Leviathan or The Whale

at the luncheon party after Melville and Hawthorne met on Monument Mountain; or that down in Carolina, another monster caused a sensation when it swam up the Broad River into one of its tributaries which was barely a hundred yards wide, chased all the while by a party of men shooting at it with rifles.
    Throughout the century, from all corners of the globe, there were sightings of sea serpents. Surely not even the sceptical could dismiss them as a conspiracy of fools? Spectators swore to the same details: a huge, long-necked animal, able to swim faster than the fastest whale. Precise locations were given, in latitude and longitude, marking these appearances at exact moments in time, to be entered in ship’s logs, and relayed in newspaper paragraphs. Such was the evidence surrounding the sea serpent that when Henry Dewhurst published his
Natural History of the Cetacea
in 1834, he included it as fact, ‘one of those unknown animals which occasionally puzzle the zoologist when they make their appearance’.
    Scanning the yellowing columns of newsprint, it is remarkable to see how often such mythical animals rear their head, and what a debate raged around the possibility of their existence. The most famous encounter came on 6 August 1848, when the crew of HMS
Dœdalus
, en route from the Cape of Good Hope to St Helena, watched ‘an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea’. Sixty feet of the animal was visible
à fleur d’eau
, as Captain McQuhæ, stirred to poetic French by the apparition, described it. The creature (which to me looks rather like a giant slow worm) passed so close that had it been ‘a man of my acquaintance’, the captain added, ‘I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye’. Readers of the
Illustrated London News
thrilled to a double-page spread on the subject, along with the testimony of an officer of the Royal Navy.
    But of all these accounts, it is those that describe interaction with whales that most terrify and intrigue; not least because, in such company, they seem to disprove the assertions of experts who claimed that what experienced sailors saw were in fact whales, sharks, porpoises, or even elephant seals. In June 1818 eighteen passengers and the captain of the packet
Delia
, sailing off Cape Ann, watched a sea serpent battling a humpback whale, the creature rearing its head and tail twenty-five feet out of the water. In July 1887 a monster was seen fighting what was presumed to be a cetacean off the Maine coast; the following morning, a dying whale was found stranded nearby, ‘its flesh torn and gashed’. The most extraordinary report, however, came from the South Atlantic in 1875.
    On 8 January, off Cape São Roque, on the north-eastern corner of Brazil–a landmark for emigrating whales–the barque
Pauline was
sailing in moderate winds and fine weather when her crew saw some black spots on the water, with a whitish pillar high above them. As the ship drew near, it became apparent that the pillar was more than thirty feet tall, and was rising and falling with a splash. George Drevar, ship’s master, picked up his eyeglasses and could not believe what he saw: a sea serpent with its coils wrapped twice around a sperm whale.
    At this point in the narrative I find it almost impossible to proceed, for fear of waking the sleeping monster, wondering if I’d ever dare go out of my depth again.
    Using its head and tail as levers, the serpent was twisting itself around the whale ‘with great velocity’. Every few minutes the pair sank beneath the waves, only to reappear, still engaged in mortal combat. The struggles of the whale–along with two others nearby which were ‘frantic with excitement’–turned the sea around them into a boiling cauldron, rent with loud and confused noise. From its coils, Drevar estimated the serpent to be in excess of 160 feet long. He noted that its mouth was ever open, an observation that somehow makes the scene more awful. As the crew of the
Pauline
watched, the battle of the leviathans continued for fifteen minutes, and ended only when the whale’s flukes, waving backwards and forwards and lashing the water in its death throes, vanished below, where, Drevar had no doubt, ‘it was gorged at the serpent’s leisure; and that monster of monsters may have been many months in a state of coma, digesting the huge mouthful.’
    With that final act, the two sperm whales