Weird Tales/Volume 11/Issue 2/The Barnacle Goose
The Barnacle Goose
THE barnacle goose, which is a wild goose quite common in northern Europe, was given its name centuries ago because of a curious and inexplicable superstition; which was nothing less than that barnacles, the tiny shell-fish which attach themselves to ships' bottoms or floating timbers, eventually turn into geese! Barnacles are curious little mollusks which fasten themselves by a fleshy peduncle usually to wooden ships, and sometimes in such quantities that the ship must be put in dry dock and the hull scraped.
Many people in early days did not believe that these mollusks reproduced themselves, but fancied that they grew in some sort of spontaneous manner on tree trunks or in the crevices of decaying timber. Giambattista Porta, in his book on natural magic (published 1569) says, "Not only in Scotland but in the river of Thames by London, there is a kind of shell-fish which . . . commonly stick in the keel of some old ship. Some say they come of worms, some of the boughs of trees which fall into the sea. If any of them be cast upon shore, they die; but they which are swallowed still into the sea, live and get out of their shells, and grow to be ducks or such-like birds."
Butler remarks in Hudibras:
"As Barnacles turn Poland Geese
In th' Islands of the Orcades."
Gerarde gravely records in his Herbal (1597) that "in the north parts of Scotland and in the Islands called Orcades there are certain trees whereon these tree-geese and barnacles abound." He describes the resulting fowl as "bigger than a mallard and lesser than a goose, called by the Lancashire people a tree-goose."
It is said that there are still people on the northern Irish and Scottish coasts who believe that these geese are transformed from barnacles; and until recently, at least, the barnacle goose was eaten in France on fast days, on the belief that this was permissible because it was more of a fish than a fowl.