GLADIATORS OF THE SEA. 339 



with. Be this as it may, the attack was made, and at four o'clock 

 the next morning the captain was awakened with the unwelcome in- 

 telligence that the ship had sprung a leak. She was taken back to 

 Colombo, and thence to Cochin, where she was hove down. Near the 

 keel was found a round hole, an inch in diameter, running completely 

 through the copper sheathing and planking. As attacks by sword-fish 

 ai*e included among sea-risks, the insurance company was willing to 

 pay the damages claimed by the owners of the ship if only it could be 

 proved that the hole had really been made by a sword-fish. No in- 

 stance had ever been recorded in which a sword-fish had been able to 

 withdraw his sword after attacking a ship. A defense was founded 

 on the possibility that the hole had been made in some other way. 

 Professor Owen and Mr. Frank Buckland gave their evidence, but 

 neither of them could state quite positively whether a sword-fish which 

 had passed its beak through three inches of stout planking could with- 

 draw without the loss of its sword. Mr. Buckland said that fish have 

 no power of backing, and expressed his belief that he could hold a 

 sword-fish by the beak ; but then he admitted that the fish had con- 

 siderable lateral power, and might so ' wriggle its sword out of a hole.' 

 And so the insurance company will have to pay nearly six hundred 

 pounds because an ill-tempered fish objected to be hooked, and took 

 its revenge by running full tilt against copper sheathing and oak 

 planking." 



The instrument with which such damage is done is a flat, bony 

 prolongation of the upper jaw, which tapers slightly to a nearly 

 square end. Fig. 2, although representing the weapon of a very 

 young fish, will serve to show the appearance of the upper and under 

 sides of the sword. Its material is not very hard, and it would fail 

 to pierce a ship's timbers but for the enormous swiftness with which 

 it is driven by the charging fish. 



An unsigned article in " Harper's Weekly " for October 25, 1879, 

 contains a mention of a sword being found, in 1725, imbedded as 

 deeply in the side of the British ship Leopard as an iron bolt of the 

 same size could be driven by nine strokes of a twenty-five-pound ham- 

 mer. Yet the fish drove it in at a single thrust. The same writer 

 tells the following still more remarkable story : " On the return of the 

 whale-ship Fortune to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1827, the stump 

 of a sword-blade of this fish was noticed projecting like a cog outside, 

 which, on being traced, had been driven through the copper sheathing, 

 an inch board under-sheathing, a three-inch plank of hard wood, tbe 

 solid white-oak timber twelve inches thick, then through another two- 

 and-a-half-inch hard oak ceiling, and lastly penetrated the head of aa 

 oil-cask, where it stuck, not a drop of the oil having escaped." 



One of the traditions of the sea, time-honored, believed by all mar- 

 iners, handed down in varied phases in a hundred books of ocean- 

 travel, relates to the terrific combats between the whale and the sword- 



