Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  ~~~~~~~

  5 - Of Monsters and Mermaids

  The terrors of the deep are genuine enough. In 1985 a large shark was killed in the Gulf of Thailand. In its stomach were the skulls of two men, 'adults of Caucasian origin'. The same year, sharks, unusually, started taking surfers off the coast of California. The theory emerged that people wearing black wet suits look like seals, one of the sharks' food sources. In 1986 in Kiribati - once the Gilbert Islands -local fishermen watched in horror as a creature with tentacles grabbed first one and then another of their colleagues and dragged them down to die in the depths.

  Recent years have seen some of the mysteries of the deep resolved, others rendered all the more intriguing. Some fears have been allayed. The sea snake, with the deadliest venom in the world, seems to reserve its lethal powers for fellow marine creatures and hardly ever attacks man. Other horrors have been reinforced - not least sharks.

  The incident in Kiribati added another makeweight to the balance of evidence which now suggests that there may indeed be truly giant octopuses lurking in the vast biosphere of the sea. There is room enough. Not only does the sea cover nearly three-quarters of the earth's surface, but its great depths mean that there is perhaps 300 times as much living space than is to be found on the plateaus of earth's dry land. Reminders of our ignorance are regularly delivered.

  In 1984 the fishing vessel Helga netted a megamouth shark off Catalina Island, California - only the second member ever seen of what is now established as an entirely new species. It now floats in a tank of ethanol at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History - a 15-ft (4.5-m) -long symbol of how little we know of the sea. And the marine biologists regularly outline the huge area of darkness in which they operate.

  Biologist Malcolm Clarke, studying sperm whales, found in their stomachs not only huge quantities of squid - up to 30,000 squid jaws in one whale's gut -but species rarely or never caught in the plethora of nets and devices which the scientists use to prospect the sea. Yet the weight of these unknown creatures eaten by whales each year, he calculated, exceeds that of the entire human race put together. The squid, some of them very large to judge by their beaks, must exist in their millions, yet many species rarely fall into the hands of man; there must be many more which man has never seen.

  The Giant Octopus

  In 1984 a weird series of incidents off the coast of Bermuda gave a hint that the lair of the giant octopus may have been found. It has been clear that this creature is not merely a chimera ever since the day in 1896 when an enormous carcass was washed up on the beach of St Augustine in Florida. The main part of the body weighed around 7 tons and was 18 ft (5.5 m) long by 10 ft (3 m) across. A local naturalist, Dr De Witt Webb, measured two of the tentacles, though he thought they were only stumps, at 23 ft (7 m) and 32 ft (10 m).

  His view then was that he was dealing with an octopus of daunting proportions - perhaps 200 ft (60 m) across. His photographs leave no room to doubt the bulk of the animal, but what has sustained modern confidence in the veracity of his attribution was the happy coincidence that a piece of the animal's flesh was preserved in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. This meant that in 1963 Dr Joseph Gennaro could make a histological analysis. He concluded that the tissue was not from a squid or a whale and was probably from an octopus. But the mystery remains: could such gigantic creatures really exist when the largest octopus otherwise known to man is a mere 23 ft (7 m)?

  In the summer of 1984 a Bermuda trawler owner, John P. Ingham, was working on what he hoped would be a profitable theory. He thought that very large - and commercially attractive - shrimps and crabs might be found, if he could only get traps down to 1,000 fathoms or so - more than 6,000 ft (1,800 m) - off the Bermuda shelf. The theory was working: he had brought up 1/2 lb (500 gm) shrimps, and crabs 2 ft (60 cm) across. Ingham now proceeded to construct really strong traps built of 1/4 - and 3/8 - in iron rods, braced with 2-in (5-cm) tree staves. They measured between 6 and 8 ft (1.8 and 2.4 m) square by 4 ft (1.2 m) deep. The traps were lowered and raised by winch from John Ingham's 50-ft (15-m) boat, Trilogy.

  By the beginning of September Ingham had already had a couple of worrying incidents. First he lost a trap after a sudden strain on the line. There was nothing obvious to explain it. Then, a few days later, on 3 September, the crew were hauling up a new pot and had reached about 300 fathoms when they felt the line being pulled out. There was a series of jerks, and once again the line parted. On 19 September 1984 Mr Ingham had a trap set at 480 fathoms -around 2,800 ft (850 m) down. This time, even with the full force of the winch, they could not break the pot clear of the bottom at all. Trilogy is equipped with a sophisticated type of sonar known as a chromascope, and Skipper Ingham went inside to use it. He set the 'scope on what is known as 'split bottom mode'.

  There, clearly outlined on the ocean floor, was a pyramid-like shape, measurable on the chromascope as fully 50 ft (15 m) high: something was surrounding their trap. Ingham and his crew decided not to force the issue this time. They would settle down and wait, with the rope snubbed as tight as possible on the winch. After about twenty minutes, Ingham suddenly had the eerie feeling that the boat was starting to move - that it was being towed.

  Again he went inside to check his array of navigation instruments. The positions given by the Loran are extremely precise. The instrument confirmed his view. The boat was moving steadily south at a speed of about 1 knot, After about 500 yards, whatever was towing the Trilogy decided to change direction and turned inshore. A short distance further on it abruptly turned again. By now Ingham was convinced that some creature had hold of his pot and was steadily advancing, trap, 50-ft boat and all, towards some private destination.

  At one point Mr Ingham put his hand on the rope near the water line. 'I could distinctly feel thumps like something was walking and the vibrations were travelling up the rope.' The 50-ft sonar lump, the peregrinations of the boat, the thumps, the previous lost traps - Ingham was now convinced that he was in the grip of some truly gigantic sea creature. Suddenly the creature appeared to let go. The rope became slack and the crew had no trouble hauling up the trap. It was bent on one side and the top had been stoved in.

  Neither cameras nor underwater scanners operated by scientists have accompanied Mr Ingham, but the circumstances point firmly to an octopus: a creature on the ocean floor with the power to retain a trap against a large ship's winch; an accumulation of bite-size shrimp and crab -kindly if regretfully arranged by Mr Ingham; the location off the Bermuda shelf: all lead inexorably to the idea of a large octopus. No other creature known or imagined could conceivably give such a show of strength in such circumstances. Perhaps the homeland of the great creature which was so mysteriously washed up almost a century ago in Florida has now at last been located.

  Mermaids

  Recent research has solved one of the world's other sea mysteries, the mermaid stories. Two Canadian scientists from Winnipeg, Drs Lehn and Schroeder, ascribed visions of mermaids to a precise optical illusion.

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  [See Second Set Of Plates pl27 to pl38]

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  They knew that sightings of mermaids could be traced back to medieval Norse texts, such as The King's Mirror, which were otherwise very accurate in their descriptions of sea creatures. Only the mermaid and the kraken - the sea monster - are not recognized by today's marine biologists. The author of The King's Mirror gives a very vivid and precise description of a merman:

  This monster is tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water. It has shoulders like a man's but no hands. Its body apparently grows narrower from the shoulders down, so that the lower down it has been observed, the more slender it has seemed to be. But no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped. No one has ever observed it closely enough to determine whether its body has scales like a fish or skin like a man. Whenever the monster has shown itself, men have always been sure that a storm would follow.

  The author then describes its mate, the
mermaid, which has breasts, hair, large webbed hands and a tail like a fish. This description tallies closely with a creature in the north Pacific, known to Japanese chroniclers as umibohzu, or the priest of the sea.

  Lehn and Schroeder suggested that in the cold northern waters, the warmer air which predicates a storm would mix in a layer over the sea, creating a swirling mass of air of changing temperature which could act as a distorting lens, exaggerating the height but not the width of an object. Seen through this natural hall of mirrors, the head of a walrus or the top of a whale could assume the lowering shape of a merman or mermaid.

  It was only a theory, though tested through a computer programme developed for ray-tracing. But the two doctors finally got a chance to prove their point when one spring day the atmospheric conditions on Lake Winnipeg seemed perfect: on land it was a hot day (28°C) but some thin ice still remained on the lake. They went out in a boat and, sure enough, a mermaid appeared - and stayed long enough to be photographed. It was convincing enough to make a modern mariner believe he had met a siren. In fact it was a boulder sticking out of the water half a mile away.

  This new proof of the accuracy of the Norse seamen in their observations seems to dispose of the Atlantic mermaid at least; though it suggests that their description of the great kraken - now the one unrecognized phenomenon in The King's Mirror - might also be frighteningly accurate.

  But the explanation of a cold-water mirage hardly sufficed for the vivid encounters repeatedly described in the tropical waters of Papua New Guinea.

  Roy Wagner, Head of the Anthropology Department of the University of Virginia, had heard tales of the ri back in 1979. A local magistrate told him he had met a ri near a reef while on a fishing expedition off New Ireland. The creature had risen from the sea and stared at him. It had a monkey-like face rather than a human one. As it went on staring, the magistrate flung his spear at it. 'But I couldn't make up my mind whether to hit him or not, so I threw it crookedly. You would expect it to be frightened off, but no. It just surfaced farther on, and stared at me again.'

  Wagner collected a number of similar stories, and then one day in Ramat Bay, he himself saw a long dark shape, which all the locals said was a ri or mermaid. All the descriptions agreed that the ri had long dark hair on its head, was light-skinned and that the females had breasts like women. Wagner was sufficiently intrigued to organize an expedition in 1983 with Richard Greenwell of the International Society of Cryptozoology.

  This only added to the mystery, for they did indeed observe at relatively close quarters a large creature rolling and blowing on the surface and then disappearing for ten minutes or more beneath the water - behaviour which did not tally with that of any known creature of any size. The ri clearly existed, but it remained the ri - an unknown creature, and still a mermaid to the Papuans.

  Two years later a much more lavishly equipped expedition set out in the 65-ft (20-m) Australian dive boat, Reef Explorer, with side scan sonar and video cameras, not to mention ship-to-shore telephones and air-conditioned cabins. When they got to Nokon Bay, New Ireland, they saw an animal rolling and playing on the surface. It clearly had no dorsal fin but seemed to have flukes. At that point a local villager, Tom Omar, came canoeing out to them. This was the ri or ilkai, he pronounced. The female, he said, had a woman's breasts, hair and hands. Indeed, there was a family of them in the bay - male, female and child, he reported.

  During the next ten days the captain of the Reef Explorer, Kerry Piesch, and other members of the expedition managed to get near the creature with underwater video and still cameras. One photo was clear and unmistakable: the animal was a dugong - a rare but not unknown sea creature. The theory that the ri was a dugong had been considered and dismissed, as the ri's behaviour was quite unlike anything hitherto reported about dugongs.

  In particular, it was thought that the dugong could dive for only a minute or so at a time; the New Ireland animal was under water for upwards of ten minutes. But as the pictures and the video accumulated, there was little room for doubt. Then came a sad conclusion. One morning the villagers were seen pulling a large creature out of the water. It turned out to be a dead female. No breasts, no hair, and undoubtedly a dugong. She had been shot by a high-powered rifle.

  No culprit was found, though the villagers blamed neighbours from the next bay. The corpse, laid out on the beach at Nokon Bay, effectively ended the hunt for the Papuan mermaid. But it was not hard to see how that strange body, with its hand-like flukes, cavorting out of the water in the haze of a tropical sea, might well answer the pervasive and attractive myth of men and girls cast or lured into the ocean and transmuted into mermen and mermaids to fascinate mariners for centuries past.

  The Kraken

  If the mermaid seems to vanish into the mist of imagination, the classic sea monster seems as persistent as ever. Many of the sightings round the British Isles now seem ascribable to the wonderful leathery turtle. This huge creature, as big as a mini car and weighing perhaps 800 lb (360 kilos), now seems to be more common in British waters than was previously thought, for it is born thousands of miles away in the Caribbean or even Malaysia. Virtually nothing is known of its journeys across the oceans, but it seems unlikely that it would intentionally venture into the chill waters of the North Atlantic.

  In 1985, however, another great leathery turtle came ashore near Mousehole in Cornwall. It was nearly 7 ft (2.5 m) long and weighed just under 7 hundredweight. It had apparently choked on a plastic bag, mistaking it for the jelly fish which are its principal food source. Many of the descriptions of classic British sea monsters, such as the Soay monster, suggest the leather back turtle as a convincing explanation. But no one has yet proposed a satisfactory solution to the traditional sea monster with horse's head and humps, which has been seen by seamen and shore watches all over the world and seems as common as ever.

  At least six people saw the Stinson Beach monster north of San Francisco one afternoon in October 1983. Matt Ratto was a member of a construction crew working on the highway. They had binoculars which were apparently used for observing frolics on the beach during their lunch breaks. However, this time they were at hand for more serious viewing when one of the crew called up on the two-way radio and told Ratto to look out to sea.

  The mystery animal was only 100 yards off shore and about a quarter of a mile away when Ratto focused on it. It was being followed by a large flock of birds and about two dozen sea lions. Ratto and his fellow crew members all agreed that the creature was about 100 ft (30 m) long - they had the sea lions with which to compare it. Ratto said: 'There were three bends like humps and they rose straight up. Then the head came up to look around.' Truck driver Steve Bjora thought it looked like a huge eel. 'The sucker was going 45 to 50 miles an hour. It was clipping. It was boogeying.'

  Safety inspector Marlene Martin of the California Department of Transport apparently told her family it was the biggest thing she had ever seen in her life: 'It made Jaws look like a baby.' A teenager on the beach below, Roland Curry, also saw the animal, and reported that it was his second sighting within a week. The first time, it was visible for only about thirty seconds and the head came up for a couple of seconds before the animal dived.

  Later the same week a surfer, Young Hutchinson, reported that a sea serpent had surfaced within 10 ft (3 m) of his surfboard off the Santa Ana River: 'At first I thought it was a whale, but I've seen a lot of whales and it didn't look the same at all. The skin texture wasn't the same and there were no dorsal fins. In fact it was like a long black eel. It was really moving. We got the hell out of there and paddled for the shore.'

  The local scientists all offered the usual explanations of pilot whales and porpoises in a line jumping from the water. But these do not seem adequate for a creature viewed for some time by a group of people, one of whom had binoculars, and then at very close quarters by an apparently levelheaded surfer. In the chronicles of sea monsters, Stinson Beach, 1983, seems a hard one to explain away.

&nbs
p; A more enigmatic recent report comes from Iceland. Two bird-watchers, Olafur Lafsson and Julius Asgeirsson, were on the beach twenty miles north of Reykjavik, when they saw two creatures emerging from the sea and gambolling about on the beach. Asgeirsson said: 'They were larger than horses, they moved about like dogs, but they swam like seals.' The animals soon went back into the water, leaving behind tracks in the sand. 'The footprints were larger than those of horse hoofs and split like those of a cloven-footed animal, but with three cloves instead of two.' No explanation beyond the shrouded visions of the old Icelandic sagas has yet appeared.

  One putative source for the eel-like sea monster has been thoroughly discredited by recent research. Over the last century a few examples of giant eel larvae have been trawled out of the oceans. One captured by the round-the-world Dana expedition in 1930 was nearly 6 ft (2 m) long. Comparisons with other eel larvae suggested that it might grow into a serpent of mammoth proportions if it progressed in similar fashion.

  There was speculation about giant eels of up to 150 ft (45 m), which might well fit the bill as sea monsters. However, Dr David Smith of the University of Texas has shown that not only do the giant eel larvae not go on growing, they actually get shorter when they transmute into a fish, becoming spiny eels of only 2 or 3 ft (60 to 90 cm) in length.