Part 87

The appearance took place, as is stated, near Orme’s Head, a headland of the Northern coast of Wales, projecting in a north-western direction into the Irish Sea. The great rapidity of the movement through the water, estimated at thirty miles an hour, its great length of about 200 feet, its black colour, its vertical undulations and the whole external appearance of the animal, outlines of which are represented in the figure, at once betray the sea-serpent.

Another correspondent of Nature immediately wrote to the Editor as follows: “I have seen four or five times something like what your correspondent describes and figures, at Llandudno, and have no doubt whatever that phenomenon was simply a shoal of porpoises. I never, however, saw the head your correspondent gives.” There! It is just the head which shows that the animal seen by the party of gentlemen and ladies above mentioned, was one single animal and not a row of porpoises!

And therefore, one of the eye-witnesses, Mr. W. BARFOOT, promptly answered in Nature of Febr. 8, 1883:

“Like your correspondent, Mr. Sidebotham (in Nature Vol. XXVII, p. 315), I have frequently seen a shoal of porpoises in Llandudno Bay, as well as in other places, and on the occasion referred to by Mr. Mott, in Nature, Vol. XXVII, p. 293, the idea of porpoises was at first started but immediately abandoned. I will venture to suggest that no one has seen a shoal of these creatures travel at the rate of from twenty five to thirty miles an hour. I have seen whales in the ocean, and large flocks of sea-birds, such as those of the eider-duck, skimming its surface; but the strange appearance seen at Llandudno on September 3 was not to be accounted for by porpoises, whales, birds, or breakers, an opinion which was shared by all present.”

“William Barfoot.”

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In 1883 Mr. HENRY LEE published his Sea Monsters Unmasked, one of the Series of publications of the International Fisheries Exhibition. This delightful book treats of the Kraken and the sea-serpent.

In the Preface Mr. LEE remarks:

“In treating of the so-called “sea-serpent”, I have been anticipated by many able writers. Mr. Gosse, in his delightful book “The Romance of Natural History”, published in 1862, devoted a chapter to it; and numerous articles concerning it appeared in various papers and periodicals.”

“But, for the information from which those authors have drawn their inferences, and on which they have founded their opinions, they have been greatly indebted, as must be all who have seriously to consider this subject, to the late experienced editor of the Zoologist, Mr. Edward Newman, a man of wonderful power of mind, of great judgment, a profound thinker, and an able writer. At a time when, as he said, “the shafts of ridicule were launched against believers and unbelievers in the sea-serpent in a very pleasing and impartial manner”, he, in the true spirit of philosophical inquiry, in 1847, opened the columns of his magazine to correspondence on this topic, and all the more recent reports of marine monsters having been seen are therein recorded. To him, therefore, the fullest acknowledgements are due.”

I too am under obligations to Mr. NEWMAN, as to one who has collected so many reports of the sea-serpent and published them in his journal, but I fail to see in him what Mr. LEE asserts him to be.

As to the contents of Mr. LEE’S “Great Sea-Serpent”, the second part of his Sea-Monsters Unmasked, I may be allowed to note the following.

First he mentions the various great snakes of antiquity and believes them to be merely boas (read pythons) and real sea-snakes. Next he represents a figure, found on a sarcophagus or coffin in the Catacombs of Rome, and tells us that it corresponds in many respects with some of the descriptions of the sea-serpent given several centuries afterwards. I, however, don’t observe any resemblance in them. I consider this monster as a singular combination of a horse and a fish, badly drawn, as one of the representations of those wonderful ideas or beliefs of antiquity concerning the existence of such monsters as sirens, tritons, the minotaurus, etc.

Further he treats of OLAUS MAGNUS, Bishop PONTOPPIDAN, HANS EGEDE, the Animal of Stronsa, and of various reports of the sea-serpent, and it is obviously a favoured idea of his that the sea-serpent is only to be accounted for by a great calamary; to prove this, he makes himself guilty of all kinds of misrepresentations and improbabilities; he considers every one as having been the dupe of optical deceptions, or as having made exaggerations, and their observations to be “full of error and mistakes”! And he who has never seen a sea-serpent, but sits pen in hand in his chair at his desk, knows it best of all: all sea-serpents were calamaries, except a very few, which were a row of porpoises! But the more Mr. LEE has to deal with more recent reports, the less he is able to explain the various sea-serpents by reference to his favoured calamary. Of the animals seen in the Harbour of Gloucester in 1817 he says: “Of this I can offer no zoological explanation”. He neither gives an explanation of the sea-serpent seen in 1833 by British officers (n^o. 97), nor of that in Lochourn (n^o. 137, 138, 139, 140). Then he says: “Many other accounts have been published of the appearance of serpent-like sea-monsters, but I have only space for two or three more of the most remarkable of them”. Truly, an easy way to get rid of them! One of these two or three more remarkable reports is the fight between the whale and the sea-serpent (n^o. 144) of which he proposes several explanations (I beg to refer the readers to that account), ending with the words: “it must be left for further elucidation”. The sea-serpent of the City of Baltimore (n^o. 149) was misunderstood by him. He compares the splash of the water, caused by the animal’s dropping its neck like a log of wood into it, with the caudal fins of a calamary (just imagine!) but ends: “but, as one with a bull-dog expression of eye-brow, visible at 500 yards distance, does not come within my ken, I will not claim it as much.” And of the animal of the Osborne he says:

“It seems to me that this description cannot be explained as applicable to any one animal yet known. The ridge of dorsal fins might, possibly, as was suggested by Mr. FRANK BUCKLAND, belong to four basking sharks, swimming in line, in close order; but the combination of them with long flippers, and turtle-like mode of swimming, forms a zoological enigma which I am unable to solve.”

Nevertheless, in answering the question: “To which of the recognized class of created beings can this huge rover of the ocean be referred?” he says: “I reply: To the Cephalopoda” (i. e. calamaries). Such a contradiction I do not understand.

And notwithstanding his cherished great-calamary-hypothesis, and after having said some words about Mr. NEWMAN’s Plesiosaurus theory and Mr. WILSON’s ideas of the extraordinary development of snakes, he ends his work with the following conclusions:

“I arrive, then, at the following conclusions: 1st. That, without straining resemblances, or casting a doubt upon narratives not proved to be erroneous, the various appearances of the supposed “Great Sea-Serpent” may now be nearly all accounted for by the forms and habits of known animals; especially if we admit, as proposed by Dr. Andrew Wilson, that some of them, including the marine snakes, may, like the cuttles, attain to an extraordinary size.”

“2nd. That to assume that naturalists have perfect cognizance of every existing marine animal of large size, would be quite unwarrantable. It appears to me more than probable that many marine animals, unknown to science, and some of them of gigantic size, may have their ordinary habitat in the great depths of the sea, and only occasionally come to the surface; and I think it not impossible that amongst them may be marine snakes of greater dimensions than we are aware of, and even a creature having close affinities with the old sea-reptiles whose fossil skeletons tell of their magnitude and abundance in past ages.”

I am unable to follow out such a reasoning.

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=156=.--1883, October 15?--The Graphic of 20th. October, 1883, mentions, p. 387:

“The inevitable sea-serpent has turned up again. This time he has been seen going down the Bristol Channel towards the Atlantic at the rate of twenty-five miles per hour, and afterwards he was noticed off the north coast of Cornwall. The monster was about half a mile long, and left a greasy trail behind him.”

I have no doubt about the appearance of a sea-serpent in Bristol Channel, and a few hours or a day afterwards off the north coast of Cornwall, as several individuals have already been reported on the west coast of Great Britain. The greasy trail left behind it is not an improbability, but the length of half a mile is most probably an invention of the incredulous Editor of the Graphic!

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Mr. C. HONIGH in his Reisschetsen uit Noorwegen in de Gids for 1884, p. 300 speaking of strange and violent motions in the water of the lake of Mjösen in Norway during perfectly calm weather tells us as a specimen of Norwegian superstition:

“People ascribe these motions to sea-serpents, in which many persons in Norway firmly believe upon the authority of undeniable witnesses and their observations. One of the most famous of these monsters lived some centuries ago in the lake of Mjösen, in the neighbourhood of Hamar, where it became entangled in the shallow. A monk killed it with arrow-shots in its eye, and the monster then floated to near the “Holy-Isle” to a place which is still called “Pilestöa”. And yet there is still a sea-serpent in the lake, which has coiled itself round the great bell of Hamar, which in the time of the seven years’ war was lowered to the bottom.”

Mr. HONIGH adds: