326 THE VARIOUS ACCOUNTS, [ N°. 137—140. ] 
crossing the Sound of Mull, from Mull to the mainland, “on a 
very calm afternoon, when’, as he writes, “our attention was at- 
tracted to a monster which had come to the surface not more than 
fifty yards to our boat. It rose without causing the slightest dis- 
turbance of the sea, or making the slightest noise, and floated for 
some time on the surface, but without exhibiting its head or tail, 
showing only the ridge of the back, which was not that of a whale, 
or any other sea-animal that I had ever seen. The back appeared 
sharp and ridgelike, and in colour very dark, indeed black, or 
almost so. It rested quietly for a few minutes, and then dropped 
quietly down into the deep, without causing the slightest agitation. 
I should say that above forty feet of it, certainly not less, appear- 
ed on the surface.” It should be noticed that the inhabitants of 
that western coast are quite familiar with the appearance of whales, 
seals and porpoises, and when they see them, they recognize them 
at once. Whether the creature which pursued Mr. Maclean’s boat 
off the Island of Coll m 1808, and of which there is an account 
in the Transactions of the Wernerian Society (Vol. I, p. 442); was 
one of these Norwegian animals, it is not easy to say. Survivors 
who knew Mr. Maclean say that he could quite be relied upon 
for truth.” 
“The public are not likely to believe in the creature till it is 
caught, and that does not seem likely to happen just yet, for a 
variety of reasons, — one reason being that it has, from all the 
accounts given of it, the power of moving very rapidly. On the 
20th., while we were becalmed in the mouth of Lochourn, a steam 
launch slowly passed us, and, as we watched it, we reckoned its 
rate at five or six miles an hour. When the animal rushed past 
us on the next day at about the same distance, and when we 
were again becalmed nearly in the same place, we agreed that it 
went quite twice as fast as the steamer, and we thought that its 
rate could not be less then ten or twelve miles an hour. It might 
be shot but would probably sink. There are three accounts of its 
being shot at in Norway; in one instance it sank, and in the 
other two it pursued the boats, which were near the shore, but 
disappeared when it found itself getting into shallow water.” 
“It should be mentioned that when we saw this creature and 
made our sketches of it, we had never seen Pontoppidan’s “Nat- 
ural History’, or his print of the Norwegian sea-serpent, which 
has a most striking resemblance to the first of our own sketches. 
Considering the great body of reasonable Norwegian evidence, 
