Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids

One of the lessons of cryptozoological investigation is that most cryptids are brand-spanking new. The Loch Ness monster (a Hollywood spin-off) was born after my own grandmother. The modern Bigfoot legend premiered the same year as Leave It to Beaver. If the chupacabra (goat sucker) were a person, it would be in high school, the story of this vampiric cryptic from Puerto Rico being only as old as the sci-fi horror movie Species (1995), on which it was based.¹

But sea monsters are, if you will forgive me, a different kettle of fish. Descriptions of sea monsters are as old as written language. They appear in the Bible and in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even by the very strictest definition, the fully formed modern version of the Great Sea Serpent goes back at least to 1755, when Bishop Erich Pontoppidan’s book The Natural History of Norway made it a permanent part of global popular culture.

Over the past 250 years, sea serpents have enjoyed a unique level of support from the scientific community. They have been endorsed, discussed, or denounced by some of the great scientific minds in history, including such legendary pioneers of biology as Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen, and Thomas Henry Huxley. Developing alongside the evolution of paleontology and the discovery of dinosaurs and their marine-reptile cousins, the high-level debates about the reality of sea serpents that took place in learned journals and gas-lit parlors helped define the methods and borders of modern science.²

The idea of vast creatures sliding undetected through the abyss stirred my imagination deeply at a young age. How could it not? What kid could read a story like Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” (about a huge, ancient sea serpent drawn to a lighthouse) and not thrill to the idea that it could be true? Imagine such a primeval monster, as Bradbury did, “hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn’t that a word now … the Deeps. There’s all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.”³

Why, anything could be down there, couldn’t it?

But I had a very personal reason to think that sea serpents were just waiting out there to be discovered: my parents saw one, when I was a young child. I was raised as something of a nomad. My family lived in a silver travel trailer and spent winters on the beaches near Victoria, British Columbia. We just pulled in the trailer, and presto: home. On one of those beaches, my parents saw the twentieth century’s best-known regional version of the Great Sea Serpent: Victoria’s own Cadborosaurus. I’ll let my father tell the story as he remembers it—a story that has shaped my career to this day:

For years, I dreamed of just that. I scoured catalogues for monster-hunting equipment. I designed logos for my future Cadborosaurus expeditions. I got my local librarian to help me write to the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau. And today, bizarrely enough, I find myself in the professional position of actually investigating monsters (albeit skeptically). Through it all, it seemed—and still seems—perfectly plausible that a sea serpent–like animal could exist. Why not? The ocean is certainly big enough, and it is an exhilarating fact that many of its inhabitants remain completely unknown.

Could some sea serpent stories be true? As with other cryptid mysteries, the best place to start is at the beginning. How did the idea get started in the first place? How did it take the form that it did? Why, for example (and this deeply puzzled me as a kid), are classic sea serpents so often described with horse-like manes?

Why, of all things, would sea serpents have heads that resemble those of horses (or cows, sheep, or camels)?

Sea monsters are as old as literature—and for good reason! Imagine the ocean through the eyes of the ancients: endless, dark, and deadly. When brave warriors, traders, and fishermen ventured out over that alien abyss, they could only imagine what vast and terrible dangers stirred below. One thing they did know: sometimes the sea swallowed men. To ancient mariners, explains classical scholar Emily Vermeule, the sea was “more like a tightrope over an open tiger-pit than a safe road home.”⁶

Accordingly, the seas of the ancient imagination swarmed with a teeming variety of powerful, malevolent monsters. Many were inspired by true-life animals filtered through folklore, mythology, and the tales of travelers returned from distant lands. Even as these real and folkloric creatures were named, they also blended easily into one another. In particular, the dividing lines between sea monsters, whales, dragons, and snakes were fluid. Think of the biblical Leviathan: a primordial sea monster, yet simultaneously a dragon, but considered by many to be a whale. The book of Job emphasizes the fiery aspects of this vast (if vague) ocean-dwelling monster:

By contrast, writers and artists immersed in the coastal culture of the ancient Greeks faithfully described many dangerous, delightful, and delicious sea animals in detail. But whales, being relatively rare in the Mediterranean, were as hard to study as they were terrifying. As a result, no clearly identifiable, naturalistic Greek images of whales are known to exist.¹⁰ Instead, “sea monster” and “whale” were interchangeable concepts in early classical literature, with the same word, ketos, used for both. Ketos is the basis for the word “cetacean,” but it was not originally restricted to whales: it was an umbrella term for anything big and scary that lived in the sea, including whales, sharks, and tuna (figure 5.1).

Alongside the merman (Triton) and the hippocamp (a Capricorn-like creature whose body combines the front half of a horse with the back half of a fish, to which we will return), the ketos was one of the three standard sea monster types employed by Greek artists. As creative vase painters and sculptors explored the ketos form over many centuries, several varieties emerged. Many images of the ketos straightforwardly depict very big fish. Other artists imagined ketos monsters as grotesque hybrids: fishes with the heads of powerful terrestrial animals. Once this mix-and-match scheme became common, artists could combine creatures as creatively as they wished.¹¹ By the Hellenistic period (the three or four centuries following the continent-spanning conquests of Alexander the Great), sea monster art had become more light-hearted and fantastic. Artists were happy to try inventive depictions, as archaeologist Katharine Shepard notes: “We find for the first time in the Hellenistic period the sea-centaur, -bull, -boar, -stag, -lion, -panther and -pantheress.”¹²

Papadopoulos and Ruscillo describe a third style of ketos illustration, which is much more intriguing from a cryptozoological perspective: “An alternative manner of representing the ketos is as a large serpent-like creature: a snake by any other name. Like the big fish, a suitably massive snake was one, relatively straightforward, way of giving iconographic substance to a massive sea creature that was, above all else, mysterious and frightening.”¹³ This last sort of fantastic, vertically undulating beast included elements from the mutually blurry notions of dragons, fish, whales, and pythons (among other animals),¹⁴ but to the modern eye they scream “sea serpent.” Just look at that vertical undulation! Does this mean that the ancients did have knowledge of a genuine sea serpent 2,000 years before the modern legend emerged in Scandinavia?

Not so fast. It is very easy for modern audiences to be misled when interpreting out-of-context artworks from other times and other cultures. For example, UFOlogists who see “evidence” of flying saucers in medieval or Renaissance paintings mistakenly project their own expectations onto stylized depictions of clouds, the Holy Spirit, or even broad-brimmed hats.¹⁵ As it happens, the long, snaky, vertically undulating tails that make ketos images resemble our notion of sea serpents were not unique to those depictions. The same tails were used just as often for hippocamps and for mermen (figure 5.2). It is worth noting that while neither fish nor serpents move by means of vertical undulation, a wavy or an arched body is extremely handy for indicating sinuousness in profile images on vases or shallow relief sculptures. “Of course,” notes legendary cryptozoological writer Bernard Heuvelmans (one of the coiners of the word “cryptozoology”),¹⁶ “most primitive or childish pictures show snakes wriggling in the same way, but this is simply because it needs some skill in perspective to draw the side view of an animal that wiggles horizontally.”¹⁷

Is there reason to think that artists modeled the ketos on a genuine serpentine animal? No. The ketos may be widespread in classical art, but it cannot be used as evidence for the existence of a cryptid. As art historian and archaeologist John Boardman explains in an influential overview of the ketos, it is a wasted effort to speculate about “our beast’s relationship to real or imagined sea monsters since we can show that his creation is an artistic amalgam not much troubled by what swam or was thought to swim in the Mediterranean.”¹⁸ Moreover, it is clear that images of the ketos changed with the fashions among artists—a pattern more consistent with the depiction of imagined creatures than real animals.

But consider the opposite: What if art inspired the notion of the sea serpent? The universality of vertical undulation as an artistic solution for portraying wiggly movement in static two-dimensional media (and the rarity of vertical undulation in nature) hints that the Great Sea Serpent of modern legend could owe something to art. We will return to the influence of art, but first let’s explore the efforts during the classical period that we would call “science” today. Classical artists may not have recorded evidence for the existence of the modern sea serpent, but what of those ancient thinkers who attempted to accurately describe the animals of the air, land, and sea?

Was Oudemans too hasty? It is unambiguously the case that the sophisticated scholars of classical Greece and Rome did, in fact, preserve accounts of sea monster sightings. For example, classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has identified dozens of ancient references to allegedly real aquatic monsters.²⁰ But did these authorities describe creatures that are recognizably “sea serpents” in the modern sense? To qualify as sea serpents, creatures must (minimally) live in the sea and look like serpents. Some classical texts describe marine monsters that are not serpents. They include a giant man-eating sea turtle²¹ and some clear references to whales (such as the orca enclosed in a harbor and battled by boats as entertainment under the Roman emperor Claudius).²² Others describe serpentine creatures that did not live in the sea (such as a giant snake that allegedly fought Roman soldiers at a river in North Africa).²³

Oudemans briskly dismissed the argument that the animals mentioned by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and other classical natural historians were sea serpents, considering them pythons, eels, and known species of sea-adapted snakes. This cavalier approach may seem hard to justify, but I think that he was correct: despite some serpent-like versions of the ketos in art, and despite many ancient references to sea monsters in general, classical history and literature can offer little to help the case for the sea serpent in particular.

Consider Aristotle. His meticulous History of Animals (350 B.C.E.) is often cited in support of the sea serpent, but this is a stretch too far. The most frequently quoted passage refers simply to “some strange creatures to be found in the sea, which from their rarity we are unable to classify.” Fishermen apparently described some of these unidentified rarities as “sea animals like sticks, black, rounded, and of the same thickness throughout.”²⁴ This representation may sound suggestive to those sufficiently willing to cherry-pick, but it is vague to the point of meaninglessness. Another passage is much more clear—in that it clearly does not describe a sea serpent:

As with stories of whales and sea monsters, ancient Greek lore about pythons was intertwined (and often interchangeable) with that of dragons. Consider an example from Greek epic poetry. When the legendary hero Jason approaches the grove of the Golden Fleece, the last challenge he must face is a vast serpent (figure 5.3):

The armies of Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great conquered far to the east, invading India in 326 B.C.E. There, Alexander’s officers reported seeing snakes as large as 24 feet long and heard claims of snakes many times larger.²⁹ By the time the Roman military commander and naturalist Pliny the Elder compiled his Natural History (ca. 77–79), stories of Indian mega-snakes had grown to describe “dragons”³⁰ fond of hunting elephants—indeed, of “so large a size that they easily encircle the elephants in their coils and fetter them with a twisted knot.”³¹ (By the Renaissance, the dragon-versus-elephant idea had been applied to African pythons as well. Edward Topsell wrote in 1608 of the “enmitie that is betwixt Dragons & Elephants, for so great is their hatred one to the other, that in Ethyopia the greatest dragons have no other name but Elephant killers.”)³²

Looking over this literature, Heuvelmans correctly concluded that classical tales “do not refer to the sea-serpent, even in the widest sense, but to other creatures which have nothing to with the case.”³³ This absence is conspicuous when contrasted with the way that classical knowledge of other, known sea animals expanded and improved over time. Aristotle and other natural historians eventually hammered down an accurate understanding of whales, distinguishing these animals from other sea monsters with the term phallaina (the root of the Latin word baleaena and the English term “baleen”). By the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle could describe how whales breathe air through a blowhole instead of gills, bear live young, and even provide milk for those young. No comparable understanding emerged for any sort of sea serpent. This suggests that there were no genuine sea serpents for classical informants to observe.

Developed by the Greeks, embraced by the Romans, and passed from country to country during the Middle Ages, the image of the hippocamp slowly mutated into something more than a decoration for vases. Over time, this fantasy creature became an allegedly real cryptid. In my opinion, the modern myth of the Great Sea Serpent (including the recent version, Cadborosaurus) is a cultural invention descended from the artistic tradition of the hippocamp.

It is not hard to spot a family resemblance.³⁴ Compare the typical hippo-camp with a modern composite drawing of Cadborosaurus (figure 5.5). These creatures are a direct, one-to-one anatomical match—from the tips of their whale-like flukes, to their pectoral limbs, to their horse’s manes.³⁵ Here is a clear answer to some of the peskiest questions about the sea serpent: Why the preposterous vertical arches? Why the mane of a horse? Why the head of a horse (or, in some variants, a cow, sheep, or camel)? It is a puzzle that bothered me as a kid and has bothered me throughout my career as a skeptical investigator. Why would sea serpents look so much like horses? It turns out that the answer is simplicity itself. Like Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, sea serpents have their shape because they were, literally, “drawn this way.”

The horse-headed hippocamp motif first appeared in Greece during the Orientalizing period at around the same time as the Triton (or merman) and the ketos-type sea monster. It is important to emphasize at the outset what hippocamps were not. They were not gods. They were not characters in myths. Most important, they were not believed to be real animals. The classical world did have a lively tradition akin to cryptozoology. Serious scholars like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder attempted to fold into natural history the fantastic creatures described in rumor, legend, and travelers’ tales from distant lands. Dragons, unicorns, and griffins fit into this tradition, as do ferocious ketos sea monsters. Even mermen were reportedly spotted by eyewitnesses, but hippocamps were not.

Hippocamps existed almost exclusively in art, where they often were depicted as steeds for mythological beings associated with the sea (figure 5.6). They appeared as an artistic motif at around the same time as the emergence of artwork that featured a similar-looking real-world fish: the spiral-tailed, horse-headed sea horse.³⁶ Indeed, these real and mythological creatures reflect each other so well that sea horses are classified as members of the genus Hippocampus, giving these delicate little fish the unlikely designation “horse sea monster.” Recursively, the fantastical hippocamps may have been inspired by the fish—although the origin of the monster is unclear. Archaeologist Katharine Shepard reflected that interpreting the significance of the hippocamp is a “difficult problem, since he plays no part in any mythological tale”:

An immensely popular Greek text called the Physiologus was instrumental in transmitting the concept of the hippocamp. Composed in Alexandria, Egypt, between the second and fourth centuries,⁴⁰ the Physiologus is a collection of legends about interesting and exotic animals from the fox to the unicorn—but it is not a work of natural history. The unknown compiler intended the Physiologus to be read for moral instruction. Drawing material from the legends and natural history of classical antiquity, the Physiologus reconceived each creature in the service of overt Christian allegory.⁴¹ Appearing alongside such old favorites as the centaur, siren, and phoenix, the hippocamp (Hydrippus) became a symbol for Moses:

The Greek Physiologus was soon translated into Ethiopian, Armenian, Syrian, Arabic, and Latin. From there, the evolution of the book got more complicated. (Translator Michael Curley dryly understates, “The influence of Physiologus on the literature and art of the later Middle Ages is too long a story to be fully recounted here.”)⁴³ For our purposes, it’s enough to note that a rich and varied ecosystem of versions and adaptations emerged, with hand-drawn manuscripts in many languages spreading throughout Europe.

“A major watershed in the later history of Physiologus,” Curley continues, “is its incorporation into the encyclopedias and natural-historical compendia of the late Middle Ages.” In particular, the influential Etymologies (ca. 623) of the archbishop and scholar Isidore of Seville drew heavily on the legends collected in the Physiologus, while dropping most of the Christian allegorical content. In Isidore’s treatment, the hippocamp is rendered down from a Moses figure to an ordinary sea creature. Smack dab between whales and dolphins is the entry for “Sea-horses (equus marinus), because they are horses (equus) in their front part and then turn into fish.”⁴⁴ This demythologized version brought the fantastical hippocamp a step closer to its modern reinvention as a cryptid.

The tradition of compiling animal legends continued in a genre of twelfth- and thirteenth-century books referred to generically as the “bestiary” (book of beasts). Larger collections than the Physiologus, they contain three times the content of the earlier books. Bestiaries include exotic monsters, but the central passages feature ordinary creatures made to serve Christian allegory. “For what is the good of a lesson that can only be taught by hearsay,” asks translator Richard Barber, “relating to a beast that no one has ever seen in the flesh? The longest sermons are devoted to topics drawn from everyday life: the ant and the bee display the virtues of humility, obedience and industry, the viper warns against the sin of adultery.”⁴⁵

Bestiaries were hand-copied (and creatively improvised) from previous bestiaries, and they varied enormously. Some describe the hippocamp; in others, the hippocamp appears as an illustration. The lavishly gold-leafed Ashmole Bestiary, for example, features an illustration of the hippocamp in its general discussion of fishes (figure 5.8).

As a maritime culture, the Norse naturally told tales of a great many sea monsters—including a huge, kraken-like creature called the hafgufa—but even among these teeming monstrosities, the hrosshvalr was considered especially savage. It was described in a twelfth-century text called The King’s Mirror (Konungs Skuggsjá), which was almost certainly intended to instruct the son of a Norwegian king.⁴⁶ Along with lessons in statesmanship and trade, The King’s Mirror taught the unknown prince about useful species of whales and warned him of the dangerous monsters of the sea:

Ortelius made historic contributions to cartography, creating the first modern atlas in 1570 (and later, incidentally, proposing continental drift). His depiction of the hippocamp as a living monster also marked a critical milestone in the formulation of the sea serpent. Ortelius lavishly populated his maps with monsters, many borrowed from the work of Olaus Magnus or harkening back to the curly-tailed ketos. The map of Iceland that Ortelius published in 1585 teems with ferocious beasts, including our friend the hrosshvalr. He described it as “sea horse, with manes hanging down from its neck like a horse. It often causes great scare to fishermen.” In his illustration, the hippocamp has long webbed toes and a finny frill on the back of its horse-like forelimbs—a form that it often takes in heraldry. (In other heraldic uses, the hippocamp may have front flippers instead of webbed feet.) The hrosshvalr still has essentially this shape, although now filtered through the sensibilities of modern fantasy art. It is depicted, for example, as a maned, flippered, hippocamp-like animal on a stamp issued by the Icelandic government in 2009 (figure 5.10).

When the modern sea serpent legend eventually made its way into academic debates (starting in the 1750s with a treatment written by Bishop Erich Pontoppidan of Norway), scholars were quick to suggest that it could be the Jörmungandr myth repackaged for a scientific age. Discussing the tale of Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, Bishop Thomas Percy noted in 1770, “We see plainly in the … fable the origin of those vulgar opinions entertained in the north, and which Pontoppidan has recorded concerning the craken and that monstrous serpent described in his History of Norway.”⁴⁸ A century later, this view was still invoked as an explanation for the sea serpent. In 1869, The New American Cyclopedia held:

Is this view correct? Is the modern sea serpent descended from Jörmungandr? It is probably not a coincidence that a culture with a stupendously large mythological sea serpent later invented a stupendously large cryptozoological sea serpent, but the exact relationship is not entirely clear. (As early as 1822, attempts were made to turn the argument on its head: perhaps a species of serpentine cryptid gave rise to the Norse myth, rather than the other way around.⁵⁰ As A. C. Oudemans elaborated, “All fables have their foundation in facts, or in objects of nature, and it is plausible that the Norwegians had met with the sea-serpent before the fable of Thor’s great Serpent was inserted into their Eddas.”)⁵¹

It is certainly plausible, even likely, that the Jörmungandr myth could be among the roots of the Norwegian sea serpent legend. In turn, the Midgard Serpent can be plausibly interpreted as a regional iteration of primordial dragon myths, such as the Babylonian Tiamat and the biblical Leviathan. It’s worth noting that our sources for the Midgard Serpent and other Norse myths date from well into the Christianization of the Nordic countries. Written by a Christian, The Prose Edda begins with the words, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth and all those things which are in them; and last of all, two of human kind, Adam and Eve, from whom the races are descended.”⁵²

Born at the dawn of the thirteenth century, Albertus worked in a twilit age of both deep superstition and remarkable advances (such as windmills, ship rudders, and, at the end of his life, papermaking in Italy). Albertus started off slowly. “For the first thirty years of his life he appeared remarkably dull and stupid,” according to Charles Mackay.⁵³ He became a Dominican friar and eventually a bishop—and, along the way, one of the medieval world’s most celebrated scholars, remembered today as a towering prescientific thinker.⁵⁴ (The famed Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas was a student of Albertus Magnus.)

Albertus Magnus is best known for his encyclopedic De animalibus, which built on the work of Aristotle (with material from other authorities, including insights from Albertus himself). Among the menagerie of real aquatic animals and mythical marine monsters is our old friend the hippocamp, described as a predator, “alive” and well at the cutting edge of scholarship that would one day give rise to zoology and cryptozoology: “equus maris (Sea horse) is a marine animal whose foreportion takes the form of a horse and rear parts terminate like a fish. It is a pugnacious creature, inimical to many marine species, and its diet consists of fish. It has an abject fear of man; outside the water it is utterly helpless and dies soon after being removed from its native element.”⁵⁵

Around the time that Nicolaus Copernicus proposed his heliocentric model of the solar system, Olaus Magnus created an advanced map of the Scandinavian countries and wrote a lengthy book about the people, customs, and animals of those lands. Known in English as A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555), the book became the standard reference on Scandinavia. It also provided the final stage set for the modern sea serpent (although the curtain would not fully open for a further 200 years). By then, the Scandinavian reimagining of the Greek hippocamp as a “real” sea monster was itself a centuries-old tradition. Like Albertus Magnus before him, Olaus Magnus described this Equus marinus as a genuine, living animal: “The sea-horse may be observed fairly often between Britain and Norway. It has a horse’s head, utters a neighing sound, has cloven hoofs like a cow, and seeks its pasture as much in the sea as on land. It is seldom caught, even though it reaches the size of an ox. Lastly, its tail is bifurcated like a fish’s.”⁵⁶

Olaus also presented a menagerie of other exotic sea monsters, including a “monstrous Hog” with “four feet like a Dragons, two eyes on both sides in his Loyns, and a third in his belly, inclining toward his navel.” Another seemingly unlikely creature was “a Worm of blew and gray colour, that is above 40 cubits [60 feet] long, yet is hardly so thick as the arm of a child.” Oddly enough, this worm (which he claimed to have regularly seen himself) appears to be a real animal: the thin nemertean bootlace worm (Lineus longissimus), which can grow longer than 100 feet.⁵⁷

But it is to another Olaus Magnus monster that we must turn—a land-based Norwegian serpent that, Olaus said, sometimes entered the water to hunt. This has become one of the most-quoted passages in the vast sea monster literature:

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)!

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

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:

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 superstition 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.”

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 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.

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.

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:

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,

What did Ferry and his men see? It is interesting to speculate, as did skeptical naturalist Henry Lee: “The supposed coils of the serpent’s body present exactly the appearance of eight porpoises following each other in a line. This is a well-known habit of some of the smaller cetecea.”⁸⁴ (I have seen this effect, and it is shockingly compelling. More likely suspects, however, would be the seals common to the Norwegian coast.) In any event, “the horse-like features of the sea-serpent’s head were common knowledge,” as folklorist Michel Meurger notes. “Therefore, Ferry’s assertion is proof only of a traditional interpretation of a sighting he had six years prior to his official statement. This is too long a time to have a fresh recollection but more than enough time to blend memories with collective stereotypes.”⁸⁵

The real importance of Ferry’s story is its subsequent role as a template. This widely publicized, often-translated, and precedent-setting sighting was the first credible eyewitness account to reach beyond Scandinavia, and it helped to lock in the canonical image of the sea serpent for the English-speaking world: multiple humps or coils, combined with the head and mane of a horse.

In the centuries since the publication of The Natural History of Norway, Pontoppidan has often been criticized for his credulity. “Indeed,” wrote Heuvelmans, “the Bishop of Bergen was treated as a liar as arrant as Münchhausen.”⁸⁶ Other critics have been kinder. “The Norwegian Bishop,” granted Lee, “was a conscientious and painstaking investigator, and the tone of his writings is neither that of an intentional deceiver nor of an incautious dupe. He diligently endeavoured to separate the truth from the cloud of error and fiction by which it was obscured; and in this he was to a great extent successful.”⁸⁷ I have argued that quite a bit of Pontoppidan’s work can be regarded as early “scientific skepticism.”⁸⁸ He advocated for science literacy, pointedly critiquing his clerical brethren for “supercilious neglect” of knowledge of the physical world. Pontoppidan even went out of his way to investigate and correct popular falsehoods, such as the idea that bottomless whirlpools penetrate through the entire Earth and the already ancient legend that the Barnacle Goose hatches out of trees or rotten wood.

Pontoppidan was no slouch, so it is not surprising that he zeroed in on a key problem for his sea serpent: its cultural specificity:

This strikes me as exceptionally funny in two respects. First, Heuvelmans’s assumption that two-thirds of claimed sightings are genuine was surely on the optimistic side; after all, it’s not known that there has been even one genuine sea serpent sighting—ever. Second, the pattern he described is clearly that of a pop-culture phenomenon. By his own admission, sea serpents basically did not exist before Pontoppidan’s book made them famous; since then, they have been seen regularly and increasingly. The Natural History of Norway launched the sea serpent to stardom; from there, it entered the self-sustaining fame cycle that perpetuates UFOs, Bigfoot, and other popular mysteries.

With the global publicity for Erich Pontoppidan’s sea serpent, strange carcasses took on new meaning. When a huge, vaguely whale-like animal washed up on Stronsa (now called Stronsay, an island off the northern tip of Scotland) in 1808, it was immediately identified as “a sea-snake with a mane like a horse”—and, indeed, the case seemed clear. Reportedly measured at a bulky yet sinuous 55 feet in length, with a long neck and a mane, there seemed little room to doubt that this was a creature unknown to science. Multiple sworn statements and an eyewitness sketch seemed to clinch the case (figure 5.20). And then Scottish naturalist John Barclay stepped in to confirm that it “appeared to be the Soe-Ormen described above half a century ago, by Pontoppidan, in his Natural History of Norway,” assigning it to a brand-new genus and species: Halsydrus pontoppidani (Pontoppidan’s sea-snake).⁹³

Alas, nothing was as it seemed. Today, Barclay’s Halsydrus pontoppidani is remembered alongside Nessiteras rhombopteryx (proposed for the Loch Ness monster), Hydrarchos sillimani (an alleged fossil sea serpent), and Cadborosaurus willsi as a premature taxonomic misstep. The problem? The creature rotting on the Stronsay beach, scavenged by wheeling gulls, was a basking shark. The animal’s skull, several vertebrae, and other samples were sent to Everard Home, a surgeon and leading scientist who had recently received the Royal Society of London’s prestigious Copley Medal. With these specimens, Home was able to firmly identify the animal as a basking shark and to ascertain that the drawing and descriptions were wildly inaccurate distortions of the anatomy of the carcass. So stark was the discrepancy between the eyewitness testimony and the forensic evidence that the Stronsay Beast has lived on as a cautionary tale. “There can be little doubt that this creature was, actually, an enormous basking-shark, partly decomposed,” wrote sea serpent advocate Rupert Gould, “but the original reports are so curious, and the accepted explanation so much at variance with them, that the case deserves more than a cursory mention, if only as an instance of how misleading it is possible for honest testimony to be.”⁹⁴

But was Home’s analysis accurate? Barclay did not think so. He published a rebuttal, objecting that the head of a basking shark is 5 feet across, while the skull of the Stronsay Beast was only 7 inches wide. But Barclay had fallen into a trap that has misled people ever since. The huge, gentle basking sharks—like all sharks—have skeletons made of cartilage, rather than bone. Moreover, basking sharks are filter feeders (similar to humpback and other baleen whales). As a result, the pattern of decay in basking shark carcasses can be counterintuitive (figure 5.21). The huge jaws fall off quickly, leaving a surprisingly tiny skull perched at the end of a long spine—looking for all the world like a rotten sea serpent or long-necked plesiosaur. This is what happened to the Stronsay carcass. In the two centuries since the carcass washed ashore, the vertebrae (preserved in museum collections) have been reexamined more than once. Home’s findings have been confirmed each time. In 1933, for example, James Ritchie (then professor of natural history at the University of Aberdeen and later president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh) wrote in the Times of London about his own conclusions after reexamining the vertebrae of the Stronsay Beast at the Royal Scottish Museum:

The Stronsay Beast may never have been quite forgotten (at least within the niche sea serpent literature), but its lesson has never been learned. Again and again, people have fallen for the same grisly illusion. High-profile cases continue to arise, with many “sea serpent” or “plesiosaur” carcasses making headlines during the twentieth century—only to prove, time and again, to be basking sharks. A mere three months after Ritchie confirmed that the Stronsay Beast was really a shark, headlines around the world gleefully announced that a similar unidentified carcass (what is now called a “globster” in cryptozoological parlance) had washed up in Cherbourg, France. The Los Angeles Times declared it the “First Genuine Sea Monster Captured,” while the front page of the New York Times trumpeted that “France Has Sea Monster.”⁹⁶ After several stories on the topic, the New York Times made the inevitable retraction: “After a careful examination of the extensive remains of the ‘sea monster’ found on the shore near Cherbourg, Professor [Georges] Petit and his colleagues of the French Museum of Natural History have definitely concluded that this fish is a basking shark.”⁹⁷ This was not the last time this clichéd narrative would play out; bizarrely, it was not even the last time it played out in that year. In November 1934, newspapers from Scotland to Chicago trumpeted the discovery of a 30-foot sea serpent carcass on Henry Island (in British Columbia, Canada). The New York Times got right back on that sea horse, reporting that this “strange sea monster” had a “head resembling that of a horse” and no bones except the vertebrae.⁹⁸ Just four days later, the Times revealed, predictably, that the director of the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, British Columbia, had positively identified the remains as those of a basking shark.⁹⁹

These misidentifications are among cryptozoology’s silliest banalities, but they are not so passé that they have stopped. The most famous case may be that of the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiyo Maru, whose crew in 1977 hauled aboard a badly decomposed carcass from the Pacific Ocean off New Zealand (figure 5.22). Repulsed by the “overpowering stench and the unpleasant fatty liquids oozing onto the deck,” the fishermen photographed the carcass, took tissue samples, and then dumped it overboard.¹⁰⁰ The loss of the specimen did not deter the Los Angeles Times from excitedly speculating that this reeking, slimy mess could be a relict plesiosaur: “a huge reptile thought to have died out 100 million years ago.”¹⁰¹ But it was not to be. The tissue samples nailed down what was already obvious to anyone with a sense of history: it was a basking shark.¹⁰² Again.

The full-color photographs taken by a member of the crew of the Zuiyo Maru fired my imagination as a kid, and clearly I am not alone. The story has never completely faded. I have in my office a fantastic recent Japanese toy that lovingly re-creates the carcass in miniature—a lump of plastic painted to resemble a heap of rotting flesh. But the currency of the story goes beyond cryptozoology-themed collectibles: even today, some believers argue that the carcass truly was that of an extant plesiosaur. In a fairly typical overlap between scientific creationism (the attempt to confirm the literal truth of the account of creation in Genesis—or at least to disprove evolution—through purportedly scientific means) and cryptozoology, an article in the journal of the Creation Research Society argues that “the interpretation of the Zuiyo Maru cryptid as a shark is false” and concludes that a “Sauropterygia [plesiosaur or related marine reptile] identification remains viable.”¹⁰³ Cryptozoologically inclined creationists seem to hope that locating a plesiosaur or another so-called living fossil would pose problems for evolutionary theory, but it is hard to see why a plesiosaur would be more disruptive than the continuing existence of crocodiles and sharks, which first appeared about 220 million and 400 million years ago, respectively. Regardless, keen interest from creationists (and from wide-eyed kids) have ensured that the survival of a relict population of plesiosaurs has remained among cryptozoology’s fondest dreams. But how did plesiosaurs emerge as a dominant cryptid, and how do they relate to the hippocamp-based Great Sea Serpent?

It is worth taking a moment to picture the English scientific scene as it existed in this pioneering, pre-Darwinian period, vividly evoked by paleontologist Christopher McGowan. Reflecting on the romantic appeal of nineteenth-century geology books, McGowan wrote, “They enchanted me with their accounts of antediluvian creatures. And they spirited me away to their bygone world of Regency and Victorian England. I could picture myself—silk hat and frock coat—perambulating the foreshore of the Dorset coast, searching the cliffs for fossils. Or cabbing through London’s horse-drawn traffic to attend a meeting of gentlemen geologists.”¹⁰⁴

Top hats. Meetings by flickering gaslight. Snifters of brandy. In the halls of Oxford, cutting-edge geological lectures still taught that the features of Earth had been carved by Noah’s flood. But the world was changing fast: the Age of Steam was dawning, and the brave new science of geology was turning the understanding of the history of Earth on its head. It was becoming clear that the planet was very, very old—and that life on Earth had been very different in the distant past. In France, the great anatomist Georges Cuvier convincingly argued that some creatures known from fossils (such as mammoths) had vanished entirely from Earth, but other scientists still argued that extinction was incompatible with God’s perfection. Perhaps even mammoths had survived in some distant land?¹⁰⁵ And if remnant populations of fossil creatures had hung on in Earth’s inaccessible places, they might be very much unchanged, for no convincing mechanism for the “transmutation” (or evolution) of species was yet known.

Onto that stage stepped Mary Anning, a working-class Englishwoman whose sharp eye and sheer physical stamina made her (in an era of gentleman geology) perhaps the greatest fossil collector of her time. She is a romantic figure in the history of science, although she must not have considered herself in that light. I can’t help but picture her, walking along seaside cliffs near Lyme Regis, in Dorset, on damp, frigid mornings; kneeling in her long skirts; swinging her rock hammer with her calloused hands and bloodied knuckles—and all for the fossils that she would sell to survive, letting moneyed men take the credit of discovery. Yet, the large marine reptiles whose fossils she found triggered a stunning upheaval of human understanding of the past. These were creatures utterly unlike anything known. Ichthyosaurs were reptiles with shark-shaped bodies, while plesiosaurs were even weirder: long-necked reptiles that propelled themselves through the water with four paddle-like flippers. Their fossilized remains opened a window onto a lost world, paving the way for Charles Darwin—and incidentally remixing the popular legend of the sea serpent.

By nineteenth-century standards, the ink was hardly dry on newspaper reports of the sea serpent sightings around Gloucester in 1817 when ichthyosaurs were shown to be reptiles in 1821. The first nearly complete plesiosaur skeleton was described in 1824 in a presentation before the Geological Society of London—at the same meeting that announced the first dinosaur genus name: Megalosaurus.¹⁰⁶ Almost immediately, naturalists made the connection to sea serpents. In 1827, botanist Sir William Hooker employed the newly discovered plesiosaur and dinosaur fossils as a rhetorical device, asking why it should be, when “the recent discoveries of the Plesiosaurus and Megalosaurus have made demands upon our powers of credence far greater than the serpent, the descriptions of the latter animal have received very little trust, and even much ridicule and contempt.” Hooker went on to argue that, in light of eyewitness testimony, sea serpents may now “be assumed as a sober fact in Natural History…. We cannot suppose, that the most ultra-sceptical can now continue to doubt with regard to facts attested by such highly respectable witnesses.”¹⁰⁷

A much more direct argument was advanced in 1833 by geologist Robert Bakewell, who matter-of-factly stated in his textbook Introduction to Geology, “I am inclined to believe, that the ichthyosaurus, or some species of a similar genus, is still existing in the present seas.” Bakewell went on, “I remember one of the most particular descriptions of the sea serpent was given by an American captain …; it had paddles somewhat like a turtle, and enormous jaws like the crocodile. This description certainly approaches to, or may be said to correspond with, the ichthyosaurus, of which animal the captain had probably never heard.”¹⁰⁸

In a footnote to Bakewell’s speculation, chemist Benjamin Silliman, a professor at Yale, made the connection that would, a century later, give form to the Loch Ness monster: “Mr. Bakewell’s ingenious conjecture, that it may be a Saurian, agrees, however, much better with the supposition that it is a Plesiosaurus than an Ichthyosaurus, as the short neck of the latter does not correspond with the ordinary appearance of the sea serpent.”¹⁰⁹ The image of the sea serpent as a relict plesiosaur was swiftly taken up by other scientists. In 1835, John Ruggles Cotting noted, “The Sea-serpent, which has frequently visited the waters of New England, is supposed to belong to the genus Plesiosaurus. Its existence has been so often attested by thousands of competent witnesses, that its identity is no longer problematical.”¹¹⁰

Living prehistoric monsters. How cool would that be? At a time when the history of life on Earth was very much up for grabs (Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859), the possibility that plesiosaurs could (just maybe!) still exist had a powerful fascination for laypeople, journalists, and scientists alike. “The beliefs of the sea-serpent’s supporters were inspired by the fashion of the day,” noted Bernard Heuvelmans. “The discovery of bones of the great saurians in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in America in the second half, had fired everyone’s imagination.”¹¹¹ Of course, this popular interest had an impact on the form and frequency of reports of sightings of sea monsters. “It was not mere coincidence that as paleontologists began dredging up plesiosaurs and other relics from the past a dramatic increase in sightings of sea serpents also occurred,” deadpans science writer Sherrie Lynne Lyons.¹¹²

Plesiosaurs were, for example, proposed as an explanation for a sighting in 1848 by officers of the British frigate HMS Daedalus (figure 5.24). This case had (and still has) a very high profile, thanks to the esteem granted to naval officers and to the crisply worded report to the Admiralty submitted by Captain Peter M'Quhae. (The order of events should be noted at the outset, however. Oddly enough, the log of the Daedalus failed to record any hint of a sea serpent.¹¹³ When the Times of London nonetheless publicized an alleged sighting from almost three months earlier, the Admiralty understandably demanded details.¹¹⁴ Only at that point did M’Quhae report the alleged sighting to the Admiralty, “in reply to your letter … requiring information as to the truth of a statement published in The Times newspaper, of a sea-serpent of extraordinary dimensions having been seen from Her Majesty’s ship Daedalus.”)¹¹⁵

M’Quhae described a relatively traditional “enormous serpent,” complete with “something like the mane of a horse,” that, with head raised, passed the ship at a moderate distance (close enough to recognize a human acquaintance, according to M’Quhae, or about 200 yards at its closest approach, according to fellow witness Lieutenant Edgar Drummond).¹¹⁶ The Daedalus case remains unsolved, but the usual three possibilities exist: a hoax, a mistake, or a genuinely unknown animal. We may regard as naive the argument that “M’Quhae’s honesty was not—and, obviously, could not be—seriously called into question,” as Rupert Gould put it.¹¹⁷ (While a hoax may have struck fans of the Royal Navy as “frankly unthinkable,” skeptics know that hoaxes are uncomfortably common and cross all boundaries of class and occupation. Indeed, another London newspaper published a different sea serpent report less than three weeks after M’Quhae’s, only to learn to its embarrassment that the story was a complete fabrication.)¹¹⁸ Still, most commentators have taken the report of the officers of the Daedalus as sincere, in which case the question becomes: What did those men see? Swiftly the suggestion appeared in a letter to the Times: “[T]he enormous reptile in question was allied to the gigantic Saurians, hitherto believed only to exist in the fossil state, and, among them, to the Plesiosaurus.”¹¹⁹

The Daedalus case became an enduring part of the cryptozoological canon after it attracted a detailed public critique from one of the world’s weightiest scientific authorities: Richard Owen, of the British Museum, who had coined the term “dinosaur” just six years earlier. Owen’s reputation in his field was overpowering (“[H]is opinion on a zoological question has almost the force of an axiom,” as one of his contemporaries put it),¹²⁰ although he was known personally as an unpleasant character. His unrelenting campaign against Darwinian evolution and its supporters, which included a venomous anonymous review of On the Origin of Species,¹²¹ led the normally genial Darwin to admit, “I used to be ashamed of hating him so much, but now I will carefully cherish my hatred & contempt to the last days of my life.”¹²² Nonetheless, Owen was an awfully sharp guy, and his critique of the Daedalus case stands as one of the clearest skeptical statements on sea serpent mythology. Owen argued, plausibly enough, that M’Quhae may have misidentified an elephant seal or a sea lion. These massive mammals would match fairly closely with M’Quhae’s description of the sea serpent and the drawings he endorsed, but it remains a purely speculative explanation—parsimonious, but unproved. And that is where the mystery remains: a deadlock between Owen’s argument that M’Quhae did not know what he was looking at and M’Quhae’s retort that Owen did not know what he was talking about: “I now assert—neither was it a common seal nor a sea-elephant, its great length and its totally differing physiognomy precluding the possibility.”¹²³

Owen knew that his elephant seal explanation was speculative, but he was sure about one thing: there was no way a living plesiosaur had casually glided past a Royal Navy frigate. His caustic response remains relevant to cryptozoology:

Other scientific superstars were more easily seduced by the possibility of surviving plesiosaurs, including the great geologist and paleontologist Louis Agassiz of Harvard University. Agassiz’s scientific legacy includes the distinction of being among the first to propose a “glacial” period (ice age) in Earth’s history. Less well known is his advocacy for the sea serpent as a prehistoric survivor. Agassiz touched on the topic in a lecture he gave in March 1849:

An example of this new type of sighting, of an overtly plesiosaur-like creature, is that reported from the HMS Fly, described by Edward Newman, editor of the journal Zoologist, in 1849:

Wishful thinking did not, however, stop one later supporter of the “plesiosaur hypothesis,” Rupert Gould, from pointing out the flaws in the story that Newman and others had ignored: “If the matter were so important, why (one wonders) did not Newman get into touch with Captain Hope and obtain a first-hand version of his experience (preferably in writing): with, if possible, some confirmatory evidence? As it stands, the most remarkable feature of the story is the absence of such elementary data as the time, place, and date of the occurrence.”¹³⁰ A century after the sighting, Gould made the effort to track down the ship’s log and the details of Hope’s career. When a lieutenant, Hope had indeed served on the Fly, ten years before Newman heard the monster tale at second hand—but there is no record of any monster sighting. As Gould summed up, “It does not appear that the creature was seen by anyone except Hope” (if it was seen at all); thus the tale “cannot be regarded as carrying very much weight.” Indeed.

The Fly tale does show both the influence of the new fossil discoveries, introducing a second culturally available major template for the sea serpent—a competitor to the classic hippocamp-based form—and the expansion of the geographic range of alleged sea serpent habitat. No longer constrained to the North Atlantic, let alone to the coasts of Norway, by 1849 the sea serpent had successfully established itself in the congenial waters off California.

The idea that sea serpents were members of a relict population of plesiosaurs continued to gain traction, with acclaimed science writer Philip Henry Gosse making a high-profile pitch for the idea. “I express my own confident persuasion,” he concluded, “that there exists some oceanic animal of immense proportions, which has not yet been received into the category of scientific zoology; and my strong opinion, that it possesses close affinities with the fossil Enaliosauria [extinct marine reptiles, including plesiosaurs].”¹³¹ This was hardly the most extraordinary proposal of his career. Gosse is best remembered for his (now widely mocked) book Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot, in which he attempted to unify the new findings of geology with his own biblical literalism by supposing that God had created the living world with built-in evidence of a past that had never existed. (Gosse was correct, in one sense: such fictive prior history is implicit in the whole concept of instantaneous creation.)¹³² With this creationist argument as his unfortunate legacy, it is easy to forget that Gosse stood, in his own lifetime, among the premier writers of popular science. Stephen Jay Gould described him as “the David Attenborough of his day, Britain’s finest popular narrator of nature’s fascination.”¹³³ Gosse was especially respected on topics related to marine life. He was among the first to experiment with saltwater “aquariums”—a word he popularized with his books on the topic, inspiring both the household hobby and the tourist industry of marine-animal exhibition parks.¹³⁴

While noting the need for skepticism, especially about eyewitness testimony (“every man of science must have met with numberless cases in which statements egregiously false have been made to him in the most perfect good faith; his informant implicitly believing that he was simply telling what he had seen with his own eyes”),¹³⁵ Gosse was persuaded that sightings of sea serpents established their existence. We need not rely, he felt, purely on speculation about the possibility of surviving prehistoric animals. “On this point,” he wrote, “actual testimony exists, to which I cannot but attach a very great value.” What testimony? That same old bit of unsupported hearsay, the report of George Hope of the Fly!

Gosse addressed Richard Owen’s objections to the “plesiosaur hypothesis” (in short, that there are no plesiosaur carcasses today or any plesiosaur bones in the fossil record after the end of the reign of the dinosaurs). Like modern Bigfooters, Gosse argued that the absence of modern remains is consistent with the existence of modern plesiosaurs. (Surely their carcasses would sink. And even if one of these rare animals were to wash up on a remote shore, who would recognize it?) He also maintained that the negative evidence of the fossil record was hardly a deal breaker. Those who know Gosse’s name only in association with disreputable creationist arguments may be surprised that he approvingly cited Charles Darwin:¹³⁶

With popular-science writers like Gosse behind it, it is not surprising that popular entertainment also embraced the idea of the sea serpent. As do their present-day descendants, early science-fiction writers looked to dramatic scientific discoveries for storytelling possibilities—and plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were as dramatic as they come. In Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), for example, protagonists clinging to a raft on a secret underground sea witness a battle between “the most formidable of antediluvian reptiles, the ichthyosaurus,” and “a serpent disguised by a shell like a turtle’s, the terrible enemy of the first, the plesiosaurus.”¹³⁹ Modern human characters likewise see or interact with surviving plesiosaurs in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tale The Land That Time Forgot (1918), in which the crew of a German U-boat finds plesiosaur steaks delicious.¹⁴⁰

The theme was further advanced by Rupert Gould, who argued that—despite his criticism of Hope’s report from the Fly—the eyewitness evidence supports as many as three types of undiscovered species. Foremost among them is a gigantic creature “much resembling in outline and structure the Plesiosaurus of Mesozoic times.” Echoing Gosse, Gould invoked evolution to make his case: “I do not suggest that the last-named is actually a Plesiosaurus, but that it is either one of its descendants or has evolved along similar lines. In either case, I suggest that there is little doubt that it has much the same characteristics—a slender neck and tail and a comparatively large body with propelling flippers.”¹⁴¹

The “plesiosaur hypothesis” remained popular throughout the twentieth century, coexisting with the hippocamp-like sea serpent. Dramatically different though these two major types of sea serpents may be, they morph easily into each other throughout the world’s seas and monster lakes—with witnesses dipping liberally into both culturally available templates on a case-by-case basis. Consequently, reports and reconstructions offer no end of hybridized monsters, including plesiosaurs with manes, plesiosaur-headed serpents, and plesiosaurs with an improbable series of coil-mimicking humps on their backs. The Loch Ness monster, for example, comes in all these forms and more (including straight-up traditional sea serpents), despite Nessie’s status as poster girl for the plesiosaur-survivor mythology.

This intensely hyped skeleton of a “GIGANTIC FOSSIL REPTILE 114 Feet in Length” (as the advertisement screamed) was exhibited in New York City in 1845, in the Apollo Rooms on lower Broadway (a large saloon that had hosted the debut of the New York Philharmonic three years earlier). Crowds flocked to pay 25 cents (children half price!) to see the fossil sea serpent.¹⁴² This amounted to a tidy fortune. Consider that New Yorkers were then paying 4 cents for a quart of milk.¹⁴³ The press was as gobsmacked as the crowds. The New York Daily Tribune hailed it as “indisputably the greatest wonder that ever was brought to light out of the strata which form the crust of our globe”—and a lasting monument to American greatness.¹⁴⁴ Alas, not all was as it seemed.

Commercial fossil collector “Doctor” Albert Koch was a colorful figure: a successful and important fossil hunter, a shameless self-promoter, and (most of all) a hustler of the first order. His previous major fossil find, likewise profitably toured and hyped, was presented to the world as Missourium, “the Missouri Leviathan”—a web-footed, aquatic predator that had once lurked in the rivers and lakes of Missouri. According to Koch’s analysis of his newly unearthed creature, Missourium was remarkable for its hard armor (on which no “barbed iron, harpoon, or spear, would make any impression”) and its “enormous magnitude, ferocity, and strength, as well as fleetness in swimming.” Its “fleetness in swimming” may well have been overstated, however, for despite Koch’s colorful assertions (and the several extra ribs and vertebrae he had added to his specimen), Missourium was in fact an American mastodon. (Nonetheless, it was a very nice American mastodon. The British Museum knew exactly what it was buying when it snapped up the skeleton in 1843 for a whopping £1,300.¹⁴⁵ Anatomist and sea serpent skeptic Richard Owen promptly restored the skeleton to its rightful anatomy. It still stands in the Natural History Museum in London, properly identified as a mastodon.)¹⁴⁶

When Koch revealed as his next big trick that he had personally discovered definitive proof of a 114-foot sea serpent, it drew crowds—but also scrutiny. Hydrarchos seemed too good to be true. And, indeed, it was.

Jeffries Wyman, a professor of anatomy at Harvard, examined the massive skeleton during its New York exhibition and saw immediately that something was wrong. He communicated his findings to the Boston Society of Natural History. First, it was clear from the double-rooted teeth that the jaws of Hydrarchos belonged to a mammal, not a reptile. This identification slammed the scientific door on the sea serpent pretensions, but it wasn’t the worst of it. It was clear to Wyman that the vertebral column was cobbled together from “a series of bones which could never have belonged to the same individual, as is obvious from the fact that they manifest different degrees of ossification, and must, therefore, have belonged to individuals of different ages.”¹⁴⁷ As a final humiliation, Wyman discovered that the hippocamp-like paddles were at least partly constructed “not of bones, but of casts of the cavities of a camerated shell, a species of Nautilus…. These could not fail to strike the eye at a glance, when examined by any one acquainted with the forms of fossil nautiloid shells.” Ouch. Hydrachos was not an animal, but a chimera—a sculptural creation that combined bones from multiple fossil animals. It was assembled from several specimens of an extinct whale (now called Basilosaurus).

If the problems were this obvious to any trained eye, does this expose Koch as merely incompetent or as a deliberate fraud? The jury remains somewhat split on the question of Koch’s competence. One modern historian cautions, “To dismiss Albert Koch … as simply one of the more ingenious showmen of his day would be unfair. Koch appears to have been a keen observer of geologic phenomena and a competent natural historian, although he was not professionally trained.”¹⁴⁸ Others have been less kind. In particular, geologist James Dwight Dana of Yale was ferociously critical of Koch, writing that his papers collectively “sustain the conclusion that Dr. Koch knew almost nothing of geology, and that what he gradually picked up from intercourse with geologists he generally made much use of, but seldom was able to use rightly. In zoological knowledge he was equally deficient.”¹⁴⁹

Regardless of Koch’s level of competence, two truths stand out: his fossil finds were genuinely spectacular, and he was intentionally deceptive about those finds. “Dr. Koch was a man of large pretensions,” said Dana, concluding that “Koch appreciated the absurdity” of his claims, but made them anyway “merely to get a full house” of paying customers for his exhibits.¹⁵⁰ Dana singled out as evidence Koch’s willingness to improbably assert that Missourium was the inspiration for the biblical Leviathan—and then turn around with a straight face and publicize the notion that Leviathan was based on Hydrachos!

Following up on his original exposé of Hydrachos, Wyman explained in a letter to a colleague that “Dr. Koch, who by the way is no doctor, is a shrewd man [and] knows very well that few are sufficiently acquainted with bones to give an opinion as to the nature of the beast,”¹⁵¹ and asked for further information to help him determine the true origin of the fossil whale bones from which Koch’s sea serpent had been constructed. Koch had asserted that all the bones had been found together in a life-like assembly, but Wyman’s discovery that they came from multiple individuals showed Koch’s yarn to be “a mere fabrication” (as was the judgment of the Boston Society of Natural History). Sure enough, Wyman’s findings were confirmed by Dr. Lister, a resident of the area where Koch had found the bones. Lister investigated, informing the Boston scientists,

Interestingly, much of this story is corroborated by no less an inside source than Koch himself. His travel diaries describe his discovery of the largest cache of incomplete bones that would be used to create Hydrachos: “After the softer parts had decomposed, the bones were lying for some time unpetrified … individual bones of the skeleton suffered displacement; indeed, a part of the ribs, the foot bones and several of the tail vertebrae were lost completely.” Although loosely arranged in a “sort of half-circle,” the remaining bones were damaged and scattered, with the surviving portions of the head “completely turned around”; nonetheless, Koch was confident that “of the whole so much existed that the missing parts could be replaced artificially.”¹⁵³ And, as we now know, that is what he did—artificially, and very creatively, using bones from other locations. (Basilosaurus vertebrae were so common in the area, Koch wrote, that he found them built into fireplaces, used to support a garden gate, and even serving “a Negro for a pillow.”)

Even more striking, Koch’s diaries refer to these fossils as belonging to “Zygodon”—a bastardization of Zeuglodon, which was another name for Basilosaurus. Koch clearly understood from the get-go that Hydrachos was not a startling new form of life, but a genus that had been discovered, described, and mounted by other naturalists. Koch’s diaries reveal that he deliberately chose to do his fossil hunting in “the region in Alabama where the big Zygodon is found.”¹⁵⁴ Moreover, Koch’s use of the term “Zygodon” reveals that he knew in advance that his sea serpent was a mammal! The genus Zeuglodon was proposed by Richard Owen, whose examination of fossil bones from the inaccurately named Basilosaurus (king lizard) in 1839 revealed that “the fossil was a Mammifer of the cetaceous order”—a whale. Just as Wyman found when he examined Koch’s specimen six years later, Owen concluded that the creature’s double-rooted teeth were a dead giveaway. Thus Owen renamed it Zeuglodon (yoked tooth).¹⁵⁵

Nonetheless, the bones comprising Koch’s so-called sea serpent were rare and valuable. Despite insightful criticisms from European scientists, the assemblage was snapped up by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who gave Koch a yearly pension for life in order to secure Hydrarchos for the Royal Anatomical Museum in Berlin.¹⁵⁶ (Sadly, it was, like so many of Europe’s natural and cultural treasures, destroyed during World War II.)¹⁵⁷ Once again, a generous reward for the dishonest “Dr.” Albert Koch—the man who, as Robert Silverberg put it, made a “career of creating supermonsters.”¹⁵⁸

The sea serpent thrived not only in books and popular culture, but, according to eyewitnesses the world over, also in nature. What, if anything, were all those people seeing? To answer that question, we might stop first to consider an insight or two from the critical literature on other paranormal claims—for, to repeat Richard Owen’s insight: “A larger body of evidence, from eyewitnesses, might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent.”¹⁶⁰

When considering UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, telekinesis, faith healing, and similar elusive, paranormal phenomena, advocates must grapple with the two fundamental vulnerabilities of eyewitness-dependent cases: people lie, and people make mistakes. Traditionally, advocates for these phenomena have responded with a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument:

We have seen that deliberate fraud by both witnesses and investigators is a serious (perhaps crippling) problem for cryptozoology, but let’s set aside fraud for the moment. Price’s argument also goes to the issue of false-positive misidentification errors. As with fraud, cryptozoologists often argue, in essence, that a reasonable observer in a given eyewitness case would not have mistaken an ordinary phenomenon or animal for a cryptid. This retort to skeptics is typical: “[T]he men who see sea-serpents are familiar with seals, and … are not likely to make such mistakes.”¹⁶² By extension, if many reasonable observers report having seen cryptids, a significant percentage of those sightings should be genuine. Right? Not so fast.

As Price pointed out in regard to ESP researchers, this argument approaches the evidence from the wrong end. Those who claim to have seen cryptids are not randomly selected average observers. They are among the few people who, out of the billions of people on Earth, have already filtered themselves into the minuscule outlier population of those who claim to have seen cryptids. Even ignoring the issue of fraud, we run into the Law of Large Numbers: given large enough numbers, very unlikely things become inevitable. (As Michael Shermer has often observed, “The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.”)¹⁶³ We could grant the dubious assertion that people in general are decent observers—we could even unrealistically suppose that almost everyone is accurate almost all the time—and we would still expect some small percentage of the population to mistake ordinary animals, objects, or events for cryptozoological creatures. This becomes an inevitability simply because so many billions of people see so many billions of things.

As it happens, however, there is no need to rely on theoretical arguments and certainly no need to speculate. As with other cryptids, there are many records of false-positive sightings of sea serpents. Let’s look at a few of these documented misidentifications and their variety of causes.

The best-known modern iteration of the hippocamp-inspired Norwegian serpent is seen not in the North Atlantic off Europe, but in the Pacific Northwest of North America (figure 5.28). This Victorian legend swam into the twentieth century, suitably enough, off the Canadian city of Victoria (at the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island). The provincial capital of British Columbia, Victoria is a bustling tourist destination with a busy cruise-ship port. Today it bills itself as the City of Gardens, but in 1933 it enjoyed worldwide fame for something altogether more mysterious—nothing less than an 80foot sea monster. According to legend, it was an awesome, primeval monster: a huge serpent with fore-flippers, a lobed tail, a mane, and a head something like that of a camel or horse. But how did that legend get started? Why would anyone suppose that a monster out of time would slide undetected through the frigid waters off British Columbia and Washington State? That question hinges on a moment in history.

“After my return to Victoria during this troublesome period,” Wills continued, “it occurred to me that we should try to inject a bit of humor in the newspaper. Rumors were abroad that a sea serpent was disporting itself in our waters and I felt if the story was handled circumspectly we might have a little fun.”¹⁸² Wills was forthright about his motivations for publicizing the serpent (people needed a pick-me-up to balance all the bad news, and, not incidentally, the newspaper needed the money),¹⁸³ but he was hardly the first newspaper editor to turn to the sea serpent in an hour of need. As the Critic put it in 1885:

With the Victoria Daily Times backing the 1933 serpent story, Cadborosaurus, as the paper dubbed the creature (or Caddy, for Cadboro Bay, allegedly a favorite haunt for the creature), became a media darling, making headlines from London to Los Angeles, from the New York Times to Time.¹⁸⁶ But how did the traditional Atlantic sea serpent take up residence in the Pacific? Assuming that Wills did not invent it from whole cloth, how did the “rumors” about the serpent get started? And why, then, in 1933—the same year that Nessie was born?

My strong suspicion is that Cadborosaurus may have been inspired by the film King Kong and, even more so, by the global press surrounding the recent monster innovation at Loch Ness in Scotland—which was itself based on King Kong. Let’s look at how events unfolded.

According to Wills, it literally began on a slow news day. “One morning things were dull in the newsroom of The Times,” Wills recalled. “The police court reporter had returned from his beat without record of even a drunk. In his despair he blurted out: ‘A couple of guys say they’ve seen a sea serpent off Cadboro Bay. What about that for a headline?’”¹⁸⁷ Wills dispatched reporter Ted Fox to talk first to witness W. H. Langley and then to another man, Fred W. Kemp.¹⁸⁸ The next day’s front-page headline proclaimed, “Yachtsmen Tell of Huge Serpent Seen off Victoria.”¹⁸⁹ This seized the imagination of the city, inspiring a rash of copycat sightings and launching an enduring legend.

Both Langley and Kemp claimed that they had seen huge sea monsters, allegedly in independent sightings over a year apart. According to Langley, he and his wife were sailing when they heard “a grunt and a snort accompanied by a huge hiss,” and then “saw a huge object about 90 to 100 feet off,” of which “the only part of it that we saw was a huge dome of what was apparently a portion of its back.” It was, he said, visible for only a few seconds before diving. Contemporary critics were quick to point out that it swam like a whale, sounded like a whale, and looked like a whale. Langley disputed this interpretation,¹⁹⁰ but whales do abound in the area: humpback whales, gray whales, sperm whales, and others. Given that no other evidence corroborates this momentary, undeniably whale-like anecdote, the Langleys’ sighting seems to be a completely trivial case.

Kemp’s sustained daylight sighting was more interesting. According to Kemp, he and his family were picnicking one afternoon in 1932, on one of a group of tiny islands just off Victoria, when they saw something extraordinary. A huge creature swam up the channel between Chatham and Strongtide islands, leaving an impressive wake. In a signed statement, Kemp recalled,

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!

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?

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.

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:

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:

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.

But neither elephant seals nor boat wakes explain why the canonical Caddy takes the form it does. Eyewitness reports of Cadborosaurus are highly variable (up to and including the claim that “‘Caddy’ has three heads”),²²³ which is to be expected from a mixed population of witnesses interpreting a wide variety of phenomena through the multiple lenses of modern sea monster mythology, Hollywood, and their own imaginations. Nonetheless, the influence of the classical hippocamp on Cadborosaurus is very clear.

Anatomically, the canonical Caddy is extremely similar to the hippocamp: snaky and horse-headed, with a lobed tail like a whale, vertical tail arches, and two fore-flippers below the base of the neck. Caddy’s improbable mane so obviously resembles that of the hippocamp that I find it hard to regard these features as anything other than cultural homologues—which neatly explains something that has puzzled me since I was a child. (The hippocamp template is even clearer when looking at a Caddy-inspired children’s book about a sea serpent named Serendipity, which was very popular among children of my generation. As author Stephen Cosgrove told me, Serendipity’s design borrows “a whole lot of Caddy. I think she is related on her mother’s side.”)²²⁴

But what of Caddy’s famous camel-shaped head? Wills argued on a television program in 1950 that Caddy “is not a horse-face[d] sea serpent like some inventions of the past, but has a camel-like head.”²²⁵ Doesn’t this distance Caddy from the hippocamp? Not really. “Camel-like” is a minor variation on the traditional “horse-headed” characteristic, and the shape of sea serpents’ heads have always been said to resemble those of a variety of large terrestrial mammals: the hippocamp-descended “horse-like” head dominates, but “cow” and “sheep” are common variants, and even “giraffe” shows up from time to time. For their part, those who claim to have seen Cadborosaurus also use a range of animal comparisons to describe their monster. But contrary to the creature’s camel-headed reputation, “horse-like” is by far the most common description for Caddy’s head! When Darren Naish, Michael Woodley, and Cameron McCormick broke down the 178 eyewitness reports recorded by LeBlond and Bousfield in their book Cadborosaurus, they found an astonishing range of descriptions. The witnesses mentioned body lengths of anywhere from 5 to 300 feet, for example, and practically any natural-seeming color from tans to blacks to greens. But the descriptions that the witnesses gave of Caddy’s head are much more uniform: about 75 percent compared it with that of a large animal; of those, a whopping 42 percent said that Caddy’s head looked like that of a horse, and about 13 percent chose the next most popular description: “camel-like.” Combined, the closely similar head-shape descriptions of “horse,” “camel,” “giraffe,” “cow,” and “sheep” comfortably dominated, with a majority of almost 70 percent.²²⁶

The continuing influence of the horse-headed hippocamp template seems clear. Yet, it is also true that sea monster reports are as wildly unpredictable as the sea—and as kaleidoscopically varied as the human imagination.

Cryptozoology thrives on the failure to distinguish observations from conclusions. The inappropriate certainty that people feel for their conclusions is itself treated as primary evidence. Few things in cryptozoology feel as hair-raisingly persuasive as “I was there! I know what I saw.” The problem is that different people “know” that they have seen many very different things. Taken at face value, then, the eyewitness evidence implies the existence of many very different types of undiscovered sea monsters—indeed, many competing monsters in every cryptozoological subcategory. (For example, cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Patrick Huyghe report more than fifty kinds of just bipedal, humanoid cryptids as described by different witnesses at different times.)²²⁸

This exuberant proliferation of monsters posed a challenge for the “author zero” of the modern sea serpent mythology, Bishop Erich Pontoppidan. Discussing an earlier sighting of a sea monster described by clerics Hans and Poul Egede (figure 5.31),²²⁹ Pontoppidan was forced to “conclude (what by other accounts I have thought probable) that there are sea snakes, like other fish, of different sorts.”²³⁰ This was honest of him. Rather than annexing Egede’s quite different monster in service of his own maned Norwegian serpent, Pontoppidan itemized the many points of difference and dubbed it a new species. But he could not stop there. Pontoppidan was likewise forced to admit the existence of other sea monsters: the vast kraken 1½ miles in diameter—and even mermen! How could he not? In his own diocese were “several hundreds of persons of credit and reputation, who affirm, with the strongest assurance, that they have seen this kind of creature,” and he personally spoke with many of these highly certain merman eyewitnesses.

As the sea serpent concept spread beyond Scandinavia, new yarns covered the range from unlikely to implausible to flat-out ridiculous—and each story jarred against others. In 1786, for example, a newspaper reported that two sailors had sworn before a magistrate and a justice of the peace that they had seen a monster “at least three English miles” in length.²³¹ (Even in those days, this was a bit much to swallow. A rival newspaper soon mocked that this “droll fish” had been killed and that a colossal lead kettle was being constructed to boil it.)²³² A 3-mile monster is clearly an outlier in the sighting database, but the report did involve sworn testimony from multiple witnesses—cryptozoology’s gold standard, such as it is.

This situation would not improve with time. As Charles Gould noted in 1886, “The narratives of different observers disagree so much in detail that we have a difficulty in reconciling them, except upon the supposition that they relate to several distinct creatures … the various creatures collectively so designated being neither serpents nor, indeed, always mutually related.”²³³

So variable are eyewitness accounts of sea serpents that Bernard Heuvelmans found it necessary to propose several distinct, undiscovered species of marine mega-fauna: “The legend of the Great Sea-Serpent, then, has arisen by degrees from chance sightings of a series of large sea-animals that are serpentiform in some respect,” including “three Archaeoceti or very primitive Cetecea … then two pinnipeds … and several eel-like fishes,” and “finally a pelagic saurian shaped like a big crocodile.”²³⁴ Yet, not even this expanded scheme is sufficient to encompass the diversity of eyewitness accounts. Discussing Heuvelmans’s “Merhorse” (hippocampus)-type serpent, Coleman and Huyghe struggled to explain why “observers report several sizes and forms,” invoking sexual variation and regional differences as “probably responsible for the appearance of two distinct categories within the Waterhorse type; one larger and hairier, the other smaller with smoother skin and what appears to be a longer neck in proportion to a slighter body.”²³⁵ Even this level of subdivision glosses over enormous variation. For example, Coleman and Huyghe tentatively folded the Scottish traditions of freshwater water-horses and water-bulls into their two mer-horse subcategories, even though these distinct folkloric creatures are typically described as supernatural, amphibious quadrupeds. (All European water-horse traditions possibly owe something to cultural common descent from the hippocamp, but that does not mean that the multiple traditions are not clearly distinct from one another. The Cadborosaurus-type sea serpent bears extremely little similarity to the shape-shifting kelpies described in the discussion of the Loch Ness monster.)

“Sea-serpents themselves seem to be as variable as fashions,” despaired Heuvelmans.²³⁶ He struggled to make eyewitness reports fit within the classification scheme of his several hypothetical species, but many refused to fit. Many reports described characteristics from more than one of his categories or creatures that fit into none. He wrote, “The problem seems to get more and more confused, as more and more different types of monsters appear, until at times one can almost bear it no longer. I have often felt, during the last seven years, that it was beyond my powers to solve and that I should have to confess myself beaten.”²³⁷ The truth is, he probably should have. Efforts to classify sea serpents (or other cryptids) on the basis of sighting reports are deeply problematic, as Huxley understood in 1893. An insightful article by Charles Paxton compared such efforts to obsessing over the Monster Manual from the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Subjectively “shoe-horning” varied reports into preconceived categories is “misleading and can lead to invalid conclusions,” Paxton explained. The monsters of folklore and of eyewitness reports “are not easily classified. They are conceptually amorphous and difficult to define. Fireside tales are not associated with morphological or zoological precision. Names and characteristics of monsters do not conform to the rigid minds of modern-day cryptozoologists. Snarks overlap with boojums.”²³⁸ Disconnecting cryptozoology from the fundamental fuzziness of eyewitness reports destroys the foundation on which monster hunting rests. According to Paxton’s very good advice, it is best to avoid the temptation even to assign names to cryptids (unless used simply to designate a geographical location, such as “Loch Ness monster”). “The raw data of cryptozoology should not be ‘cryptids’—as many cryptozoologists seem to believe—but reports,” Paxton emphasizes. “So when cryptozoologists refer to a particular ‘cryptid’ they really should be referring to a number of reports which may or may not have a common source.”

Does Paxton’s warning about assuming a common source for divergent reports pose a problem for the identification of sea serpents with the hippo-camp of classical Greek art? It would if the argument were that witnesses are “really” describing hippocamps, but that is not my position. Instead, I argue, as does Paxton, that myths and legends are amorphous and fluid, with individual storytellers (including eyewitnesses; sincere or not, cryptid reports are ultimately stories) drawing freely from any and all culturally available templates. When witnesses attempt to explain ambiguous phenomena, the hippocamp-derived Great Sea Serpent is one of those available templates. Plesiosaurs are another.

The characteristics of the hippocamp, including the mane and horse’s head, were built into the sea serpent legend at its inception—with the hippocamp inspiring the hrosshvalr and havhest, these Nordic mer-horses engendering the Scandinavian sea serpent, and the Scandinavian sea serpent informing all that has come since. In this evolution of ideas—“memetic” evolution, to employ biologist Richard Dawkins’s metaphor ²³⁹—the hippocamp’s cluster of connected characteristics have allowed it to remain a successful and long-lived creature in the ecology of the imagination. It has evolved slightly since classical times and has come to perform new functions and occupy new habitats, but the hippocamp has remained such a coherent and competitive form that it clearly is echoed in the canonical Cadborosaurus. In parallel with the hippocamp’s line of descent, the discovery of fossils of extinct marine reptiles in the nineteenth century introduced a successful new cluster of dominant traits: those of the small-headed, flippered, long-necked plesiosaur. In the memetic competition taking place in the imaginations of individuals, in popular culture, and in scientific (and pseudoscientific) speculation, ideas may not only change vertically over time, but also trade characteristics horizontally with their competitors. This horizontal meme transfer results in no end of hybridized creatures, as witnesses and storytellers mix and match characteristics from the hippocamp-style Great Sea Serpent, from plesiosaurs, from dragons, from whales and other known animals, and (in memetic evolution’s engine of mutation) from mistakes and imagination. In most alleged water monster habitat, serpent types are reported alongside plesiosaurs. In some niches, the plesiosaur becomes dominant (as is the Loch Ness monster); in others, the hippocamp-type serpent emerges as the apex monster (as is Caddy). But the truth is that sea serpents are shape-shifters. How could they not be? They are, after all, creatures of culture, not of nature. In all environments—in fiction, in the cryptozoological literature, and in the oceans of the mind—sea monsters teem and vary and return to type, as unpredictable, as unique, and yet as familiar as the waves themselves.

Incredulity requires no training, no knowledge, no investigation. “Any fool can disbelieve in sea serpents,” as Archie Wills put it.²⁴¹ By itself, doubt does nothing to advance knowledge. Even Occam’s celebrated razor is just a betting strategy. Parsimony tells us which proposed explanations to investigate first; it does not tell us which explanations are true. Often nature is simple and elegant, but sometimes it is not.

For this reason, Owen should be applauded for voluntarily taking up his own burden of proof. After all, the goal of science is not to stonewall weird ideas, but to find out what is true. He rested his case on the negative evidence that no bone or carcass or geologically recent fossil of a sea serpent had yet emerged, on all the coasts and in all the museums of the world. It is often said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” but this is only sometimes true. If a given hypothesis (“The world has giant sea monsters”) predicts that we should see certain evidence (“Therefore, the world has sea monster carcasses”) and we do not see that evidence (for the record, we do not), then that actually is evidence of absence. It may or may not be strong evidence, depending on the particulars of the case—but it is relevant, and it does count.

In this chapter, I have tried to present not only the negative evidence, but also a positive historical case for the sea serpent. The sea serpent can be shown, in my opinion, to be a cultural creation: a concept rather than an animal. It arose out of art, and then evolved and spread with changing fashions, popular media, and the happenstance of fossil discoveries. Yet even now, knowing all that, I must admit: that does not mean that there could not also be a sea serpent.

In 1933, a letter writer to the Times of London argued—somewhat oddly—that the existence of the sea serpent or Nessie would be disturbing to skeptics:

And what of my parents’ sighting of Cadborosaurus—the event that propelled me into a career of skeptical paranormal investigation? I’ll leave you with my father’s closing thoughts: