THESE MEN SAW SEA SERPENTS

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 291, 4 September 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

THESE MEN SAW SEA SERPENTS

Last week a strange story came from the coast of Skye, wrote George Edinger, in the “Sunday Express ’ recently. Two sea monsters had been seen swimming off the island. The old passionate argument has broken out again. Were these really sea serpents? Were they porpoises, in a line, floating seaward, or sheer imagination? And, anyhow, can .such a thing as a sea serpent really exist? In August, 1746, Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, listened to the story of u sea serpent seen off the coast of Norway. He heard of a head held more than two feet above the water which resembled that of a horse. “It had a long white mane,” swore the ten Norwegian sailors who had sighted it, “a long white mane hanging down to the surface of the water like a parcel of sea weeds hanging down . . . we saw seven or eight coils which were very thick and as far as we could guess there was a fathom’s distance between each fold.” “It had a head like a horse,” Flying Officer Felly wrote only last year when he described an extraordinary monster that appeared out of the water while he was flying the L.M.S. mail from Liverpool to Belfast. “Its neck protruded ten feet out of the water.” A hundred years bad passed since the days of Bishop Pontoppidan when H.M. steam frigate Daedalus came steaming home from the Cape through summer seas in August, 1848. “At five o’clock in latitude 24 degrees 44 minutes S. and longitude 90 degrees 22 minutes East, something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman,” Captain Inquhae writes. “The circumstance was reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, with whom and Mr. William Barret, the master, I was at the time walking the quarterdeck.

“It was discovered to be a huge sea serpent with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the sea . . . there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal on the water level.

“The diameter of the serpent was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head. It had no fins, but something like a mane of a horse or rather a packet of seaweed washed about its back.”

“No fins,” says Captain Inquhae. Yet it was the sight of an apparent row of fins “appearing at irregular heights above the water” that first drew the attention of Commander Pearson, of the royal yacht Osborne, to an extraordinary creature off the Stilly Isles on June 2, 1877. As he looked the fins sank. And a bullet-shaped head rose above the water.

“Quite six feet thick, the head narrow. It was very broad across the back and shoulders, about fifteen or twenty feet,” he says. But an account of a monster sighted some years after, off Brazil, helps to explain them. It was described to the Zoological Society by two Fellows, Mr. E. G. B. Waldo Meade and Mr. M. J. Nicholl, who saw it from Lord Crawford’s yacht, Valhalla. Mr. Waldo Meade writes;— •(• • ?

“On December 7, 1905, I was on the poop of the Valhalla with Mr. Nicholl

Stories Through the Years

when he drew my attention to an object in the sea about 100 yards from the yacht. ... I saw a large fin or frill sticking out of the water, dark seaweed brown, somewhat crinkled at the edge.” He immediately fixed his fieldglasses upon it and “A great head and neck rose out of the water in front of the frilL The neck did not touch the frill in the water. The neck appeared about the thickness of a slight man’s body, and from seven to eight feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness. The head had a very turtle-like appearance.” The feature that Commander Pearson called “an irregular line of fins” and Mr. Waldo Meade “a frill crinkled at the edge,” was probably the mane like a packet of seaweed ou which the Norwegian sailors and the officers of the Daedalus had commented. There is one feature of the sea serpent that appears again and again. The earliest accounts and the latest dwell on the long serpentine neck which rises out of the water sometimes waving, like a serpent, at times held rigid like a giraffe, sometimes visible for six feet, sometimes for sixty, a neck of which no man has yet seen the end. Take the monster seen by the armed merchantman Hilary in May, 1917, off the coast of Iceland. This is how her captain, Captain Dean, R.N., describes it: — “The head was about the shape of a cow and was black, the true length of the neck was probably not less than twenty feet. At first glance the creature suggested a tree trunk with only the knobby ends visible, the knobby ends were, in fact, its head and dorsal fin.” This- appearance was entered in the ship’s log, but two days later the Hilary was torpedoed and the log was lost. The neck was seen again for a few moments from a South Atlantic liner in 1920.

“In April, 1920, on a voyage to tlie River Plate,” wrofe Mr. Thomas Muir, third officer of the R.M.S.P. Tyne, to Lieutenant-Commander Gould, “I was standing on the deck when I saw on the starboard side what appeared to be a spar projecting from the sea. “The head, like an umbrella handle, turned and looked at the ship, then the creature closed in toward us to about 400 yards. For roughly five minutes it travelled parallel to us, then the neck curved over like a swan, and it dived out of sight. The neck projected thirty to thirty-five feet.”

Now, in face of so many accounts all agreeing, about the principal features of this monster, it is obviously futile to go on obstinately denying its existence. It is perfectly true that people often genuinely imagine they see things that are really illusions. But people do not go ou imagining they see the same thing or making the same mistake for two hundred years. It is easier to believe that some gigantic reptile that was killed off by the ice age on land has managed to survive in the warmth of great ocean depths by burrowing into the mud of the ocean floor, and that it is occasionally tempted to the surface when the weather is warm.