In the last edition, I considered the idea that the myths and legends of sea serpents might represent evidence that some dinosaurian creatures actually survived extinction. Thus we traced notions of giant reptilian sea monsters to their roots and explored what has been identified by German comparative mythologists as the Chaoskampf, the motif of a god hero defeating a sea serpent that represents chaos, as seen in the battles of Yahweh vs. Leviathan, Marduk vs. Tiamat, Baal vs. Yam, and Thor vs. Jörmungandr. But there are far more than those that I discussed, such as the Greek myth of Zeus vs. Typhon, the Hittite myth of Tarhunt vs. Illuyanka, the Indian myths of Indra vs. Vritra and Krishna vs. Kāliyā, the Egyptian Ra vs. Apep, the Chinese Yu the Great vs. Xiangliu, and the Japanese Susanoo vs. the 8-headed dragon Orochi [please excuse my pronunciation]. I further looked at similar legends of heroes in antiquity that faced sea serpents, like Heracles and Perseus facing the ketos or cetus, but of course there are more of these as well, such as Apollo defeating Python, the serpent at the center of the earth; Cadmus slaying a dragon at Athena’s direction and cultivating an army from its teeth; and Jason of the Argonauts defeating the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. Then there are the dragon-slaying Saint George, Saint Michael the Archangel, and Saint Theodore of Amasea, and the dragon-slayers of medieval legend, such as Beowulf, Siegfried, Gawain, Lancelot, Tristan, and John Lambton, to name just a few. These examples, even when viewed as pure myth with no basis in real encounters between mankind and huge reptilian creatures, still tend to indicate some knowledge of such massive dinosaurian animals having once existed, knowledge unlikely to have been derived from the fossil record back then, as there is no evidence of dinosaur bones having been discovered before the 17th century, nor any reason to believe discoverers of such a fossil in antiquity would be able to discern the anatomy or nature of the creature to whom the bones belonged. And we have reports from antiquity and beyond of ancient peoples finding carcasses of reptilian sea monsters that had washed ashore, unidentified remains, sometimes called globsters, which because they can often be indefinable blobs, are frequently dismissed by skeptics. Take for example, the Stronsay beast, a 55ft corpse that washed ashore on the island of Orkney in 1808. Thinking it a sea serpent, some gave it a scientific name, Halsydrus pontoppidani. Skeptics looked at reports about its remains and claimed it was merely an oversize basking shark. Similarly, even the many reports of encounters with living sea monsters that come to us from antiquity are waved away by the scholarly and the scientific-minded, who claim they are run-of-the-mill sea creatures like whales, despite evidence that ancients were very familiar with whales. The apotheosis of this pattern, of witnesses being mistrusted after the fact, reports being cast in a skeptical light by those supposed to be better qualified at identifying something they didn’t actually see, came in the 19th century, when sightings of sea serpents became more and more frequent despite scientific insistence that such creatures simply did not exist.

In August of 1817, poor weather drove a coasting vessel in to the bustling harbor town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, on Cape Ann, where its skipper made his way to a local auction house and shared a story that everyone found hard to credit. He and his crew, he said, had spied something strange in the waters at the bay’s entrance. Bobbing there was a creature that appeared to be some kind of sea serpent! It was at least 60 feet long! The patrons of the auction house scoffed and guffawed at the skipper’s ridiculous prank, but before much longer, more and more people were claiming to have seen this creature in the bay. Its body could be seen on the surface of the water, they said, with keg-sized humps all down the trunk of its body, which writhed and moved like a caterpillar. Its skin was black and leathery, and its head was that of a snake, without ears or horns or any sign of gills, and with eyes the size of plates. As sighting after sighting was reported, some continued to disbelieve, while others gave credence to the reports, for after all, this was not the first time that a sea serpent had been seen in Gloucester Bay. It was the oldest seaport in the country, and in fact was one of the first settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered in 1623 by James I. The first such report came not long after that when in 1639 John Josselyn, known for writing about New England and its flora and fauna, put down in his diary a story told to him thirdhand about a sea serpent encounter. A boat full of Englishmen spied the serpent “coiled up like a Cable upon a Rock at Cape-Ann,” as the story went, and were discouraged from shooting at it by two Native Americans on board who indicated that if the serpent weren’t killed by their shots, it would attack them in their boat. And again, in a 1641 diary entry, one Obadiah Turner described some residents gathering clams after a storm when just offshore they spotted a serpent that was 15 fathoms, or 90 feet long, a sight that Turner suggests was no great surprise to the inhabitants of Cape Ann, who had seen such creatures before. Now Josselyn’s report, coming from a local who heard it himself from a neighbor, seems about as suspect as any urban legend, and the entry in Turner’s journal actually appears only in a 19th century book of biographical sketches that, while historically accurate in some regards, may be entirely fictional in others, but the historical precedent of serpent sightings in Gloucester Bay, while weak, is there. And as August wore on 1817, historical precedent soon became moot, as hundreds of sightings accumulated.

A depiction of the Gloucester sea serpent, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, these witness sightings survive in the form of eighteen signed depositions given under oath before a local magistrate. A shipmaster named Ellery swore to seeing the serpent’s flat, snake-like head and about 40 feet of its body, which seemed jointed with humps the size of 2-gallon kegs. He saw the beast turn around quickly, its head passing by its own tail. Then we have a merchant named James Mansfield who on the 15th likewise saw an enormous serpent swimming around the surface, holding its head about a foot above the water, and he too described humps on its body, calling them “bunches.” Then another mariner named William Somerby described a snake-headed sea serpent that swam past his schooner more swiftly than any whale. Describing its swimming motion, he said its body rose and fell, and its head moved from side to side as it went. On and on the reports go, agreeing in most particulars. Sightings were made mostly in Gloucester Bay, but up the coast into Maine as well, and south all the way to Long Island Sound. All of them described a snake-like creature with a flat oblong head—compared to a snake’s in shape but to a horse’s in size—that it raised sometimes several feet above the water on a long neck. And crucially, it was said to be indented or uneven on its back and body, with humps or joints. A former staff member of George Washington’s, General David Humphries, came to the area to collect reports, and according to him, the serpent was actually seen by a crowd of more than 200 people over the course of an entire afternoon, frolicking in the waters off Windmill Point in Massachusetts Bay. Obviously a phenomenon like this would not go unnoticed even by a fledgling press, and indeed, the Boston Weekly Messenger spread news of the creature with the headline “Monstrous Serpent.” Surely this exacerbated the rash of sightings and encouraged some who had seen nothing to make false claims, for soon tourists flooded the area, hoping for a glimpse of the monster. Add to this the fact that a $5,000 bounty was put on the creature, and you have not only ferries full of looky-loos choking up Gloucester Bay but also ships full of whalers readying their harpoons and cod fishermen setting out nets and attaching baited shark hooks to buoys in hopes of catching and skinning the serpent. It is said some ships who encountered the serpent simply turned around and sailed away in fear, or took on artillery to protect themselves. One man, Martin Gaffeney, supposedly shot the creature, but it only dove out of sight into the waters and surfaced again in the distance, out of range of Gaffeney’s gun.

Amid this outrageous flap, the Linnaean Society of New England, a group devoted to taxonomy, or the naming and classification of organisms, took an interest. With no specimen, they looked to personal testimony as a reliable alternative. Forming a committee, the Linnaean society wrote a questionnaire to hand out while interviewing witnesses and engaged the Gloucester judge who took the aforementioned depositions and published the witness statements with the lengthy title of Report of a Committee of the Linnaean Society of New England Relative to a Large Marine Animal Supposed to be a Serpent, Seen near Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in August 1817, a primary source for witness statements about the serpent. According to the Linnaean Society, there was simply too much evidence for there to be nothing to the reports. The fact that it was all testimonial evidence did not dissuade them, as testimonial evidence was at the time given great weight, when the witnesses could be confirmed to be of good reputation. So the Committee concluded that they had identified a new species, a genuine sea serpent! And they bolstered this conclusion with further notes on a physical specimen they believed had been discovered. Shortly after the sightings had begun, some farmers had pitchforked what appeared to be a three-foot snake on the beach, but this snake was unusual. After the farmers had given their statements and turned the dead snake over to the Linnaean Society committee, they saw it for themselves and dissected it. There were unusual protuberances along on the snake’s back, and as this appeared to correspond with the reports of the sea serpent’s humps, they decided that this must be a young specimen of the same species, which they named Scoliophis atlanticus. To their chagrin, however, a French naturalist named Alexandre Lesueur, who had also examined the snake, declared that it was nothing more than a common black snake suffering from a disease that left its spine deformed. While sightings continued, in 1819 in Nahant, and then up in Nova Scotia in 1825 and 1833, after a while they died away. At the time, one Boston newspaper declared it would no longer report on the serpent because it was not news, for “the existence of this fabulous animal is now proven beyond all chance of doubt.” Yet at the same time, it was already becoming a dubious story, with one playwright in Charleston publishing a drama in 1819 called The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax: a Dramatic jeu d’esprit in Three Acts, which suggested that the people of Gloucester had lied about seeing the serpent just to increase tourism.

A Linnaean Society illustration of the Scoliophis atlanticus via Wikimedia Commons

Regardless of the vagaries of public opinion or the credulity of the press, what the example of the Gloucester Serpent demonstrates is that the scientific community, in the beginning of the 19th century, was actually very open to the notion of a previously unconfirmed species of large marine creature. The alacrity with which the Linnaean Society of New England announced the discovery of a new species, to say nothing of the gameness of Edinburgh’s Wernerian Natural History Society to endorse the authenticity of the Stronsay Beast, as discussed in my recent patron exclusive, shows that the very idea of a real sea serpent was not yet scientific anathema. How, then, did that change? One might look to the 1840s and a major character I introduced in Part One, Richard Owen, who might be thought of as a sort of villain in this story, especially if you believe his biographers that he was a callous and dastardly egoist who relished controversy, and if you consider that during his career he claimed credit for fossil discoveries that others had actually made. He even visually fits the bill of our story’s villain, as in his old age, he very much resembles how we imagine Ebenezer Scrooge to appear. But in our last installment, I only pointed out the irony of this “father of the dinosaurs” comparing pterodactyls to dragons in his Crystal Palace statuary exhibition while he vehemently attacked any who would suggest that dinosaurs survived in the time of man as the dragons or sea serpents of yore. But let us look more specifically at what Owen did to earn himself the nickname “the Sea-Serpent Killer.” Perhaps his first foray against sea serpents was not against any living example of one, but against a fossil, for remember that the first half of the 19th century was the heyday of dinosaur discovery and classification. The fact that evidence of massive reptilian creatures existing in the far past emerged at the same time as reports of them appearing in modern day seas cannot be discounted as a major impetus of belief in the Great Sea Serpent. But in the 1840s, Richard Owen dealt a blow to notions of ancient sea serpents when one Dr. Richard Harlan sent Owen a number of massive vertebrae and other bones that had been discovered in the American South. Harlan had deduced from these bones the existence of a huge reptilian sea creature that he called Basilosaurus, or “king lizard.” However, after examining them, Owen concluded and made known to the world that this was a cetacean creature, a prehistoric whale, not a reptile, suggesting it be renamed the Zeuglodon. Thus Richard Owen killed his first sea serpent, and out of this scholarly kerfuffle would arise an affair that would forever shake the scientific community’s faith in sea serpent tales.

Present at one meeting of the Association of American Geologists at which Dr. Harlan presented his Basilosaurus bones was one Dr. Benjamin Silliman. Silliman was a believer in sea serpents, having come out years earlier in favor of the idea that the Gloucester Serpent was a real creature. A few years after Dr. Harlan spoke at that meeting, Silliman received a visit in Connecticut from one Albert Koch, a purveyor of antiquities and fossils who operated a kind of travelling museum of oddities. Silliman had previously published some of Koch’s writings, and knowing Koch’s interest in massive prehistoric creatures, he told Koch about a woman in Alabama who might know where another Basilosaurus skeleton could be found. Forthwith, Koch made his way to Alabama, and by hook or by crook, he came into possession of some very interesting bones indeed. Before long, like the very P.T. Barnum he fancied himself, he opened a tourist attraction to show off the assembled skeleton of a fantastical sea serpent that he called Hydrarchos sillimani, hydrarchos meaning “great sea-serpent” and sillimani after his friend who’d given him the tip. Koch traveled with his skeleton to New York City and displayed it along with a letter of endorsement from Benjamin Silliman, and he made much of welcoming the opinion of Richard Owen, who he believed would find the Hydrarchos sillimani far more similar to a Plesiosaurus than to an extinct whale. However, Koch never received the benefit or the detriment of Owen’s opinion, for before it could be offered, one of Benjamin Silliman’s very own former students, Jeffries Wyman, declared to the world that Koch’s skeleton was a crude counterfeit. It was a hoax, he asserted, a simple assortment of bones from five different skeletons that he had cobbled together to approximate the image of a sea serpent. With this claim, Benjamin Silliman demanded that Koch remove his name from the display, which Koch promptly did although he maintained the skeleton was genuine. Today, consensus remains that the Hydrarchos of Albert Koch was a fraud, just as Wyman claimed, for indeed, Koch was caught perpetrating exactly such a fraud when he sold the Missourium, a supposed skeleton of a mastodon, to the British Museum, which promptly recognized that that it was composed of several skeletons and took it apart to reassemble them correctly.

An illustration of Albert Koch’s Hydrarchos, via Wikimedia Commons

It was only a few years after this that the most famous and detailed report of an encounter with a sea serpent appeared in newspapers to astonish the lay public and stir the already kindled ire of scientific skeptics like Richard Owen, who by this point believed all sea serpent witnesses to be either liars or fools. The problem was that the witnesses of this sea serpent were considered reliable, and some might have argued, unimpeachable. It occurred on August 6th, 1848, when H.M.S. Daedalus, a Royal Navy corvette, a kind of small frigate, sailed the seas between St. Helena and the Cape of Good Hope, on its return journey from the East Indies. A midshipman saw it first, and alerted the officers who stood on the quarterdeck. The ship’s captain, Peter M’Quhae, and his first lieutenant, Edgar Drummond, along with some others, saw a large serpentine creature swimming on the surface of the sea not far from the ship. The details of this encounter come to us from the captain’s own report to his superior, which was eventually published in the Illustrated London News along with some illustrations that M’Quhae supervised to ensure their accuracy. He said that sixty feet of the creature’s body was visible, and that it seemed to move as if propelled, without any undulation of its form. And it passed so close by the ship that “had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized the features with the naked eye.” What he saw of its features was a snakelike head, exposing big jagged teeth when it opened its jaws, with a mane like seaweed, and it raised its head as high as four feet above the water as it went, as close as M’Quhae could estimate by comparing it to the length of the ship’s main-topsail yard. In all, he and his crew watched this sea serpent for twenty minutes!

As I suggested before, at the time, witness testimony was accorded great weight as evidence, as in a court of law, provided the witness could be proven trustworthy, and in this regard, Captain M’Quhae seemed unassailable. First, officers of the Royal Navy were a scientific sort of mariner, with training in navigation and meteorology and experience in observing the seas around them. They were not the kinds of superstitious sailors one might expect to dream up a monster that wasn’t there. They, like most 19th-century British gentlemen, believed in empiricism and knew that spreading a false tale like this could not only damage their reputations but also harm their careers. Furthermore, to suggest that they may have been mistaken in what they saw discounts their years of experience at sea; M’Quhae, for example, had become an officer more than thirty years earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars. Nevertheless, our villain, Richard Owen, incensed at the idea that the public would take the word of some mere navy men over the skepticism of the scientific community, weighed in. His rejoinder, published in the Times, essentially insisted that they must have just seen an elephant seal, and that they had mistaken the eddy that frequently trails behind swimming elephant seals as the body or tail of a serpent. Never mind that these experienced seamen had most likely seen elephant seals before. But the Sea-Serpent Killer had spoken, and M’Quhae’s angry rejection of the assertion did little to slow the groundswell of skepticism. In the wake of Owen’s challenge to the veracity of the sighting, more attention was paid to the account of the incident recorded by M’Quhae’s First Lieutenant, Drummond, whose version of the event differed in some key regards. It indicates that, while the captain insisted he had seen a tail, Drummond could only see a fin, and rather than passing as close as the captain says, Drummond estimates it was about a hundred yards away and could only be seen with the naked eye for five minutes, after which they had to watch it with a spyglass. Add to this Drummond’s report that the weather was “dark and squally” and you have plenty of good reason to doubt the testimony of the captain of the Daedalus, who, it should be noted, first estimated the creature’s length to be 120 feet before conferring with others on his crew and emending his estimation to half that. And at least one researcher, friend of the show Mike Dash, has actually cast some doubts upon the supposedly unimpeachable character of the chief witness, Captain Peter M’Quhae, pointing out that M’Quhae had only been offered two commands in the several decades since he became a commander, suggesting he was not necessarily the best example of a Royal Navy Captain, with all the assumptions about intellect and keen perception that go with it.

Another depiction of the Daedalus serpent encounter, via Wikimedia Commons

All of this chipping away at the façade of reliability of the Daedalus encounter may lead one to disregard it entirely and wonder why anyone ever took it seriously, but then one must understand that the story appeared in newspapers with astonishing illustrations created in collaboration with the witnesses themselves. Then, for every expert expressing his doubt in the papers, there followed another convincing report of further sea serpent encounters. A couple months later a report appeared relating the story of an American brig, the Daphne, having encountered a similar serpent in September, only a little more than a month after the Daedalus had had its encounter, and in the same waters off the African coast. With the dragon-like only 40 feet away, the Daphne aimed cannons charged with nails and sundry pieces of iron at it and fired, causing the monster to rear its head and thrash in the waters before diving and fleeing. Then on New Year’s Eve of the same year, witnesses aboard H.M.S. Plumper, near Oporto off the Portuguese Coast, saw another serpent, and like the creature reported by the crew of the Daedalus, this one too appeared to have a mane. However, as the skepticism of the learned became well-known and began to spread, sea serpent sightings fell off and almost ceased, a fact that many have suggested proves there never were any serpents to begin with. One more did occur a decade later that is worth mentioning, though, due to it finally sinking the Daedalus tale once and for all. Sailing near the Cape of Good Hope, just as the Daedalus had been, one Captain Smith spotted a sea serpent from the deck of his ship, the Pekin. Fearlessly, he commanded his crew to draw nearer to this primordial beast of the deep, and as they approached, he caught a better look at it. It was nothing but a large mass of seaweed, out of it sprouting a root that resembled a neck and head. This, of course, made the Daedalus encounter something of a joke, prompting an anonymous member of her crew to write a furious letter to the Times insisting that what they had seen was a living creature swimming rapidly, with a surge of water under its chest, but the damage had been done, first by Owen, then by others. Theories about what M”Quhae and his crew saw are many and various. It was either a seal, or an oarfish, or some kind of shark or whale, or it was some floating seaweed or a log, or perhaps even a whaler’s abandoned canoe being pulled by something he had harpooned, but it was not, could not be, a sea serpent.

In the modern age of the Internet and fascination with the paranormal and cryptozoological, interest in the Great Sea Serpent has seen a resurgence, but we have also seen the development of yet further simple and skeptical explanations of what these supposed sea monsters really might have been. In the 1990s, friend of the show Mike Dash uncovered an alternate illustration of the Daedalus serpent drawn according to First Lieutenant Drummond’s directions, and this alternative picture, which does not show a serpentine head raised far above the water, had led some to suggest that the crew saw a sei whale, a kind of rorqual whale, skimming the surface. A comparison of pictures makes a convincing case, but there remain some elements that preserve doubt, such as there being no mention of the creature blowing like a whale and the fact that the sei whale’s fin should have been more prominent. Then there is the New England Serpent. Judging from the strange descriptions of the Gloucester Serpent as having humps or segments like barrels and the description that it moved rather more like a caterpillar than a serpent—surging forward and then gathering its segments before surging again—a compelling theory has been suggested that it was a whale dragging a great deal of netting and barrels from an attempt by whalers to kill it. So rather than its body contracting and expanding, what mariners saw was its burden being pulled behind it and gathering when its momentum ceased. Again, a compelling explanation, but one that fails to account for descriptions of the creature’s large eyes and flicking, snakelike tongue. In the end, it is easy for a doubter to cherry pick certain details to fit a debunking explanation and ignore others. And we see skeptics bend over backwards sometimes to get their theories to work, saying perhaps the whale seen by the Daedalus was injured or deformed so that its fin was not so prominent, or perhaps among the barrels being dragged by the whale mistaken for a serpent in Gloucester Bay there was one pile of kegs that resembled a raised neck and snakelike head. These contortions can sometimes seem just as ridiculous as the alternative belief, that primordial, perhaps dinosaurian creatures, survivors of the massive extinction event that wiped out most other animals like them, still roam about in the seas, hidden beneath the surface for the most part, until they rear their controversial heads and cast our notions of natural history into chaos and confusion.

The much less sensational sketch of Lieutenant Drummond’s recollection of the creature, via the Skeptical Inquirer

Leviathan, The Great Sea Serpent, Part 2: Into the Chaos Waters

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