brighter-than-the-sun exposures as brief as
a millionth of a second — are now devoting their minds to
problems of underwater photography.

Oceanographic science is in its very earliest infancy.
All man's researches have taken him down only a small
fraction of the distance that separates him from the floors
of the deepest ocean chasms. The bathyscaphe descents
which have already been made have penetrated the
deeps at a few places only, and may be compared with
the first ascents into the air in engine-powered aircraft
made by the Wright Brothers. It will be some years before
man's bathyscaphes (improved beyond recognition from
those we know today) descend over six miles into the
Mindanao Deep, and release explorers who will walk the
sea floor and investigate the life-cycles of the strange
creatures which live there. Yet man may well persist in
the improvement of his underwater devices until he is
able to make his way over the sediments which have
been deposited there through uncounted eons of time.

Illumination of the oceans will continue until larger
and larger areas are flooded with light. The impenetrable
sea of today may be widely explored during the next few
generations.

Considering the enormous advances in all fields of
human knowledge in recent years, our wildest imagina-
tive speculations regarding the future exploration of the
world's seas may become matter-of-fact reality before our
children's children have reached maturity. But the sea
will always remain, in some senses, impenetrable. Should

271

THE IMPENETRABLE SEA

the entire area of the world's oceans become, at some
future time, brilHantly illuminated, and all their multi-
farious species catalogued and described, so that no
single inch of the deepest floors remained uninvestigated,
new mysteries would unfold within and beyond every
school of knowledge acquired. Myriads of new facts
would fructify as science sent forth new exploratory roots.
Growth is an eternal process which cannot be confined or
ended by fruition. Impenetrable today — in the sense that
it is baffling and inscrutable — the sea will remain im-
penetrable as long as man inhabits this spinning planet.
Sir Cyril Hinshelwood's words, spoken as President of
the Royal Society in June 1957 when he was asked what
was hoped to be gained from the Geophysical Year, are
particularly applicable to the sea and its wonders :

If we could predict all that we would learn it would
not be worth doing. The Creator was much cleverer
than Man, however, and has done all sorts of things
that we never suspected. Any new knowledge may
produce a discovery of great value. The more unpre-
dictable that knowledge was in advance, the greater
its value will be.

272

INDEX

Adelie penguin, 163
Admiralty Research Laboratory,

268-9
African catfish, 194
Aircraft, record heights, 23
Albacore, 39
Alexander the Great (legend),

166
Alexandrian Libraries, 165
Algae y 150
Amas of Japan, 157
Amazon bore, 84
Ambergris, 222 ^^ seq.
Anacangrispasqui, 222
Andromeda nebula, 100
Anemones, 129, 181
Angler-fishes, 266-7
Annandale, Dr. N., 116
Anse de L'Aiguillon mussel beds,

131.
Antoniada, 30
Aqualung, 175 et seq., 270
Arata, G. F.,jun., 253
Archaeceti, 215
Architeutis, 249
Argonauta argo, 2^"] et seq.
Aristotle, 58, 140, 171
Asiatic jet, 67-68
Assyrian breathing device, 1 72
AstroideSy 144
Atmosphere, 59 et seq.
Atramentum (ink), 247
Aurelia aurita, 126
Amelia fiavidula, 127
Auxospores, 240

Bacon, Roger, 172

Bacteria, luminous, 262 et seq.

Balaenoptera musculus, 209

Baleen, 215, 216, 236
Barnacles, 129
— "closing their doors", 132
Basking shark, 203
Bathyscaphe descents, 13, 176,

263, 270, 271
Batten, 160
Bay of Fundy bores and tides,

84-85
Beaufort, Sir F., 69
Beaufort scale, 69
Bel-Aqua Thunderhead, 1 70
Beluga, 220
Benthos, 112
Berril, N. J., 254
Bivalve, largest British, 146
Blackfish, 54
Blennies, iiy et seq.
Blennius gattorugine, 1 1 7
Blennius vulgaris, 1 1 7
Blond, George, 232
Bluefish, 39
Blue shark, 187
Blue whale, 209-10
Bolland, W., 179
Bonitos, 39
Bora, 70

Borelli, Giovanni, lyi et seq.
Bores, river, 83 et seq.
Bottlenose, 219 20
"Bouchet" system, 131
Bourne, 144
Branchellion, 197
Brauer, August, 267
Bream's speed, 38
Breathing devices, underwater,

lyi et seq.
"Breathing plant" causing trade

winds, 63

273

INDEX

Brighton Aquarium, 251
British Honduras cyclone, 83
BrugnatelH, 265
Bruniere, Dr. de la, 204
Bryozoa, 1 1 2
Buckland, 195
Butterfish, 1 1 8
Butterfly-fish, 181

Callorinus alascanus, 225

Carlos, King of Portugal, 47

Carnivora, 224

Gephalopods, 245 et seq.

Cephaloptera, 191

Getacea, 215

Challenger, 22, 168

Gharybdis whirlpool, 91 et seq.

Ghelonians, 50

Gheyney, J. K., 139

Ghiase, S. delle, 257

Ghromatophores, 263

Gicero, 247

Glams, 145-6, 156, 252

Glimbing fish, 11 4- 15

Gloud formation, 60

Goastlines, no et seq.

Goates, G. W., 255-6

Coelenterata, 119 et seq., 140, 264,

267
Goleridge's Ancient Mariner, 65
Golour-changing devices, 93-94
Golumbus, 66, 97, 198
Colymbidae, 157-8
Coiymbus glacialis, 158-9
Colymbus septentrionalis, 159
Gonservation of sea resources,

233

Gook, Gapt. J., 142, 168

Copepoda, 48 et seq., 241 et seq.

Goral reefs, 142 et seq.

Gorals, 138 et seq., 155

Goriolis effect, 61

Goriolis, Gaspard G. de, 61

Gosta, Juan de la, 168

Gousteau, Lieut. -Gom. Jacques-
Yves, 171, 175 et seq., 203 et
seq., 248, 263

Gowrie, 146

Grabs, 146

Graig, John, 212 ^/ seq.

Grockett, E., 212 et seq.

Crocodilus porosus, 146

Currents, 67 et seq.

Currents, world's strongest, 88

Cuttlefish, 53, 55, 219, 222, 247

et seq.
Cuvier, 257
Cyanea arctica, 127
Cyclones, 83
Cyclostomata, 183
Cyclothone, 94-95

Daldorf, Lieut., 116

Dalton, John, 59

Dampier, W., 59

Dancing octopus, 256-7

Darwin, iii, 126, 164, 236

Davy, John, 47

Delphinidae, 2 1 1

Devil-fish, a five-ton, 201

Devil-fishes, 191 et seq.

Diatoms, 150-1, 237 ^/ seq.

Dicerobatis, 191

Discocephali, 197

Divers (human), 138 et seq., 154

et seq.
Divers (birds), 157 ^^ seq.
Diving devices, 1 66 et seq.
Dixon, Gapt. G. G., 102
Dogfishes, 185-6, 189, 207
Dog whelk, 134
Doldrums, 65-66
Dollar-fish, 118
Dolphins, 33, 52 et seq.
Donati, V., 236
Drach, Prof., 204
Ducks, 160
Dugong, 231-2
Dumas, Frederic, 171, ij6etseq.,

205

Earth, motion of, 64

Earth's peaks and depressions,

22
Echineididae , 197

74

INDEX

Echineis naucrates, 198

Echinoderm, 146

Edgerton, Dr., 271

Eels, 50, 105, 248 et seq., 252

Ehrenreich, Dr., 189

Eider ducks, gripped by mussels,

130-1
Elasmobranchii, 186
Electric fishes, 1 94 et seq.
Electronic flash lamp, 241
Elephant-headed mollusc, 95
£lie Monnier^ 1 3 et seq.
Eliot, Sir W., 191
Emperor penguin, 162
Erythrocytes, 246
Eskimoes, 219-30
Ewart, Prof., 195

Fabre, 75-76
Fan-shell, 146
Fathometers, 170
Fernez system, 177
File-fish, 51-52, 102-3
Finbacks, 218
Fire-fly squid, 264
Fishes, sounds made by, 54
Fishes, hearing in, 44
Fish, fastest, 40-41
Fishmen, 1 54 et seq.
Fish surgery, 45, 251
Fish submarines, 42
Flagella, 147 et seq.
Flagellata, 149
Flammarion, 87
Fleuss, H. A., 174
Florida Keys, 143
Flying-fishes, 38 et seq., 102-3
Flying-fish, fastest, 39
Flying gurnards, 33, 43
Flying herrings, 33
Flying squid, 33, 44, 45
Forbes, Edward, 236
Fort Jefferson coral, 144
Fox, D. L., 248
Freminet, 173-4
Frobisher, Sir M., 56
Frogmen, 175, 179
Fucaceae, loo-i

Gagnan, Emile, 175

Gannet, 160

Gaper, 146

Gar-pike, 40

Geoghios, Stetti, 156

Gilmore, Dr., 232

Girod, P., 247

Globe-fishes, 50-51

Great Barrier Reef, 1 42 et seq.

Grebes, 158

Gulf of Mexico, 80

Gulf Stream, 77 ^/ seq.

Gunther, Dr. A., 194

Gurnards, 39 et seq.

Gymnotus, 194, 197

Haeckel, 124

Hag-fishes, 183

Haldane, Prof, 239

Halley, Dr., 155, 175

Hammerheads, 188

Haneda, Yata, 262

Harmattan, 70

Harvest-fish, 1 18

Hass, Hans, 206

Hatchet-fish, 94

Hectocotylus, 2^J et seq.

Hectocotylus octopodis, 258

Henson, Victor, 237

Hermit-crabs, 146

Herrings, 241

Heteroteuthis dispar, 262

Hinshelwood, Sir Cyril, 272

Hippocrates, 58, 139, 165

Hirudinea, 197

Histrio histrio, 104

Homer, 167

Hooghly River bore, 84

Houot, Lieut. -Com., 13 et seq.,

263
Horse latitudes, 66-67
Horse-mackerel, 33
Humboldt, 99
Hunter, John, 219
Huxley, T. H., 147, 236
Hwang Ho River, sediment, 75
Hydroids, 103
Hydromusae, 124

275

INDEX

Hydrozoa, 127

Ice-caps, melting, 76
Impennes, 160
Implosion, 269
Isy-Schwart, Marcel, 207

Jackass penguin, 164
James, W. H., 174
Jelly-fishes, 118 et seq., 242, 244
Jet-propulsion, creatures using,

40, 246
Johnston, H. H., 99
Jordan, Dr. D. S., 34
Jupiter, 31

Keast, Dr. R., 157
Kelvin, Lord, 168-9
Key West, 139-40
Killer whales, 211^/ seq.
Kleingert, 174
Klobius, 222
Kolliker, A., 257-8
Kon-Tikij 232
Krakatoa eruption, 72
Kraken, 261

Lamp-carrying fishes, 95
Lampreys, 183

Lamps, underwater, 268 et seq.
Lane, Frank W., 34, 38, 159-60,

246, 248, 252, 255
Le Blanc's performing seal,

228-9
Lebour, Dr. M. V., 244
Lenticula marina^ 63
Le Prieur, 175
Leptocephali^ 109
Lethbridge, John, 173-4
Limpets, 129, 132
Linschotten, 222
Lister, Dr., 62
Lockley, R. M., 226-7
Lohmann, Hans, 237
Lowell, 31
Lubbock, 126
Luciferase, 266
Luciferin, 266
Luciferine, 263

Lumiere, Cornel, 205 et seq.
Luminescence J 262 et seq.

Macaire, 265

MacGinities, 248

Maelstrom, 96

Magellan, 66

Malapterurus, 194, 197

Manatees, 230-1

Marbled angler, 105

Mars, 30

Marsigli, Count L., 236

Mater, 265

McCartney, 265

Meandrina labyrinthica^ 144

Medusae, 125, 264

Melsom, Capt. H. G., 221

Melville, Hermann, 220

Mercator, 168

Mercator's Atlas, 96

Mercury, 30, 155

Mermaids, 231

Michael Sars expedition, 98

Mindanao Deep, 272

Miner, Dr. R. W., 182-3, 254-5

Mistral, 70

Mitchell-Hedges, F. A., 200

Moby Dick, 220

Molluscs, 129, 135, 245

Monsoons, 70-71

Moon, and the tides, 26, 80

Moore, Prof. H. B., 244

Moray eels, 146, 182, 248-9, 252

Mother-of-pearl, 165

Mudie, Mrs. J., 228

Mud-skippers, 112^/ seq.

Muller, H., 258

Miiller, J. P. M., 235

Murphy, 161

Murray, Sir J., 98

Mussels, i2g et seq., 152

My a arenaria, 146

Mystacoceti, 215

Nannoplankton, 238
Narwhal, 54 et seq.
National Oceanographic Coun-
cil, 232

76

INDEX

Nautilus, 247 et seq.
Nekton, 111-12
Nematocysts, 119^^ seq.
Nematolampas regalis, 263
Neptune, 32
Neritic Province, 33
Nesteroff, V., 204
Neumann, 222-3
Newton's Principia, 155
Norfolk coast, seals, 227-8

Ocean Province, 33
Oceans : compared with solar
system, 2 1 et seq.

— deepest spot, 22

— density layers, 78

— earth's gravitational pull, 86

— may boil away, 29

— power from, 88

— three "living spaces", 33

— waves, 28

{see also specific headings)
Octopus, 38, 246 et seq.
Octopus hongkongensis, 256
Octopus vulgaris, 256
Odontoceti, 215, 218
Ohio tornado (1842), 70
Old, Dr. E. H. H., 122
Onychoteuthisj 252
Ophiocephalus, 114
Orcinus, 2 1 1
Orcinus orca, 2 1 2
Orkneys, hurricane (1953), 70
Ostrea edulis, 133
Ostrea virginica, 133
Otaria ursina, 288
Oysters, 52, 131 et seq., 152

Paludanus, 222
Paper nautilus, 257 ^/ seq,
Paramecium, 152
Parker, G. H., 250
Pearly nautilus, 260-1
Penguins, 160 et seq.
Pennella, 48

Periophthalmus schlosseri, 113
Periwinkle, 135-6
Perrotin, 31

Perseus, 247

Petitcodiac River bore, 86

Photophores, 262 et seq.

Physalia, 120

Physeter macrocephalus, 2 1 8

Phytoplankton, 237 ^^ seq.

Piccard, Prof., 176

Pinna fragilis, 146

Pinnipedia, 224

Pipe-fishes, 103-4

Plankton, 48, 109, 111-12, 235

et seq.
Planktonic animals, 241 et seq.
Planktosphaera, 243
Planula, 148

Pliny the elder, 58, 171, 247
Pluto, 32
Plymouth, England : gale

(1824), 67

— hot rocks, 128

Poe, E. A., 96-97

Polar bear, 229

Polyprion americanus, 102

Polyps, 264

Pouting, H. G., 221

Pontoppidan, Bishop, 261

Porifera, 140

Porpoises, 39, 53, 202, 211

Portuguese man-of-war, 119 et

seq., 148, 164, 260
Preleptocephali, 108
Pressures, underwater, 167-8,

179
Prothero, E., 34
Protoplasm, 239
Proxima Centauri, 20
Pumpkin-seed, 118
Pyrosoma, 264-5

Rays, 52, 183, 190, 206 et seq.
Ray's Encyclopaedia, 90
Rain formation, 68-69
Red tide, Florida, 150
Remoras, 197 et seq.
Reyn, Dr., 63
Rivers, sediment, 75 et seq.
Rondolet, 247
Ross, Capt., 168

277

INDEX

Rotifers, 152
Rush, W. H., 253

Sabre-toothed viper-fish, 92-93

Sail-fish, 40 et seq.

Sailing Directions for the Coast of

Norway^ 96
Salisbury, Prof. R. D., 75
Salmon, 33 et seq.
Salmonids, 34

Saltfjord, Norway, currents, 88
Sandage, Dr. Allan, 29
Sand-hoppers, 129
Sargasso Sea, 97 et seq.
Sargassum bacciferum, gy et seq.
Sargassum fish, 104
Saturn, 32
Sauries, 33
Scallop, 134
Scammon Lagoon Expedition,

233-4
Schiaparelli, 30-31
Schmid, Dr., 160
Schmidt, Johannes, 105, 262
Scoresby, William, 55
Scott, Capt., 162, 221
Scyphozoa, 127
Sea-bears, 226, 228
Seals, 213, 224 ^^ seq.
Seals, performing, 228-9
Sea-stars, 182
Sea-urchins, 132
Sea-wasps, 146
Seine bore, 84
Selachiiy 183
Semper, 142
Sepia, 246 et seq.
Sepia octopodoia, 222
Serpent-head, 114. et seq.
Severn River bore, 84
Sexual lures, 266-7
Shagreen, 184, 189
Sharks, 33, 50, 95, 182 et seq.
Shark-sucker, 198
Shaw, Mr., of Drumlanrig, 37
Shearwaters, 146
Sheeps-head, 1 18
Shipley, Sir A., 100

Shore life, 128 ^/ seq.

Shrimps and prawns of Char-

. ybdis, 93-94
Shrimps of the Sargasso, 105
Shrimp, speed of, 38
Siebe, Augustus, 175
Siebenaler, Mr. and Mrs., and

their tame sharks, 214-15,

227
Signalling by sea-creatures, 264,

267
Simoom, 70
Sirocco, 70

Siphonophora, 124. et seq.
Siphonophores, 16
Skate, heaviest caught, 201
Skate, its rudimentary electric

organ, 195
Skates, 183, 190
Snails, 103, 105
Snorkel, 169

Solar system, survey of, 30 et seq.
Soundings and dredgings, 164

et seq.
Spallanzi, 265
Spear-guns, 169-70
Spermaceti, 221
Spermatozoids — high speeds,

151
Sperm whales, 218 ^/ seq.
Spheniscidae, 160
Spirula, 262
Sponges, i^J et seq.
Squids, 245 et seq.
Squids and luminescence, 262

et seq.
Squirrel-fish, 180
Star-fish attacking oyster, 134
Star-fishes, 118, 132, 145
Stars, rays from influencing

creatures, 87
Stinging cells, 119^/ seq.
Sting-rays, 146, 193, 199, 202,

206
Stringham, Emerson, 34
Sun, power from, 88 et seq.
Sun's energy, 60
Sun, tidal influence of, 86

78

INDEX

Sunfish, 33, 46, 49
Surf-scoter, 134
Sweeney, John, 207
Swordfish, 39 ^^ seq.

Tailliez, Philippe, 14, 171, 176

et seq.
Tarpon, 45-46

Teeth, shark's amazing, 184-5
Teleostei, 183
Terns, 160
Thollon, 31
Thompson, J. Vaughan, 159,

235
Thread-slime, 151
Thresher-shark, 187
Thucydides, 167
Tidal heights, greatest, 85
Tidal range, 86
Tidal rivers, 83
Tidal waves, 61, 80 ^/ seq.
Tide prediction, 82
Tide-rip, 82

Tides, 60 et seq., 80 et seq., 1 1 1
Tides, harnessing, 88 et seq.
Todd, 265
Tornadoes, 70
Torpedinidae, 194 et seq.
Torj&^^o electrocuting a duck, 195
Trade winds, 62 et seq.
Trent bore, 84
Trichechidae, 224-5
Tridacna, 145, 156
Tridacna gigantea, 146
Trigger-fish, 51
Tsien-tang-kiang bore, 84
Tunas, 39, 46
Tunny fishes, 33, 46 et seq.
Turtles, 33, 50

Ultraplankton, 238
Underwater : cameras,
270-1

— electronic eye, 270

— exploration, 164 et seq.

— gun, 169

— lamps, 268 et seq.

— scooters, 180

70- r

— television, 269-70

Uranus, 32

U.S. Navy Survey (1951), 79

Vaillant, M. le, 192
Valdes, Oviedo y, 99
Vampyroteuthis infernalis, 264
Velella, 124
Venus, 30
Venus's-basket, 148
Verrill, 45, 144
Vorticella, 124

Wade, Dr. H. W., 123

Walking-fish, 1 13-14
Walruses, 224 et seq.
Waves, 73 ^^ seq.
Waves, formulae, 74
Waves, smallest, 73
Westerlies, 67
West Indian cyclone, 83
Weymouth gale (1957), 69
Whales, 33, 47, 209 et seq.
Whale shark, 209
Whelks, 184
Whirlpools, 90 et seq.
Whirlpools, appeasing, 90
White, Dr. P. D., 234
White shark, 187, 206
White whales, 220
White-Wickham, H., 203
Wiedersheim and Parker, 197
Willm, 13
Williams, A. S., 31
Winckworth, R., 247
Wind erosion, 71-72
Wind, greatest ever known, 70
Winds, 58 et seq.
Winds, superstitions, 63
Wind velocities, 69
Wreck-fish, 102
Wrecks, sunken, 180-1
Wright brothers, 271

Yangste Kiang, sediment, 75

Zoarces viviparus, 1 1 7
Zoea, 236, 242

279

mm.

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