109 years ago today, the most intriguing "sea serpent" sighting of all time was made. The circumstances were perfect, the witnesses well-qualified, and the animal very strange-looking. So what really happened?
Here's the relevant chapter from my 2006 book
Shadows of Existence.
THE BRITISH
NATURALISTS' SEA MONSTER
Are there
large and strange unclassified animals roaming the oceans of the world? The best single piece of evidence to date on
this question came from two British men of science, Michael J. Nicoll and
E.G.B. Meade-Waldo. In 1905, these
witnesses observed a "sea monster" which has never been explained.
The men were
both experienced naturalists, Fellows of the Zoological Society of London. Their account of "a creature of most
extraordinary form and proportions" is recorded in the Society's
Proceedings and Nicoll's 1908 book Three Voyages of A Naturalist.
On December
7, 1905, at 10:15 AM, Nicoll and Meade-Waldo were on a research cruise aboard
the yacht Valhalla. They were fifteen
miles east of the mouth of Brazil's Parahiba River when Nicoll turned to his
companion and asked, "Is that the fin of a great fish?"
The fin was
cruising past them about a hundred yards away.
Meade-Waldo described it as "dark seaweed-brown, somewhat crinkled
at the edge." The visible part was
roughly rectangular, about six feet long and two feet high.
As
Meade-Waldo watched through “powerful”
binoculars, a head on a long neck rose in front of the frill. He described the neck as "about the
thickness of a slight man's body, and from seven to eight feet was out of the
water; head and neck were all about the same thickness ... The head had a very
turtle-like appearance, as also the eye.
It moved its head and neck from side to side in a peculiar manner: the
color of the head and neck was dark brown above, and whitish below - almost
white, I think."
Nicoll noted,
"Below the water we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black
patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature." They kept the creature in sight for several
minutes before the Valhalla drew away from the beast. The yacht was traveling under sail and could
not come about. At 2:00 AM on December
8th, however, three crewmembers saw what appeared to be the same animal, almost
entirely submerged.
In a letter
to author Rupert T. Gould, author of The Case for the Sea Serpent, Meade-Waldo remarked, "I shall never
forget poor Nicoll's face of amazement when we looked at each other after we
had passed out of sight of it ... "
Nicoll marveled, “This creature was an example, I consider, of what has
been so often reported, for want of a better name, as the ‘great sea-serpent.’”
What did
these gentlemen see? Meade-Waldo offered
no theory. Nicoll, while admitting it is
"impossible to be certain," suggested they had seen an unknown
species of mammal, adding, "the general appearance of the creature,
especially the soft, almost rubber-like fin, gave one this
impression." The witnesses did not
notice any diagnostic features such as hair, pectoral fins, gills, or nostrils.
The late
zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, in his exhaustive tome In the Wake of the
Sea-Serpents, suggested this sighting involved a huge eel or eel-shaped fish
swimming with its head and forebody out of the water. For reasons no one understands, the largest
known species of eel, the conger, does swim this way on occasion. Interestingly, the conger also has been
observed to undulate on its side at the water’s surface, producing an
appearance that looks little like an eel and a lot like a serpentine monster,
albeit a small one. Congers are known to
reach about nine feet in length.
Another
candidate for the sighting might be a reptile.
Nicoll's sketch certainly bears some resemblance to a plesiosaur, a
Mesozoic-era tetrapod suggested as a solution for sea serpent sightings as
early as 1833.
Plesiosaurs
keep turning up in connection to sea serpents because they were one of the few
marine species of any type in the fossil record to have long necks. American humorist Will Cuppy once remarked on
plesiosaurs, “They might have a had a useful career as sea serpents, but they
were before their time. There was nobody to scare except fish, and that was
hardly worth while.” Indeed, the
plesiosaur fossil record stops with that of their land-based cousins, the
dinosaurs.
There is
another problem in connecting these animals to the 1905 description. In addition to the absence of relevant
fossils dated within the last sixty million years, no plesiosaur is known to
have possessed a dorsal fin. There was
no need for a dorsal fin for stability on the turtle-like bodies of these
animals. A plesiosaur with a fin or
frill unsupported by bones and thus unlikely to fossilize, presumably for
threat or sexual display, is not impossible, but this is pure speculation.
Nicoll's idea
of a mammal poses problems as well. No
known mammal, living or extinct, fits
the description given by the two naturalists.
Some cryptozoologists believe sea monster reports are attributable to
archaeocetes: prehistoric snakelike whales, such as those in the genus
Basilosaurus. It's conceivable this group could have evolved a
long-necked form, but the known whales were actually evolving in the opposite
direction, resulting in the neckless or almost neckless modern cetaceans. One other mammalian possibility is a huge
elongated seal. This seems equally
difficult to support, given that no known seal, living or extinct, has either a
truly long neck or a dorsal fin.
Meade-Waldo
was aware of the famous sea monster report made in 1848 by the crew of the
frigate HMS Daedalus. He thought his own
creature "might easily be the same."
The Daedalus witnesses described an animal resembling "a large
snake or eel" with a visible length
estimated at sixty feet.
There are a
few reports specifically describing giant eels.
A German vessel, the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, observed such a creature
in its entirety off England in 1912. The
Kaiserin's Captain Ruser described it as about twenty feet long and eighteen
inches thick. Four Irish fisherman claimed to have caught a nineteen-foot eel
in 1915. In 1947, the officers of the
Grace liner Santa Clara reported their ship ran over a brown eel-like creature
estimated at sixty feet long. In 1971,
English fisherman Stephen Smith was in the area of the 1912 sighting when he
allegedly encountered an eel over twenty feet long, with the head of a conger
eel but “four times the size.” He told
author Paul Harrison, “I have fished all over the world, but never have I seen
something like this.” Smith suggested it
was… “a form of hybrid eel, but at twenty feet? There must be a more rational
explanation, but I’m damned if I know what it is!”
The only
“non-monster” hypothesis which has been advanced to explain the Valhalla
sighting came from Richard Ellis, a prominent writer on marine life. Ellis has suggested that a giant squid
swimming with its tentacles foremost, with one tentacle or arm held above the
surface, could present an unusual appearance which, combined with a reasonable
degree of observer error, might account for the details reported in this case.
Squid can
swim tentacles-first, and often do so when approaching prey. For one to have presented the appearance
described, though, it must have acted in a totally unnatural fashion. The squid would have to swim on its side to
keep one fin above the water while pointlessly holding up a single limb and
swimming forward for several minutes.
Even assuming it is physically possible for a squid to act this way, it
seems impossible to come up with a reason why it might do so. This explanation also requires that
Meade-Waldo, at least, made a major mistake, since he recorded seeing a large
body under water “behind the frill.”
While the
idea of a large seagoing animal remaining unidentified to this day may seem
surprising, it’s not beyond the bounds of plausibility. Recently identified
whales have already been mentioned. The
sixteen-foot megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios) was only discovered when
caught by accident in 1976. A unique
feature of the megamouth case is that this species - a slow-moving, blimplike
filter-feeder which became the sole inhabitant of a new family - was not just
unknown as a living species, but completely unknown in every respect. There were no fossil indications, no sighting
reports, and no local folklore about such a strange creature among Pacific islanders. The species just appeared. Finally, in recent times, at
least one type of whale was generally accepted by cetologists well before there was any physical evidence.
We are left
with this simple fact: on December 7th, 1905, two well-qualified witnesses
described a large unknown marine animal for which no satisfactory explanation
has been presented. Their report
strongly indicates the oceans hold (or held at that time) at least one
spectacular creature still evading the probes of science.
Ellis,
Richard. 2003. Sea Dragons. Lawrence, Kansas: University
Press of Kansas.
Ellis,
Richard. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid. New York: Lyons Press.
Ellis,
Richard. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. New York: Knopf.
Gould, Rupert
T. 1930.
The Case for the Sea Serpent.
London: Philip Allan.
Harrison,
Paul. 2001. Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters of the British
Isles. London: Robert Hale.
Heuvelmans,
Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents. New York: Hill and Wang.
Meade-Waldo,
E.G.B., and Nicoll, Michael J., 1906.
"Description of an Unknown Animal Seen at Sea off the Coast of
Brazil," Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, p.719.
Nicoll,
Michael J. 1908. Three Voyages of a Naturalist. London: Witherby and Co.
Molloy,
R. 1915.
“A Queer Tale of Flanagan and the Eel off Dalkey Sound,” publication
title unknown, August 28. Available at http://www.clubi.ie/dalkeyhomepage/ee.html.
