"On the 1st May, 1833, a party, consisting of Captain Sullivan, Lieutenants Maclachlan and Malcolm of the Rifle Brigade, Lieutenant Lyster of the Artillery, and Mr. Ince of the
Ordnance, started from Halifax in a small yacht for Mahone Bay, some forty miles to the westward, on a fishing excursion. The morning was cloudy, and the wind at S.S.E., and apparently rising.
"We had run about half the distance, as we supposed, and were enjoying ourselves on deck, when we were surprised by the sight of an immense shoal of grampuses, which appeared in an unusual state of excitement, and which, in their gambols, approached so close to our little craft, that some of the party amused themselves by firing at them with rifles. . . . Our attention was presently diverted from the whales and 'such small deer' by an exclamation from Dowling, our man-of-war's man, who was sitting to leeward, of "Oh, sir, look here!" We were startled into a ready compliance, and saw an object which banished all other thoughts save wonder and surprise.
"At the distance of from iso to 200 yards on our starboard b~w, we saw the head and neck of some denizen of the deep, precisely like those of a common snake, in the act of swimming, the head so far elevated and thrown forward by the curve of the neck as to enable us to see the water under and beyond it. The creature rapidly passed, leaving a regular wake, from the commencement of which, to the fore part, which was out of water, we judged its length to be about eighty feet; and this within rather than beyond the mark.
"There could be no mistake, no delusion, and we were all perfectly satisfied that we had been favoured with a view of the 'true and veritable sea-serpent', which had been generally considered to have existed only in the brain of some Yankee skipper, and treated as a tale not much entitled to belief It is most difficult to give correctly the dimensions of any object in the water. The head of the creature we set down at about six feet in length, and that portion of the neck which we saw, at the same; the extreme length, as before stated, as between eighty and one hundred feet. The neck in thickness equalled the bole of a moderate-sized tree. The head and neck of a dark brown or nearly black colour, streaked with white in irregular streaks. I do not recollect seeing any part of the body.
"Such is the rough account of the sea-serpent, and all the party who saw it are still in the land of the living-Lyster in England, Malcolm in New South Wales, with his regiment, and the remainder still vegetating in Halifax."
W. SULLIVAN, Captain, Rifle Brigade.
For some years the 'sea-serpent' was not seen again in these parts; but when he made his next appearance, he 'stayed around' for several seasons. In October, 1844, a millwright named Barry, of Pictou, Nova Scotia, saw a sea-monster, which he estimated to be sixty feet long and three feet around the body, swim
slowly past the pier of Arisaig, near the north-east tip of Nova Scotia. It was only about forty yards away from him and "the body appeared to move in long undulations, including many of the smaller humps. In consequence of this motion, the head and tail were sometimes both out of sight and sometimes both above water. The head was rounded and obtuse in front, and was never elevated more than a foot above the surface. The tail was pointed, appearing like half of a mackerel's tail. The colour of the part seen was black."
A well-known local geologist, J. W. Dawson, obtained this account from Barry and sent it, with another later story, to Sir Charles Lyell, who included it in his Second Visit to the United States of North America (18 So). The second account located the sea-serpent on the northern side of Nova Scotia, off Merigomish, in the thirty-mile Northumberland Strait that separates Prince Edward Island from the mainland. This time it was described as above 100 feet long by two intelligent observers who saw it nearly aground, in calm water, about 200 feet from the shore, where it remained in sight for half an hour.
"One of the witnesses," wrote Dawson, "went up a bank in order to look down upon it. They said it sometimes raised its head (which resembled that of a seal) partially out of the water.
Along its back were a number of humps or protruberances which, in the opinion of the observer on the beach, were true humps, while the other thought they were produced by vertical flexuses of the body. The colour appeared black, and the skin had a rough appearance. The animal was seen to bend its body almost into a circle, and again to unbend it with rapidity. It was slender in proportion to its length. After it had disappeared in deep water, its wake was visible for some time."
By the summer of 1845 the monster - if it was the same one - had moved its pitch back from the north to the south-east coast of Nova Scotia. St. Margaret's Bay, near Halifax, is close to Mahone Bay, where Henry Ince and his friends had sighted it. Here James Wilson, a teacher, and John Bockner, both of Peggy's Cove, were fishing from a schooner when they saw on the west side of St. Margaret's Bay something which they took at first to be a large fleet of fishing nets. A few moments later, when they looked again, it began to straighten itself out and move away swiftly, leaving a long wake behind it. "They now perceived the object to be a huge serpent, with a head about the size of a barrel, and a body in proportion, with something like a mane flowing down its neck. It carried its head erect with a slight inclination forward. Wilson thinks the animal was about from 70 to ioo feet in length. Its colour seemed to be a sort of steel grey."
Wilson and Bockner reported what they had seen to the Rev. John Ambrose, of St. Margaret's Bay, who was so impressed that he collected a batch of stories of the monster's appearance in the neighbourhood and later (1864) contributed a paper on the subject to the Nova Scotia Institute of Natural Science. The best of these stories was dated 1849 - the year following the most famous appearance of the sea-serpent to the officers and crew of H.M. Corvette Daedalus (nineteen guns) in the South Atlantic. It is interesting to compare the Daedalus account with the following, which shows marked resemblances and yet some divergencies.
In the summer of 1849 Joseph Holland, Jacob Keddy and two other Nova Scotian fishermen were on South West Island, at the west side of the entrance to St. Margaret's Bay, when they saw something very large and long swimming on the surface of the water not far from land. They launched a boat and rowed out to see what it was, arriving within a short distance of it without being noticed. It looked like a huge snake, about sixty feet long and as thick as a barrel.
"It was proportioned like an eel, i.e. tapering towards the extremities with no caudal fin perceptible, but one very high fin or row of spines, each of about an inch in diameter at the base, erected along its back, serving indeed as a dorsal fin, like the folding fin of Thymnus Vulgaris, or Albicore. This spinal erection seemed to occupy about one-third of its length, each end of it being about equidistant from the snake's extremities, and at a distance somewhat resembling, in size and appearance, the sail of a skiff. The animal's back was covered with scales about six inches long and three inches wide, extending in rows across the body, i.e. the longer diameter of scale being in the direction of the circumference of the body. The colour of the body was black. The men had no opportunity of seeing the belly, but what the Americans would call 'a smart chance' of becoming acquainted with the inside of it. For the creature, perceiving the boat, raised its head about ten feet above the water, turned towards it, and, opening its jaws, showed the inside of its mouth red in colour and well armed with teeth about three inches long shaped like those of a catfish. The men, now thinking it high time to terminate the interview, pulled vigorously for shore, followed for some distance by the snake, which at length gave up the chase and disappeared."
This was not the last appearance of the monster in Nova Scotian waters. He was often seen in St. Margaret's Bay in the years following 1849, and the local fishermen even maintained that they had spotted two of them at or near the same time. The slight variations in the descriptions given by Holland, Wilson and others suggested that there might have been a pair, with the sexes differentiated by peculiarities of shape or colour.
Part One
In 1847 the Zoologist published a fourteen-year-old story,
supported by five witnesses, of an encounter with a sea-serpent off Halifax, N.S. This story, written by Henry Ince, the Ordnance storekeeper at Halifax, runs as follows:
Signed by:
A.MACLACHLAN, Lieutenant, Rifle Brigade.
G.P. MALCOLM, Ensign, Rifle Brigade.
B.O'NBAL LYSTER, Lieutenant, Artillery.
HENRY INCE, Ordnance Storekeeper at Halifax.
The skeptics - and there were many - argued that these 'sea- serpents' were either shoals of porpoises, basking sharks, whales or giant squids. For many years the existence of the giant squid or 'kraken' was as hotly debated as that of the sea-serpent, with scientists arguing that it was a sailor's myth. However, in 1861 a French corvette, the Alecton, encountered a giant squid in the South Atlantic, fired cannon-shots at it and tried to capture it. Then, between 1870 and 1877, at least a dozen specimens of these monsters were washed up or stranded on the shores of Newfoundland at various places. On October 26th, 1873, two fishermen in an open boat found one in shallow water in Conception Bay, on the north side of the Avalon Peninsula Newfoundland, and attacked it. The squid nearly overturned their boat and dragged them under; but they luckily escaped with their lives and part of one tentacle cut off with a hatchet-blow. They reported that the creature had a body ten feet long a head two feet long, and arms thirty-two feet long. Its total length was forty-four feet. After this, the 'kraken' was generally acknowledged to be fact, not fiction-and was used to exp]ain away the still more elusive 'sea-serpent'.
TO BE CONTINUED
