Note 586 — Chapter XVII

The shark finds great favour among the negroes; “you can swallow him in de dark,” is a commendation based on the absence of small tricky bones, such as the shad’s. But to the best black gourmets, the fish only attains its highest perfection in soup, after being buried for two weeks! The cook of the friend with whom I was staying in Jamaica only consented to cutting up my shark, on condition that if a gold watch was found in its belly, that was to be her perquisite—a condition postulated, I eventually discovered, because on a similar occasion one hundred years before, her grandmother did discover a gold watch. Alas for her! two ship-bolts of iron were her only treasure-trove.