By Dimitra Mylona and Roxani Margariti.
A comic character in Alexis’s play Hellenis (Greek Woman) at the turn of the 4th c. BCE says it clearly: “Alive or dead, the fish are at war with us, for anyone who falls overboard will be eaten, and, even when dead, they (the fish) eat up our wealth, they cost us our property and whoever pays their price ends up an instant beggar”! This was a comment aiming to satirize the extravagant prices of fish in the Athenian fish market, but the passage also makes another salient point: fish are dangerous in many different ways. Being devoured by fish is a sailor’s nightmare! This was by no means a new idea at the time. Visions of man-eating marine creatures must have haunted sailors’ dreams since the dawn of sea travel.
Τoday there is an uptick in news reports about marine life and its discontents—and it is remarkable. The incidents themselves are puzzling, but as interesting are the explanations offered. Reading them has reminded us that humans have held a deep-seated and cross-cultural fascination with the dangers of the deep and have described in vivid, often lurid colors the creatures they most fear. These descriptions span the spectrum between the literary and the scientific, the real and the imaginary. What can the balance between myth and reality, marine biological fact and sea-inspired fiction, tell us about the relationship between humans and the sea? In this post, we sample some particularly salty tales of dangerous marine creatures from the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. As usual, our goal is to continue the evolving conversation that recent events have inspired!
Devoured by voracious fish: reality and the imaginary
In 1950 excavations took place at the vast necropolis of the oldest Greek colony in Western Italy, the legendary Pithekoussae. Pithekoussae was a colony of the Euboeans at what is now a busy touristic destination, the island of Ischia on the Bay of Naples. Some time at around 750-700/650 BC, a crater was made locally and found its resting place in a grave. A crater is a large open vessel for mixing wine with water at symposia, the drinking and eating parties that were discussed in a previous post of the Archives of the Sea. This example was decorated in a unique way though following the artistic conventions of the Geometric art of the time.
The Pithekoussae museum’s website offers a turnable image of the crater.
The scene painted on the Pithekoussae crater is heart-breaking! A ship has capsized and is sinking with all hands. Menacing-looking fish school around the wreck and the drowned sailors, ready for a feast. The largest creature is already devouring a man head first and another sailor has lost his upper body. Stories about long sea voyages, shipwrecks, and men lost to fish were probably part of the founding lore of the colony and a topic suitable for sympotic conversations. This crater tells the story of man-eating fish with pictures.
John Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo researched the topic of the most iconic man-eating marine creature of all, the infamous, terrifying, and awe-inspiring ketos! Looking into ancient Greek literature and even into modern song poetry about the dangers that lurk in the depths they concluded that “The waters of the sea were not for cheerful swimming, unless they were not much more than ankle-deep”. This idea, of the ketos swallowing a human whole has a strong resonance all through antiquity and the middle ages; enter Jonah/Yunus, whom we will discuss further down!
Moving from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, let’s try free-associating the literary picture of man-eating fish in the Hellenis with the sober calculation of a shipwreck’s outcome preserved in a legal document from medieval Cairo.
Witnesses and maritime experts are called to assess the likelihood of survivors after a mysterious shipwreck of one vessel in a two-ship convoy, at a specific spot along the route from Aden to India, somewhere off the coast of South Arabia. The experts’ testimony suggests that there is no hope of survival of any of the people onboard the unlucky vessel, because of “the wildness of the sea that time of year,” “the distance to shore” and “the multitude of the fish.” The author of the report did not have to explain further: going overboard in that part of the Arabian sea at that time of year meant drowning or being eaten by fish, we imagine sharks, although this is not specified.
Bouncing back to Mediterranean antiquity, we do find a remarkable case where the details of a savaging at sea are spelled out graphically. The text in question is a funerary epigram by Leonidas of Tarantum, a poet of the 3rd century BCE whose work was included in the collection of short poetic vignettes known as the Palatine Anthology and compiled in the 10th and 13th centuries CE (the image above is from the standard Loeb publication of the Anthology, volume 2, book 7:506). Here words are used to paint images of terror. The epigram memorializes the sad ending of a certain Tharsis (the Daring One, so aptly named), son of Tharmides, who was devoured by a shark. The tragedy happened when Tharsis dove to unfoul his anchor. The poet draws a lurid picture: only half of his body was drawn up by his fellow seamen to be buried on land, the other half was bitten off by the shark (το ἥμισυ δε πρίστις απεκλάσατο). We’ve seen this kind of grisly scene before, on the Pithekoussae crater! Is it a coincidence, we wonder, that Tarantum, the birth place of Leonidas is another Greek colony (of the Spartans) on the Italian peninsula? The culprit is mentioned twice: once as a άγριον εὖ μέγαν κήτος, a big wild sea monster, and once more specifically as a πρίστις, the name given in Linnaean taxonomy to the sawfish (Pristis pristis), which we have seen on this blog before.
Thus, the classical comic character’s statement that the fish eat those who fall in the sea may be a literary flourish but resonates with matter-of-fact reports—to a point. Details matter to the real-life experience reflected in the Cairo Geniza document. While the author does not specify the kind of fish feared, the maritime experts’ consulted would have had very detailed notions of what marine animals would have attacked humans. In the Palatine epigram, on the other hand, the culprit is clearly spelled out: a pristis, a kind of shark with a saw-like rostrum, lurking in the deep and always to be feared by the people of the sea.
A list and a detailed account of sea creatures that posed a threat to humans was, in fact, produced by geographers and travelers of the medieval world. In the phenomenally rich medieval Islamic cosmographical texts, some of these creatures were real and others clearly imagined. Our last post contains a passage about the sawfish as a menace for shipwrecked sailors and pearl-divers in the Red Sea as conveyed by the erudite and playful Ottoman gentleman traveller Evliya Celebi, in what can be seen as the mature sum of a long tradition in which stories are repeated or amplified.
Fighting back: treats, loud noises and fierce stares, and marine allies
How can one face these terrible fish that devour people? What bravery, what magic, what science could bring salvation? There certainly existed in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean as well, a fish fighting lore, a set of stories that provided sailors with help or at least some hope. We have already seen in our post on ambergris that according to the 10th-century Egyptian cosmographic work known as the Book of Curiosities, whales that inadvertently sank ships while playing, could be driven away by blowing horns and beat drums. Perhaps the modern yachts facing the orcas off Gibraltar should take note!
We read of another trick in a 1350 manuscript by the German priest Ludolph von Suchem. In his account of his time in the Levant and his pilgrimage to Holy Land and the Eastern Mediterranean Islands between 1336 and 1341 he dedicated a whole chapter to the perils by fish. He recounts stories told to him by sailors. He even tried to verify them by cross-checking various accounts. According to one such story, there is in the Mediterranean one fish called sea-swine, which is greatly feared by those on small vessels. The fish approaches the ships when hungry, the mariners give it bread, and it departs having satisfied its hunger. Sometimes, however, it does not, and then the real problems begin. When the sea-swine senses fear in the faces of sailors, it bites and tears their ship, sinking it. The sailors need to be extra careful when looking the fish in the eye. They have to look boldly and fiercely at the fish with an angry countenance, to make it flee. Otherwise, a terrible fate awaits!
Fierce stares had apotropaic functions across cultures. According to E. P. Evans (1896) and Gary R. Werner in 2007, several conceptions and forms of Christian symbolisms derived from classical mythology. Thus, the grotesque medieval gargoyles, the strange sculptures that served as water-sprouts on many ecclesiastical buildings all over Europe, often portray screaming, fierce and angry faces that strive to cause fear. In our eyes, the analogy with the terror inspiring face of Medusa, the Greek mythological Gorgon that Caravaggio portrayed so vividly in the 16th century, is quite strong. Those who looked at Medusa’s face and snake hair would turn into stone and, significantly, her severed head is what the hero Perseus used to kill the sea dragon that threatened Andromeda (we’ve discussed Perseus and the Gorgon in our post about mermaids and other hybrid creatures of the sea).
B. The fierce stares are often combined with a hybrid nature, which is in itself a source of fear.
In addition to plying the man-eating marine creatures with tasty treats and staring them down or driving them away with loud noise, humans could enlist a most powerful ally against destructive fish and man-eating marine monsters: the dolphin! In a remarkable passage in Qazwini’s Wonders of Creation (Aja’ib al-Makhluqat, the marvelous cosmography of fact and fiction that we have encountered several times now in our posts), the dolphin is a “blessed creature.” Its appearance at sea brings joy to mariners, who see in the dolphin a veritable lifeguard. For the dolphin “dives under the drowning man and carries him on its back or puts its tail in the drowning man’s hand and pulls him to shore.” Thus, to a human at sea dolphins are the most precious allies! They and other benevolent creatures of the sea will be the topic of a future post.
Last but not least, humans sought help from divinely empowered allies. Saints and saints-to-be rescuing humans at sea is a leitmotif of what we might call “maritime religion” in many cultures and religious traditions, and are well attested both in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (and as we write this, we feel another post coming soon!). A fabulous example of a Christian saint venerated for saving a human from demise in the mouth of a marine monster is the case of St. Antoninus of Sorrento (tradition places him in the 6th-7th century CE). A child fell in the sea and was swallowed by a whale, whereupon Antoninus intervened and wrested the child from the beast’s mouth. To commemorate this event, the church of Sorrento’s patron saint, features the whale bones pictured below!
The miracle of St Antoninus of Sorrento, his rescue of the child from the mouth of the whale, provides the perfect segue to the most famous such story of them all: the story of “Jonah and the Whale”!
The story of Jonah, Yunus, or “The One of the Fish”: same story, diverse cultures
In the first few centuries of the Common Era, people around the Mediterranean still viewed themselves as living in the Roman Empire, eastern or western. Many converted to Christianity, a new religion arising out of Judaism and rapidly spreading the appeal and expanding the audience of its sacred texts. In the 7th century CE, Islam also came to share in the same pool of texts and traditions as Judaism and Christianity. Jonah, a prophet of the Hebrew Bible, was such a shared figure.
We read Jonah’s story in the Hebrew bible (among the books of the Prophets, Jonah being the fifth of the twelve minor prophets), the Christian Old Testament (Book of Jonah) and in various passages in the Quran (including, though not limited to, the Quran’s 10th sura or chapter, which is traditionally entitled Surat Yunus, the Chapter of Jonah).
Jonah was ordered by God to go to the great Assyrian city of Nineveh to warn its inhabitants to repent. Jonah refused. Instead, he set sail towards Tarshish (either Tarsus in southeastern Anatolian coast or Tartessos on the Atlantic coast of Spain, near Gibraltar). On the way, God sent a storm to threaten the ship and the sailors drew lots to see whose fault this was. The lot fell to Jonah who admitted his guilt and asked to be thrown overboard. Indeed, the moment Jonah left the ship the storm subsided. God sent a large fish to swallow Jonah, who then spent three days and nights in its belly and eventually began to pray. Hearing his prayers, God ordered the fish to spit Jonah out, and called the prophet back to his mission to Nineveh. In the logic of this miracle story, a man gets “eaten” by a fish but the natural process of demise does not happen due to divine intervention.
In the 5th century of the Common Era a synagogue in Huqoq, in Lower Eastern Galilee in Israel, was lavishly decorated with mosaics inspired by biblical stories. Those mosaics were unearthed during recent excavations. Included in the scenes depicted is a fascinating rendition of Jonah’s story! The ship sails in a sea full of fish of all kinds and sizes. Fishermen on the periphery of the composition go about their business as usual. They work the nets, like many other fishermen, in many other mosaics in the Roman Mediterranean world. A trio of mythical bird-women (Sirens?) are also part of the scene. And on the lower left side, a man, Jonah, is being swallowed by a large fish; only his calves and feet are now visible. That fish is being devoured by a larger fish, and that one by an even larger one. While the expectation of the spectator must have been that Jonah survives in the end, the artist, probably based on current interpretations and commentary on scripture, made sure to depict the swallowing most emphatically!
This concept, that if you find yourself in the sea you may be eaten by a fish, is taken up in another scene of the Huqoq synagogue mosaics, one that depicts the parting of the Red Sea for the passage of Moses and the Israelites and the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers. In a detail not known from elsewhere, Pharaoh’s soldiers are shown as not simply drowning but as being swallowed, helmet, shield and all, by fish! As the excavators note, “the predatory fish likely embody the sea’s power to consume the drowning soldiers—a midrashic element that embellishes the Biblical story”. In this instance, there would have been no expectation of regurgitation!
The biblical story of Jonah is essentially one in which maritime reality is refracted and transformed to convey a moral lesson. The large fish or ketos of Hebrew and Greek scripture is an instrument that God deploys not to annihilate his reluctant servant Jonah but to protect him from the sea while teaching him a lesson. In a way, the fish is a vessel that keeps Jonah safe and gives him the chance to repent for his resistance against the divine will—while in the belly of the beast he has time to think things through and start praying! Muslim scripture amplifies the moralizing lesson, while offering an abbreviated version of the narrative. Although chapter 10 of the Quran is known as Surat Yunus (the Chapter of Jonah), it contains only a brief and general reference to Yunus as a prophet. The other references to him are also brief and allusive rather than fully descriptive—a technique common in the Quran. In these instances, the prophet is referred to by his name (Yunus-Jonah) or as Sahib al-Hut (The Man of the Whale) and Dhu’l-Nun (the One With the Whale). The words al-ḥūt and al-nūn are understood to refer to a large “fish,” corresponding to the Greek term ketos, or are meant more specifically to designate a whale (for a short discussion of these terms, see the postscript on our post on ambergris and whales).
The bulk of the story is given in another chapter, Surat 37 or Surat al-Saffāt (the chapter of the Ranks), where he hear only that Yunus fled from God’s command and into a merchant ship, and that when lots were drawn he was “among the losers.” The fish then swallows him and “had it not been that he praised God, he would have remained in its belly until the Day of the Resurrection. But We (God) cast him onto a barren shore, though he was ailing. And We made a gourd tree grow over him. And We sent him to preach to a hundred thousand and they became believers.” The casting on a barren shore and the gourd vine that grows to protect Jonah are details not present in the biblical text; they are beautifully depicted in a painting of the Quranic scene featured below. These enigmatic details aside, the overall sense we get from reading the relevant scattered passages about Yunus in the Quran is that the listener knows what happened to Jonah and the point of revisiting his story is to stress the main moral lesson. Again, as in the biblical text, maritime reality is refracted to convey a religious message. The terrors of the deep and the awesomeness of some of the sea’s creatures provide wonderful material for contemplating the power of the divine!
“The sun’s disk went into darkness, Jonah went into the mouth of the fish.”
The artist further embellishes with the image of a colorful angel providing the naked Jonah a green cloak after his great trial at sea. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.113. Image and information from https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/453683
Fearing the sea
In most of the stories we encounter in texts and images such as the ones we presented here, fear, wonder, and reverence go hand-in-hand. Knowledge develops alongside these tendencies in people’s hearts and brains but perhaps never completely supersedes them. Since Roxani somewhat willfully omitted it in the shark post, we’d like to close with the elephant (or rather shark!) in the room: the enduring modern fascination with Jaws! The recently published images of a young Steven Spielberg and the wooden mechanical prop that instilled fear in the hearts of generations of viewers makes us smile but the uneasy feeling when swimming in deep blue waters never fails to arise!
Want to know more? We have suggestions!
Really interesting post as always – the orca attacks on boats, it has been suggested (among other ideas) they are just having fun not revenge, being such intelligent and social animals within their pod and apparently often copy each other and have fads. The recent fatal shark attack in the Red Sea for which the unfortunate animal was beaten to death may, I read, have been attributable to their coming further inshore to hunt as fish become more scarce and also attracted by the scent of illegally dumped of meat at sea and this attack was a mistake by the shark but once there was blood too late to stop. The manta ray was the topic of horror stories as well though any net entangling etc would have been accidental.