The belief in sea-serpents does not appear in itself to be an unreasonable one, much as it is from time to time ridiculed. Many species of tropical snakes are aquatic in a greater or less degree, and though some naturalists will tell us that a serpent is not adapted by its structure and organs for a purely aquatic existence, one finds in nature so many wonderful adaptations of form to abnormal circumstances, that it is perhaps wiser to feel that in the great and almost boundless expanse of ocean there may be mysterious forms that science has not yet tabulated and described, rather than to at once assert the contrary. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that while the great mystery of the ocean depths has been tenanted by the credulous with impossible creations of the fancy, we have numerous testimonies from sea-captains and others of appearances that cannot always be so lightly dismissed. A Captain Harrington, for instance, commanding the “Castilian,” during a voyage from Bombay to Liverpool in the year 1857, sends the following account to the Times newspaper:—“While myself and officers were standing on the lee side of the poop, looking towards the island of St. Helena, then some ten miles away, we were startled by the sight of a large marine animal, which reared its head out of the water within twenty yards of the ship, when it suddenly disappeared for about half a minute, and then made its appearance in the same manner again, showing us distinctly its neck and head about ten or twelve feet out of the water. Its head was shaped like a long buoy, and I suppose the diameter to have been seven or eight feet in the largest part, with a kind of scroll or tuft of loose skin encircling it about two feet from the top. The second appearance assured us that it was a monster of extraordinary length, which appeared to be moving slowly towards the island. The ship was going too fast to enable us to reach the mast-head in time to form a correct estimate of its extreme length, but from what we saw from the deck we conclude that it must have been over two hundred feet long. The boatswain and several of the crew, who observed it from the forecastle, state that it was more than double the length of the ship, in which case it must have been five hundred feet. Be that as it may, I am convinced that it belonged to the serpent tribe; it was a dark colour about the head, and was covered with several white spots. Having a press of canvas on the ship at the time, I was unable to round to without risk, and therefore was precluded from getting another sight of this leviathan of the deep.” This precise description was endorsed by the chief and second officers of the ship—men, like the captain, of practised vision, and not at all likely to be deceived by floating sea-weed or any of the other matters brought forward to cast doubt on such stories.
It is curious that another apparently well-authenticated account of some such creature should also hail from the neighbourhood of St. Helena. Her Majesty’s ship “Dædalus,” in August 1848, when on the passage between that island and the Cape of Good Hope, came into close proximity with a strange-looking creature that was travelling through the water at an estimated speed of ten miles an hour. Captain McQuahee was unable, owing to the direction of the wind, to bring the ship into pursuit, but, as the creature passed within two hundred yards of them, they were enabled to bring it well within observation, its form and colour being distinctly visible from the vessel.
Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Upsal some three centuries ago, was a firm believer in the marvellous, and in his writings, amongst many other things, he gives details of a sea-serpent two hundred feet long by twenty feet thick, having a dense hairy mane and eyes of fire. This monster, he further tells us, “puts up its head on high like a pillar and devours men.” He also tells of another kind, that is forty cubits long and no thicker than a child’s arm; this is blue and yellow in colour. His writings also furnish a more detailed account of a vast monster thrown ashore in 1532 on the English coast near “Tinmouth.” This creature was ninety feet long and twenty-five feet thick, having thirty ribs on each side, a head twenty-one feet long, and two fins of fifteen feet each. This creature, from its proportions, fins, and so forth, was evidently not serpentine in character, though it may fairly be classed amongst monsters of the deep.
A Greenland missionary, Egede, tells in his journal of a frightful sea-monster that he saw on July 6, 1734. It raised itself so high out of the water, he says, that its head overtopped the mainsail. It had a long and pointed snout, and spouted like a whale; its fins were like great wings. Another very circumstantial account is that given by Captain Laurent de Ferry of Bergen in 1746. His creature had a horse-like head, raised some two feet out of the water; in colour it was grey, but it had a white mane and large black eyes. Seven or eight coils of the creature were visible, a fathom or so of space between each. De Ferry says that he shot at and wounded the monster, and that the water was reddened with its blood for some time after. He does not specify whether the weapon used was the longbow or not, but it seems highly probable that it was.
Where the account given is so exceedingly definite as it is, for example, in these two last instances, we are placed in the awkward predicament of either having to believe in the monster so graphically described, or to disbelieve the narrators of the stories; to conclude, in plain words, that Egede, despite his professions, was lying deliberately—a very Munchausen—and that De Ferry was either a credulous idiot himself, or wilfully concluded that the landsmen’s credulity might be safely played upon.
It has been suggested that a long line of tumbling porpoises, rolling after each other in the quaint way that they do, may have deceived people into a belief that what they saw were the coils of one of these great mythical monsters of the deep; but, however such an appearance might deceive a landsman, it is evident that those who go down to the sea in ships and occupy themselves in the great waters are too familiar with the appearance of a shoal of porpoises to be thus deceived.
The ribbon fish may in some cases have given rise to the idea of a serpent of the sea, as the appearance of their elongated, band-like bodies swimming through the water with a gentle serpentine or undulatory motion would be very suggestive. They have been known to attain a length of sixty feet; specimens of this size have actually been captured by trawlers, though even yet we are a long way from the sea serpents gravely mentioned by Pontoppidan in his “Natural History of Norway” as being over six hundred feet long.
On the occasion of the reported appearance of the sea serpent to Captain McQuahee, Professor Owen in a letter published in the Times suggested that the creature seen may have been one of the larger species of seals found in the Southern Seas. At the Falkland Islands and in the Kerguelen and Crozet groups the sea elephant attains a size of some twenty feet in length, and some such creature as this, swimming rapidly through a calm sea with its head raised, and with a long wake behind it, caused by the action of its paddles, placed at the posterior extremity of the body, like the screw of a steamer, may have been the foundation of some of the stories told of these mysterious monsters of the deep.
A good sea-serpent story is found in Captain Taylor’s “Reminiscences.” One day, when his ship was lying at anchor in Table Bay, “an enormous monster” about one hundred feet in length was seen advancing with snake-like motion round Green Point into the harbour. The head appeared to be crowned with long hair, and the keener-sighted amongst the observers could see the eyes and distinguish the features of the monster. The military were called out, and after peppering the object at a distance of five hundred yards, and making several palpable hits, it was observed to become quite still, and boats ventured off to complete the destruction. The “sea serpent” proved to be a mass of gigantic sea-weed, which had been undulated by the ground swell, and had become quiescent when it reached the still waters of the bay. Probably if mariners would attack the “monster” in the same manner whenever it is seen, we should hear little more of the sea serpent.
Stories of sea serpents are almost as old as the hills, and in many cases quite as difficult to digest.