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Updated: June 3, 2025
Some one was holding my rod, and on the instant that a huge swordfish got the bait had not the presence of mind to throw off the drag and let out line. We hurried to put on another flying-fish and I let out the line. Soon Dan yelled, "There he is behind your bait!" I saw him huge, brown, wide, weaving after my bait. Then he hit it with his sword. I imagined I could feel him cut it.
While we were thus stealing along pleasantly enough under the genial influence of this newly-found air, which as yet was confined to the upper sails, and every one was looking open-mouthed to the eastward to catch a gulp of cool air, or was congratulating his neighbour on getting rid of the tiresome calm in which we had been so long half-roasted, half-suffocated, about a dozen flying-fish rose out of the water, just under the fore-chains, and skimmed away to windward at the height of ten or twelve feet above the surface.
But when he saw a school of flying-fish rise up out of the sea, just a little ahead of us, and go skimming along like birds, and then drop again into the water, he was so surprised and delighted that he scarcely knew how to express his feelings.
I doubt, however, whether the flying-fish spring out of the water merely to escape the pursuit of their enemies. Like swallows, they move by thousands in a right line, and in a direction constantly opposite to that of the waves.
His terrific pace, indeed, was two or three times as swift as theirs, poor little things! and the greedy dolphin was fully as quick-sighted as the flying-fish which were trying to elude him; for whenever they varied their flight in the smallest degree, he lost not the tenth part of a second in shaping a new course, so as to cut off the chase; while they, in a manner really not unlike that of the hare, doubled more than once upon their pursuer.
A bourgeois buys himself a small position, and there he is backed by his colleagues. If he suffers an injustice, he finds defenders at once. The man of letters is unsuccoured; he resembles a flying-fish; if he rises a little, the birds devour him; if he dives, the fish eat him. Every public man pays tribute to malignity, but he is paid in honours and gold.
I was curious and interested. Remembering all I had heard about these fish, I did not anticipate getting a strike from him. We circled him and drew the flying-fish bait so that he would swim near it. As it was, I had to reel in some. Presently we had the bait some twenty yards ahead of him. Then Captain Dan slowed down. The broadbill wiggled his tail and slid out of sight.
The children clustered round in ecstasies of admiration and wonder as they heard of the dark brown atives, the curious expedients by which barter was carried on; also of cruel Spaniards, and of savage fishes, with all the marvels of flying-fish, corals, palm-trees, humming birds all that is lesson work to our modern youth, but was the most brilliant of living fairy tales at this Elizabethan period.
They rise to escape their pursuers, the bonitos, which rush after them, showing their noses above the water now and then. But the poor flying-fish have their enemies above the waters as well as under them; for they no sooner rise than they risk becoming the prey of the ocean birds, which are always hovering about and ready to pounce upon them. It is a case of "out of the frying-pan into the fire."
No doubt this was to his satisfaction, for almost in the same instant that the flying-fish returned within the mandibles of his beak it disappeared, wings and all, down that dark passage, where, no doubt, many another of its kind had preceded it.
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