88 
SEA MONSTERS UNMASKED, 
the captain had a boat lowered, and himself standing in the 
bow, armed with a harpoon, approached the monster. It was 
found to be an immense piece of sea-weed, drifting with the 
current, which sets constantly to the westward in this latitude, 
and which, with the swell left by the subsidence of a previous 
gale, gave it the sinuous snake-like motion." 
Captain Harrington, of the ship Castilia7i, reported in the 
Times of February 5th, 1858, that : 
"On the i2th of December, 1857, N.E. end of St. Helena 
distant ten miles, he and his officers were startled by the sight of 
a huge marine animal which reared its head out of the water 
within twenty yards of the ship. The head was shaped like a long 
nun-buoy,* and they supposed it to have been seven or eight feet 
in diameter in the largest part, with a kind of scroll or tuft of loose 
skin, encircling it about two feet from the top. The water was 
discoloured for several hundred feet from its head, so much so 
that on its first appearance my impression was that the ship was 
in broken water." 
Evidently, again, a large calamary raising its caudal 
extremity and fin above the surface, and discolouring the 
water by discharging its ink. 
This was immediately followed by a letter from Captain 
Frederick Smith, of the ship Pekin, who stated that : 
" On December 28th, 1848, being then in lat. 26° S., long. 6° E. 
(about half-way between the Cape and St. Helena), he saw a very 
extraordinary-looking thing in the water, of considerable length. 
With the telescope, he could plainly discern a huge head and neck, 
covered with a shaggy-looking kind of mane, which it kept lifting 
at intervals out of water. This was seen by all hands, and was 
declared to be the great sea-serpent. A boat was lowered ; a line 
was made fast to the * snake,' and it was towed alongside and 
hoisted on board. It was a piece of gigantic sea-weed, twenty 
* See illustration, p. 67. 
