THE EXTINCTION OF THE GREAT SEA-SERPENT. 



By RICHARD BEYNON, F.R.G.S. 



HE nineteenth cen- 

 tury is an age of 

 transition. There 

 is little that has es- 

 caped signing with 

 the mark of change. 

 Scientific develop- 

 ment has invested 

 most things with a 

 modern air of im- 

 provement and 

 utility that contrasts 

 violently with the 

 staidness and slow- 

 pacedness so cha- 

 racteristic of the 

 age of our grand- 

 fathers. Then 

 people had leisure 

 to be sentimental, 

 now the stern demands of the business of life de- 

 nominate sentiment unprofitable, and we sigh in 

 vain for the more credulous and less curious days 

 of yore, when the earth yet possessed hidden 

 corners and the ocean unfathomed depths, in which 

 the imagination might roam at will, peopling land 

 and sea with grotesque fancies of curious birds and 

 flowers, strange animals, and still stranger fishes. 

 But all this is changed. Geographical exploration 

 and research have very materially circumscribed the 

 confines of the district where the possibilities of nature 

 were existent, and instead of revelling among the 

 luxuriant idealisms of the might-be, we must perforce 

 content ourselves with the more prosaic knowledge 

 of that which absolutely is. Long after the teachings 

 of travel had dispelled the old illusions 



" Of the cannibals that each other eat, 

 The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 

 Do grow beneath their shoulders," 



popular belief still loved to inhabit the recesses of 

 the ocean with monsters, traditions of which had 

 No. 325. — January 1892. 



been handed down from the very earliest ages. It is 

 a melancholy fact that such creations do not survive 

 the irresistible advance of modern science. The 

 blast of the steam-whistle seems fatal to romance, 

 and the endless procession of steamships that join in 

 the bonds of commerce the nations whom the seas 

 divide, will soon tend to reduce ocean voyaging to 

 the practical level of a railway journey. But there is 

 one belief deep-rooted in the nautical mind, and 

 equally accepted by landsmen, that probably will 

 never be effectively eradicated. The great sea- 

 serpent always has and always will be a denizen of 

 the ocean. Why should not the mighty sea produce 

 a creation worthy of itself? "The wisest palaeon- 

 tologists deny its existence," say the sceptics. They 

 are able to find no definite data upon which to assign 

 the monster a place in the ranks of animated nature. 

 "Never mind positive proof," argue the believing 

 ones, " prove conclusively that the creature does not 

 exist, and then, and not till then, will we give up 

 our faith in its being." And so it has come to pass 

 that the sea-serpent lives on, and will continue to do 

 so until its existence is disproved — a task admittedly 

 impossible. 



The widespread belief in the existence of some 

 great ocean monster has been common among all 

 maritime nations from the very first ages, and the 

 prevalent faith in the great sea-serpent is no doubt 

 traceable to the myths of our Aryan ancestors. It is 

 worthy of note that the popular notion of the sea- 

 serpent is decidedly Miltonic. In " Paradise Lost" 

 the description of the arch-fiend is the exact 

 prototype of the sea-serpent as seen by captains of 

 merchantmen and others. 



" With head uplift above the wave, and eyes 

 That sparkling blazed ; his other parts besides 

 Prone on the flood, extended lone and large, 

 Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge 

 As whom the fables name of monstrous size." 



The Kraken, so minutely described by Pontop- 

 pidan, the good Bishop of Bergen, goes on all 

 fours with the account of the serpent alluded to 



B 



