The channel at this point is about 500 yards wide. Swimming to the steep rocks of the island opposite, the creature shot its head out of the water on to the rock, and moving its head from side to side, appeared to be taking its bearings. Then fold after fold of its body came to the surface. Towards the tail it appeared serrated, like the cutting edge of a saw, with something moving flail-like at the extreme end. The movements were like those of a crocodile. Around the head appeared a sort of mane, which drifted round the body like kelp.191
Kemp estimated that the animal was more than 60 feet long. Although it was indistinct with distance—it was at least 1,200 feet away, maybe 1,500—this was no fleeting sighting. According to Kemp, he and his family watched the monster for several minutes before it slid off the rocks and swam away.
What was it? It seems to me like a group of sea lions among the distant kelp, viewed at too great a distance and interpreted with too great a dollop of imagination. The interesting question is: Whose imagination?
Kemp’s description may provide a clue. Despite the copycat sightings and editorial assumptions that gave Cadborosaurus its canonical appearance as a hippocamp-type sea serpent, and despite Kemp’s inclusion of the traditional “mane … like kelp,” his description was as much like that of a dinosaur as a sea serpent. The wash thrown up by the monster, he said, gave the impression that it was “more reptile than serpent to make so much displacement.” He added, “It did not seem to belong to the present scheme of things, but rather to the Long Ago when the world was young.”192
Responding to the Kemps’ sighting, one letter to the editor of the Victoria Daily Times offered an opinion that Caddy might be a sauropod dinosaur called Diplodocus. The writer noted Caddy’s long neck and long tail, and called it “probable that it has legs with webbed feet with which it propels itself.”193 Kemp seized on the dinosaur idea with enthusiasm: “Diplodocus describes better what we saw than anything else. My first feelings on viewing the creature were of being transferred to a prehistoric period when all sorts of hideous creatures abounded.” He said that the creature’s movements “were not fishlike, but rather more like the movement of a huge lizard.”194 Kemp drew a sketch of the half-submerged monster that was consistent with the appearance of a sauropod: long neck, rounded body, and long tail (figure 5.29). He explained that “the body must have been very bulky. From the movements I firmly believe the creature had flippers or some kind of legs.”195
This combination of elements—a swimming sauropod dinosaur and the notion of being transported to a prehistoric world full of terrible monsters—is very familiar. It is reminiscent of another sauropod swimming in another primal environment teeming with hideous creatures: the Diplodocus or Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) that attacks the crew of the Venture on King Kong’s perilous Skull Island!
Figure 5.29 The “huge lizard” reported by Fred Kemp. (This drawing, done in 1933, is identified in Archie Wills’s notes as having been “made by an artist,” but it closely resembles a rougher sketch identified as “Mr. Kemp’s original sketch,” in Bruce S. Ingram, “The Loch Ness Monster Paralleled in Canada, ‘Cadborosaurus,’” Illustrated London News, January 6, 1934.) (Image courtesy of University of Victoria Archives, Archie H. Wills fonds [AR394, 4.3]; see also “Caddy,” Victoria Daily Times, October 20, 1933)
We have seen that the legend of the Loch Ness monster was created immediately after the release of King Kong and that George Spicer’s key Nessie sighting seems to have been lifted from that film. Could the movie also have inspired Kemp’s Cadborosaurus story? The time line certainly works: King Kong, it happens, opened in Victoria on May 20, 1933—less than five months before the birth of Cadborosaurus.196 It blew away moviegoers, scared the socks off viewers, and stuck in the memories of all who saw it. The similarity between Caddy and Kong may not be a smoking gun, but it is certainly suspicious.
If Kemp’s sighting story was sincere, it may well have been influenced by the film. After all, he told no one about his astonishing brush with a gigantic super-monster at the time that it allegedly occurred—speaking up only the following year, months after the release of King Kong. His sighting, he admitted, was extremely uncertain because of the tremendous distance involved. He could not make out the key details. For example, the creature’s head was just a blob. If the sighting occurred at all, it is likely that he saw a distant group of marine mammals swimming and climbing on the rocks (as is entirely typical in the area) and plausible that Hollywood may have contaminated his already vague impressions of what he had seen.
If, however, the story was completely invented at a date close to its first publication, the influence of the recently screened King Kong would be even easier to explain. (There are thin but tantalizing hints that the case could be a hoax. In 1950, for example, Maclean’s quoted Kemp as claiming that Cadborosaurus had super-speed: “‘I wouldn’t like to say how fast he travels, people might laugh.’ But he added under persuasion, ‘Only a bullet would travel anywhere near as fast!’”197 There’s also Wills’s recollection, “We convinced several noted citizens to lend their names to a story stating they had seen the marine creature.”198 This probably refers to the reluctance of sincere witnesses to go on record, although Wills did make this remark in the context of generating a media sensation on purpose. For now, I will assume that Kemp’s story was probably sincere, although, of course, completely anecdotal.)
Where does this leave Cadborosaurus? Could it be that the entire legendary edifice—the subsequent sightings, the books and television programs, the public sculpture, and the place in popular culture—rests on a foundation of smoke and the flickering screen of a cinema?
Caddy as a Going Concern
Questionable as Caddy’s origin story may be, enthusiasts continue to advocate for and seek the creature, which means that the hippocamp-type Great Sea Serpent of the North Atlantic remains a going concern in cryptozoology. This may come as a surprise to some readers, but there it is.
An effort called CaddyScan, for example, uses digital-camera traps to record passing wildlife in the hope of catching evidence of Cadborosaurus. The British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club (of which I am a member) records and reports on new sightings as they come in. Honestly, I dig all that. As a lifelong Cadborosaurus fan, I find myself pleased that people are still searching. I also find it easy to appreciate the reasons—good and bad—that people find the mystery compelling.
To start with one of the weakest, it is occasionally pointed out in the monster’s defense that Caddy was included in the Guide to Marine Life of British Columbia, published by the Royal British Columbia Museum. Written by G. Clifford Carl, the guide does indeed include Cadborosaurus, but the minuscule listing is clearly tongue in cheek. (Caddy’s total length is described as “variable, depending upon circumstances or condition of observer,” while its status is listed as “Questionable.”)199 This humorous approach is not surprising. As Archie Wills said, recalling his deliberate manufacture of a popular-culture monster legend, “Even Dr. Clifford Carl, director of the Provincial Museum, went along with the idea; knowing that world-wide coverage would prove beneficial to Victoria’s tourist trade.”200 As Maclean’s described him, Carl was a fan of the Caddy character (call him a willful agnostic), but hardly a believer in its biological reality: “‘I’m all for Caddy myself,’ says Dr. Carl. ‘I don’t want to see him (or her, or it, or them) exposed. And if Caddy by some strange chance does actually exist it would be a pity to capture him, stuff him and put him on view in some museum.’”201 (In fact, Carl created one light-hearted Caddy hoax himself. When the Victoria Daily Times offered a cash reward for a photograph of Caddy in 1951, the first, comically fake entry came from Carl.)202
A much better argument is that sea monsters are inherently plausible in light of both the available habitat and the fossil record. There’s an awful lot of ocean out there—room to hide any number of large aquatic creatures and perhaps even air-breathing vertebrates. The rates of discovery for
new species can be plausibly extrapolated to estimate the number of discoveries remaining to be made, although not with any great certainty. For example, when applying various means of extrapolation to the question, “How many extant pinniped species [seals and relatives] remain to be described?” Michael Woodley, Darren Naish, and Hugh Shanahan arrived at estimates as high as fifteen and as low as zero.203 (The number of pinnipeds left to be discovered is especially relevant because the mainstream of cryptozoological thought now favors the hypothesis that undiscovered, long-necked seals lie behind many sea serpent sightings.) Finally, the coincidence that mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and other large marine reptiles existed in the geologic past remains as seductive today as it was in 1848.
Another reason that the argument for the existence of Cadborosaurus appears compelling is that sightings continue. In 2010, for example, cryptozoologist John Kirk reported a personal sighting of a Cadborosaurus with a cow-like head swimming in the wide Fraser River (within a few miles of the point where the Fraser empties into the Strait of Georgia, near Vancouver).204 Also in 2010, reports emerged of a tightly guarded video of Cadborosaurus that became part of the reality-television series Alaskan Monster Hunt.205 As flimsy as it may appear to skeptics, the continuing accumulation of eyewitness accounts builds up to a “mountain of evidence” that proponents find unparsimonious to reject. (Skeptics may bend over backward to explain all these cases, runs the argument, but c’mon! Surely the simplest explanation is that these people saw what they said they saw!) Here we must note once again that many people do mistake ordinary phenomena for sea serpents and repeat Richard Owen’s observation that a “larger body of evidence, from eye-witnesses, might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the seaserpent.”206 Mountains of anecdotal testimony exist for many paranormal beliefs that cryptozoologists would reject—but, of course, this does nothing to make anecdotes in favor of their own favorite mysteries seem less compelling.
For those who pursue Cadborosaurus, however, the most powerful piece of evidence is something known as the Naden Harbour carcass (figure 5.30). Found in 1937 in the stomach of a sperm whale processed at the Naden Harbour Whaling Station in Haida Gwaii (a large cluster of Canadian islands near the Alaska Panhandle that were known as the Queen Charlotte Islands until 2010), this long, unidentified biological specimen seemed odd to the whalers. They photographed the specimen. As a result of those photographs, generations of cryptozoologists and critics alike have been compelled to share the whalers’ impression: it looks really weird. Moreover—and this has sailed, if not a thousand ships, at least some flights of fancy—it looks somewhat like Cadborosaurus. Or, rather, it looks superficially similar to the features that the hypothetical Cadborosaurus is alleged to possess—the features of a hippocamp.
Figure 5.30 The unidentified carcass recovered from the stomach of a sperm whale at the Naden Harbour Whaling Station in Haida Gwaii in 1937. (Image I-61404 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)
In 1992, that resemblance provoked leading Cadborosaurus proponents Edward Bousfield and Paul LeBlond to formally propose in a scientific paper that the Naden Harbour carcass be considered the type specimen for a new species to be recognized as Cadborosaurus willsi.207 Although this naming followed the lead of Clifford Carl, whose Guide to Marine Life of British Columbia had jokingly dubbed the creature “Cadborosaurus (Wills),” Bousfield and LeBlond were widely criticized for having taken this step. Despite being friendly to cryptozoology in principle, paleontologist and science writer Darren Naish pointed out that this taxonomic leap put the cart before the sea horse:
Firstly, establishing a new species on the basis of a photo is just not acceptable: article 72(c)(v) of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature states that the actual specimen figured or described, and not the illustration or description, must serve as the holotype. The name Cadborosaurus willsi, based on a photograph and not the specimen it depicts, therefore has no official standing and should be ignored.208
Worse, according to Naish, was that “the number of speculations that Bousfield and LeBlond included within the paper are inappropriate for a work masquerading as a technical description, never mind the fact that those speculations were fantastic and logically flawed.” Naish noted some oddities that also had leaped out at me. According to Bousfield and LeBlond, Caddy’s very long body (which should have a lot of drag as it moves through the water and, therefore, be slow) can be reconciled with the extremely high speeds attributed to it by witnesses if it bunches itself up into a series of loops that approximate the torpedo shape of a tuna. They also speculated that the beast’s famous (hippocamp-based) mane may be “some gill-like, gas-exchange organ” able to extract oxygen from the water.209 A neat trick for an animal that Bousfield and LeBlond believe is a reptile—and an outright guess. “If these proposals sound nonsensical, or just extremely speculative and lacking in justification,” Naish concluded, “that’s because they are.”
Many cryptozoologists, though, applaud Bousfield and LeBlond for their forward-looking vision; even skeptics acknowledge that the risks they have taken require some serious guts.210 But why speculate at all? If the Naden Harbour carcass can settle the case, so much the better. So … where is it now? Well, that’s the problem. As LeBlond and Bousfield made clear in 1995, “Exactly how the carcass was disposed of or whether any part of it was preserved is not known.”211 One lead suggests that it was sent to the Pacific Biological Station at Nanaimo, British Columbia. However, LeBlond and Bousfield found that “nobody there knows anything about it.” Another possibility is that it was sent to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1937.212 When I contacted the museum to follow up on this lead, Jim Cosgrove had to disappoint me:
The fact is, we have no record of ever having received the specimen in the photograph from Naden Harbour nor do we have any record of the examination of the specimen or who would have done the necropsy. Lastly, we have no record of how the specimen was disposed of. Nothing appears in any of the Museum’s annual reports which were often remarkable documents of the previous year’s activities. In short we have no records of this specimen at all.213
And that’s it. That’s the beginning and end of the case of the Naden Habour carcass. Without the carcass (or material from it), there is no way to identify it.214 Cryptozoologists do not know what it was, as much as they would like to; I do not know what it was, for all that I wish I did. Could the photograph really show the carcass of a genuine Cadborosaurus? Sure. Why not? Unfortunately, it is lost to history. If, indeed, it was a Cadborosaurus, we can only mourn for the lost opportunity and hope that it comes again.
The Nature of Cadborosaurus
Why did Cadborosaurus appear in 1933? Local factors had to align to make it happen (Archie Wills’s personal creativity and sense of humor, economic hardship, and, of course, proximity to the water), but the release of King Kong and the resulting emergence of the Loch Ness monster earlier that year no doubt primed the pump.
But why did Caddy take the form that it did? On the simplest level, the nature of Cadborosaurus willsi is obvious: it is fakelore, a manufactured legend, an entertainment product created by regional media. (There is even a bogus Indian legend associated with the story.)215 On a deeper level, Caddy became a genuine cryptid—genuine in that people “see” it, making it a living part of twenty-first-century folk belief. And, at the deepest level, it is a modern descendent of the classical Greek artistic motif: the hippocamp.
Caddy’s namesake, Archie Wills (dubbed “Victoria newspaperman and fish story expert” by the Associated Press),216 conceived a popular mystery, and then he made it happen. Although he maintained a winking ambiguity in his writing, there is good reason to suspect that Wills did not believe in the serpent’s literal reality. When the New York Sun put the question to Wills directly, for example, he dodged—and yet also said it all. “It is not my function to dispute these eyewitnesses or to erect barriers impugning them,” Wills answered. “
News is news. The story attaching to this particular sea serpent belongs to The [Victoria Daily] Times wherever it turns up. When Caddy goes out of his way to call at this port, we shall continue to treat him as front page material for all he is worth.”217 When Paul LeBlond and John Sibert contacted Wills in 1970 to solicit his help in building a scientific case for the creature, Wills politely responded that “the best success is found in writing stories with ‘tongue in cheek.’ I have always found that ‘Caddy’ appeared here when morale was low, for instance, in 1933, when the Depression was bad.” Wills wished the men “good luck in your quest for knowledge,” but warned, “In view of the fact that you wish to be factual and actually prove the existence of the species, maybe my collaboration would be a handicap.”218
Be that as it may, Wills deserves his reputation as Caddy’s godfather. As a result of the publicity he gave it, many other people certainly do believe in Cadborosaurus. And as skeptics know all too well, believing is seeing. “Expectant attention” has been known by psychologists since the nineteenth century, and its role in the paranormal has been discussed since at least 1852 (when William Carpenter invoked the combination of expectant attention and what he coined as “the ideo-motor principle” in order to explain the action of dowsing rods).219 Cryptozoologists acknowledge this problem. As Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe explained, the human propensity for simple mistakes of perception is amplified by “psychological contagion—if people are told to look for monsters, they will see them.”220 The Caddy database contains fairly obvious hoaxes (such as the yarn that Jack Nord told about shooting at a 110-foot serpent with 8-inch fangs at a range of a mere 35 yards),221 but also many sincere sighting reports. We have looked at several sources of false-positive misidentification errors—such as sea lions, waterfowl, seaweed, and boat wakes—and I may add just one more: elephant seals. Sometimes found in the waters (and on the beaches) off Victoria,222 these 16foot giants are rarely seen and unfamiliar to most locals, and they bear an intriguing resemblance to the hypothetical Cadborosaurus. Depending on ambient conditions, they may appear black, brown, gray, or even green, and (most interestingly) the bulbous noses of male elephant seals give them an exaggerated, camel-like profile.
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