Part 72

“The sketch (this was a reduced copy of the drawing of the head of the animal seen by Captain M’QUHAE; attached to the submerged body of a large seal, showing the long eddy produced by the action of the terminal flippers) will suggest the reply to your query, “Whether the monster seen from the Daedalus be anything but a saurian?” If it be the true answer, it destroys the romance of the incident, and will be anything but acceptable to those who prefer the excitement of the imagination to the satisfaction of the judgment. I am far from insensible to the pleasures of the discovery of a new and rare animal; but before I can enjoy them, certain conditions--e. g. reasonable proof or evidence of its existence--must be fulfilled. I am also far from undervaluing the information which Captain M’QUHAE has given us of what he saw. When fairly analized, it lies in a small compass, but my knowledge of the animal kingdom compels me to draw other conclusions from the phenomena than those which the gallant captain seems to have jumped at. He evidently saw a large animal moving through the water, very different from anything he had before witnessed--neither a whale, a grampus, a great shark, an alligator, nor any of the larger surface swimming creatures which are fallen in with in ordinary voyages. He writes--“On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent” (read “animal”), “with the head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea. The diameter of the serpent” (animal) “was about fifteen or sixteen inches behind the head; its colour a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat”. No fins were seen (the captain says there were none; but from his own account, he did not see enough of the animal to prove the negative). “Something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed, washed about its back.” So much of the body as was seen was “not used in propelling the animal through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation.” A calculation of its length was made under a strong preconception of the nature of the beast. The head, e. g., is stated to be, “without any doubt, that of a snake;” and yet a snake would be the last species to which a naturalist conversant with the forms and characters of the heads of animals, would refer such a head as that of which Captain M’Quhae has transmitted a drawing to the Admirality, and which he certifies to have been accurately copied in the Illustrated London News for October 28, 1848, p. 265. Your Lordship will observe that no sooner was the captain’s attention called to the object, than “it was discovered to be an enormous serpent”, and yet the closest inspection of as much of the body as was visible, à fleur d’eau, failed to detect any undulations of the body, although such actions constitute the very character which would distinguish a serpent or serpentiform swimmer from any other marine species. The foregone conclusion, therefore, of the beast’s being a sea-serpent, notwithstanding its capacious vaulted cranium, and stiff, inflexible trunk, must be kept in mind in estimating the value of the approximation made to the total length of the animal, as “(at the very least) sixty feet”. This is the only part of the description, however, which seems to me to be so uncertain as to be inadmissible, in an attempt to arrive at a right conclusion as to the nature of the animal. The more certain characters of the animal are these:--Head with a convex, moderately capacious cranium, short obtuse muzzle, gape of the mouth not extending further than to beneath the eye, which is rather small, round, filling closely the palpebral aperture; colour, dark brown above, yellowish white beneath; surface smooth, without scales, scutes, or other conspicuous modifications or hard and naked cuticle. And the captain says, “Had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should have easily recognized his features with my naked eye.” Nostrils not mentioned, but indicated in the drawing by a crescentic mark at the end of the nose or muzzle. All these are the characters of the head of a warm-blooded mammal--none of them those of a cold-blooded reptile or fish. Body long, dark brown, not undulating, without dorsal or other apparent fins; “but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of sea-weed, washed about its back.” The character of the integuments would be a most important one for the zoologist in the determination to the class to which the above defined creature belonged. If an opinion can be deduced as to the integuments from the above indication, it is that the species had hair, which, if it was too short and close to be distinguished on the head, was visible where it usually is the longest, on the middle line of the shoulders or advanced part of the back, where it was not stiff and upright like the rays of a fin, but “washed about.” Guided by the above interpretation, of the “mane of a horse, or a bunch of sea-weed”, the animal was not a cetaceous mammal, but rather a great seal. But what seal of large size, or indeed of any size, would be encountered in latitude 24° 44′ south, and longitude 9° 22′ east--viz. about three hundred miles from the western shore of the southern end of Afrika? The most likely species to be there met with are the largest of the seal tribe, e. g. Anson’s sea lion, or that known to the southern whalers by the name of the sea-elephant, the Phoca proboscidea, which attains the length of from twenty to thirty feet. These great seals abound in certain of the islands of the southern and antarctic seas, from which an individual is occasionally floated off upon an iceberg. The sea lion exhibited in London last spring, which was a young individual of the Phoca proboscidea was actually captured in that predicament; having been carried by the currents that set northwards towards the Cape, where its temporary resting-place was rapidly melting away. When a large individual of the Phoca proboscidea or Phoca leonina is thus borne off to a distance from its native shore, it is compelled to return for rest to its floating abode, after it has made its daily excursions in quest of the fishes or squids that constitute its food. It is thus brought by the iceberg into the latitudes of the Cape, and perhaps farther north, before the berg was melted away. Then the poor seal is compelled to swim as long as strength endures, and in such a predicament I imagine the creature was that Mr. Sartoris saw rapidly approaching the Daedalus from before the beam, scanning, probably, its capabilities as a resting-place, as it paddled its long stiff body past the ship. In so doing, it would raise a head of the form and colour described and delineated by Captain M’Quhae, supported on a neck also of the diameter given; the thick neck passing into an inflexible trunk, the longer and coarser hair on the upper part of which would give rise to the idea, especially if the species were the Phoca leonina, explained by the similes above cited. The organs of locomotion would be out of sight. The pectoral fins being set on very low down, as in my sketch, the chief impelling force would be the action of the deeper immersed terminal fins and tail, which would create a long eddy, readily mistakable, by one looking at the strange phenomenon with a sea-serpent in his mind’s eye, for an indefinite prolongation of the body.”

“It is very probable, that not one on board the Daedalus ever before beheld a gigantic seal freely swimming in the open ocean. Entering unexpectedly from that vast and commonly blank desert of waters, it would be a strange and exciting spectacle, and might well be interpreted as a marvel; but the creative powers of the human mind appear to be really very limited, and, on all the occasions where the true source of the “great unknown” has been detected--whether it has proved to be a file of sportive porpoises, or a pair of gigantic sharks--old Pontoppidan’s sea-serpent with the mane has uniformly suggested itself as the representative of the portent, until the mystery has been unravelled.”

“The vertebrae of the sea-serpent described and delineated in the Wernerian Transactions, vol. I., and sworn to by the fishermen who saw it off the Isle of Stronsa (one of the Orkneys), in 1808, two of which vertebrae are in the Museum of the College of Surgeons, are certainly those of a great shark, of the genus Selache, and are not distinguishable from those of the species called “basking-shark”, of which individuals from thirty to thirty-five feet in length have been from time to time captured or stranded on our coasts.”

“I have no unmeet confidence in the exactitude of my interpretation of the phenomena witnessed by the captain and others of the Daedalus. I am too sensible of the inadequacy of the characters which the opportunity of a rapidly passing animal, “in a long ocean swell”, enabled them to note, for the determination of its species or genus. Giving due credence to the most probably accurate elements of their description, they do little more than guide the zoologist to the class, which, in the present instance, is not that of the serpent or the saurian.”

“But I am usually asked, after each endeavour to explain Captain M’Quhae’s sea-serpent, “Why should there not be a great sea-serpent?”--often, too, in a tone which seems to imply, “Do you think, then, there are not more marvels in the deep, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?” And, freely conceding that point, I have felt bound to give a reason for scepticism as well as faith. If a gigantic sea-serpent actually exists, the species must, of course, have been perpetuated through successive generations, from its first creation and introduction into the seas of this planet. Conceive, then, the number of individuals that must have lived, and died, and have left their remains to attest the actuality of the species during the enormous lapse of time, from its beginning, to the 6th. of August last! Now, a serpent, being an air breathing animal, with long vesicular and receptacular lungs, dives with an effort and commonly floats when dead; and so would the sea-serpent, until decomposition or accident had opened the tough integument, and let out the imprisoned gases. Then it would sink, and, if in deep water, be seen no more until the sea rendered up its dead, after the lapse of the aeons requisite for the yielding of its place to dry land,--a change which has actually revealed to the present generation the old saurian monsters that were entombed at the bottom of the ocean, of the secondary geological periods of our earth’s history. During life the exigencies of the respiration of the great sea-serpent would always compel him frequently to the surface; and when dead and swollen--

“Prone on the flood, extended long and large,”

he would

“Lie floating many a rood; in bulk as huge, “As whom the fables name of monstrous size, “Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove.”

“Such a spectacle, demonstrative of the species if it existed, has not hitherto met the gaze of any of the countless voyagers who have traversed the seas in so many directions. Considering, too, the tides and currents of the ocean, it seems still more reasonable to suppose that the dead sea-serpent would be occasionally cast on shore. However, I do not ask for the entire carcase. The structure of the back-bone of the serpent tribe is so peculiar, that a single vertebra would suffice to determine the existence of the hypothetical Ophidian; and this will not be deemed an unreasonable request, when it is remembered that the vertebrae are more numerous in serpents than in any other animals. Such large blanched and scattered bones on any sea-shore, would be likely to attract even common curiosity; yet there is no vertebra of a serpent larger than the ordinary pythons and boas in any museum in Europe.”

“Few sea-coasts have been more sedulously searched, or by more acute naturalists (witness the labours of Sars and Lovén), than those of Norway. Krakens and sea serpents ought to have been living and dying thereabouts from long before Pontoppidan’s time to our day, if all tales were true; yet they have never vouchsafed a single fragment of the skeleton to any Scandinavian collector; whilst the great denizens of those seas have been by no means so chary. No museums, in fact, are so rich in skeletons, skulls, bones and teeth of the numerous kind of whales, cachelots, grampuses, walrusses, sea unicorns, seals, etc., as those of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden; but of any large marine nondescript or indeterminable monster they cannot show a trace.”

“I have inquired repeatedly whether the natural history collections of Boston, Philadelphia, or other cities of the United States, might possess any unusually large ophidian vertebrae or any of such peculiar form as to indicate some large and unknown marine animal; but they have received no such specimens.”

“The frequency with which the sea-serpent has been supposed to have appeared near the shores and harbours of the United States, has led to its being specified as the “American sea-serpent;” yet, out of the two hundred vertebrae of every individual that should have lived and died in the Atlantic since the creation of the species, not one has yet been picked up on the shores of America. The diminutive snake, less than a yard in length, “killed upon the sea-shore”, apparently beaten to death, “by some labouring people of Cape Ann,” United States (see the 8vo pamphlet, 1817, Boston, page 38), and figured in the Illustrated London News, October 28, 1848, from the original American memoir, by no means satisfies the conditions of the problem. Neither does the Saccopharynx of Mitchill, nor the Ophiognathus of Harwood--the one four and a half feet, the other six feet long: both are surpassed by some of the congers of our own coasts, and, like other muraenoid fishes and the known small sea snake (Hydrophis), swim by undulatory movements of the body.”

“The fossil vertebrae and skull which were exhibited by Mr. Koch, in New York and Boston, as those of the great sea-serpent, and which are now in Berlin, belonged to different individuals of a species which I had previously proved to be an extinct whale; a determination which has subsequently been confirmed by Professors Müller and Agassiz. Mr. Dixon of Worthing has discovered many fossil vertebrae, in the Eocene tertiary clay at Bracklesham, which belong to a larger species of an extinct genus of serpent (Palaeophis), founded on similar vertebrae from the same formation in the Isle of Sheppey. The largest of these ancient British snakes was twenty feet in length; but there is no evidence that they were marine.”

“The sea saurians of the secondary periods of geology have been replaced in the tertiary and actual seas by marine mammals. No remains of Cetacea have been found in lias or oolite, and no remains of Plesiosaur, or Ichthyosaur, or any other secondary reptile, have been found in Eocene or later tertiary deposits, or recent, on the actual sea-shores; and that the old air-breathing saurians floated when they died has been shown in the Geological Transactions (vol. V., second series, p. 512). The inference that may reasonably be drawn from no recent carcase or fragment of such having ever been discovered, is strengthened by the corresponding absence of any trace of their remains in the tertiary beds.”

“Now, on weighing the question, whether creatures meriting the name of “great sea serpent” do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcase of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilized state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea serpents, krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence, than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favour of their existence. A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent.”

What speaks for itself, this letter appeared in several journals and newspapers. So I have found it in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 2d. Ser. Vol. II, p. 458 (15? Nov. 1848), in GALIGNANI’s Messenger of Nov. 23, 1848, in the Illustrated London News of Nov. 25, 1848, and in the Zoologist, of Nov. 27, 1848. As it came from such a quarter it is not surprising that many persons were willing to acquiesce in the decision.

Captain M’QUHAE, however, promptly replied to Professor OWEN. His answer was also addressed to the Editor of the Times (Times, Nov. 21, 1848):

“Sir,--Will you do me the very great favour to give a place in your widely-circulating columns to the following reply to the animadversions of Professor Owen on the serpent or animal seen by me and others from Her Majesty’s ship Daedalus on the 6th. of August last, and which were published in the Times of the 14th. inst.?

“I am, Sir, your obedient servant

“P. M’Quhae.

“Late Captain of Her Majesty’s ship Daedalus.

“London, November 18.

“Professor Owen correctly states that I “evidently saw a large creature moving rapidly through the water very different from anything I had before witnessed, neither a whale, a grampus, a great shark, an alligator, nor any of the larger surface-swimming creatures fallen in with in ordinary voyages”. I now assert, neither was it a common seal nor a sea elephant; its great length, and its totally differing physiognomy, precluding the possibility of its being a Phoca of any species. The head was flat, and not a “capacious vaulted cranium;” nor had it “a stiff inflexible trunk”--a conclusion to which Professor Owen has jumped, most certainly not justified by the simple statement, that “no portion of the sixty feet seen by us was used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation.”

“It is also assumed that the “calculation of its length was made under a strong preconception of the nature of the beast;” another conclusion quite contrary to the fact. It was not until after the great length was developed by its nearest approach to the ship, and until after that most important point had been duly considered and debated, as well as such could be in the brief space of time allowed for so doing, that it was pronounced to be a serpent by all who saw it, and who are too well accustomed to judge of lengths and breadths of objects in the sea to mistake a real substance and an actual living body, coolly and dispassionately contemplated, at so short a distance too, for the “eddy caused by the action of the deeper immersed fins and tail of a rapidly moving gigantic seal raising its head above the water,” as Professor Owen imagines, “in quest of its lost iceberg.”

“The creative powers of the human mind may be very limited. On this occasion they were not called into requisition; my purpose and desire being, throughout, to furnish eminent naturalists, such as the learned Professor, with accurate facts, and not with exaggerated representations, nor with what could by any possibility proceed from optical illusion; and I beg to assure him that old Pontoppidan’s having clothed his sea-serpent with a mane could not have suggested the idea of ornamenting the creature seen from the Daedalus with a similar appendage, for the simple reason that I had never seen his account, or even heard of his sea-serpent, until my arrival in London. Some other solution must therefore be found for the very remarkable coincidence between us in that particular, in order to unravel the mystery.”

“Finally, I deny the existence of excitement, or the possibility of optical illusion. I adhere to the statement, as to form, colour, and dimensions, contained in my official report to the Admiralty; and I leave them as data whereupon the learned and scientific may exercise the “pleasures of imagination” until some more fortunate opportunity shall occur of making a closer acquaintance with the “great unknown”,--in the present instance assuredly no ghost.”

It also appeared in the Illustrated London News of Nov. 25 1848.

And a gentleman, who signed his letter with the initials J. C., wrote a letter to the Editor of the Illustrated London News (see this Journal of Nov. 25, 1848) to rectify another statement of the learned Professor: