with. Be this as it may, the attack was made, and at four o'clock the next morning the captain was awakened with the unwelcome intelligence that the ship had sprung a leak. She was taken back to Colombo, and thence to Cochin, where she was hove down. Near the keel was found a round hole, an inch in diameter, running completely through the copper sheathing and planking. As attacks by sword-fish are included among sea-risks, the insurance company was willing to pay the damages claimed by the owners of the ship if only it could be proved that the hole had really been made by a sword-fish. No instance had ever been recorded in which a sword-fish had been able to withdraw his sword after attacking a ship. A defense was founded on the possibility that the hole had been made in some other way. Professor Owen and Mr. Frank Buckland gave their evidence, but neither of them could state quite positively whether a sword-fish which had passed its beak through three inches of stout planking could withdraw without the loss of its sword. Mr. Buckland said that fish have no power of backing, and expressed his belief that he could hold a sword-fish by the beak; but then he admitted that the fish had considerable lateral power, and might so 'wriggle its sword out of a hole.' And so the insurance company will have to pay nearly six hundred pounds because an ill-tempered fish objected to be hooked, and took its revenge by running full tilt against copper sheathing and oak planking."
The instrument with which such damage is done is a flat, bony prolongation of the upper jaw, which tapers slightly to a nearly square end. Fig. 2, although representing the weapon of a very young fish, will serve to show the appearance of the upper and under sides of the sword. Its material is not very hard, and it would fail to pierce a ship's timbers but for the enormous swiftness with which it is driven by the charging fish.
An unsigned article in "Harper's Weekly" for October 25, 1879, contains a mention of a sword being found, in 1725, imbedded as deeply in the side of the British ship Leopard as an iron bolt of the same size could be driven by nine strokes of a twenty-five-pound hammer. Yet the fish drove it in at a single thrust. The same writer tells the following still more remarkable story: "On the return of the whale-ship Fortune to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1827, the stump of a sword-blade of this fish was noticed projecting like a cog outside, which, on being traced, had been driven through the copper sheathing, an inch board under-sheathing, a three-inch plank of hard wood, the solid white-oak timber twelve inches thick, then through another two and-a-half-inch hard oak ceiling, and lastly penetrated the head of an oil-cask, where it stuck, not a drop of the oil having escaped."
One of the traditions of the sea, time-honored, believed by all mariners, handed down in varied phases in a hundred books of ocean travel, relates to the terrific combats between the whale and the sword-
