This serpentine animal appears in virtually every book and documentary on the topic of sea serpents, cited as the canonical first important record of the Great Sea Serpent. It is easy to understand why so many authors fall into this trap. A maned snake that snatches screaming sailors from the rigging? Sure sounds like the monster of modern legend! But it isn’t—not quite. Not yet.
Looking back at Olaus Magnus’s account, pioneering sea serpent author A. C. Oudemans was happy in 1892 to take those elements that conformed to his own vision of the sea serpent—and to discard the rest arbitrarily, decreeing, for example, the testimony of “its devouring hogs, lambs, and calves, and its appearance on summer nights on land to take its prey to be a fable.”59 In constructing his cherry-picked version, Oudemans fundamentally misrepresented the dragon-like snake that Olaus had described. According to Olaus, this monster does not venture onto land to take its prey, but lives and hunts on land (in “cliffs and hollows of the seacoast”) and occasionally enters the water to harvest seafood (such as the sailors it cracked “like sugared almonds,” as a magazine article put it in 1843).60 This lifestyle is firmly underlined by the accompanying illustration in A Description of the Northern Peoples, which clearly shows the serpent emerging from its cave on land (figure 5.12)!
Figure 5.12 The serpent depicted in Olaus Magnus’s Description of the Northern Peoples emerges from a cave on land to prey on the crews of passing ships.
A serpent, sure. The modern sea serpent? No. Olaus Magnus’s snake should be viewed as a component legend, a root. It has the mane of the hippo-camp, and it is a menace to ships, but Olaus Magnus was clear in describing it as a land-based monster. It is, in short, a lindorm—one of the standard gigantic snakes or dragons in Scandinavian folklore.
It’s important to realize as well that supernatural phenomena were fundamental components of lindorm stories of this period. When Olaus Magnus wrote that the appearance of the serpent foretells a major upheaval, such as a royal death or a major war, he was not kidding—and he was not just tacking on some bit of superstitious gloss to the end of a naturalistic wildlife sighting. The supernatural significance is what those stories are about; the naturalism that cryptozoologists impose on them is the artificial gloss. Nonetheless, such revisionist demystification is a long-standing (and ongoing) tradition.61 When science-minded Bishop Erich Pontoppidan repeated Olaus Magnus’s snake story 200 years later, he felt it was obvious that Olaus “mixes truth and fable together … according to the superstitious notions of that age.”62 Bernard Heuvelmans likewise pooh-poohed the supernatural aspects of Olaus Magnus’s account (“We may smile at His Eminence’s naïveté”), but the truth is that such arbitrary editorializing is reckless. Folklorist Michel Meurger is scathing of the way that Heuvelmans and other cryptozoologists omit or downplay the supernatural, calling it a “gross distortion” of these stories.63
The Evolving Sea Serpent
Two more centuries would go by before the parallel currents of folklore described by Olaus Magnus—the lindorm and Scandinavian iterations of the hippocamp—would converge to form the modern sea serpent legend. During those 200 years, scholars continued to discuss the hippocamp by its many names: “hippocamp” or “hyppocamp” (English); hippokamos or Hydrippus (Greek); sjø-hest (Norwegian); hroshvalur, hrossvalur, or roshwalr (Icelandic); Equus marinus, Equus aquaticus, or Equus bipes (Latin); and cheval marin (French). Following those discussions is difficult, complicated by the fact that most European cultures had their own version of the hippocamp-style monster, plus related (yet distinct) supernatural, kelpie-type water-horses associated with bodies of freshwater. In most of the languages, the word for the hippocamp-monster is the same as the name for delicate little fishes: sea horse. And, to make things even more bewildering, many hippocamp-type monsters are interchangeable with walruses!
In all this confusion, the English-language cryptozoological and skeptical literatures have typically treated the hippocamp-type monsters as rather marginal creatures with no particular relationship to the sea serpent. Still, I am not the first to note that the old Scandinavian mer-horse traditions became part of the formulation of the new Scandinavian sea serpent. Referring to the work of Norwegian writer Halvor J. Sandsdalen, Michel Meurger explains that the modern sea serpent represents a hybridization, a “fusion of several fabulous creatures originally clearly differentiated in Norwegian folklore”:64 the terrifying half-fish, half-horse monster called the havhest (another Scandinavian synonym for “hippocamp”) blended with the lindorm, “a land snake blown to gargantuan proportions.”
We’ll come to that moment of fusion—the moment the modern sea serpent was born—shortly. For now, let’s look more closely at the evolution of the hippocamp as an allegedly real monster at the dawn of the scientific era.
Some authorities of the late Middle Ages and early modern period took the mer-horse to be a fact of natural history, on the sensible basis that people sometimes saw them. Others correctly linked the folk belief in horse-headed sea monsters to the classical concept of the hippocamp. French naturalist Pierre Belon and Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner were among the skeptics. A specialist in marine animals, Belon straightforwardly identified the hippocamp as the “fabulous horse of Neptune” (figure 5.13).65 As we have seen, Olaus Magnus argued in 1555 that the hippocamp was a genuine animal, but Gesner (an even more towering figure in zoological history) accepted Belon’s debunking analysis. Gesner’s encyclopedia Historiae animalium (1551–1558) was the most ambitious natural history text written since the fall of Rome. Gesner repeated Belon’s argument that modern sea horse sightings are based on an invented classical fancy:
Figure 5.13 The hippocamp as depicted in both Pierre Belon’s De aquatilibus, a treatise on fishes, and book 4 of Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium.
The Ancients took great liberties with their charming fables, crafted to conceal the truth yet be believed and cloud the credulous minds of men in a haze of nonsense…. Those who put their faith in the silly pictures of the ancients are deceived…. It all comes from the desire of princes for the fame of their name and the wonder of scholars: since they wished to signify their dominion over land and sea, they joined together the two animals that symbolize these elements, horse and dolphin, which became a monstrous fusion of marine detritus they still call by the name of Hippocampus.66
Gesner was much less skeptical in his treatment of other monsters discussed by Olaus Magnus. He repeated the descriptions and illustrations of two species of sea serpent: a smaller type (about 30 or 40 feet long) and the dragon-like mega-serpent portrayed by Olaus:
On the same map there is another sea-serpent, a hundred or two hundred feet long … or three hundred … which sometimes appears near Norway in fine weather, and is dangerous to Sea-men, as it snatches away men from ships. Mariners tell that it incloses ships, as large as out trading vessels … by laying itself round them in a circle, and that the ship is then turned upside down. It sometimes makes such large coils above the water, that a ship can go through one of them.67
Gesner’s otherwise faithfully redrawn version of the illustration in A Description of the Northern Peoples makes the critical change of moving the monster to open water, rather than emerging from a cave on shore (figure 5.14). The illustration of the smaller serpent shows another modern feature: the serpent floats with its coils arching cartoonishly out of the water (figure 5.15). As Bernard Heuvelmans later noted, this now-canonical detail is fundamentally ridiculous: “Perhaps the great number of humps in the great sea serpent is the result of the naiveté or incompetence of the illustrators. Gesner’s picture of his ‘Baltic’ sea serpent certainly leads one to think so, for the way the animal floats almost entirely out of the water would be mechanically impossible for anything but a balloon.”68
Alongside the fledgling Scandinavian idea of the sea serpent, belief in the monstrous sea horse continued. Surgeon Ambroise Paré took up the topic in his book Des monstres et prodiges (1573). Caught between the superstitio
n of the Middle Ages and the first stirrings of proto-scientific empiricism, Paré was intensely interested in medical marvels (gruesome birth defects, in particular) but also turned his attention to black magic, celestial portents, and monsters. After discussing several sorts of mermen, Paré described the hippocamp as a living creature: “This marine monster having the head, mane and forequarters of a Horse, was seen in the Ocean sea; the picture of which was brought to Rome, to the Pope then reigning.”69 (It’s interesting how these ideas cluster: after 2000 years, classical Greek Tritons and hippocamps were still swimming alongside each other in the European imagination.) It was around this time, in 1585, that mapmaker Abraham Ortelius depicted the Icelandic hrosshvalr as a classical hippocamp, “with manes hanging down from its neck like a horse.”
Figure 5.14 The land-based mega-serpent of Olaus Magnus becomes the ocean-going sea serpent of Conrad Gesner.
Figure 5.15 Conrad Gesner’s smaller type of sea serpent, as reproduced in Edward Topsell’s Historie of Serpents.
As the infant scientific tradition began to wobble to its feet, so too did a related tradition that I work in: what is now called scientific skepticism, or the critical examination of popular beliefs, especially of paranormal claims.70 Scientifically inclined writers began to ask which beliefs could be supported by empirical evidence and which were baseless superstitions. These attempts themselves often amounted to little more than reactionary scorn, and many of them proved to be as inaccurate as the claims they were critiquing. In England, physician Sir Thomas Browne’s book Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenets and Commonly Presumed Truths (1646; also called Vulgar Errors) blends religious reasoning, the new empirical spirit, and ancient wisdom to produce a wonderful hit-and-miss prototype of the skeptical genre. Browne was quite right to doubt the “very questionable” claims that chameleons consume nothing but air and that the “flesh of Peacocks corrupteth not,” and he likewise nailed the falsity of the belief in hippo-camps. In his day, the sea horse was cited as proof of the folkloric notion that all the animals of the land were reflected by counterparts in the sea. Browne would have none of it, retorting scornfully, “As for sea-horses which confirm this assertion; in their common descriptions they are but Grotesco deliniations which fill up empty spaces in maps, and meer pictorial inventions, not any physical shapes.” He insisted that the folkloric sea horse was identical to the classical hippocamp.71 (Browne emphasized that this mythical sea horse was distinct from the walrus and the curly-tailed fish, both of which were also called sea horse—as was, I might add, the hippopotamus in many medieval sources. I can’t help but empathize with Browne’s frustration: these several conflated creatures are a hassle to disentangle.)
Despite the skeptics, the belief in the monstrous sea horse persisted throughout European culture. For example, a quick-tempered Jesuit missionary named Louis Nicolas described the hippocamp as an animal living in Canada. Nicolas traveled extensively within Canada between 1664 and 1675 and produced his Codex canadensis (a hand-drawn, seventy-nine-page document depicting the animals and aboriginal peoples of Canada) around 1700.72 Nicolas showed an unambiguous classical hippocamp, matter of factly drawn alongside a beaver (figure 5.16), as a “sea-horse which is seen in the fields on the banks of the Chisedek River, which empties into the Saint Lawrence.”73
By that time, the hippocamp had endured for two millennia, evolving from a purely artistic creature of fantasy to a monster accepted as real by scholars and regular folks across Europe and beyond. And it was not done yet.
THE BIRTH OF THE SCANDINAVIAN SERPENT
The Scandinavian sea serpent was finally born at the end of the seventeenth century. It existed then only as a regional monster, but the moment of fusion had come. As the Scandinavian serpent matured, German scholar Adam Olearius recorded a third-hand sighting around 1676 (“on the Norwegian coast, he saw in the calm water a large serpent, which seen from afar, had the thickness of a wine barrel, and 25 windings”), and historian Jonas Ramus recorded another sighting in 1698.74
The fully modern reformulation of Olaus Magnus’s shore-dragon as a gigantic, fully aquatic marine serpent with arching coils and a mane (the sea serpent form that survives as the cryptid Cadborosaurus) finally emerged as an established part of Norwegian folklore in 1694, when it was recorded in Hans Lilienskiold’s hand-scripted and gorgeously painted four-volume Speculum boreale (Northern Mirror). Lilienskiold was a high government official whose writing explored the culture, geography, and wildlife of the northernmost parts of Norway.75 The sjø-ormen (sea-worm), Lilienskiold wrote, “cannot be considered anything less than a bad vermin which often curves 236 feet in quiet seas, so it looks like a number of ox-heads have been thrown into the water.”76 Crucially, Lilienskiold’s sea serpent featured a “light-grey mane which goes a fathom down below the neck,” thereby merging the parallel traditions of the hippocamp, the serpentine lindorm, and the unnamed monsters of the sea. In a remote corner of Norway, a hybrid folkloric monster had been born.
Figure 5.16 The hippocamp as cheval marin in Louis Nicolas’s Codex canadensis. (Collection of the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma)
This new kind of sea serpent had what it took to become a star. All it needed was a promoter, a well-positioned publicist. That promoter was Bishop Erich Pontoppidan.
Erich Pontoppidan
Two hundred years after Olaus Magnus, the sea serpent was an established part of folk belief in Scandinavia—and only there. This point deserves boldfacing and underlining: the sea serpent was an exclusively Scandinavian creature, a cultural relative of the Icelandic hrosshvalr and havhest traditions. As Bernard Heuvelmans explained, “The sea-serpent was rarely heard of except in Scandinavia. There it was considered as a real animal and elsewhere as a Norse myth.”77
Then everything changed. The man responsible was Erich Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen in Norway from 1747 to 1754. Pontoppidan was not only a highly placed clergyman, but also a reputable member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. For this reason, it made a splash when his two-volume Natural History of Norway boldly argued for the flesh-and-blood reality of “the Mer-maid, the great Sea snake, of several hundred feet long, and the Krake[n] whose uncommon size seems to exceed belief.”78 His advocacy for these creatures caught the imagination of the world. In particular, Pontoppidan’s sea serpent took off as a global popular mystery—igniting a scientific debate that would rage through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continue among cryptozoologists in the twentieth and twenty-first.
When Pontoppidan turned his considerable talents to the discussion of the sea serpent, the Norwegian coast remained “the only place in Europe visited by this strange creature.”79 But there, sea serpents were already an entrenched part of popular culture. For example, Pontoppidan quoted a treatment by the foremost Norwegian poet of the previous generation, Petter Dass:
The great Sea Snake’s the subject of my verse,
For tho’ my eyes have never yet beheld him,
Nor ever shall desire the hideous sight;
Yet many accounts of men of truth unstain'd,
Whose ev'ry word I firmly do believe,
Shew it to be a very frightful monster.
Many Norwegians accepted the reality of the sea serpent, while skeptics, who “are enemies to credulity, entertain so much the greater doubt about it.” Either way, by then everyone in Norway had heard of the legendary monster. As Pontoppidan reported, “I have hardly spoke with any intelligent person” who was not able to give “strong assurances of the existence of this Fish”—and to describe it.80 That sea serpents had become a widely familiar, culturally available explanation for ambiguous or unfamiliar sights at sea should have given Pontoppidan pause, but he seems not to have realized the implications. Instead, he built his case on the aggregate of sighting reports, just as cryptozoologists do, citing “creditable and experienced fishermen, and sailors, in Norway, of which there are hundreds, who can testify that they have annually
seen” sea serpents.81 He was impressed by the way in which eyewitnesses “agree very well in the general description,” adding that “others, who acknowledge that they only know it by report, or by what their neighbors have told them, still realize the same particulars.”82 This was a critical error. Pontoppidan treated cultural sea serpent lore as a confirmation of eyewitness testimony, rather than as a generator of sighting reports.
Be that as it may, some of the sightings were spectacular, leading the bishop to believe that sea serpents grew to a whopping 600 feet long. Witnesses also persuaded him that the necks of Norwegian serpents featured “a kind of mane, which looks like a parcel of sea-weeds hanging down to the water” (figure 5.17). Fifty years after Hans Lilienskiold first described the truly modern sea serpent, the hrosshvalr- and havhest-derived mane persisted as a key feature of the folk belief (and, by virtue of looking like seaweed, provided an obvious source for mistaken sightings).
This cultural DNA from the hippocamp is glaringly obvious in Pontoppidan’s primary case study: the sworn testimony of naval officer Lawrence de Ferry. As a science-minded scholar, Pontoppidan was a voracious seeker of information who combed the literature, wrote letters, and questioned widely along the docks. “Last Winter,” he wrote,
I fell by chance in conversation on this subject with captain Lawrence de Ferry … who said he doubted a great while, whether there was any such creature, till he had the opportunity of being fully convinced, by ocular demonstration, in the year 1746. Though I had nothing material to object, still he was pleased, as a further confirmation of what he advanced, to bring before the magistrates, at a late sessions in the city of Bergen, two sea-faring men, who were with him in the boat when he shot one of these monsters.83
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