Animal myths and bizarre human facts

AT Christmas, one finds time to walk and take the air and, perhaps, time to sit at home and read a book.

I’ve recently come across two books that would while away some enjoyable hours, one on our natural history, the other recounting a bizarre episode in marine history that took place off our shores.

Niall Mac Coitir’s Ireland’s Animals, Myths, Legends and Folklore (Collins Press) is beautifully presented, a hardback with full-page watercolours by Gordon D’Arcy, the noted naturalist.

It is full of arcane and interesting facts about our native fauna. Apparently the Celts went fox-hunting, and Mad Sweeney of the poem Suibhne Geilt — from whom, I imagine, T S Eliot borrowed the title for Sweeney Amongst the Nightingales — speaks affectionately of fox-watching.

We learn a great deal about our natural history from this book. The wood mouse isn’t native: it came with Mesolithic settlers — a wood mouse tooth was found in a 7,600-year-old Mesolithic site, in Dublin. The house mouse is a comparative arriviste, establishing itself in the 7th century. Despite their depredations in the pantry, mice have a respectable status in Irish legend. It is said they are a cure for baldness — if marinated properly for a year, after which the marinade is applied to the skull — and a mouse would obligingly nibble St Colman’s ear when he dozed off while psalm-singing.

Hedgehogs were introduced by the Normans for food, while the frog was absent until 1696 when a Fellow of Trinity, convinced this was against the natural order, “obtained some frog spawn from England and placed it in a ditch in the College Park.

In the 9th century, Donatus, an Italian bishop, had written a rhymed account of Ireland which included, “No snakes are creeping there with venomed guile, no raucous frogs disturb the rustling reeds”. Mac Coitir’s book is full of gems and he must be applauded for gathering, and blending, a treasury of fantasy and reality.

Meanwhile, the sea is another country and in the great outdoors of the ocean, a lone ship far from land is a nation unto itself.

In the summer of 1828, two hundred miles off Cape Clear, Captain William Stewart, a small, lightly-built man, contrived to ‘capture’ and bind with ropes seven on the nine men aboard his ship — one of them also a ship’s captain, the others all able-bodied seamen — before brutally slaughtering them in view of a small boy, the son of a friend, travelling as a passenger in his care. The other two crew members, severely wounded — one of them had lost an eye — survived by hiding away. Alannah Hopkin tells the story, based on research by Kathy Bunney, in The Ship of Seven Murders, published by Collins Press.

It is the extraordinary story of how, on a voyage from Barbados to Cork in June 1828, a respectable and experienced sea captain, owner of a fine house overlooking Cobh Harbour, the father of four children, a man “popular with ship owners for his reliability and honesty” and having, amongst ships’ crews “a reputation for fairness and humane treatment”, was gripped with an obsession which transformed him into a monster who yet remained, on the surface, sane and plausible when he came into contact with other ships.

How did he contrive to bind seven able-bodied men to the floor of his cabin, the ropes pinioned with nails and tightened more day by day — for which inconvenience, bizarrely, he apologised — until he murdered them one by one, the small boy, confined to bed through illness, a terrified witness to all that transpired?

How did he manage to persuade the two apprentice boys aboard to assist him in his efforts? What motivated Stewart and what happened to him after his ship sailed into Cobh with the seven corpses in the “sickly slaughterhouse” of his cabin? It is an extraordinary tale, stranger than fiction, a piece of local history one would question were it not so well researched and true.

A reader asks me to draw attention to the artist, David Shepherd’s, fine animal portraits, available through www.gatewaysark.co.uk, while another inquires if Charlie Wilkins, the Irish Examiner’s iconic gardening correspondent, is not incorrect in condemning honey fungus as poisonous, saying that his fellow Germans have been eating them for centuries. Deadly to trees, yes, but not to humans, although somewhat indigestible, I’ve found.