Sea serpent

The Sea serpent is one of the book’s most persistent unknowns: a creature reported across oceans, sometimes investigated as a matter of natural history, but never conclusively established. Its force lies in the uneasy space between testimony and explanation. Witnesses described huge, fast-moving, long-necked animals, and some accounts placed them in direct encounters with whales; later readers are left to weigh those claims against the absence of a specimen that survived to be examined.

Massachusetts Sightings and Investigation

During the first half of the nineteenth century, reports of Sea serpents were especially frequent off Massachusetts. The witnesses were not presented merely as isolated fabulists: accounts described numerous people watching the animals, sometimes for hours, and the Linnæan Society of Boston formally investigated reports from the coast. The society’s pamphlet, preserved in the British Library and once owned by Joseph Banks, made the sightings part of a public debate about what the sea might contain.

The inquiry began with reports from Gloucester in August 1817. Witnesses described a very large animal with a serpentine shape and motion, seen at the surface in calm, bright weather. Some accounts compared its visible body to a line of separate sections. The committee sought testimony rather than relying on one observer: shipmaster Solomon Allen reported seeing the creature on three consecutive days, while shipmaster Epes Ellery described seeing its head and an extended stretch of its body through a spyglass. Their statements lent the case the form of an evidentiary proceeding, even though observation alone could not identify the animal.

In assessing the reports, the committee consulted earlier natural histories, including Bishop Pontoppidan’s 1755 account of Norway. The Linnæans concluded that the evidence supported the creature’s existence. That judgment did not settle the matter; it fixed one moment in a longer argument over whether unfamiliar animals could be accepted on the strength of repeated testimony. A second reported serpent in Long Island Sound later that year, followed by accounts from the Hudson River and Nahant, extended the story beyond Gloucester and made the possibility harder to confine to a single local sighting.

A Wider Record of Encounters

The book follows reports beyond Massachusetts, emphasizing how often observers described similar features: an immense animal, a raised neck or head, and rapid movement across the surface. Precise locations and times entered ship logs and newspapers, while the naturalist Henry Dewhurst included the Sea serpent among animals that might puzzle zoologists when they appeared. Such records give the reports a documentary texture, but repetition is not the same as confirmation: the surviving descriptions establish what people said they saw, not a settled zoological identity.

Some accounts brought the creature close to whales. In 1833, British officers fishing in Mahone Bay first noticed pilot whales behaving unusually near their small craft. They then reported an animal following the whales, moving with a raised head and a curving, snake-like motion; the officers estimated its length at about one hundred feet. The incident gives the Sea serpent a place in an ecological scene rather than a solitary apparition: the observers understood the whales’ behavior as a response to another presence in the water.

Other reports made the encounters more dramatic. In 1818, passengers and the captain of the packet Delia said they watched a Sea serpent fight a humpback whale off Cape Ann. In 1887, a creature was reportedly seen struggling with what observers took to be a cetacean off the Maine coast; a whale found stranded the next morning had visible damage. These accounts made interaction with whales particularly compelling to the book’s narrator, while leaving open whether the reported animals were serpents or something misidentified.

The Pauline Account

The most elaborate whale encounter came from the South Atlantic in 1875. On 8 January, the barque Pauline was sailing off Cape São Roque, a landmark on migrating whales’ route, when its crew noticed dark shapes and a pale column rising above the water. As the vessel drew nearer, its master, George Drevar, reported seeing a Sea serpent with coils around a sperm whale.

According to Drevar’s account, the serpent used its head and tail as levers as the two animals repeatedly disappeared beneath the surface and returned to view. Two other sperm whales were nearby. The struggle lasted about fifteen minutes; Drevar estimated the serpent’s length at more than 160 feet, judging from its coils. He reported that the two watching whales then moved toward the ship without their usual visible signs of activity, as if seeking shelter. The detail that they approached the vessel gives the episode its particular emotional weight: the encounter is framed not only as a contest between enormous animals, but as a possible moment of refuge sought from an unknown threat.

The narrative does not treat Drevar’s report as proof. The book notes that the scene might have involved a giant squid and a whale, and acknowledges that whales themselves can appear monstrous to human observers. That alternative does not explain every detail, but it keeps the reader between natural and extraordinary interpretations. The account’s specificity—its date, location, ship, named master, estimated dimensions, and duration—makes it vivid as testimony without resolving what the crew encountered.

The Missing Specimen

In 1852, a New Bedford whaler, the Monongahela, claimed to have pursued and harpooned a Sea serpent in the South Pacific. The crew reportedly brought a 103-foot animal aboard and preserved it, describing a long, flat, ridged head and ninety-four teeth. News of the claim travelled through correspondence carried by another vessel and appeared in the British journal Zoology. For a moment, the story seemed to promise what sightings could not: a body available for public inspection.

That prospect disappeared when the Monongahela failed to reach port. The ship was lost at sea the following year with all hands, and the reported specimen vanished with it. The account therefore ends in an absence rather than a discovery. The Sea serpent remains suspended between a tradition of repeated observation and the one kind of evidence that might have transformed that tradition: a surviving specimen. Across the book’s collected reports, the creature is neither simply dismissed nor securely authenticated; it marks the limits of what witnesses, records, and retrospective explanation can establish about life beneath the sea.