Are you plagued by writhing monstrosities which encircle your corvette and try to drag you down into the depths? Is your frigate scarred and battered from too many encounters with aquatic horrors of unfeasible size? Then you need the greydogtales guide to sea serpents.
In less nautical news, we are currently peddling our story A Persistence of Geraniums for publication, and will have a jolly good anthology announcement next week. Listeners are pressing for another Mr Dry tale, concerning the Edwardian assassin, and next month may have to see another chapter of Sandra’s First Pony, our popular Enid Blyton/H P Lovecraft crossover series. We also have some great interviews in the pipeline, covering weird art, talented authors and yes, lurchers. Speaking of which, Django is upside down as usual, and we have work to do…
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Sea serpents. As promised, author Matt Willis is here to explain all. Last episode, we interviewed Matt on the subject of his novel Daedalus and the Deep, and on his writing in general (sea serpents, saltwater and ship’s biscuits). Today he revisits some of the topics raised back then in more depth. This is an educational channel, you know, not just fun. And we love mythological beasts, especially when they might almost be real…
The Sea Serpent Paradox
by Matt Willis
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, and it goes something like ‘if they existed, we’d have proof by now’. Properly the Fermi Paradox refers to intelligent alien life elsewhere in the universe, but it could equally well apply to sea serpents.
Sea serpents. A particular form of sea monster – perhaps even the archetypal sea monster alongside the tentacled kraken. Huge, snake or eel-like, possibly humped, or else loops of its body protrude above the surface, and dangerous to mariners in unknown waters. The sea serpent is the sea’s equivalent of the alien visitor – there is a great deal of anecdotal evidence to their existence, and almost no evidence of any other kind.
That wasn’t always felt to be the case. “That there is such a creature, however, there can be little doubt, as his appearance has been so often alluded to,” wrote Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion of July 1852. It seemed that proof of the existence of the giant sea serpent must have been round the corner. Strange, then, that some 160 years later, the very notion that giant sea serpents exist or have ever existed seems unlikely, if not ludicrous.
The incident that triggered Gleason’s to state with confidence that the sea serpent must be real was what is now one of the better-known cases, the incident that inspired my novel ‘Daedalus and the Deep’. On 6 August 1848, Midshipman Sartoris of the Royal Navy corvette HMS Daedalus alerted the officers on the ship’s quarterdeck to an unusual sight. The captain, first lieutenant and sailing master were all present to see the approach from the ship’s beam of a large creature of a kind none had observed before. Captain Peter M’Quhae, in command of the vessel, described the encounter in his official report to the Admiralty:
“It was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea; and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our maintopsail-yard would show in the water, there was at the very least sixty feet of the animal a fleur d’eau no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognised the features with the naked eye.”
Reports of sea serpents all over the world were not exactly uncommon prior to that. There are plenty of recorded sightings going back to the 11th century and evidence that the creature was a familiar concept long before that. In Norse mythology, Jörmungandr was a giant sea serpent that grew so large it encircled the Earth. While notable events, recorded sightings of giant sea serpents seem to have been in evidence every few years, and on occasion much more frequently.
Unlike stories of visitors from other planets (often involving abduction), which didn’t really get going until the 1960s, sea serpent sightings began to tail off dramatically at the end of the 19th century, so much so that the phenomenon was noticeably rarer by the 1920s. Writing in 1925, in his book ‘Animals of Land and Sea’, Austin Clark of the Smithsonian Institution wrote: ‘“In the last 20 years we have heard less and less about the sea serpent.” Clark attributed this to the size of ships increasing and steam ships replacing sailing vessels. The “vantage point” for making observations therefore moved “from the low and insecure wave-washed deck of a small sailing boat to the high, comfortable, secure, and relatively dry deck of a much larger steamer.” This shift in perspective “removed the element of fear and hence dulled the imagination so that sailors are now able to study calmly and report correctly what they see.”
Problem solved then.
Unfortunately, for a scientist, Clark appears to have conveniently failed to consider any number of other factors that might influence the relative visibility of sea serpents. The noise of the steam engines and vibration from the ships’ screws causing the creatures to stay away, for example, or an increase in the mechanisation of whaling reducing a potential food source. Correlation does not imply causation, and to make such a broad assumption was strikingly bad practice for a scientist. But then ‘science’ has expended a great deal of time and energy on a ‘nothing to see here, move along’ approach when it comes to sea serpents.
The entry on sea serpents from the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica lists a string of ‘likely’ phenomena mistaken for sea serpents. These include: A school of porpoises; a flight of sea-fowl; a large mass of seaweed; a pair of basking sharks; ribbonfish/oarfish; giant squid; a whale, and a sea-lion. The encyclopaedia concludes that “with very few exceptions, all the so-called ‘sea serpents’ can be explained by reference to some well-known animal or other natural object.”
Many of the ‘rational’ explanations subsequently offered rely on substantial mistakes in interpretation, over-excitement or difficulties with observation such as distance or poor light. It is hard to see how, assuming the phenomenon sighted behaved as the Daedalus’s officers described, it could possibly have been a piece of seaweed, or indeed a whale or elephant seal, let alone an upturned canoe
The Daedalus Disputes
The Daedalus Sea Serpent report was met with a mixture of public fascination and scientific dismissal. Perhaps M’Quhae and the Daedalus’s officers didn’t appreciate the storm their story would create, but the media seized upon the sighting. The first public report of the sea serpent was in the Times of 10 October, six days after the corvette’s return. The London Illustrated News hailed “a new attestation to the existence of the Great Sea Serpent”.
The same newspaper later published comments by the biologist Sir Richard Owen, who claimed that the most likely explanation for the sighting was that it was an elephant seal swimming in open water. Owen suggested that what the officers had thought to be the creature’s tail was the long eddy which typically trailed behind an elephant seal.
Captain M’Quhae immediately and angrily rejected Owen’s claims, but the story was already causing embarrassment to the Admiralty. Questions arose in Parliament about how a Royal Navy captain could have allowed the report to be printed. Undeterred, M’Quhae collaborated with an illustrator to produce a series of engravings of the encounter, and these appeared alongside a copy of M’Quhae’s report to the Admiralty in the Illustrated London News of 28 October. In addition to three images portraying the Daedalus sea-serpent, the paper reproduced an anatomical drawing of the “American Sea Serpent, Scolioph Atlanticus” and a copy of a woodcut representing a 1740 sighting off Norway.
It’s hard to imagine that men such as the officers of the Daedalus would have opened themselves up to the risk of career damage and social ridicule lightly. Indeed, they had every right to expect that their account would be evaluated methodically. Observation and recording of natural phenomena by ‘reliable witnesses’ was an important part of science in the early 19th century.
And conditions for observation were good. It’s often assumed that sightings of sea serpents result from poor visibility, distance, bad light etc – and yet a surprising proportion of ‘marine cryptid’ sightings are made in good conditions. The 1,000-ton, 150ft ocean-going Daedalus could not be described as a ‘wave-washed… small sailing boat’, and its officers and crew would no doubt have protested strongly at Clark’s suggestion that they were so permanently terrified as to be unable to interpret what they saw around them accurately.
The immediate attempts in some quarters to dismiss the sighting out of hand may nevertheless seem surprising. Owen, for example, seems to have reached for ‘rational’ explanations without considering for a moment that the sighting was indeed of a giant sea serpent. Owen, who coined the term ‘dinosaur’, was no stranger to fantastic creatures. His suggestion that professional sailors who had spent a career at sea (M’Quhae gained his commission as lieutenant during the Napoleonic wars, more than three decades previously) would not recognise an elephant seal borders on the insulting. His immediate leap to find alternative explanations is indicative of an attitude that was already becoming entrenched – that sea serpents were not to be taken seriously by scientists.
Yet there had been no shortage of reported sightings of sea serpents over the previous two centuries. In the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts a sea serpent was frequently reported in the bay from the mid-17th century, culminating in 18 sightings in 1817. The 12 months following the Daedalus sighting produced two potential confirmations – later in 1848 an American brig reported a similar creature in almost exactly the same place (between St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope), and the following year a Royal Navy sloop made another strikingly similar sighting in the North Atlantic.
On the other hand, errors and hoaxes were rife. sea serpents in the recent past. The ‘sea serpent fever’ in New England generated by the numerous Gloucester sightings had led to one example. In fact, the very anatomical drawing of ‘Scolioph Atlanticus’ attached to the Daedalus story had originated in a bizarre mistake by a member of the New England Linnaean Society in 1817. The over-enthusiastic discoverer had found a deformed terrestrial snake on a beach, and took it to be the juvenile form of the sea serpent often seen in the bay. The error was quickly discovered, but was apparently still pervasive thirty years later.
Dr Koch’s Concoctions
Worse, three years before the Daedalus sighting, showman ‘Dr’ Albert Koch had paraded an egregiously fraudulent ‘sea serpent’ before a credulous public. Koch had earlier jumped on a bandwagon created by fossil skeletons discovered and displayed by respectable naturalists with the ‘Missourium’, a fake cobbled together from mastodon remains. This ‘creature’ sold (to the British Museum, no less), Koch turned to the fashionable sea serpent for his next showpiece. The prehistoric whale Basilosaurus had been discovered (and identified as a whale by Sir Richard Owen) in 1835, and was thought at the time to be of distinctly serpentine appearance. In 1845, Koch assembled parts of at least six skeletons as well as pieces of other whale skeletons and even Ammonite shells. The result was the 114-foot “Hydrarchos – or Leviathan of the Antediluvian World!” according to Koch’s promotional material.
Contemporary naturalists, including Owen, were infuriated by Koch’s adulation by public and press. However vehemently they pointed out that Koch’s skeletons were fakes, the crowds kept on going to see them – in fact, the controversy probably boosted visits to Koch’s exhibits.
In the light of foolish errors like ‘Scolioph Atlanticus,’ and outright scams like Hydrarchos, that sea serpent sightings weren’t taken seriously by naturalists. By 1848, the sea serpent had already fallen into the domain of the pseudo-scientific. In another century, the giant sea serpent would become the poster-child for the new pseudo-science of cryptozoology, but this process had begun much earlier.
The decline of sea serpent sightings could be down to all kinds of things. Perhaps we are that much more sensible and less credulous now, than the crowds that flocked to see Hydrarchos, or the sailors who saw mermaids’ mirrors in the fins of manatees. Perhaps the sea serpents have all gone, deafened by ships’ engines, driven crazy by sonar and starved of food by overfishing and whaling-to-extinction. Perhaps we don’t see them anymore because they’re all gone. Or nearly all gone.
Serpents and Fiction
In fiction, however, particularly in the fantasy genre, the sea serpent retained its appeal throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, the ship Dawn Treader is encounters a sea serpent that makes the characteristic attack of looping its body around the ship’s hull and attempting to crush it.
Robin Hobb’s ‘Liveship Traders’ books present sea serpents as the larval form of dragons. In Naomi Novik’s ‘Temeraire’ series, sea serpents exist in the 19th century along with dragons and Bunyips. Perhaps the best, eeriest and most affecting bit of sea serpent literature I have come across, though, is Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Fog Horn’:
“And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet”.
“The Fog Horn blew.
“And the monster answered.
“A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.”
Bradbury understands that if such a creature exists, it must be lonely as hell.
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Our thanks again to Matt, whose novel can be found on the right-hand sidebar. More Stranger Seas later this month.
See? Now you have loads to talk about at parties. We look forward to seeing you in a few days, and don’t forget, if you subscribe to greydogtales (bottom left-ish), you’ll, er, you’ll have subscribed. Maybe there should be a prize, or something? We don’t know. We’ll get back to you on that one…