Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Figure 5.17 The maned sjø-ormen (sea-worm), drawn by Hans Strom, in Erich Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway.

  Ferry wrote a statement describing his encounter, and his men swore before the magistrates that the statement was correct. Ferry had, the statement said, been at sea on a calm day when his eight rowers told him that “there was a Sea-snake before us.” He ordered the men to intercept the creature and “took my gun, that was ready charged, and fired at it.” The animal dived, leaving blood in its wake. “The head of this snake,” Ferry swore, “which it held more than two feet above the surface of the water, resembled a horse…. It had … a long white mane that hung down from the neck to the surface of the water. Beside the head and neck, we saw seven or eight folds or coils of this Snake, which was very thick … there was about [6 feet] distance between each fold.”

  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:

  Before I leave this subject, it may be proper to answer a question that may be put by some people, namely, what reason can be assigned why this Snake of such extraordinary size, &c. should be found in the North sea only? For, according to all accounts from seafaring people, it has never been seen anywhere else. Those who have sailed in other seas in different parts of the globe, have, in their journals, taken particular notice of other Sea-monsters, but not one of them mentions this.89

  Many societies share the ocean, but only one encounters sea serpents. That is such a screaming, flashing, gigantic red flag that readers may be forgiven if they find Pontoppidan’s answer to it unconvincing. He simply asserted that “when the thing is confirmed by unquestionable evidence, and is found to be true,” then armchair objections are beside the point. Moreover, Pontoppidan argued that “this objection requires no other answer, than that the Lord of nature disposes of the abodes of his various creatures, in different parts of the globe, according to his wise purposes and designs, the reason of his proceedings cannot, ought not to be comprehended by us.” This dodge seems to me like the clergyman in Pontoppidan inappropriately pulling rank on the scientist.

  THE GREAT SEA SERPENT

  Erich Pontoppidan’s book was the critical turning point for the sea serpent: a Scandinavian phenomenon that burst forth onto the world stage to become an enduring part of popular culture. (I can’t help but think of the Swedish pop band ABBA.) To understand what a breakthrough this was, consider Bernard Heuvelmans’s overview of the sighting database (figure 5.18). He estimated that in the centuries before the publication of Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway, there were only nine dated and documented sightings of sea serpents in all of history. After Pontoppidan? “The number increases to twenty-three between 1751 and 1800 but they do not become really frequent until the first half of the nineteenth century: 166 from 1801 to 1850 and 149 from 1851 to 1900. The rate did not drop in the twentieth century, for there were 194 between 1901 and 1950.” Heuvelmans noted that the trend was continuing in the 1960s, when he compiled the statistics. Assuming that one-third of sightings record misidentification errors or hoaxes, he estimated that “this makes 100 sightings every fifty years, an average of two a year, right up to the present.”90

  Figure 5.18 Sightings of sea serpents, 1600–1950, by fifty-year intervals, according to Bernard Heuvelmans.

  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.

  The Stronsay Beast

  For as long as humans have walked beside the sea, they have marveled at the strange things that sometimes wash ashore. “During the rule of Tiberius, in an island off the coast of the province of Lyons the receding ocean tide left more than 300 monsters at the same time, of marvelous variety and size,” recorded the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder.91 Similarly, a pamphlet published in 1674 describes a “Strange Monster or Wonderful Fish” that washed up on a beach in Ireland (figure 5.19). The description and illustration clearly identify the animal as a large squid, 19 feet in length (including the arms) “and in Bulk or Bigness of Body somewhat larger than a Horse.” (The anonymous author of the pamphlet cheekily added that “some Zealots hearing of a strange Creature … took it for the Apocaliptical Beast, and fancied the Pope was landed in person.”)92

  Figure 5.19

  The “Strange Monster or Wonderful Fish” that washed ashore in Ireland in October 1673.

  Figure 5.20 The sketch of the Stronsay Beast drawn by an eyewitness. (Redrawn from Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society 1 [1811])

  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

  Figure 5.21 It is typical for a decaying basking shark to resemble a plesiosaur. (Illustration by Daniel Loxton)

  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:

  They tell their own tale to scientific examination. They are obviously part of the backbone of a gristly fish; by no possibility could they belong to a plesiosaur, or to any reptile or amphibian, nor could they be part of a whale or even of a bony fish. The texture of the segments of the vertebrae, their size, and curious pillared structure, agree exactly with those of the basking shark, a monster which may be 40 ft. long and which occasionally appears in British waters…. The sea-serpent of Stronsay, which a century and a quarter ago raised so great a commotion in the scientific world, has fallen from its unique estate, but it remains a not-to-be-forgotten memorial to the credulity of the inexperienced and of the scientists who built upon so shaky a foundation.95

  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.

  Figure 5.22 The carcass of a basking shark aboard the Japanese fishing trawler Zuiyo Maru in 1977. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruthin, Wales)

  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?

  The “Plesiosaur Hypothesis”

  In their nineteenth-century heyday, sea serpents enjoyed more mainstream scientific respectability than any other cryptid has ever achieved. This high-profile scientific attention was based on a truly spectacular coincidence: just as the sea serpent was reaching the peak of its popularity, new fossil discoveries taught scientists that gigantic marine reptiles genuinely used to exist. In primeval seas, sinuous plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs swam beside dinosaur-dominated shores (figure 5.23). As the world reflected on a recent rash of sea serpent sightings on the East Coast of North America (especia
lly in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1817), astonishing fossil finds shone a warm light of plausibility on the modern serpent legend—a spotlight under which the sea serpent thrived.

  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.