S 1 4: THE GREAT UNKNOWK 



I now come to an incident, which, from the character of 

 the witnesses, the captain, officers, and crew of one of Her 

 Majesty's ships, and from the medium through which it 

 was announced, an official report to the Lords of the Admi- 

 ralty, — commanded great notoriety and interest, and gave 

 an unwonted impetus to the investigation of the question. 



The Times newspaper of October 9, 1848, published the 

 following paragraph : — " When the Dwdalus frigate, 

 Captain M'Quhse, which arrived at Plymouth on the 4th 

 instant, was on her passage home from the East Indies, 

 between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena, her 

 captain, and most of her officers and crew, at four o'clock 

 one afternoon, saw a sea-serpent. The creature was 

 twenty minutes in sight of the frigate, and passed under 

 her quarter. Its head appeared to be about four feet 

 out of the water, and there was about sixty feet of its 

 body in a straight line on the surface. It is calculated 

 that there must have been under water a length of thirty- 

 three or forty feet more, by which it propelled itself at 

 the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The diameter of the 

 exposed part of the body was about sixteen inches, and 

 when it extended its jaws, which were full of large jagged 

 teeth, they seemed sufficiently capacious to admit of a tall 

 man standing upright between them/' 



and the editor states that he is indebted for it to Mr W. H. Ince, who 

 received it from his brother, Commander J. M. R. Ince, KN". It was 

 written by their tmcle, one of the eye-witnesses, Mr Henry Ince, the 

 Ordnance Store-keeper at Halifax, in Nova Scotia. The dates affixed 

 to the names, are those on which the gentlemen received their respec- 

 tive commissions. The editor is not aware of their present rank. 



