THE REAL SEA-SERPENT 413 



or by the Commander of the Royal Yacht " Osborne " 

 off Sicily in the same year. Even in such accounts of the 

 long serpent, with pointed head, swimming rapidly on 

 a calm sea, coil after coil, Mr. Lee thinks that we have 

 all that could well be seen from the deck of the body 

 of a gigantic cuttle-fish, propelling itself, as its habit 

 is, backwards by the rush of water expelled from its 

 " funnel/' with its tail-fin simulating the serpent's head, 

 and the wavy outline of its trunk, head, and tentacles 

 giving the appearance of the long serpentine body. 



There is a big and interesting book by Dr. Oudemans 

 of the Hague, published in 1892, in which practically 

 all the recorded appearances of the sea-serpent are 

 chronicled and discussed ; and Dr. Oudemans is fully 

 convinced that underlying many of them we have a 

 fragmentary account of something for which the cuttle- 

 fish theory does not suffice. Since the publication of 

 this book one of the most remarkable of all accounts 

 of the sea-serpent has been published in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Zoological Society by two eye-witnesses, 

 Mr. E. G. B. Meade- Waldo and Mr. M. G. Nicoll, who 

 had seen the creature from the Earl of Crawford's yacht 

 " Valhalla," off the coast of Brazil, on December 7, 1905. 

 They saw a great fin about 6 feet long standing up out 

 of the water, and then suddenly in front of the fin a 

 turtle-like head shot up on a long eel-like neck, of which 

 about 6 or 8 feet were visible. Neither the shape nor 

 the size of the creature's body could be made out. 



It is impossible to epitomize here the many other 

 accounts of the serpent, for which the reader must be 

 referred to Dr. Oudemans' book, and to the same 

 source the reader must go for Dr. Oudemans' own 

 elaborate deductions and conclusions as to what the 

 sea-serpent really is. Suffice it here to say that he 

 believes it to be a mammal, and to belong to the Order 



