176 



Sea^Serpents 



of, say, at the outside, twenty tons in weight, to swallow 

 a morsel of eighty or one hundred tons ! Indeed we 

 might well expect him to lie many months in a state 

 of coma. In truth, Olaus Magnus or Pontoppidan 

 never bettered this yarn, though they were far from 

 being amateurs at the task. And it was sworn to. 



There are also the stories of the ministers who saw 

 the Sea-serpent in the Sound of Mull and estimated 

 its length at sixty feet. They did not expect to be 

 believed, and said so, only they felt that any explana- 

 tion of what they saw except that it was a great Sea- 

 snake was impossible to accept. But the most difficult 

 story of all to account for is that told by Captain 

 McQuhae of H.M.S. ' Daedalus,' and his officers, which 

 in 1848 created so great a sensation in England. Very 

 briefly, the story is that, in lat. 24° 44' S., and long. 9° 

 22' E., an enormous serpent was seen, its head and 

 shoulders some four feet out of water, and quite 

 sixty feet of its body on the surface. It passed rapidly 

 without any undulatory movement, so close to the 

 ship that the gallant captain says he could have dis- 

 tinguished a man's features at the distance. It had 

 no fins, but something like seaweed washed about its 

 back. 



Now it is not fair to suppose that the captain 

 and his officers stated anything that they did not 

 believe to be true, yet no less an authority than 

 Professor Owen in a long letter to The Times of Novem- 

 ber II, 1848, points out that the captain's observations 

 and his conclusions do not fit at all, finally giving 

 it as his (the Professor's) opinion that the thing seen 

 was a great seal or sea elephant ; much to the captain's 

 annoyance, who replies very warmly to the great 

 paleontologist's letter. Another authority gives it 

 as his opinion that the creature was a huge basking 



