ST. J A G O. 6i 
sides of thick oak plank have been completely perforated by 
the snout of the sword-fish, not of the common species the 
Xiphias gladiuSy of which we struck one at the entrance of 
Porta Praya bay, but another or at least a variety, of greater 
dimensions, being sometimes from twenty to thirty feet in 
length, and distinguished by a large spotted back fin, and by 
the rounded extremity of the snout or boney process. Vmi 
Schouten of Home, in his very entertaining voyage round the 
world, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, states 
that " a great fish or a sea monster, having a horn like a 
" common elephant's tooth, not hollow but full, struck the 
" ship with such great strength that it entered into three 
" planks of the ship, two of green and one of oaken wood, 
" and into a rib, where it turned upward to their great good 
" fortune." In the year 1801, a Danish ship came into the 
Cape of Good Hope, in consequence of springing a leak ofi' 
the Brazil coast. On examination it was found that she had 
been struck by a sword-fish, the snout of which had pene- 
trated the bottom, where it still remained, having snapt close 
to the plank on the exterior side of the vessel. In the same 
year a small English ship came into Table bay, having re- 
ceived in the Southern Atlantic a stroke from a sword-fish, 
which* buried part of the boney snout so deep in the stern- 
post as to impede the action of the rudder. These two facts 
consist with my own knowledge, which, together with the 
piece of plank from the bottom of an East Indiaman, now in 
the British Museum, transfixed by the sword of this fish, may 
satisfy the doubts of the most sceptical on a subject which 
was known to the ancients perhaps more than two thousand 
