Terrifying, isn’t it? This comes (as pictured above) from A description of a strange (and miraculous) Fish, cast upon the sands in the meads, in the Hundred of Worwell, in the County Palatine of Chester, (or Chesshiere. The certainty whereof is here related concerning the said most monstrous Fish (1635). A few stanzas of poetry accompany the great image above, some of which I’ll include here:
It is a fish, a monstrous fish,
a fish that many dreads,
But now it is as we would wish,
cast up o’th sands i’th meads,
In Chesshire; and tis certaine true,
Describ’d by those who did it view.
O rare
beyond compare,
in England nere the like.
The poet records the beast’s overall measurements (21 yards and 1 foot long, 5 yards high), and describes the jaw-bone in particular detail (“five yards long,” with “teeth in’t thirty foure, Whereof some of them are in weight two pounds, or rather more”). Similar attention is paid in both the poetry and the woodcut to the, well, Pistle (“in length foure yards, big as a man i’th wast”) and Cods (“like two hogsheads great”). Right. But such wonder aside, the great carcass provided more than “sixteene tuns of Oyle.” I’ll leave you with the closing stanza:
The Mariners of Chester say
a Herring-hag tis nam’d:
What ere it be, for certaine they
that are for knowledge fam’d,
Affirme, the like in ages past
Vpon our Coast was neuer cast.
O rare
beyond compare,
in England nere the like.
