Âmona; The Child; and The Beast, page 19 by Louis Becke
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on the reef, when a snake about three feet in length suddenly shot up from below within a foot of his face. In his anger and disgust he unthinkingly struck it with his hand, and was quickly bitten on the forefinger. A few hours later he was in a high fever, accompanied with twitchings of the extremities; then tetanus ensued, followed by death in forty-eight hours.
Although these sea snakes are common to all tropical seas, they are most frequent about the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. On any smooth day they may be seen disporting themselves on the surface, or rising suddenly from the depths, erect their heads and some inches of their bodies clear from the water, gaze at the passing vessel, and then swiftly disappear. In nearly all the Pacific Islands the natives hold them in detestation and horror, and when one is seen lying coiled up on a rock sunning itself or crawling over the surface of the reef in search of food, a stone, accompanied by a curse, is always hurled at it. In the Ellice Oroup, when catching flying-fish at night, one (or more) of these horrid serpents is sometimes swept up in the scoop-net before it can be avoided. They range from six inches to nearly four feet in length, and all have one feature--a blunted tail-end.
Quite recently much further light has been thrown on the subject by Sir James Hector, of the Philosophical Society of Wellington, New Zealand. At one of the Society's meetings, held in April last, Sir James showed several specimens of hydrida, some from Australasian Seas, others from the Atlantic. The usual habitat of sea snakes, he said, were the tropical seas generally, but some had been captured in the comparatively cold waters of the New Zealand coast, at the Catlins River. These latter were all yellow-banded; those from the islands of the Fijian Oroup were black-banded, and those taken from the Australian coast grey-banded. There were, he said, no fewer than seventy species, which, without exception, were fanged and provided with glands sec