"On the morning of the 24th February, the ship being becalmed in lat. 26° S., long. 8° E. (about forty miles from the place where Captain M'Quhæ is said to have seen the serpent), the captain perceived something right astern, stretched along the water to a length of twenty five or thirty feet, and perceptibly moving from the ship, with a steady sinuous motion. The head, which seemed to be lifted several feet above the water, had something resembling a mane running down to the floating portion, and within about six feet of the tail. Of course Captain Herriman, Mr. Long, his chief officer, and the passengers who saw this came to the conclusion that it must be the sea-serpent. As the 'Brazilian' was making no headway, to bring all doubts to an issue, the captain had a boat lowered, and himself standing in the bow, armed with a harpoon, approached the monster. It was found to be an immense piece of sea-weed, drifting with the current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, and which, with the swell left by the subsidence of a previous gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion."
Captain Harrington, of the ship Castilian, reported in the Times of February 5th, 1858, that:
"On the 12th of December, 1857, N.E. end of St. Helena distant ten miles, he and his officers were startled by the sight of a huge marine animal which reared its head out of the water within twenty yards of the ship. The head was shaped like a long nun-buoy,[ [31] ] and they supposed it to have been seven or eight feet in diameter in the largest part, with a kind of scroll or tuft of loose skin, encircling it about two feet from the top. The water was discoloured for several hundred feet from its head, so much so that on its first appearance my impression was that the ship was in broken water."
Evidently, again, a large calamary raising its caudal extremity and fin above the surface, and discolouring the water by discharging its ink.
This was immediately followed by a letter from Captain Frederick Smith, of the ship Pekin, who stated that:
"On December 28th, 1848, being then in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E. (about half-way between the Cape and St. Helena), he saw a very extraordinary-looking thing in the water, of considerable length. With the telescope, he could plainly discern a huge head and neck, covered with a shaggy-looking kind of mane, which it kept lifting at intervals out of water. This was seen by all hands, and was declared to be the great sea-serpent. A boat was lowered; a line was made fast to the 'snake,' and it was towed alongside and hoisted on board. It was a piece of gigantic sea-weed, twenty feet long, and completely covered with snaky-looking barnacles. So like a huge living monster did this appear, that had circumstances prevented my sending a boat to it, I should certainly have believed I had seen the great sea-serpent."
In September, 1872, Mr. Frank Buckland published, in Land and Water, an account by the late Duke of Marlborough, of a "sea-serpent" having been seen several times within a few days, in Loch Hourn, Scotland. A sketch of it was given which almost exactly accorded with that of Pontoppidan's sea-serpent, namely, seven hunches or protuberances like so many porpoises swimming in line, preceded by a head and neck raised slightly out of water. Many other accounts have been published of the appearance of serpent-like sea monsters, but I have only space for two or three more of the most remarkable of them.
On the 10th of January, 1877, the following affidavit was made before Mr. Raffles, magistrate, at Liverpool:
"We, the undersigned officers and crew of the barque 'Pauline' (of London), of Liverpool, in the county of Lancaster, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, do solemnly and sincerely declare that, on July 8, 1875, in lat. 5° 13' S., long. 35° W., we observed three large sperm whales, and one of them was gripped round the body with two turns of what appeared to be a huge serpent. The head and tail appeared to have a length beyond the coils of about thirty feet, and its girth eight feet or nine feet. The serpent whirled its victim round and round for about fifteen minutes, and then suddenly dragged the whale to the bottom, head first.
"Geo. Drevar, Master; Horatio Thompson, John Henderson
Landells, Owen Baker, and William
Lewarn."Again, on July 13, a similar serpent was seen, about two hundred yards off, shooting itself along the surface, head and neck being out of the water several feet. This was seen only by the captain and one ordinary seaman.
"George Drevar, Master.
"A few moments after it was seen some 60 feet elevated perpendicularly in the air by the chief officer and the following seamen:—Horatio Thompson, Owen Baker, Wm. Lewarn. And we make this solemn declaration, conscientiously believing the same to be true."
In the Illustrated London News, of November 20th, 1875, there had previously appeared a letter from the Rev. E. L. Penny, Chaplain to H.M.S. London, at Zanzibar, describing this occurrence and also the representation of a sketch (which I am kindly permitted to reproduce here), drawn by him from the descriptions given by the captain and crew of the Pauline. "The whale," he said, "should have been placed deeper in the water, but he would then have been unable to depict so clearly the manner in which the animal was attacked." He adds that, "Captain Drevar is a singularly able and observant man, and those of the crew and officers with whom he conversed were singularly intelligent; nor did any of their descriptions vary from one another in the least: there were no discrepancies." The event took place whilst their vessel was on her way from Shields to Zanzibar, with a cargo of coals, for the use of H.M.S. London, then the guard ship on that station.