[SEA-MONSTERS.]
Whether the sea contains any creature at all answering to the popular idea of a 'sea-serpent'—that ophidian monster which is annually reported to have been interviewed by various crews and persons—is a problem which will only be solved by the actual capture of one of those visitors. There are, as will presently be pointed out, certain well-known true sea-snakes, the Hydrophidæ of the Indian Ocean, which swim by means of their compressed fin-like tails; but whether these marine serpents will correspond to the 'sea-serpents' of popular tales, is a matter deserving further investigation. The wide ocean presents features well suited to tempt the imagination to stray into the wildest flights. Its vastness; the difficulty of exploring even a small portion of its surface, as well as its enormous depths; its capacity for containing the strangest and most gigantic objects that fancy can picture: these are attributes of the mighty deep that have ever attracted the attention and prompted the weird imaginings of man.
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 Botanica, 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 carcase 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 shewn 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.'