THE GREA T SEA SERPENT. 423 



monster, (p. 393), would certainly accord with this last 

 hypothesis. Captain Drevar, however, adheres firmly to 

 his original theory, and in a communication which I have 

 recently received from him he writes : 



" You may rely upon my report as strictly true, and in no way 

 exaggerated. I called the second officer out of his bed to witness the 

 conflict, and he remarked at the time that had the occurrence been 

 further off he would have concluded that it was a sword-fish and a 

 thrasher fighting a whale, which he thought he saw on his first voyage 

 to sea. Several shipmasters told me that they had seen the same con- 

 flict near the locality that I saw it, but had not been close enough to 

 see the coils ; they thought it was two separate fish fighting the whale, 

 but were satisfied that it might have been the head and tail portion of 

 a huge serpent about the whale." 



On the 28th of January, 1879, a " sea serpent " was seen 

 from the s.s. City of Baltimore (Fig. 22, next page), in the 

 Gulf of Aden, by Major H. W. J. Senior, of the Bengal 

 Staff Corps The narrator " observed a long, black object 

 darting rapidly in and out of the water, and advancing 

 nearer to the vessel. The shape of the head was not unlike 

 pictures of the dragon he had often seen, with a bull-dog 

 expression of the forehead and eyebrows. When the 

 monster had drawn its head sufficiently out of the water, 

 it let its body drop, as it were a log of wood, prior to 

 darting forward under the water. This motion caused a 

 splash of about fifteen feet in length on either side of the 

 neck much in the ' shape of a pair of wings.' " This last 

 particular of its appearance, as well as its movements, 

 suggest a great calamary ; but, as one with " a bull-dog 

 expression of eyebrow, visible at 500 yards distance," does 

 not come within my ken, I will not claim it as such. 



In June 1877 Commander Pearson reported to the 

 Admiralty, that on the 2nd of that month, he and other 

 officers of the Royal Yacht Osborne, had seen, off Cape 



