BULLETIN OF TIIK UNITED STATES llsii COMMISSION. .".lT) 



III. iio>xti:k si ».miii>im-. 

 By RICHARD A. PROCTOR. 



[From Knowledge, April '■'•, 1885.] 



I have always been a believer in the sea-serpent of Captain McQubae, 

 of tbe Dsedalus. I was a very young lad when his report of the strange 

 encounter first appeared; but it seemed to me then, and it seems to me 

 still, that the sea-captain bad much the best of tbe discussion with the 

 representatives of science. There was that cautious naturalist and 

 paleontologist, Richard Owen, so anxious to disprove tbe sea-serpent 

 that he pictured to himself the captain and officers of a Britisb frigate 

 frightened out of their wits, and out of at least one of their senses, by 

 the sight of a sea-elepbaut (as he tried to make it out) rather far away 

 from its native abode, and urging its course as fast as possible home- 

 ward. Captain McQuhae, in a report to tbe Admiralty, says .that he 

 and bis officers saw a long-necked sea-monster traveling swiftly in the 

 teeth of a 10-knot breeze on the surface of the sea, so quickly that he 

 could see the waves frothing against the creature's cbest. It passed so 

 near that be could have distinctly seen the features of a man at the 

 distance. He and his officers had a good view of the creature. (For 

 a wonder they were not possessed by the customary desire to shoot it, a 

 desire which speaks as honorably of the human race as the saying of 

 tbe North Country miner immortalized by Leech, who, seeing a stranger, 

 thought it due welcome to '"eave 'arf a brick at un.") Tbey rejected 

 the sea-elephant with derision, as entirely inconsistent with what they 

 bad clearly seen ; while tbe idea of tbeir being frightened— well, Ameri- 

 cans in old times tackled a few of our British frigates with greater or 

 less success, but tbey did not find our seamen quite so timorous as to 

 be likely to tremble in their shoes at the sight even of an extra large 

 sea-elephant. Yet Professor Owen persisted in his belief that the Dae- 

 dalus sea-serpent story was not worthier of credence than a story about 

 ghosts. That particular ghost he thought he had laid. 



Since then all sorts of explanations of sea-serpent stories have been 

 advanced. Because one captain has mistaken a lot of floating sea-wrack 

 half a mile away for a sea-monster, therefore tbe story of a sea-creature 

 seen swiftly advancing against wind and sea, at a distance of less than 

 200 yards, meant nothing more than misunderstood sea- weed. Another 

 mistakes a flight of birds in tbe distance, or a shoal of porpoises, or even 

 a range of bills beyond the horizon, for some sea serpentine monster, and 

 forthwith other accounts, however manifestly inconsistent with such 

 explanations, are regarded as explained away. Then, worst of all, some 

 idiot invents a sea-serpent to beguile his time and find occupation for 

 bis shallow pate; and so soon as the story is shown to be only a story, 



