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This goddess was personified by an athletic, ugly man, marked with the small-pox, dressed as a female, with a woman's night-cap on his head, ornamented with sprigs of sea-weed; she had a harpoon in her hand, on which was fixed an albicore; and in her lap lay one of the boys of the ship, dressed as a baby, with long clothes and a cap: he held in his hand a marlinspike, which was suspended round his neck with a rope-yarn this was to assist him in cutting his teeth, as the children on shore use a coral.
"Ah!" said the sailor, "so used I when I was a boy; but there ain't no gudgeons here." "What sort o' fish are there, then?" said Tom. "Oh, all sorts: bonito, and albicore, and flying-fish, sometimes dolphins and sharks." "Any whales?" cried Tom, winking at me. "Sometimes; not very often, my lad," said the sailor quietly. "They lies up in the cold water, more among the ice.
Suddenly the dinghy shored over, and might have capsized, only for the fact that Dick was sitting on the opposite side to the side from which the line hung. Then the boat righted; the line slackened, and the surface of the lagoon, a few fathoms away, boiled as if being stirred from below by a great silver stick. He had hooked an albicore.
Albicores, bonitoes, and dolphins followed the ship for several days in succession; and one albicore, which had a mark on his back, from which we knew it, followed us from 3 degrees north latitude to 10 degrees south latitude, a distance of eight hundred and forty miles. An immense whale rose close to us one day, like an island emerging from the deep.
That in the sea is the fish called albicore, as large as a salmon, which follows with great swiftness to take them; on which this poor fish, which cannot swim fast as it hath no fins, and only swims by the motion of its tail, having its wings then shut along the sides of its body, springeth out of the water and flieth, but not very high; on this the albicore, though he have no wings, giveth a great leap out of the water, and sometimes catcheth the flying fish, or else keepeth in the water, going that way as fast as the other flieth.
Apparently it was nearly five feet long, and its sides flashed in the clear water where it was not foaming with the lashing of the captive's vigorous widely-forked tail. "Bonito," cried the captain. "No, no, albicore," said Mr Brymer. "Suppose we wait till it's fully caught," said Mr Frewen, smiling at Miss Denning, when I saw her brother give him an angry look.
Then you would see the superb albicore with his glittering sides, sailing aloft, and after describing an arc in his descent, disappear on the surface of the water. Far off, the lofty jet of the whale might be seen, and nearer at hand the prowling shark, that villanous footpad of the seas, would come skulking along, and, at a wary distance, regard us with an evil eye.
When the flying fish is weary of the air, or thinketh himself out of danger, he returneth to the water, where the albicore meeteth him; but sometimes his other enemy, the sea-crow, catcheth him in the air before he falleth.
A landsman would have been half demented in his condition, many a sailor would have been taciturn and surly, on the look-out for sails, and alternately damning his soul and praying to his God. Paddy smoked. "Whoop!" cried Dick. "Look, Paddy!" An albicore a few cables-lengths to port had taken a flying leap from the flashing sea, turned a complete somersault and vanished.
Neptune lowered his trident, and presented the dolphin to the captain, as Amphitrite did her albicore, in token of submission and homage to the representative of the King of Great Britain. "I have come," said the god, "to welcome you into my dominions, and to present my wife and child." The captain bowed. "Allow me to ask after my brother and liege sovereign, the good old King George."
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