Unicornicopia by Clint Marsh

Author:Clint Marsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

CERTAINTIES

Odell Shepard

THE zoologists of four hundred years ago believed that every terrestrial form of animal life had a marine counterpart. When men began to think, in the seventeenth century, that the land-surface of the globe had been fully explored and yet no unicorn was any where discovered, it was natural, therefore, that they should seek the animal beneath the ocean waves. They were justified by at least a partial success: the alicorn, whose origin had been concealed so long by the mists and dangers of the northern seas and by that old fear of the Atlantic sedulously propagated two thousand years before by Phoenician merchants, was traced at length to its source. The method of this discovery and the effects of it upon commerce and medicine and scholarship, the coincidence of it with the dawn of modernity, the light it threw backward over the way we have comethese things, which make up perhaps the most interesting department of unicorn lore, are what we have left to consider.

Near the end of an exceedingly dull history of Iceland I find a vivid passage relating how Arnhald, the first Bishop of that country, was wrecked off the west coast of it in the year 1126, barely escaping with his life. There is a marsh on the mainland, the narrator tells us, near the spot where the shipwreck occurred, and this marsh was in his time still called the Pool of Corpses because of the many bodies of drowned sailors washed ashore there after the disaster. “And there also were found, afterward, the teeth of whales (dentes balenarum,) very precious, which had gone down with the ship and then had been thrown on shore by the motion of the waves. These teeth had runic letters written on them in an indelible red gum so that each sailor might know his own at the end of the voyage, for they had apparently been tossed into the hold helter-skelter as though intended merely for ballast.”

To one reader, at least, that passage is not merely vivid but thrilling, for these “whales’ teeth” were indeed very precious. Shakespeare's Clarence saw no greater wealth in his gorgeous dream of the under-sea than this that went down with the Bishop of Iceland eight hundred years ago and was found again in the Pool of Corpses. The fact that each man had his name written on the teeth he owned shows that they were already valuable, but this was in 1126; their market value was to increase for five centuries until they were worth ten times their weight in gold. The “whales’ teeth” found in the Pool of Corpses were the “true unicorns’ horns” of kings’ treasuries.

How many cargoes such as this were brought safely to port in later years no one can say, for they belonged to a business in which it did not pay to advertise. There were not enough of them, at any rate, to glut the market, nor did they come in frequently enough to attract the slightest attention in Europe.

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