The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  They had no food or water and no shelter from the sun. To avoid swamping the raft they had to take turns hanging precariously from its sides, where they had no defense against the attacks of Portuguese men-of-war, which Cox later described as “stinging like a million bees”. By the second day some of the men had become delirious; on the third the sharks started to close in. For three days the wounded and thirst-maddened survivors were picked off one by one. Then, to the sailors’ joy, the circling sharks suddenly disappeared.

  One of the survivors gazed into the ocean depths and saw, to his horror, a huge shape surfacing beneath them. An enormous tentacled creature surfaced beside them and flailed its “arms” over the raft. It grabbed an Indian sailor, “hugging him like a bear”, and dragged him into the sea. Satisfied with its prey it moved off but later renewed its attack. Lieutenant Cox’s arm was badly mauled by a grasping tentacle, but this time the sailors managed to fight it off. Several days later Cox, Rolandson, and Davidson, the only survivors of the original twelve, were rescued by a Spanish ship.

  When, in 1943, Cox was examined by the British biologist, Dr John L. Cloudsley-Thompson, the latter observed a number of circular scars on Cox’s arm showing that disks of skin and flesh, each measuring about one and a quarter inches in diameter, had at some time been savagely gouged out of it. In Cloudsley-Thompson’s opinion the injuries closely resembled those made by the serrated suckers of a squid; and from their size he deduced that the squid in question would have had to have been approximately twenty-three feet long. Richard Owen and his fellow skeptics would have regarded this as a monster of unprecedented proportions, but the only surprise for Cloudsley-Thompson was that a giant squid so “small” could abduct a full-grown man.

  Another account of a giant squid also dates from the war years. J. D. Starkey describes how he would lower a cluster of electric bulbs over the side of an Admiralty trawler to attract fish, which could then be easily caught. One night in the Indian Ocean he found himself gazing at a “green unwinking eye”. Shining a powerful torch into the water, Starkey saw tentacles two feet thick. He walked the length of the ship, studying the monster, with its parrotlike beak, and realized that it had to be more than 175 feet long. The squid remained there for about fifteen minutes; then “as its valve opened fully . . . without any visible effort it zoomed into the night”.

  The major problem, as far as science is concerned, is that it seems virtually impossible to study sea monsters in their natural habitat. Like the notorious Loch Ness monster, they seem oddly shy. One student of “lake monsters”, the late Ted Holiday, even came to believe that some of them must be regarded as paranormal phenomena – a conclusion he reached because of his observation that some of the lakes in which monsters have been observed are too small to support a large creature. Holiday’s encounters with the Loch Ness monster also developed in him a conviction that it seemed to have a sixth sense about when it could show itself without danger of being photographed.

  Another “monster watcher” – Tony “Doc” Shiels – reached a similar conclusion. In 1975 and 1976 there were many sightings of a sea monster off Falmouth, in Cornwall; it was christened “Morgawr”, meaning “Cornish giant”. Shiels succeeded in taking an excellent photograph of Morgawr, which had the same “plesiosaur-like” shape as the Loch Ness monster – a long neck and a bulky body with “humps” on the back. Shiels subsequently went to Loch Ness and immediately succeeded in snapping two photographs of the monster. But his book Monstrum, subtitled A Wisard’s Tale, makes it clear that he believes that his own monster-sightings have involved some kind of encounter with the world of the paranormal.

  This need not imply that creatures like Morgawr and “Nessie” are ghosts, as Holiday was at one point inclined to believe. It may merely imply that they possess highly developed telepathic powers that have enabled them, thus far, to avoid the monster-hunters with considerable success. Which in turn may imply that those who wish to study them must also possess such powers.

  The mystery of the underwater monsters is still far from solved. But at least there is now enough evidence to make it clear that Olaus Magnus and Bishop Pontoppidan deserve an apology.

  51

  Who Was Shakespeare?

  Early in 1616, a respectable middle-class gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon decided it was time to make his will; a few months later in April he died, apparently after a drinking bout with two old friends from London, the playwrights Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. And then, for a considerable time, he was more or less forgotten. Within seven years of his death, a monument was erected to him in the parish church. In 1656 the antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who was interested in coats of arms, reproduced an inaccurate sketch of it in his Antiquities of Warwickshire. It showed a gentleman with a drooping moustache, whose hands rested on a woolsack – a symbol of trade. Few people in Stratford seemed to be aware that this mournful-looking tradesman was a famous actor-playwright who had performed before Queen Elizabeth.

  More than a century later, in the 1770s, a clergyman named James Wilmot retired to his native Warwickshire, and devoted his declining years to the study of his two favourite writers, Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. Since the village of which he was now the rector – Barton-on-the-Heath – was only half a dozen miles from Stratford, he began making inquiries to find out if any stories and traditions of the great actor-playwright now survived in his native town. Apparently no one knew of any. But from the study of Shakespeare’s plays, Wilmot had concluded that he must have been a man of wide learning, and must therefore have possessed a considerable library. Over the course of many years he made diligent inquiries in the area, investigating small private libraries for fifty miles around. He found nothing whatever – not a single volume that might have belonged to Shakespeare. And finally he was struck by an astonishing conviction: that the man called Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him. The man who possessed all the qualifications for writing them was his other favourite author, Francis Bacon.

  Wilmot was apparently so overwhelmed by this realization – for by this time, Shakespeare was becoming recognized as one of the greatest of English playwrights – that he decided to keep his strange convictions to himself. But almost thirty years later, when he was eighty, some of his caution had evaporated. And when he was visited by an Ipswich Quaker in 1803 Wilmot finally revealed his embarrassing secret. The Quaker, James Cowell, was researching Shakespeare’s life because he had agreed to read a paper about him to his local philosophical society, and no standard biography had yet been published. Cowell was shaken, but more than half convinced. Two years later he read his paper on Shakespeare, and told his astonished fellow-townsmen about the remarkable old vicar and his alarming theories. The Ipswich philosophers were apparently “thrown into confusion”. Perhaps Wilmot heard about their reaction; at all events, he left instructions in his will that all his Shakespeare papers should be burnt, and this was duly carried out. And Cowell’s lecture lay undiscovered until more than a century later, when an eminent Shakespearian scholar described Wilmot in The Times Literary Supplement as “The first Baconian”.23 Professor Allardyce Nicoll did not intend it as a compliment, for he regarded the proponents of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare’s authorship as cranks.

  And why should anyone reach such an apparently eccentric conclusion? Why should the gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon not be the author of Hamlet and Lear, just as most people assumed he was? In fact the notion is not quite as absurd as it sounds. The most baffling thing about Shakespeare is the lack of actual connection between the “gentleman of Stratford” and the author of the plays. Shakespeare went to London in his twenties; within a few years he was a successful actor and playwright, and by the time he reached his mid-thirties (in 1601) he was one of the most popular writers of the time. The author of Coriolanus and The Tempest must have known he possessed genius – he says as much in sonnet 55, beginning:

  Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

&n
bsp; Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime.

  And when he returned to Stratford in his mid-forties he had become a wealthy man through the use of his talents. Is it conceivable that he did not even bother to take a single printed copy of any of his works with him – there were many extant – and that he even left behind in London the library he must have accumulated over the years? Of course, he may have done so – but in that case, what happened to them? Why are they not mentioned in his will?

  Shakespeare scholars reply that in Elizabethan times acting was not regarded as a particularly respectable profession – hardly more so than pimping – and that Shakespeare may have preferred to keep it to himself. This is true. But writers, then as now, were regarded as a cut above most other professions, and Shakespeare was also the author of the sonnets, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. The sonnets appeared in 1609, two years before he retired to Stratford – surely he would have taken a few copies with him to distribute to his friends and family? Surely he would have made sure that copies of his works went to his beloved daughter Susanna to whom he left most of his estate in the will, and to her husband, the distinguished physician Dr John Hall, who was later to refuse a knighthood from Charles I? Again, the scholars reply that he may well have done so, and that Shakespeare’s books simply vanished over the next fifty years or so – by which time admirers were beginning to show an interest in the playwright. It could be true, but it sounds somehow unlikely.

  The Rev. Wilmot had another reason for doubting that the gentleman of Stratford wrote the plays. They seem to reveal a man of wide learning and experience: a knowledge of medicine, law, botany and foreign countries, as well as of court life. Where would a butcher’s son from Stratford have the opportunity of gaining such knowledge? Francis Bacon, on the other hand – philosopher, essayist and Lord Chancellor – was known as one of the most erudite men of his time. . . .

  For Wilmot one of the main problems was that Shakespeare’s reputation had increased so much since his death that it was difficult to sort out the truth from the later legends. Until 1660 – when the theatres opened again after the Puritan interregnum – he remained half forgotten (although his collected plays had appeared in 1623). There was a Shakespeare revival during the Restoration, but his plays were “adapted” and almost totally rewritten. John Aubrey’s Brief Lives (1682) has an extremely “brief” life of Shakespeare – a mere two pages – in which he says that Shakespeare was a butcher’s son, and that he would make dramatic speeches when he had to kill a calf. By that time the Stratford vicar John Ward had noted in his diaries (1661–3) the legend about Shakespeare dying after a drinking bout with Jonson and Drayton. By 1670 Shakespeare’s reputation with the playgoing public was as high as it had been in 1600, and unscrupulous booksellers were getting rid of all kinds of old plays by declaring they were by Shakespeare. The “Shakespeare boom” was largely the work of Sir William Davenant, who was reputed to be Shakespeare’s godson – perhaps his son – and who devoted much of his life to reviving the reputation of his idol. The first Life of Shakespeare appeared in 1709, as the introduction to Nicholas Rowe’s six-volume edition of Shakespeare; Rowe obtained much of his information from the actor Thomas Betterton, another worshipper of the bard, who had made a pilgrimage to Stratford to collect stories and traditions in about 1708. It was Rowe who first printed the story about how Shakespeare fled from Stratford after being caught poaching the deer of Sir Thomas Lucy. From then on the legends multiplied: stories of carousing in Warwickshire villages – notably “drunken Bidford” – of rhymes about fellow-townsmen, of holding horses’ heads outside the theatre when he first came to London, of his love affairs, his appearances before Queen Elizabeth and King James, and dozens more. In 1769 Shakespeare was now regarded with such reverence that the burghers of Stratford decided to hold bicentenary celebrations, and asked the famous actor David Garrick to take charge of the Jubilee. (They were, in fact, five years too late – Shakespeare was born in 1564 – but no one seemed to mind this.) Shakespeare had already become a source of income to the tradesmen of Stratford. Rain spoiled the celebrations, and Garrick lost a small fortune; nevertheless, the Jubilee may be said to have established the “Shakespeare Industry” as Stratford’s chief source of income.

  But in the same year, 1769, Herbert Lawrence, a friend of Garrick’s, published an amusing allegory called The Life and Adventures of Common Sense which describes how a plausible rogue and habitual thief named Shakespeare stole some of the attributes of Wisdom, Genius and Humour and used them to write plays. It was not meant to be a serious accusation, but it seemed to demonstrate a mildly satirical attitude to the Shakespeare Industry. Soon after this the Rev. James Wilmot moved to Barton-on-the-Heath and began those researches that led him to conclude that Shakespeare’s real name was Francis Bacon. But when the Quaker James Cowell imparted these conclusions to the Ipswich Philosophical Society in 1803 he swore them to silence about the name of their author, and they seem to have kept their word.

  The absurd episode of the Ireland forgeries demonstrates the extent to which “Bardolatry” (as Shaw was to call it) had gained a foothold by the 1790s. Samuel Ireland, a prosperous author of travel books, worshipped Shakespeare, and allowed various tradesmen of Stratford to sell him a large number of Shakespeare relics, including a goblet carved from the mulberry tree planted in Shakespeare’s garden and the chair on which Shakespeare sat in his courting days. Ireland’s youngest son William craved his father’s affection, and began forging small Shakespeare items, such as a mortgage deed. His father’s greed led him finally to forge whole Shakespeare plays which for a while fooled many experts. The bubble finally burst in 1796, when Ireland’s play Vortigern was presented at Drury Lane; at the line: “And when this solemn mockery is ended” the audience burst into boos and jeers. When William finally confessed to the forgeries his father flatly refused to believe him, remaining convinced that such “works of genius” were beyond the powers of his untalented son. In the previous century there had been a far more sensible and balanced attitude – Samuel Pepys thought Twelfth Night “but a silly play” and A Midsummer Night’s Dream “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life”. By the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare was regarded as a godlike genius whose feeblest lines were regarded as beyond criticism. Matthew Arnold expressed this attitude of mindless worship in a sonnet that began:

  Others abide our question. Thou art free.

  We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,

  Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill

  That to the stars uncrowns his majesty . . . etc.

  It was probably this kind of uncritical veneration that lay at the root of the various heresies that began to spring up in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848 the American consul at Vera Cruz, Joseph C. Hart, wrote a book on The Romance of Yachting in which he paused to reflect: “Ah, Shakespeare – Immortal Bard – who were you”? And in the next thirty-five pages, Hart digresses from yachting to suggest the theory that the Stratford actor was merely a hack who inserted bawdy lines into plays that had been written by starving poets. In 1857 William Henry Smith published Bacon and Shakespeare in which he pointed out that nothing we know about Shakespeare indicates that he could be the author of the plays, while Bacon had all the necessary qualifications.

  He had already been anticipated by a brilliant and attractive American lady, Delia Bacon, who had started life as a schoolteacher, then become an author and lecturer. Her special subjects were history and literature, and her study of Shakespeare convinced her – for the reasons we have already discussed – that the retired actor of Stratford was an unlikely author for the plays. She became convinced that the evidence for Bacon’s authorship lay in England, probably in the tomb itself. She gained the support of that eminent Bostonian Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of a New York banker who admired Bacon, Charles Butler. She sailed for England in the spring of 1853, armed with an introduction to Carlyle from Emerson. Carlyle took to he
r at once and gave her support; so did Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was American consul in Liverpool. She spent three years living in lodgings and writing her book to prove that Bacon was Shakespeare. The publishers Chapman and Hall sent her a rejection note declining to have any part in “an attack on one of the most sacred beliefs of the nation and indeed of all nations” – a phrase that expresses the almost religious bigotry that had become typical of the British attitude to Shakespeare. In 1856 she moved to Stratford and charmed the clerk of the church into allowing her to spend some time locked alone in the church; but at the last minute her nerve failed her – or perhaps she was merely demoralized at the thought of trying to rip up the floor of the church and dig down seventeen feet, the reputed depth of the grave.

  In 1857, Delia Bacon finally brought out her Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded. (Hawthorne, with whom she had quarrelled, paid for it.) But it proved to be a confused and confusing book – it is not even clear whether her “suspect” is Bacon, Raleigh, Spenser, Sidney or the Earl of Oxford. Her main thesis was obviously absurd – that a group of enlightened scholars concocted the plays, using the Stratford actor as a “front”, in order to express convictions that might otherwise have led to imprisonment and torture. Reviewers were understandably scathing. After so many years of effort, Delia was shattered, and her mind gave way soon after. A nephew found her in a lunatic asylum, and took her back to New England, where she died at the age of forty-eight.