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The Sea-Serpent: Drevar

Captain Drevar follows Pontoppidan (probably unwittingly) in identifying the sea-serpent with the leviathan of Scripture, quoting Isaiah xxvii. 1, "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan, the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." As I read the above passage, it is the dragon that is in the sea, and not the leviathan, which should be identified with the sea-serpent, unless the two, dragon and leviathan, are in apposition, which does not seem to be the case.

These various narratives which I have collected are, for the most part, well attested by the signature, or declaration on oath, of well-known and responsible people. Captain Drevar, in the small pamphlet which he had printed for private circulation, says: "Does any thinking person imagine I could keep command over men with a deliberate lie in our mouths?" and a similar question may be asked, with, I think, the possibility of only one reply, in the case of the narratives of Captain MʻQuhe and other officers and commanders in various navies and merchant vessels, and of the numerous other reputable witnesses who have affirmed, either as a simple statement or on oath, that they have seen sundry remarkable sea-monsters. I used the expression, "I think," because, of course, there is the possibility of scepticism. "Authority, in matters of opinion, divides itself (say) into three principal classes: there is the authority of witnesses; they testify to matters of fact. The judgment upon these is commonly, though not always, easy; but this testimony is always the substitution of the faculties of others for our own, which, taken largely, constitutes the essence of authority. "This is the kind which we justly admit with the smallest jealousy. Yet not always; one man admits, another refuses, the authority of a sea-captain and a sailor or two on the existence of a sea-serpent." * I, for my part, belong to the former of these two categories. I believe in the statements that I have recorded, and in the following reasoning address only those who do likewise. That mistakes have occasionally occurred is undoubted. Mr. Gosse records two instances in which long patches of sea-weed so far excited the imagination of captains of vessels as to cause them to lower boats and proceed to the attack.

The credibility of ghost stories generally is much affected when supposed apparitions are investigated and traced to some simple cause; and the hypersceptical may argue on parallel grounds that the transformation, in some few instances, of a supposed sea-serpent into sea-weed, or the admission of the plausible suggestion that it has been simulated by a seal, a string of porpoises, or some other very ordinary animals, largely affects the whole question. And this would undoubtedly be the case if the conditions of the several examples were at all similar. But the hesitation or temporary misapprehension of captains or crews, in a thousand instances, as to the nature of a string of weed, supine on the surface, and lashed into fantastic motion by the surge of the ocean waves, has absolutely no bearing on the positive stories of a creature which is seen in calm fjords and bays to roll itself coil after coil, uplift its head high above the water, exhibit capacious jaws armed with teeth, conspicuous eyes, and paws or paddles, which pursues and menaces boats, presents a tangible object to a marksman, and when struck disappears with a mighty splash.

The probability of a gigantic seal, or of a string of por- * Nineteenth Century, March 1877, p. 20. Article on "Authority in Matters of Opinion," by G. Cornewall Lewis. Reviewed by W. E. Gladstone. poises, being mistaken for a sea-serpent by post-captains and their officers in the Navy is small, but becomes almost, if not quite, impossible when the observers are fishermen on coasts like those of Norway, who have been in the habit of seeing seals and porpoises almost every day of their lives. We may, therefore, freely grant that occasional mistakes have arisen, just as we have admitted that undoubtedly many hoaxes have been indulged in.

A rational and commonplace explanation is quite possible in some cases, as, for example, in that of a creature of abnormal appearance seen by the crew of Her Majesty's yacht, the Osborne, in the Mediterranean, which was suggested, with great probability, to have been, if I remember correctly, some species of shark; while the supposed seaserpent, washed up on the Isle of Stronsa, in 1808, proved, on scientific examination, to be a shark of the genus Selache, probably belonging to the species known as "the barking shark."

The great oceanic bone shark, known to few except whalers, which has been stated to reach as much as sixty feet in length, may also occasionally have originated a misconception; and there must be still remaining in the depths of the ocean undescribed species of fish, of bizarre form, and probably gigantic size, the occasional appearance of which would puzzle an observer.