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Updated: June 3, 2025
And at this sunset moment, or hour for time seemed nothing a school of giant tuna began leaping around us, smashing the water, making the flying-fish rise in clouds, like drifting bees. I saw a whole flock of flying-fish rise into the air with that sunset glow and color in the background, and the exquisite beauty of life and movement was indescribable.
Nor am I likely to forget my disappointment when he totally ignored the flying-fish bait we trolled before him. That experience was but a forerunner to others just like it. Every day we sighted one or more swordfish. But we could not get one to take hold. Captain Dan said there was more chance of getting a strike from a swordfish that was not visible rolling on the surface.
"Aye, sorr," said Mr McCarthy, joining in the conversation, "and didn't it droive us too! Begorrah, there was some times that the wind tuck the ship clane out of the wather and carried us along in the air like one of them flying-fish you'll say when we gits down to the line!" "It was fortunate it was in our favour," observed the captain reflectively.
It was a single flying-fish, which by some chance, perhaps from not being either so fast a swimmer or so swift upon the wing as its fellows, had lagged behind the "school." It was no longer playing laggard, and for a very good reason: since an albacore, nearly full three feet in length, was swimming after it and doing his very best to overtake it.
For thereupon ensued not only a constant fair wind, but also fine weather, so that the ship sailed on day after day over a sparkling, gently heaving sea of deepest blue tipped with tiny creaming foam-caps out of which leaped those marine marvels the flying-fish in countless shoals as the bows clove the roaring surges, while overhead the sky daily assumed a deeper, richer tint of sapphire, out of which the sun, scarcely veiled by the solemn drifting trade-clouds, shot his beams with ever-increasing ardour.
Porpoises frisking at the bows and chasing each other in a circle around bow and stern as though the transports sat motionless; schools of flying-fish with filmy, rainbow wings rising from one wave and shimmering through the sunlight to the foamy crest of another sometimes hundreds of yards away.
The flying-fish in the Red Sea have been described too often for it to be necessary for me to say anything about the beauty of these fishy swallows, but we saw hundreds of them dart out of the sea, skim along for a distance, and then drop in again.
He leaped half out, and some one snapped a picture. It looked like a fortunate opportunity grasped. We tried him again, with flying-fish and barracuda. But he would not take either. Yet he loafed around on the surface, showing his colors, quite near the boat. He leaped clear out once, but I saw only the splash. Then he came out sideways, a skittering sort of plunge, lazy and heavy.
The surface of the sea was like a sheet of melted glass, save where, here and there, a transient cat's-paw flecked it for a moment with small patches of delicate blue, that came and went as one looked at them. Even the flying-fish seemed to consider the weather too hot for indulgence in their usual gambols, for none of them were visible.
One thing is certain, that the flying-fish can turn while in the air, that is, diverge slightly from the direction first taken; and this would seem to argue a capacity something more than that of a mere spring or leap. Besides, the wings make a perceptible noise, a sort of rustling, often distinctly heard; and they have been seen to open and close while the creature is in the air.
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