Record #124
Sea Horse
A marine horse that emerges from the sea to breed with land mares.
Original Text
Unlike most other imaginary animals, the Sea Horse is not a composite creature; it is no more than a wild horse whose dwelling place is the sea and who comes ashore only on moonless nights when the breezes bring him the smell of mares. On some undetermined island - maybe Borneo - the herders hobble the king’s finest mares along the coast and hide themselves underground. Here Sindbad saw the stallion that rose from the sea, watched it leap on to the female, and heard its cry.
The definitive edition of the Book ofa Thousand and One Nights dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographerZakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise Wonders of Creation wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dryland, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse’s and slightly larger than the ass’s.’ He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver’ .
An eighteenth-century Chinese traveller, Wang Tai-hai, writes:
The sea horse usually appears along the coast in search of a mare; sometimes he is caught. His coat is black and shining, his tail is long and sweeps the ground. On dry land he goes like any other horse, is very tame, and in a day can travel hundreds of miles. But it is well not to bathe him in the river, for as soon as he sees water he recovers his ancient nature and swims off.
Ethnologists have looked for the origin of this Islamic fiction in the Greco-Roman fiction of the wind that makes mares fertile. In the third book of the Georgics, Virgil has set this belief to verse. Pliny’s explanation (VIII, 67) is more rigorous:
It is known that in Lusitania in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and along the Tagus, mares, when a west wind is blowing,stand facing towards it and conceive the breath of life; this produces a foal, and this is the way to breed a very swift colt, but it does not live more than three years.
The historian Justinus ventures the guess that the hyperbole ‘sons of the wind’, applied to very fast horses, gave rise to this fable.
The definitive edition of the Book ofa Thousand and One Nights dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographerZakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise Wonders of Creation wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dryland, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse’s and slightly larger than the ass’s.’ He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver’ .
An eighteenth-century Chinese traveller, Wang Tai-hai, writes:
The sea horse usually appears along the coast in search of a mare; sometimes he is caught. His coat is black and shining, his tail is long and sweeps the ground. On dry land he goes like any other horse, is very tame, and in a day can travel hundreds of miles. But it is well not to bathe him in the river, for as soon as he sees water he recovers his ancient nature and swims off.
Ethnologists have looked for the origin of this Islamic fiction in the Greco-Roman fiction of the wind that makes mares fertile. In the third book of the Georgics, Virgil has set this belief to verse. Pliny’s explanation (VIII, 67) is more rigorous:
It is known that in Lusitania in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and along the Tagus, mares, when a west wind is blowing,stand facing towards it and conceive the breath of life; this produces a foal, and this is the way to breed a very swift colt, but it does not live more than three years.
The historian Justinus ventures the guess that the hyperbole ‘sons of the wind’, applied to very fast horses, gave rise to this fable.