The Devil-fish of Jamaica. 173 



leisurely flapping and floundering on the surface of the brokeu 

 water, striking first one fin into the air and then the other, and 

 presenting a bulk of living flesh half the dimensions of the ves- 

 sel. The sea-devil is the fish that Barrere and other travellers 

 speak of, of such uncommon dimensions, springing above the 

 surface of the sea, and splashing the water to an immense 

 height when falling into the sea again. It was these fishes that 

 Le Vaillant saw in his second voyage to Africa, the smallest 

 one, which he caught, being twenty-five feet long in the body, 

 and some thirty feet wide in the fins. It is of this fish that 

 Sonnini speaks when he represents a flat fish seen on the surface 

 larger and wider than the vessel he was sailing in. The most 

 interesting narrative is that of Kisso, of a fish taken in 1807, in 

 a net at Nice, called a mandrague, a net divided into chambers, 

 and stretched out with anchors, and gathered in by boats. It 

 was a female, Gephaloptera Massena, the vacca of the Mediter- 

 ranean fishermen. It weighed 1328 lbs. avoirdupois. When the 

 female fish had been taken, the male, which was afterwards cap- 

 tured, and weighed 885 lbs., haunted for two days the spot where 

 its mate had disappeared. The female had been trussed up, by 

 having its tail stuck into its gills. In this posture it moaned 

 piteously. The companion fish wandered round and round the 

 nets, searching for it, and was finally taken in the same man- 

 drague in which its mate had been caught, but was quite dead. 

 There is something amusingly touching in this love of sea-devils 

 —the moaning captive, and the woe-begone wanderer seeking 

 his lost one, with the lover finding no solace but in dying in the 

 toils in which the object of his affection had perished. 



Are we to take the occurrence related by Colonel Hamilton 

 Smith, in the Boca del Drago of Trinidad, as appetite or mere 

 devilry ? He says that just after daylight, a soldier from the 

 ship he was in was observed by the man in the maintop desert- 

 ing, swimming from the vessel. He was called on to return, 

 but just at the moment a devil-fish threw one of his fins over 

 him, when he disappeared, and was seen no more. 



The sea-devils luxuriate much upon the surface of the sea. 

 In Kingston harbour, where at times they are common enough, 

 they have excited great apprehension by being unexpectedly 

 approached floating on the surface, or swimming just beneath 

 it. The horn-like processes, mistaken for a mouth wide open ; 

 the flapping fins so much apart, creating misconceptions of the 

 form of the fish and of its dimensions, and increasing the dread 

 of danger at a distance ; and even the disregard of the fish for 

 objects out of the range of its lateral vision, in seeming to be in 

 pursuit of what may be ahead, when it is only indifferent about 

 avoiding it, because it does not perceive it, are incidents that 

 terrify. Sometimes the evening excursionist, on the quiet moon- 



