Odd this day

By a quirk of fate, today’s and tomorrow’s ACTUAL EVENTS FROM HISTORY involve ACTUAL SEA SERPENTS which ACTUALLY EXIST. We begin on 6 August 1848, when a ship “on her way from the Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena came near a singular-looking object in the water”

That phrase is from Robert Chambers’ Book of Days, which goes on to say that the ship was captained by one Peter M’Quhae (whose name should probably be said in a similar tone to that of Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr, but I digress).

The news only emerged when the ship arrived in Plymouth two months later, appearing in The Times in October, an account recounted in Dutch zoologist Antoon Cornelis Oudemans’ The Great Sea Serpent in 1882:

No report of the sea-serpent has ever more shaken the incredulity … than that known as the account of the Daedalus, after the frigate from which the sea-serpent was seen.

The Times of October, 9, 1848, published:

“Intelligence from Plymouth, dated 7 Oct.” “When the Daedalus frigate … was on her passage home from the East Indies, between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, her captain, and most of her officers and crew, at four o’clock one afternoon, saw a sea-serpent … Its head appeared to be about four feet out of the water, and there was about sixty feet of its body in a straight line on the surface … there must have been under water a length of thirty-three or forty feet more, by which it propelled itself at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The diameter of the exposed part of the body was about sixteen inches; and when it extended its jaws, which were full of large jagged teeth, they seemed sufficiently capacious to admit of a tall man standing upright between them”.

The 18th and 19th centuries, being times of scientific progress, were ages when New Stuff was being discovered, but also when such marvels were mistaken for The Stuff Of Legend — see also: mermaids

Odd this day

As the Library of Congress’ blog puts it,

This was the dawn of an age when legend met science with the idea that science could solve ancient mysteries.

After the Times story appeared, the Admiralty “instantly inquired into the truth of the statement” and “the gallant captain’s official reply” was published in the Times on 13th — and it’s difficult not to admire the language used to say ‘mate, if I say I saw a serpent…’

He also reported that he was “having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen”, and this eventually found its way into the Illustrated London News:

Obviously, the best illustration is this one, though, in which its head resembles that of a giant, slightly mournful otter:

All this attracted the attention of Professor Richard Owen, a contemporary of Darwin and coiner of the word ‘Dinosauria’, who wrote a long letter to The Times, published on 11 November 1848, which expressed some scepticism…

But I am usually asked, after each endeavour to explain Captain M’Quhae’s sea-serpent, “Why should there not be a great sea-serpent ?” often, too, in a tone which seems to imply, “Do — you think, then, there are not more marvels in the deep, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?” And, freely conceding that point, I have felt bound to give a reason for scepticism as well as faith. If a gigantic sea-serpent actually exists, the species must, of course, have been perpetuated through successive generations, from its first creation and introduction into the seas of this planet. Conceive, then, the number of individuals that must have lived, and died, and have left their remains to attest the actuality of the species during the enormous lapse of time, from its beginning, to the 6th. of August last!

He discounted the possibility of elephant seals, krakens, Enaliosauria (an obsolete term for ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs), and concluded

A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent.

You’ll notice that some of his arguments — the sea-serpent being “perpetuated through successive generations”, and the lengths of time involved — are used still in usually unsuccessful attempts to put people off the idea of the Loch Ness monster…

Odd this day

Anyway, M’Quhae promptly wrote to the Times again, sounding mildly peeved

Professor Owen correctly states that I “evidently saw a large creature moving rapidly through the water very different from anything I had before witnessed, neither a whale, a grampus, a great shark, an alligator, nor any of the larger surface-swimming creatures fallen in with in ordinary voyages”. I now assert, neither was it a common seal nor a sea elephant; its great length, and its totally differing physiognomy, precluding the possibility of its being a Phoca of any species The head was flat, and not a “capacious vaulted cranium;” nor had it “a stiff inflexible trunk” a conclusion to which Professor Owen has jumped, most certainly not justified by the simple statement, that “no portion of the sixty feet seen by us was used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation.

…and the sighting gave rise to a lot of correspondence, coverage and speculation — far too much of it to go into here. Nobody thought to ask the sea serpent, which is probably why it pulled this face when posing for pictures:

A story of this kind had global reach, and the savage beast turned up in the San Francisco Call the following year, where it was identified by one “Professor A Labbie, the famous French doctor of sciences” as a really big, long seal.

It even became a metaphor in a Punch cartoon for the forces of revolution/chaos facing Europe that year.

(That image, incidentally, is taken from Victorian Web’s fascinating page Victorian Cryptozoology: The Great Sea-Serpent and its Cultural Representations, which is a good place to find out more about that aspect of the serpent phenomenon.)

Even into the 20th century, you could find newspapers — in this case the Washington Times in 1904 — running things like this:

So it is, frankly, rather disappointing to find that Skeptical Inquirer have spoilt all the fun by suggesting that it might, on further consideration, have been a sei whale. Bastards.

The 1848 'Enormous Serpent' of the Daedalus Identified | Skeptical Inquirer

Oh, well. Join me tomorrow for the COMPLETELY GENUINE sighting of a sea monster in Nantucket in 1937. That’ll show ’em.