It is a curious fact that recent scientific research has revealed the existence in the sea, at the greatest depths, of most minute and wonderfully formed organisms, the beauty and rarity of which necessarily secure our admiration; but instances of animals of enormous size being met with beyond those already known, are few and far between. This fact may be accounted for by the circumstance, that while it is easy to construct instruments for capturing the smaller creatures living in the deep, it is a very different matter to entrap and secure an unseen monster, whose very size must endow him with enormous strength. The whale, so far as we know, is the largest denizen of the deep. Whether it is possible that it can be equalled by giants of some other order or race, is the point which public curiosity is very keen to have settled.
The appearance of great snakes at sea is recorded by more than one old voyager; but it would seem to have been only of late years that the idea of their existence has been generally confined to one, familiar to us all as the "Great sea-serpent."
In Opuscula Omnia Botanic Thomæ Johnsoni, 1629, we have an account of a great serpent captured off Sandwich by two men, who found it stranded among the shoal water by the sea-shore. It is described as being fifty feet long, and of a fiery colour. We are also told that they conveyed the carcase home, and after eating it, stuffed the skin with hay, to preserve it "as a perpetual remembrance of the fact."
In David Crantz's "History of Greenland," published in 1766, we have an extract (illustrated by a drawing) concerning the kraken, from the narrative of a Captain Paul Egede, supposed to be the brother of a famous Danish missionary of the same name. The kraken, it is however necessary to remark, is the northern name for a giant cuttle-fish, the existence of such a monster being now a matter of scientific fact.
"On the 6th of July, 1734," says this old seaman, "as I was proceeding on my second voyage to Greenland, in the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope, a hideous monster was seen to raise its body so high above the water that its head overtopped our main-sail. It had a pointed nose, and spouted out water like a whale; instead of fins it had great broad flaps like wings; its body seemed to be grown over with shell-work, and its skin was very rugged and uneven; when it dived into the water again, it threw up its tail, which was like that of a serpent, and was at least a whole ship's length above the water; we judged the body to be equal in bulk to our ship, and to be three or four times as long."
Eric Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, celebrated in his days as a naturalist, though he never actually saw it or met any one who had seen it, believed implicitly in the great sea-serpent existing somewhere; and in his writings has a good deal to tell us about its ways and habits; and it is upon record that Sir Lawrence de Ferry, commander of the old castle of Bergen, not only saw the monster, but shot at it on the high seas, wounded it, was pursued by it, in its pain and fury, so closely that he narrowly escaped with his life.
In 1801 there was cast ashore on the coast of Dorsetshire a snake twenty-eight feet in length and twenty feet in circumference; but this has since been alleged to have been a Basking-shark; and the same has been said of a great snake-like carcaso that was beaten to pieces by a tempest, and cast ashore on one of the Orkney Isles in the autumn of 1809, and some fragments of which, the Scots Magazine for that year states, were lodged in the Museum of the Edinburgh University.
A very distinct description of the sea-serpent occurs in Dr. Hooker's Testimony respecting it, and communicated to Dr. Brewster's Journal of Science. About half-past six o'clock on a cloudless evening at sea, the doctor heard suddenly a rushing noise ahead of the ship, which at first he supposed to be a whale spouting, but soon found to be a colossal serpent, of which he made a sketch as it passed the vessel at fifty yards' distance, slowly, neither turning to the right nor left. "As soon as his head had reached the stern, he gradually laid it down in a horizontal position with his body, and floated along like the mast of a vessel. That there was upwards of sixty feet visible, is shown by the circumstance that the length of the ship was a hundred and twenty feet, and that at the time his head was off the stern, the other end had not passed the main-mast.... His motion in the water was meandering, like that of an eel; and the wake he left behind him, was like that occasioned by a small craft passing through the water.... The humps on his back resembled in size and shape those of a dromedary."
Dr. Hooker states further, that the description precisely accorded with that of a serpent seen five years before by Captain Bennett of Boston. At a later period, three officers in Her Majesty's service—namely, Captain Sullivan, Lieutenant Maclachlan, and Ensign Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade—beheld a similar creature gambolling in the sea near Halifax; but they asserted that it was at least one hundred and eighty feet in length, and thicker than the trunk of a moderately sized tree. Nor must we forget the official account which was transmitted in 1848 to the Lords of the Admiralty, by Captain Peter M'Quhae of Her Majesty's ship Dædalus, past which, he and his crew saw the great sea-serpent swimming merrily—a document which produced, or provoked, a learned paper in the Westminster Review; while Professor Owen asserted that what was seen from the deck of the Dædalus, would be nothing more than a large seal borne rapidly southward on a floe or iceberg.
Recently, the appearances of the serpent have been amusingly frequent and clearly detailed. He has been seen in the north seas and the south seas, and in many places nearer home; in the Frith of Forth, off Filey Bay and the North Foreland, off Hastings and the Isle of Arran, the Menai Strait and Prawle Point; and in 1875, a battle between it and a whale was viewed from the deck of the good ship Pauline of London, Captain Drevar, when proceeding with a cargo of coals from Shields to Zanzibar, destined for Her Majesty's ship London. When the Pauline reached the region of the trade-winds and equatorial currents, she was carried out of her course, and after a severe storm, found herself off Cape Roque, where several sperm-whales were seen playing about her. While the crew were watching them, they suddenly beheld a sight that filled every man on board with terror. Starting straight from the bosom of the deep, a gigantic serpent rose and wound itself twice in two mighty coils round the largest of the whales, which it proceeded to crush in genuine boa-constrictor fashion. In vain did the hapless whale struggle, lash the water into foam, and even bellow, for all its efforts were as nothing against the supernatural powers of its dreadful adversary, whose strength "may be further imagined," says a leader in the Daily Telegraph, "from the fact that the ribs of the ill-fated fish were distinctly heard cracking one after the other with a report like that of a small cannon. Soon the struggles of the wretched whale grew fainter and fainter; its bellowings ceased, and the great serpent sank with its prey beneath the surface of the ocean."