Leviathan or The Whale

Boston,’ noted the society, whose members were all Harvard graduates and one of whom, Jacob Bigelow, was a renowned scientist and inventor of the term ‘technology’. ‘It was said to resemble a serpent in its general form and motions, to be of immense size, and to move with wonderful rapidity; to appear on the surface of the water only in calm and bright weather; and to seem jointed or like a number of buoys or casks following each other in a line.’ In response, the society appointed a committee ‘to collect evidence with regard to the existence and appearance of any such animal’. It was a court of law called to consider the existence of sea monsters; and although its findings might have certified a hippogriff, it is hard to conclude that the witnesses did not see what they say they saw.
    Amos Story of Gloucester, mariner
, said the animal had a head shaped like that of a sea turtle, ‘his colour appeared to be a dark brown, and when the sun shone upon him, the reflection was very bright. I thought his body was about the size of a man’s body.’

    A Monstrous Sea Serpent ,

    The largest ever seen in America
,
Has just made its appearance in Gloucester Harbour, Cape Ann, and has been seen by hundreds of Respectable Citizens.

    Solomon Allen of Gloucester, shipmaster
, saw it three days running, ‘nearly all day from the shore…I was on the beach, nearly on a level with him…He turned short and quick, and the first part of the curve that he made in turning resembled the link of a chain.’
    Epes Ellery of Gloucester, shipmaster
, witnessed ‘the upper part of his head, and I should say about forty feet of the animal…I was looking at him with a spy-glass, when I saw him open his mouth, and his mouth appeared like that of the serpent; the top of his head appeared flat…He appeared to be amusing himself though there were several boats not far from him.’
    In their deliberations, the committee consulted historical accounts such as that of Bishop Pontoppidan’s
Natural History of Norway
of 1755. The cleric recorded that experienced seamen found it strange to be asked if such creatures existed; he might as well have asked if there were such fish as cod or eel. Bearing such evidence in mind, the Linnæans declared ‘the foregoing testimony sufficient to place the existence of the animal beyond a doubt’.
    It was a remarkable conclusion, and as if to mark it, a second serpent was seen in Long Island Sound that October, ‘perhaps not more than a half mile from the shore, a long, rough, dark-looking body, progressing rapidly up sound (towards New York)’. One witness watched through his telescope as its back, forty or fifty feet of which was visible, rose above the surface, ‘irregular, uneven, and deeply indented’. It was a somehow horrifying scene, of a monster approaching Manhattan, and was revisited later when another was seen eighty miles up the Hudson River. A further sighting off Nahant, Boston, was witnessed by at least two hundred people.
    Over the following years, these creatures reappeared in the same waters, as though summoned by the same upwelling of food that brought the whales to the Gulf of Maine. In May 1833, for instance, five officers of the British garrison out fishing for the day in Mahone Bay off Halifax were surprised by a school of pilot whales ‘in an unusual state of excitement and which in their gambols approached so close to our little craft that some of the party amused themselves by firing at them with rifles’.
    Only then did the officers realize that the whales were fleeing ‘some denizen of the deep’ two hundred yards behind. Its movements were ‘precisely like those of a common snake, in the act of swimming, the head so elevated and thrown forward by the curve of the neck, as to enable us to see the water under and beyond it’. The creature was estimated at one hundred feet in length.
    That August, the British consul watched a similar animal from a hotel terrace in Boston: ‘above a hundred persons saw it at the same time’. One was even seen at Herring Cove in Provincetown, apparently enticed by the presence of fish and warmer waters. No less a person than Senator Daniel Webster saw a monster off Plymouth, a sighting recorded in Thoreau’s
Cape Cod
, along with the politician’s urgent request to fellow anglers never to mention a word of the encounter, lest he spend his life being asked about it. Little wonder that the serpent was a topic of conversation