Part 89

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In the first days of December 1889, Mr. JOHN ASHTON published his Curious Creatures in Zoology. Pages 268-278 of his volume treat of the sea-serpent. The illustrations which accompany this part are: 1. A representation of a piece of sculpture on a wall of the Assyrian palace at Khorsabad, which as I believe, has nothing at all to do with the sea-serpent, but which is a bad drawing of a Hydrophis. 2. The drawing of GESNER (our fig. 16) twice reduced. 3. EGEDE’s sea-serpent, as it was published in PONTOPPIDAN (our fig. 22). 4. An eel-kind taken from ALDROVANDUS’ work, and 5. A reduced copy of Captain M’QUHAE’s sea-serpent (our fig. 28).--

Curious is Mr. ASHTON’s assertion, when speaking of the sea-serpent of Khorsabad-palace and of ARISTOTELES: “These ........ were doubtless marine snakes, which are still in existence, and are found in the Indian Ocean, but the larger ones seem to have been seen in more northern waters”. Consequently he believes, like Mr. ANDREW WILSON that the Hydrophidae may develop gigantically and when in this condition make little trips from their common tropical residences to more northern latitudes!

Further he quotes OLAUS MAGNUS, GESNER, TOPSELL, ALDROVANDUS, PONTOPPIDAN, and EGEDE, but all by the way.

More space is devoted to the accounts of WALTER SCOTT, and to the observations of Mr. MACLEAN (n^o. 31), of a party of British officers (n^o. 97), of Lars JOHNÖEN (n^o. 92), of Captain M’QUHAE (n^o. 118), and of Lieutenant HAYNES (n^o. 148). All this, however, without giving the least explanation, and ending with these words:

“I think the verdict may be given that its existence although belonging to “Curious Zoology”, is not impossible, and can hardly be branded as a falsehood.”

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=162=.--1890, June.--De Amsterdammer, Weekblad voor Nederland, of July 12th. of this year, mentions:

“The sea-serpent again.--Captain David Tuits, of the British schooner Anny Harper, has been favoured with a sight of it, near Long Island, not far from the coast of Connecticut. He is a perfectly trustworthy gentleman, who hitherto has never believed in sea-serpents, but who has now seen one on a clear day; the tail which was coloured brown with black spots, was about forty feet out of the water. The captain estimates the total length of the monster at over one hundred feet.”

I think it not too bold to consider this report almost a duplicate of our n^o. 135. There the sea-serpent is called “a large snake about 100 feet long, of a dark brown colour, head and tail out of water, the body slightly under”. Most probably captain Tuits also saw only the head and the tail of the animal, and not the trunk. The tail is described here to be brown with black spots. It is evident that only the upper part of the tail was seen.

I immediately enquired of the Editor of the Amsterdammer about the source of this article; he, however, promptly answered me that his correspondent did not remember from which of the five or six German newspapers daily read by him, he had copied it.--

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“To what class of known beings does this monster of the deep belong?” This question has caused various suppositions, to which we will turn our attention in the next chapter.--

The various explanations hitherto given.

I have found the =first= explanation given about the Sea-Serpent in the Report of the Committee of 1817, where we read an extract from a M. S. journal of the Rev. WILLIAM JENKS, which he communicated in a letter to the Hon. Judge DAVIS, and which letter is printed there. It runs as follows:

“A gentleman of intelligence (Rev. Alden Bradford of Wiscasset, now Secretary of the Commonwealth,) inquired of Mr. Cummings, whether the appearance might not be produced by =a number of porpoises=, =following each other= in a train.”

This passage from the private journal was written in Sept. 10, 1809; but after having consulted SILLIMAN’s American Journal of Science and the Arts, Vol. II, Boston 1819 (1820), we are convinced that Mr. BRADFORD’s inquiry of Mr. CUMMINGS took place before Aug. 1803.

Fig. 52 shows my readers a porpoise.

As we read in SCHLEGEL’s Essai sur la physionomie des Serpens, p. 517, note, PETER ASCANIUS in his Icones rerum naturalium Cahier V, Copenhague, 1805, says:

“In summer porpoises approach the coasts and the fjords. They often meet in the open sea in troops of several scores, and when the weather is calm and fine, they range in a line after each other to play and to tumble: they then have the appearance of a chain of little eminences floating on the surface of the water; some fishermen of the North, seeing them at a great distance, took this resemblance for an immense animal and gave it the name of sea-serpent.”

Again in the letter from Mr. S. PERKINS to Mr. E. EVERETT, dated August 20, 1817, we read:

“All these facts, however, were loose, and from the variety of reports, people had gotten to doubt their foundation, and supposed it was only a number of porpuses following each other in rapid succession.”

For the fourth time we read in FRORIEP’S Notizen, Vol. XIX, p. 193:

“Christiania, September 5, 1827. Last week several persons saw large shoals of porpoises, and therefore uttered the supposition that the alleged presence of the sea-serpent was not right.”

Mr. MITCHILL’S paper, of 1828, which we have inserted in toto in our Chapter on hoaxes, also ends with the supposition that the “gambols of porpoises” have given rise to all the tales of the sea-serpent.

SCHLEGEL in his Essai sur la physionomie des Serpens, La Haye, 1837, p. 105, in his chapter on Fables respecting snakes says:

“We are surprised to hear of a sea-serpent, monstrous in shape and size”,

and he refers to his chapter on true sea-snakes, the Hydrophidae. There p. 517 he ends his chapter with the following words: