Chapter ANACONDA of A by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

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The natives said these great snakes had poisonous fangs. These Cleyer could not find, but he believes the teeth to be in some degree venomous, for a servant of his scratched his hand on one of them. It swelled, greatly inflamed, and produced fever and delirium:

“Nec prius cessabant symptomata, quam Serpentinus lapis (see SNAKE-STONE) quam Patres Jesuitae hic componunt, vulneri adaptatus omne veneum extraheret, et ubique symptomata convenientibus antidotis essent profligata.”

Again, in 1768, we find in the Scots Magazine, App. p. 673, but quoted from “London pap. Aug. 1768,” and signed by R. Edwin, a professed eyewitness, a story with the following heading: “Description of the Anaconda, a monstrous species of serpent. In a letter from an English gentleman, many years resident in the Island of Ceylon in the East Indies..... The Ceylonese seem to know the creature well: they call it Anaconda, and talked of eating its flesh when they caught it.” He describes its seizing and disposing of an enormous “tyger.” The serpent darts on the “tyger” from a tree, attacking first with a bite, then partially crushing and dragging it to the tree.… “winding his body round both the tyger and the tree with all his violence, till the ribs and other bones began to give way .… each giving a loud crack when it burst .… the poor creature all this time was living, and at every loud crash of its bones gave a houl, not loud, yet piteous enough to pierce the cruelest heart.”

Then the serpent drags away its victim, covers it with slaver, swallows it, etc. The whole thing is very cleverly told, but is evidently a romance founded on the description by “D. Cleyerus,” which is quoted by Ray. There are no tigers in Ceylon. In fact, “R. Edwin” has developed the Romance of the Anaconda out of the description of D. Cleyerus, exactly as “Mynheer Försch” some years later developed the Romance of the Upas out of the older stories of the poison tree of Macassar. Indeed, when we find “Dr Andrew Cleyer” mentioned among the early relators of these latter stories, the suspicion becomes strong that both romances had the same author, and that “R. Edwin” was also the true author of the wonderful story told under the name of Foersch. (See further under UPAS.)

In Percival’s Ceylon (1803) we read: “Before I arrived in the island I had heard many stories of a monstrous snake, so vast in size as to devour tigers and buffaloes, and so daring as even to attack the elephant” (p. 303). Also, in Pridham’s Ceylon and its Dependencies (1849, ii. 750 - 51): “Pimbera or Anaconda is of the genus Python, Cuvier, and is known in English as the rock-snake.” Emerson Tennent (Ceylon, 4th ed., 1860, i. 196) says: “The great python (the ‘boa’ as it is commonly designated by Europeans, the ‘anaconda’ of Eastern story) which is supposed to crush the bones of an elephant, and to swallow a tiger” .… It may be suspected that the letter of “R. Edwin” was the foundation of all or most of the stories alluded to in these passages. Still we have the authority of Ray’s friend that Anaconda, or rather Anacondaia, was at Leyden applied as a Ceylonese name to a specimen of this python. The only interpretation of this that we can offer is Tamil anai-kondra [anaikkónda], “which killed an elephant”; an appellative, but not a name. We have no authority for the application of this appellative to a snake, though the passages quoted from Percival, Pridham, and Tennent are all suggestive of such stories, and the interpretation of the name anacondaia given to Ray: “Bubalorum … membra conterens,” is at least quite analogous as an appellative. It may be added that in Malay anakanda signifies “one that is well-born,” which does not help us … [Mr Skeat is unable to trace the word in Malay, and rejects the derivation from anakanda given above. A more plausible explanation is that given by Mr D. Ferguson (8 Ser. N. & Q. xii. 123), who derives anacandaia from Singhalese Henakandayâ (hena, ‘lightning’; kanda, ‘stem, trunk,’) which is a name for the whipsnake (Passerita mycterizans), the name of the smaller reptile being by a blunder transferred to the greater. It is at least a curious coincidence that Ogilvy (1670) in his “Description of the African Isles” (p. 690), gives: “Anakandef, a sort of small snakes,” which is the Malagasy Anakandîfy, ‘a snake.’]

1859.—“The skins of anacondas offered at Bangkok come from the northern provinces.”—D. O. King, in J. R. G. Soc., xxx. 184.