40S 



FOREST AND STREAM. 



fDEC. 21, 1883. 



SEA SERPENT OF BISHOP PONTOPP1DAN. 



—there was a degree of flatness, with a slight hollow ou the 

 top of his head; the eyes were proniiuent and stood on: 

 considerably from the surface, resembling in thai respect 

 the eyes of a toad. 1 had a full view of hint for seven oi 

 eight minutes," 



May tl, 1833, live ofliccrs of the British army; Cant 

 Sullivan. Lieuts. Maclachan and Lyster. Ensign Malcolm, 

 and Ordnance Storekeeper Ince, saw between Halifax and 

 Mahone Bay, perhaps twenty miles off the land, ••the head 

 and neck of some denizen of the deep, preeise'y like those 

 of a common snake in the act of s«'imming, fhe head so 

 far elevaW and thrown forward hy the curve of the neck as 

 to enable us to see the water under and beyond if, There 

 could be i,o mistake, no delusion, and we were all satisfied 

 that we had been favored with a view of th? 'true and verit- 

 able sea serpent' which had beer generally considered to 

 have existed in the brain of some r Yankee skipper.' Th«' 

 head of the creature we set down at about six feet in 

 length, and that portion of the neck which we saw at the 

 same: the extreme length we judged at b, I. ween eighty ami 

 one hundred feet; the neck iu 'thickness equalled the bole of 

 a moderate sized tree; the head and neck of a dark brown 

 or nearly black color, streaked with white in irregular 

 streaks." 



Al! of these, with the exception of the one seen by Cept. 

 Smith in the North Pacific, have occurred on the coast of 

 New England and Nova Scotia. They are attested in such 

 a Drainer and to such a degree that if they pertained to any 

 other subject, they would not only demand, but compel 

 eivdeucr. 1 doubt if it would be possible to bring any more 

 convincing pi oof at the present time that Major Andre was 

 taken as a spy and was executed as a spy, thaii has been 

 here adduced to the appe-irancu at intervals on our coast of 

 huge manue animals, to which popularly the name of sea 

 serpent has been attached. They may be of various types; 

 their nature we will presently consider. 



The. testimony of Capt. Chappell is more definite than 



at of any of the others, partly perhaps from the fact of 

 uaving the various points recalled to his attention, while hi: 

 memory was still fresh and vivid.' But the others all givi 

 evidenc ' directly cumulative upon that offered by him. 



Passing now to other countries, these animals seem to 

 have been seen on the coast of Norway, more, frequently 

 than in any other region, and perhaps than in all other* 

 combined. T do not quote the testimony of Bishop Pon- 

 toppitlan, for it is much mixed with fable and exaggeration, 

 and widely open to criticism, i copv. however, more by 

 way of cuiiosity than anything else the two figures he has 

 given, taking them from the Danish edition issued at Copen- 

 hagen in 175-J. 



But coming down to our own day, the evidences and the 

 witnesses are too numerous to be individually specified. 1 

 will merely cite the conclusion reached by the Rev. Alfred 

 C. Smith, M. A., an excellent natunflist, who published his 

 obsefwitiors in the Zoologist He says, "Host no opportu 

 nity of making inquiries iu Norway "of all I could see, as to 

 the general belief in the country regarding the animal in 

 question; but all, with one exception— naval officers, sailors, 

 boatmen and fishermen— concuin d in affi ming most posi- 

 tively that such a-i animal did exist, and had been repeatedly 

 seen off their coasts and fiords, all see med to marvel very 

 much at the. skepticism of the Euglish, for refusing credence 

 to what, to the minds of the Norwegians, seemed so incon- 

 trovertible." 



I will give but one example more, though I might ex- 

 tend them very greatly. I give this because of the rank of 

 the observer, and because of the attention which his official 

 position drew to it and the discussi, n which it exi ited. 



When the Daedalus ft igatc arrived at Plymouth on her 

 passage home from the E ist Indies in 1848, Cant. 31cQuhal 

 made an official report to the Admirality. dated October 11. 

 In this report h» says that on the 6th of August, iu lal. 24 

 41 S. and long. 9' 22 E. they -aw "an enormous serpent, 

 with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly 

 above the surface of the sea" "at the very least sixty feet 

 of the animal afinur a'cau, no portion of which was to our j 



perception, used in propel 'in? it through the water." "It 

 passed rapidly, but so close under our Ve quarter, 1h«t had 

 t been a man of my acquaintance, 1 should easily have 

 recognized his features with th ■ naked eye;" "it held on at 

 'lc pace of from twelve to fifteen miles per hour.*' "The 

 diameter was about til teen or sixteen indies behind t lie 

 head;" "its color a dark brown, with yellowish white about 

 the throat. It had no fins, but - ometliiug like the mane of 

 ■i horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed washed about its 

 kick." Lieut. Drummoud published a statement in which 

 he says, "the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the 

 head, nnd visible occasionally." 



This brought into the field'the great zoologist Prof. Rich- 

 ard Owen. His article is too long for quota! ion. but the con- 

 clusion to which be comes is that what Capt. McQuhal saw 

 was simply a great seal, probably Phoca probozculea, that is 

 in English", a sea elephant. To this Capt. McQuhal replied 

 with a sharp and possibly somewlv? t indigrant denial, and I 

 do not wonder at it; he had good reason. Not lis seaman- 

 ship, it is true, but, his sea knowledge was impeached. He 

 knew the subject about which he wrote; flic professor diil 

 not. In saying this, no disrespect is intended to Pi of. 

 Owen ; he has tco long Blood in the very fore-front of living 

 naturalists to make such a thing possible. But it must be 

 remembered thai the animal in question be had not seen, 

 and th" Cap ain bid, and what is the chief point of all, 

 Capt. McQuhal was experienced in sea objects, while Prof. 

 Owen was not, I no more believe that Capt McQuhal 

 could have seen a sea elephant o • any other seal and de- 

 scribed it as he did, than that he could have seen a schooner 

 and described it as a ship. 



To what then do all these lines of evilenee tend? Dis- 

 missing all prejudice, and taking the argument and the 

 proof as we surely would in respect to any ordinary matter, 

 it seems to me that we have found good' reason to be con- 

 vinced and to admit without doubt or hesitation, that at 

 various times and in many instances, very large marine 

 animals have been seen which certainly are not whales, 

 seals, sharks, nor in fact representatives of any known living- 

 types, and that these animals while differing from each 

 other, according to the accounts, in some respects, have yet 

 a general agreement. They are of elongated form, have a 

 slender neck, with a head somewhat broader, a conspicuous 

 eye, and are of a dark color; the skin, so far as stated, is 

 smooth, without scales. Mostly no fin isfound on the neck 

 or hack, no one mentions that they "spout" like the whales, 

 i hough the figure given by Pontoppidan 'and which he de- 

 rived from Hans Egede's reports represents the aninal 

 pouring forth a perfect tonent fiom his throat, which no 

 whale ever does or could do — of course the Bishop's figure 

 was not taken from a photograph. As to motion, the" ac- 

 counts vary; some represent an undulatory appearance, but 

 there has perhaps been error of observation, inasmuch as 

 we know no type of vertebrate animals which swim with 

 vertical unduJatious. No snake would do it, and no fish: 

 their motion is horizontally lateral, no 1 vertical. In others 

 of the accounts, the body has been stated to remain quiet, 

 even while the animal moved rapidly, and the force applied 

 for propulsion must therefore necessarily have been beneath, 

 probably by means of fins or flippers. 



Do we know any type which will come within the range 

 of such requirements? Look*-n the preceding page and sec. 

 You have there a view of a skeleton, which is not a matter 

 of imagination; it is a common illustration, you may find it 

 in any ordinary text book of geology. The animal is called 

 Plesiosaurus. He is supposed to have ended his life and 

 history very many ages ago, and yet (admitting that you 

 shorten his neck) if you clothe him with flesh, and request 

 him to sit or rather lie for his picture off Montauk Point, I 

 « annot see. but that you m ly get very nearly an idea of life 

 animals' en thereby Capt. Chappell; not that I believe ho saw 

 a Plesio aurus, still the kinship may be god. 



Tbi Plesiosaiirs were only one group among a great num- 

 ber of giant reptile forms inhabiting the seas and shal'ow 

 waters of the. Mesozo.c ages, and though it was long thought 

 that al! the types of lite of the fossils found" in the Tertiary 



and Secondary rocks hrd passed away, yet more recent re- 

 seaich has shown that that was only a premature judgment. 

 We know no.v that Tertiary types still remain, and tiiat es- 

 pecially among the inhabitants of deep water, or the open 

 sea, we need expeiicnce little, surprise at any discoveries of 

 old forms as still in existence. 



Now, inasmuch as we know that quite various t' pes of 

 large marine reptiles did exist, some without neck — the 

 head being solidly Joined to the body as in Ichthyosaurus— 

 and with every gradation from that to Elasme'saurus, in 

 which the neck comprised more than half the entire length, 

 there seems no absurdity in supposing that here and then, a 

 straggling representative may still remain; the species in 

 each instance having mostly passed away, with only a few 

 survivors now in existence. This is in perfect accordance 

 with what we know of the mode of disappearance of types 

 in the progress of the earth's history. 



Supposing this hypolhes : s to be correct, we should expect 

 that now and then,' at greater or hss intervals, an individual 

 might be seen; we should expect that if they were described 

 correctly, the descriptions would vary; we should expect 

 that they would at times raise the In ad above water, but 

 that they would not "spout," and that the paddles or dip- 

 pers beneath would dr.ve them rapidly lorward; we should 

 expect that some of them would be without fin or crest on 

 the neck, while with others such tin appendage might be 

 found. In all these points we think that the analogy be- 

 tween them and the animals which we have been consider- 

 ing holds entirely good. If so, the term "sea scipent" is. 

 as was at first suggested, a misnomer, though there is now 

 no probability that it will ever be changed. 



If it is a-ked why they may not really be snakes, as well 

 as any other reptilian type, the answer" is that there never 

 have been any true serpents inhabiting the sea with vtLieh 

 there is the slightest reason for comparing them. There are 

 at the present time various species of true snakes, perfeetly 

 marine, living far from land, but they arc all of small size, 

 three, four, or possibly five feet in length, and no more allied 

 to these huge animals' than is a gartersnake or rattlesnake. 



An argument against the existence of the "sea serpents," 

 so called, has been constantly urged, and even by so great 

 an authority as Prof. Owen, that no specimen of them has 

 ever been cast on shore; nr>t a single bone which could have 

 belonged to one of them exists in any collection. The argu- 

 ment appears to me extremely weak. Whence should such 

 a specimen come? What probability is there that one might 

 be found dead ? 



The very body of the hypothesis is that their numbers are 

 very small, thus in the first place diminishing to almost, 

 nothing the prospect that one should be stranded. But in 

 addition to this they are slender and heavy, not covered 

 like a whale with blubber, and in" the event of death the 

 body would sink at once to the bottom, removing all proba- 

 bility, and in common cases all possibility, of even a single 

 bone ever coming under human observation. 



The body of a whale, on the contrary, being enveloped in 

 blubber, is much more likely io float, and yet how very sel- 

 dom is the body of a whale cast on shore, notwithstanding 

 t e fact of their vastly greater numbers. I doubt exceeds 

 ingly if the existence of even the right whale, or the spu-m 

 whale, could now be proved fiom specimens found on shoic, 

 except where their death has been due to the agency of 

 man. 



That these animals are not seen more frequently is from 

 their small numbers very natural. And then, too, the ocean 

 is very wide. Mr. Philip H. Gosse, F. R. 8„ an authority 

 not to be douhted, says tnat in lat. 19 N. and Ion. 46 .to48° 

 \V. the ship in which he was sailed for seventec n continuous 

 hours, surroundid by a troop of whales, oE a species ccr- 

 lainly undescribed. 'They were about thirty feet in length, 

 black above and white beneath, with the swimming paws 

 white ou the upper surface— a very remarkable. C-araeter. 

 He adds— "Heie then is a whale of large size, occurring in 

 great numbers in the North Atlantic, which on no other 

 occasion has fallen under scientific observation." Can we 

 wonder then that an animal, or animals, existing in so small 



