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“There is another kind of fish as bigge almost as a herring, which hath wings and flieth, and they are together in great number. These have two enemies, the one in the sea, the other in the aire. In the sea the fish which is called Albocore, as big as a salmon, followeth them with great swiftnesse to take them. This poore fish not being able to swimme fast, for he hath no finnes, but swimmeth with mooving of his taile, shutting his wings, lifteth himselfe above the water, and flieth not very hie; the Albocore seeing that, although he have no wings, yet he giveth a great leape out of the water and sometimes catcheth the fish being weary of the aire.”

It is wonderland to this man. He writes as of a thing never before beheld and with a curious ambition of accuracy, clearly making little doubt that in any case his story will not be credited, and that therefore since the truth is astonishing enough, he may as well carefully stick to it. And the barnacle? Does the barnacle hold any poetry to us? One would as soon seek for the seed of romance in the periwinkle or the crab. Taking up the first dictionary at hand, I find barnacle described as a “shell-fish, commonly found on the bottom of ships, rocks, and timber.” But those wonderful ancient mariners made a goose of it; as may be observed in Mr. John Lok’s account of his ship which arrived home “marvellously overgrowne with certaine shells” in which he solemnly affirms “there groweth a certain slimie substance, which at the length slipping out of the shell and falling in the sea, becometh those foules which we call Barnacles.” Were not those high times for Jack? A barnacle, whether by the sea-side brim or anywhere else, is to us, alas! in this exhaustive age, a barnacle, and nothing more. Or take the maelstrom—a gyration not quite so formidable as the imagination of Edgar Allan Poe would have us believe, but by report exactly one of those features of the ocean to alarm the primitive fancy with frightful ideas: “Note,” says Mr. Anthonie Jenkinson in his voyage to Russia, 1557, “that there is between the said Rost islands and Lofoot a whirlepoole called Malestrand which ... maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants’ houses of the sayd islands tenne miles off. Also if there cometh any whale within the current of the same, they make a pitiful crie.” And so on. How fine as an artistic touch should we deem this introduction of the whale by the hand of an imaginative writer! The detail to the contemporary readers of Mr. Jenkinson’s yarn would make an enormous horror of that “whirlepoole,” for what should be able to swallow leviathan short of some such stupendous commotion as would be caused by the breaking up of the fountains of the waters of the earth? Let it be remembered that whales were fine specimens in that age of poetry. They were then big enough to gorge a squadron of men-of-war, ay, and to digest the vessels. We have had nothing like them since—the nearest approach to such monsters being the shark in which, on its being ripped open, there was found one full-rigged ship only, with the captain and the mate quarrelling in the cabin over the reckoning.