THE SEA SERPENT

Bush Advocate, Volume XXIII, Issue 310, 13 January 1912, Page 8

THE SEA SERPENT

The story of the sea' serp-emt seen in the Tasman Sea by officers of the Strathardle will be greeted with innumerable jokes .at their expense. The public has got into its head that the seaserpent is a joke. But while scientists are not agreed that there is such a creature, the evidence for its existence .j not to bo despised. There is tlio story of the officers of H.M.S. Daedalus, which encountered an enormous serpent in the South Atlantic in 1848. The oreatere wihich resembled a snake or an eel, and showed 1 .about 60 feet of body, passed quito close to the ship, and those on board had) a good look at it. In 1875 the British ship Paulino witnessed, off the Africa.n coast, a struggle between .a whale and a gigantic serpent, wihich wound itself round the whale and crushed it in boaconstrictor fashion. Two years later the officers of her Majesty's yacht Osborne, a vessel which one would not expect to be the home of fishermen's tales, saw a serpent off the coast of Sicily. This creature was of immense length, audi,' like the one seen by those m the Strathardle, had a, head like a crocodile. Ma,ny other oases are on record in wkich mariners have reported with circumstantial detail having seen ser.pent-like animals in the ocean.