The first literary mention of the creature I have been able to find appears in a comedy by Aristophanes, The Knights, where the playwright imagines a dialogue between several ships, the eldest trireme saying that, rather than be sent on a dangerous expedition, she would prefer to remain at home, grow old, and be eaten by shipworms. Ovid, in a line almost too famous to quote, speaks of his heart constantly nibbled by sorrow, "gnawed as a ship is injured by the hidden borer" (estur ut occulta vitiata teredine navtsj. Theophrastus describes the creature scrupulously, though Pliny m«es fact and fancy in his Natural History, mistakenly saying that "borer worms have a very large head in relation to their size," and confusing them the grub of an insect. In the Middle Ages, the scholarmonk Yscolan рГ°1е' 11 year I was placed At Bangor, on the pole of a weir. Sl er thou my sufferings from seaworms." Curiously, we find no mentl0n of shipworms in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Goethe, SHIPWORMS 133 132 THE WEST SIDE Pushkin, and other authors of universal genius. But it crops up freqUentj in accounts of the Age of Exploration, being blamed for the failure f Columbus's fourth voyage in 1502, when all his vessels had to be shelved because of problems with their bottoms. Sir Francis Drake's flagship vv found riddled with shipworms when it returned from circumnavigatin the globe. The "Zeeworm" devastated Holland in the 1730s. As Smollett reports, "The Dutch were greatly alarmed by an apprehension of being overwhelmed by an inundation occasioned by worms, which were said to have consumed the piles of timber work that supported their dykes. They prayed and fasted with uncommon zeal in terror of this calamity, which they did not know how to avert in any other manner. At length they were delivered from their fears by a hard frost, which effectually destroyed these dangerous animals." Perhaps because Holland suffered so much shipworm damage, Dutch scientists led the way in investigating the malicious mollusk. Godfrey Sellius's 366page Latin treatise, Historia Naturalis Teredinis seu Xylophagi marini (1733), is still regarded as a masterpiece of research. The British scientist J. B.Jeffreys observed about Sellius in his own nicely written British Conchology (1865): "The subject appears to have fascinated him, much in the same way as a capricious mistress does her lover, who now deprecates the cruelty of his fair tormentor, and then extols to the skies her beauty and gentleness. He calls the Teredo a wicked beast, the worst plague that angry Nature could inflict on man; but he defends it against the calumnies of certain anonymous writers who had preceded him, and he expresses in enthusiastic terms his admiration of its symmetry, economy, ingenuity, social harmony. . . and its wonderful perfection in every particular. Clearly the shipworm has the power to dazzle susceptible mentalities.