CHAP. V1IL] AMERICAN DESCRIPTIONS. 113 



as to resemble a string of floating barrels in motion. He said 

 that after this explanation had been suggested to him, he was 

 one of thirty persons who ran along the beach at Nahant, near 

 Boston, when the sea serpent was swimming very near the shore. 

 They were all convinced that it was one animal, and they saw 

 it raise its head out of the water. He added that there were at 

 that time two sea serpents fishing in the Bay at once. 



Among many American narratives of this phenomenon -which 

 have been communicated to me, I shall select one given me by 

 my friend Mr. William M llvaine of Philadelphia, because it 

 seems to attest the fact of the creature having wandered as far 

 south as Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, lat. 35. &quot; Captain 

 Johnson, of New Jersey, was sailing, in the year 1806, from the 

 West Indies, on the inner edge of the gulf stream, in a deeply 

 laden brig, when they were becalmed, and the crew and passen 

 gers awe-struck by the sudden apparition of a creature having a 

 cylindrical body of great length, and which lifted up its head 

 eight feet above the water. After gazing at them for several 

 minutes it retreated, making large undulations like a snake.&quot; 

 The story had been so much discredited that the captain would 

 only relate it to intimate friends. 



After the year 1817, every marvelous tale was called in the 

 United States a snake story ; and when Colonel Perkins went to 

 Washington twenty years ago, and was asked if he had ever 

 known a person who had seen the sea serpent, he answered that 

 he was one of the unfortunate individuals who saw it himself. I 

 confess that when I left America in 1846, I was in a still more 

 unfortunate predicament, for I believed in the sea serpent with 

 out having seen it. Not that I ever imagined the northern seas 

 to be now inhabited by a gigantic ophidian, for this hypothesis 

 has always seemed to me in the highest degree improbable, seeing 

 that, in the present state of the globe, there is no great develop 

 ment of reptile life in temperate or polar regions, whether in the 

 northern or southern hemisphere. When we enter high latitudes, 

 such as those in which the creature called a sea serpent most 

 frequently occurs, we find even the smaller reptilians, such as 

 frogs and newts, to grow rare or disappear ; and there are no 



