The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  To be fair to von Däniken and The Morning of the Magicians, it must also be admitted that Hapgood’s carefully argued analysis of the portolans does offer some support for the “ancient astronaut” theory. The Oronteus Finaeus map does look as if it has been based on an aerial view. So does the 1550 Hadji Ahmed map of the world seen from above the North Pole. Moreover, it is still difficult to see how the lines and the vast drawings on the desert floor at Nazca could have been drawn by people who were unable to look down on them from the air – although primitive balloons would have been as effective as spacecraft for that purpose.

  But the theories that have appealed to Hapgood’s findings for support (including those based on the Oera Linda Book, discussed in chapter 39) cannot be regarded as evidence either for or against his findings. All that is quite certain is that Hapgood’s evidence for an ancient maritime civilization that preceded any of those we know is virtually incontrovertible.

  50

  Sea Monsters

  Unknown Giants of the Deep

  On 10 October 1848, the Times of London carried the following report: “When the Daedalus, frigate, Captain M’Quhae, which arrived on the 4th inst., was on her passage from the East Indies between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, her captain, and most of her officers and crew, at four o’clock one afternoon, saw a sea serpent”.

  The report brought a flood of angry letters from naval men who felt that the Times was failing in its duty to the public by printing such rubbish. Understandably, the public took a different view, and newspapers all over the country seized upon the story. A conference was hastily called at the Admiralty, which concluded that an immediate investigation was required.

  The first step was to contact Captain Peter M’Quhae, to find out whether there any substance to the story. To the embarrassment of Admiral Sir W. Gage, who was in charge of the investigation, M’Quhae replied that despite certain glaring inaccuracies, the Times story was essentially correct: he had indeed seen a sea monster. He had noted the event in the ship’s log and had planned to report the incident through normal channels.

  His story was as follows: At five o’clock on 6 August 1848, while the Daedalus was between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, one of the midshipmen reported a strange creature swimming slowly toward them off the starboard bow. Most of the crew were at supper, and there were only seven men on deck, including the captain, the watch officer, and the ship’s navigator. All of them witnessed what M’Quhae described as “an enormous serpent” – judged to be about 100 feet long – as it swam in a straight line past the frigate, apparently oblivious to its existence. The captain judged it to be travelling at around twelve to fifteen miles an hour and described how it had remained within the range of their spyglasses for nearly twenty minutes. Although the afternoon was showery and dull, M’Quhae stated that it was still bright enough to see the creature clearly and that it swam close enough that “had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye”.

  He described the large, distinctly snakelike head projecting just above the waves on a neck about fifteen inches thick, followed by sixty feet or so of serpentine back, which crested above the surface of the water. The colour was uniformly dark brown, apart from the throat, which was a yellowish white. To M’Quhae it seemed to slip through the water effortlessly, without the aid of fins or the undulatory swimming typical of snakes and eels. This odd fact may be explained by a mane of hair or seaweed that ran along its back and that may have obscured its means of propulsion. At no point did the creature open its mouth to reveal “large jagged teeth” (as the Times had reported). The witnesses had all agreed that it appeared neither frightened nor threatening but rather that it was traveling forward “on some determined purpose”. M’Quhae had made a sketch of the creature which, at the admiral’s request, he converted into a larger drawing to accompany his statement.

  To the credit of the Admiralty, it quickly made the controversial report publicly available. On 13 October the Times printed the report in full, and fifteen days later the Illustrated London News printed several pictures of the “Daedalus sea serpent” based on M’Quhae’s drawing. The “purposeful” sea monster became a subject of sometimes heated national debate.

  The other six witnesses named by M’Quhae backed his version of events, but it was clear from the outset that there was some difference of opinion on details. The magazine Zoologist published an extract from the journal of the watch officer, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, covering the day of the sighting. Drummond had judged the head to be about ten feet long – rather large for a sixteen-inch neck to support. He estimated the visible part of the body at about twenty feet long, and although he mentioned that the captain claimed to see another twenty feet of tail just beneath the surface, this still came short of M’Quhae’s estimate of sixty feet of wave-cresting body. Drummond also disagreed about what his captain referred to as a “mane” on the creature’s back, preferring to describe it as some sort of dorsal fin.

  Few skeptics were rude enough to accuse the witnesses of being downright liars, but many hinted that this was their view. One wrote to the Times asking why M’Quhae did not order his men to put about and give chase to the creature. Another, perhaps with tongue in cheek, demanded why he had not fired a broadside at it.

  A more useful contribution to the discussion was a letter in the Literary Gazette that pointed out that the description of the Daedalus monster was remarkably like that of a sea serpent described by the Danish Bishop Pontoppidan in his influential zoological study, A Natural History of Norway (1753). It continued: “One might fancy the gallant Captain had read the old Dane, and was copying him, when he tells of the dark brown colour and white about the throat, and the neck clothed as if by a horse’s mane or a bunch of sea-weed, the exact words of the historian”. Through all this M’Quhae maintained a dignified silence. It took the intervention of one of Europe’s leading men of science to persuade him to comment.

  Sir Richard Owen, curator of the Hunterian Museum, an anatomist, naturalist, and paleontologist of immense reputation, came forward to lead the crusade of Daedalus sea-serpent debunkers. Owen was considered by many people to be the greatest living authority on zoology. Pugnaciously conservative, he would later become Darwin’s most bitter and most venomous opponent.

  Owen began by sending the Times a copy of a lengthy letter he had written to a friend who had inquired whether the Daedalus sea serpent might not be a survival of the Saurian age – one of the most popular theories that had emerged during the controversy. Owen dismissed M’Quhae’s suggestion that the creature was a giant sea snake, implying that the captain should leave scientific deductions to the experts. After a careful consideration of M’Quhae’s statement, Owen came to the conclusion that the creature was almost certainly a mammal of some sort, and – since his analysis was based on the preconceived idea that the sighting was of some species already known to science – he went on to suggest one that might fit the bill: the Phoca proboscidea or sea elephant. (The level of Owen’s expertise on sea serpents may be judged from his remark that alligators are often encountered by vessels at sea; in fact, alligators are relatively weak swimmers and cannot even live in turbulent stretches of river.)

  The sea elephant is, in fact, an enormous seal (it may grow to twenty feet in length) that is native to the seas around Antarctica. Owen’s suggestion was that one of these creatures might have been swept north on an iceberg, from which it would swim periodically to eat fish. When the ice melted, it would have been forced to swim until its strength gave out. Perhaps, he wrote, it was dying when the Daedalus encountered it, thus explaining its lack of interest in them. In his opinion, what M’Quhae had mistaken as a forty-foot stretch of semisubmerged reptilian body was, in fact, the turbulence its horizontal tail made as it swam along in a straight line. The “mane” that the captain noted was, Owen pointed out, typical of bull sea elephants – also known as Anderson’s sea lions. He then went on
to deny the existence of all sea serpents on the grounds that science had found no evidence of them and concluded with the assertion: “A larger body of evidence from eye-witnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of sea-serpents”.

  In a letter to the Times M’Quhae replied, a little testily, that the creature seen that day had not been a sea elephant, which he would have quickly recognized, or for that matter a seal of any kind. As an experienced sailor he was quite capable of telling the difference between water turbulence and the passage of a large, solid body. He also insisted that he had not heard of the account of a sea serpent given by Bishop Pontoppidan until it had been mentioned by the Literary Gazette correspondent and that therefore it could not have influenced him to embroider the account of what he had seen.

  Finally, he ended by stating categorically that there had been no hysterical excitement among the witnesses and that he himself was certain that no kind of optical illusion could have misled them about the details given in the report. His statement, he concluded, would stand as it was “until some more fortunate opportunity shall occur of making a closer acquaintance with the ‘great unknown’ – in the present instance assuredly no ghost”. The letter was his final word on the controversy, and its general tone was one of a man sick to death of the whole subject.

  Ten years after the Daedalus sighting, a Captain Frederic Smith wrote to the Times describing how his lookout on the Pekin had sighted what they took to be a sea serpent with a “huge head and neck, covered with a long shaggy-looking kind of mane”, but that had proved to be a twenty-foot length of seaweed. The letter ended by concluding that the Daedalus serpent was almost certainly a piece of seaweed as well. This drew a reply from an officer of the Daedalus in which he stated that the “serpent” was “beyond all question a living animal, moving rapidly through the water”. He went on to describe how they had observed it at close quarters for some time. Again, the circumstantial details of the report are impressive.

  At least the British Admiralty indicated their belated support for M’Quhae’s story by placing his report in their official records, the first such claimed sighting to be dignified in this way.

  In fact, there had been dozens of sightings of sea serpents before 1848 – Bernard Huevelmans’s book In the Wake of the Sea Serpents (1968) lists about 150 between 1639 and 1848. The 1639 sighting is secondhand, but there are dozens of other reports that are as circumstantial as M’Quhae’s. For example, Captain George Little, of the frigate Boston, described how, in May 1740, he was lying in Broad Bay, off Maine, when “I discovered a large Serpent or monster coming down the Bay, on the surface of the water”. A cutter full of armed men went off to take a closer look, but “when within a hundred feet . . . the serpent dove. He was not less than from 45 to 50 feet in length; the largest diameter of his body, I should judge, 15 inches; his head nearly the size of a man, which he carried four or five feet above the water. He wore every appearance of a common black snake”.

  Huevelmans quotes 587 sightings between 1639 and 1966. One of the 1966 sightings was made by two Englishmen, John Ridgeway and Chay Blyth. Ridgeway wrote in A Fighting Chance:

  I was shocked to full wakefulness by a swishing noise to starboard. I looked out into the water and suddenly saw the writhing, twisting shape of a great creature. It was outlined by the phosphorescence in the sea as if a string of neon lights were hanging from it. It was an enormous size, some thirty-five feet or more long, and it came towards me quite fast. . . . It headed straight at me and disappeared right beneath me. . . . I was frozen with terror at this apparition.

  And Huevelmans concludes his chapter – and his sightings – with a report by two vacationers near Skegness in eastern England, who saw “something like the Loch Ness monster” a hundred yards out to sea: “It had a head like a serpent and six or seven pointed humps trailing behind”.

  Huevelmans goes on to quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as saying that if one okapi had been shot in Africa, its existence might be doubted. If ten men shoot an okapi, the evidence would be strong. If fifty men shoot one, “it would become convincing”. So 587 sightings – even if some are dismissed as fraud or genuine mistakes – undoubtedly deserve to be classified as convincing. Huevelmans then analyses the sightings and classifies them into seven basic types: the “super-otter”, with a flat head and long, otterlike body; the many-humped serpent, with its row of regular humps; the many-finned serpent, with pointed projections along both sides; the merhorse, a creature with a mane; the long-necked serpent, with a long, slender neck like a prehistoric diplodocus; and the “super-eels”, which resemble giant snakes. He toys with a classification called the “Father-of-all-the-turtles” – looking, as one might suppose, like a giant turtle – but finally dismisses it as suspect and doubtful. The first five he believes to be mammals, while the super-eel – on the evidence of body fragments – seems to be a fish.

  Bishop Pontoppidan, whom we have already encountered, was not the first to describe the sea serpent. As early as 1539 a Swedish bishop named Olaf Mansson (Latinized as Olaus Magnus) published in Venice a map of the north that clearly showed two sea serpents. And in a History of the Goths, Swedes, and Vandals, published in 1555, he describes a “serpent 200 feet long and 20 feet thick” that lives in the sea caves off Bergen. This story, accompanied by terrifying pictures of serpents devouring ships, was cited by many subsequent encyclopedists. Two hundred years later Bishop Pontoppidan devoted a chapter of his Natural History of Norway to various monsters, including the sea serpent, the kraken, and the mermaid. In the case of the sea serpent he took the trouble to obtain a firsthand account by one Captain Lorenz von Ferry, who ordered a boat to pursue the creature, and was able to describe in some detail the horselike head with a white mane and black eyes, and the many coils or folds – he thought there were seven or eight, with about a fathom (six feet) between each fold.

  The main interest of Pontoppidan’s comments at this juncture is that his book aroused considerable skepticism in Britain when it was translated in 1765 and that a Captain (later Admiral) Charles Douglas, who tried to find out what he could about such monsters, took a distinctly skeptical view of the evidence of some witnesses. Oddly enough, he recorded that while many Norwegians believed in the existence of “Stoor worms” (sea worms), they were inclined to dismiss the kraken, a giant octopus, as a myth. And it continued to be dismissed as a myth until its existence was finally accepted by science in the 1970s. The legends of the kraken – a vast octopoid monster that sometimes attacked swimmers, ships, and even coastal villages – can be traced back as far as the ancient Roman scholar Pliny, who described a “polyp” with thirty-foot-long arms that climbed ashore to steal fish being salted at Carteia in Spain and that was killed only after a violent encounter. Yet it should be noted that just about every seagoing culture in the world has had its equivalent of the kraken myth.

  By comparison, Bishop Pontoppidan’s kraken seemed relatively harmless. He notes that local fishermen had discovered that there was a certain place off the coast of Norway where the recorded depth of eighty to one hundred fathoms would at times diminish to twenty or thirty fathoms, and that during these times the sea around would become turbid and muddy and the fishing in the area spectacularly abundant. This, they believed, was due to the kraken, a vast tentacled beast a mile and a half in circumference, which swam up from the seabed and attracted the fish by venting its excrement. The monster posed no danger to men provided they removed their boats from the area before it came to the surface. This kraken seemed to be curiously passive – it looked like a group of surfacing islands interconnected by a weedlike substance and surrounded by waving “horns”, some “as high and as large as the masts of middle-siz’d vessels”. After eating its fill of the fish “beached” on its immense bulk, it would sink to the bottom again.

  By the end of the eighteenth century science had dismissed such creatures as mythical. But the large number of nineteenth-century sightings of sea serpents off the coast of Am
erica began to erode the skepticism, while huge sucker marks found on sperm whales, and fragments of enormous tentacles found in their stomachs, made it clear that the giant squid was no myth either.

  In November 1861 crewmen on the French gunboat Alecton saw a giant squid near Tenerife and tried to harpoon it. The creature was clearly dying, since they were able to slip a noose around it; but it broke in two as they tried to heave it aboard. The squid was about twenty-four feet long, and the mouth measured eighteen inches across. The Alecton arrived at Tenerife with enough of the monster to leave no possible doubt of its existence, and an account of it was read before the French Academy of Sciences on 30, December 1861. Yet a zoologist named Arthur Mangin still expressed disbelief and wanted to know why the creature had not simply dove below the surface. It was more likely, he thought, that everybody concerned in the report was a liar.

  But in the 1870s so many giant squids expired on the beaches of Newfoundland and Labrador that it became impossible to doubt their existence. And in 1896 an enormous though mutilated corpse was washed up on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida, and photographed and examined by Dr DeWitt Webb. It took four horses, six men, and a block and tackle to move the six- or seven- ton bulk farther up the beach. The experts decided that it was a dead whale. But seventy-five years later, scientific examination of the few pieces that had been preserved demonstrated that it was a giant octopus (not a squid) that must have been about 200 feet across – big enough that its bulk would have occupied most of Picadilly Circus or Times Square.

  Fortunately, actual encounters with such monsters have been rare. But some of the most vivid accounts date from the Second World War. On 25, March 1941 in a remote part of the South Atlantic, the Allied vessel Britannia was attacked by a German raider flying the Japanese flag. The Germans fired on the vessel until she was ablaze, then gave the crew five minutes to abandon ship before they sank her. Because the Britannia had an insufficient number of lifeboats, many of the crew found themselves clinging to fragile rubber rafts in the open ocean, hundreds of miles from land and well off the normal shipping lanes. One of these was overloaded with twelve exhausted men, among whom were Lieutenants Rolandson and Davidson of the Royal Navy and Lieutenant R. E. Grimani Cox of the Indian Army, who survived to give an account of their experiences.