THE SEA SERPENT EXPLAINED.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1109, 6 March 1879, Page 3

THE SEA SERPENT EXPLAINED.

A writer in Nature says If you have space for the following, it is so confirmatory of Dr Drew's experience of an opera glass dispelling ' fond deceits' concerning a sea sei pent, that it may be worth recording : One morning in October, 18G9,1 was standing amid a small group of passengers on the deck of the ill-fated Rangoon, then steaming up the Straits of Malacca to Singapoie. We were just within sight of the coast of Malacca, and quite out of sight, so far as I remember, of Sumatra. One of the party suddenly pointed out an object on the port bow, perhaps half a mile off, and drew from us the simultaneous exclamation of' The sea serpent!' And there it was, to the naked eye, a genuine serpent, speeding through the sea, with its head raised on a slender curved neck, now almost buried in the water, and anon reared just above its surface. There was the mane, and there was the well-known undulating coils stretching yards behind. But for an opera glass, probably all our party on board the Rangoon would have been personal witnesses to the existance of a great sea serpent, but alas for romance ! one glance through the lenses, and the reptile was resolved into a bamboo, root, upward, anchored in some manner in the bottom—a snag,' in fact. Swayed up and down by the rapid current, a series of waves undulated beyond it, bearing on their crests dark colored weeds or grass that had been caught by the bamboo stem. Ignorance of the shallowness of the straits so far from land, and of the swiftness of the current, no doubt led us to our first hasty conclusion.