Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Sucet Spoken Of By Columbus And Martin
D'Anghiera Was Probably The Echeneis Naucrates And Not The Echeneis
Remora.) The
Fisher-fish, formerly employed by the Cubans by means of
the flattened disc on his head, furnished with suckers, fixed
Himself
on the shell of the sea-turtle, which is so common in the narrow and
winding channels of the Jardinillos. "The reves," says Christopher
Columbus, "will sooner suffer himself to be cut in pieces than let go
the body to which he adheres." The Indians drew to the shore by the
same cord the fisher-fish and the turtle. When Gomara and the learned
secretary of the emperor Charles V, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera,
promulgated in Europe this fact which they had learnt from the
companions of Columbus, it was received as a traveller's tale. There
is indeed an air of the marvellous in the recital of d'Anghiera, which
begins in these words: Non aliter ac nos canibus gallicis per aequora
campi lepores insectamur, incolae [Cubae insulae] venatorio pisce
pisces alios capiebant. (Exactly as we follow hares with greyhounds in
the fields, so do the natives [of Cuba] take fishes with other fish
trained for that purpose). We now know, from the united testimony of
Rogers, Dampier and Commerson, that the artifice resorted to in the
Jardinillos to catch turtles is employed by the inhabitants of the
eastern coast of Africa, near Cape Natal, at Mozambique and at
Madagascar. In Egypt, at San Domingo and in the lakes of the valley of
Mexico, the method practised for catching ducks was as follows:
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