CHAPTER 4.III.
How Pantagruel received a letter from his father Gargantua, and of the strange way to have speedy news from far distant places.
While Pantagruel was taken up with the purchase of those foreign animals, the noise of ten guns and culverins, together with a loud and joyful cheer of all the fleet, was heard from the mole.

Pantagruel looked towards the haven, and perceived that this was occasioned by the arrival of one of his father Gargantua's celoces, or advice-boats, named the Chelidonia; because on the stern of it was carved in Corinthian brass a sea-swallow, which is a fish as large as a dare-fish of Loire, all flesh, without scale, with cartilaginous wings (like a bat's) very long and broad, by the means of which I have seen them fly about three fathom above water, about a bow-shot.

At Marseilles 'tis called lendole.

And indeed that ship was as light as a swallow, so that it rather seemed to fly on the sea than to sail.

Malicorne, Gargantua's esquire carver, was come in her, being sent expressly by his master to have an account of his son's health and circumstances, and to bring him credentials.