3S 



ship. To think that we should thus casually fall in with the serpent 

 that had caused as much discussion as the origin of man and blasted 

 more reputations for truth than any Congressional Record ever pub- 

 lished. As a mere incident of our voyage we had been fortunate 

 enough to see what the Norwegian government maintains an ample 

 fund to discover. The unexpected does somehow or other always 

 happen. If we had been looking for this serpent Ave would never 



made commonplace the timid statements of the faint-hearted, truthful 

 mariners who had heretofore reported him. He saw the ship when 

 about half a mile away and sheered off, passing us at about that dis- 

 tance on the port side. 



Alas for the frailty of human sight ! So, now, instead of a sea ser- 

 pent we are sailing with seven fin-back whales on our port quarter, 

 and all hands are preparing to slink down into the bowels of the ship 

 again. It is too bad, but the fact is that we had been admiring seven 

 fin-back whales, which were swimming in Indian file, giving a perfect 

 illustration of how the awful sea serpent is said to do it. I have read 

 thirty-one different accounts at various times of how the sea serpent 



whales deviate from the life. Indeed Ave had seen the great sea ser- 

 in all of the accounts I have read of this sea serpent he has never 

 been seen so close at hand as we had him, and if Professor Sars, of 

 Christiana, Norway, who, it is said, has been looking for the serpent 

 for years at public expense, is really anxious to get the particulars of 

 the view we had of the monster, he can be accommodated. Had we 

 not been so close to these whales, and had the sea been the least bit 

 rough, there is not a man on board but would have gone home so full 

 of sea serpent that he could not even talk about the Arctic ocean. It 

 does not matter in the least, so far as the existence of the serpent is 

 concerned, that the late Professor Agassiz said he thought there 

 might be such a thing ; he never said he saw it. Before the sea ser- 

 pent resolved himself into whales, I was convinced that there was in- 

 deed a sea serpent in the North Atlantic, for I had heard the great 

 Ole Bull declare that he had seen it. He described it to me just as I 



looked a.s though a number of porpoises were in line rising and plung- 

 ing with great deliberation. If any one thinks that the sea serpent 

 is only the theme of Scandinavian poets and the idle talk of truthful 

 mariners let him refer to the proceedings of the Boston Society of 

 Natural History for 1874, and find out all about the expedition of 

 1839 fitted out to gather evidence about the serpent. 



