Figure 5.23 Many nineteenth-century artists and writers depicted epic battles between the newly discovered ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.
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
Figure 5.24 The creature reported by officers of the HMS Daedalus in 1848.
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 k
now 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:
Now, on weighing the question, whether creatures meriting the name of “great sea-serpent” do exist, or whether any of the gigantic marine saurians of the secondary deposits may have continued to live up to the present time, it seems to me less probable that no part of the carcass of such reptiles should have ever been discovered in a recent or unfossilized state, than that men should have been deceived by a cursory view of a partly submerged and rapidly moving animal, which might only be strange to themselves. In other words, I regard the negative evidence, from the utter absence of any of the recent remains of great sea-serpents, krakens, or Enaliosauria, as stronger against their actual existence than the positive statements which have hitherto weighed with the public mind in favor of their existence. A larger body of evidence, from eye-witnesses, might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea-serpent.124
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:
I have asked myself … whether there is not such an animal as the Sea-Serpent. There are many who will doubt the existence of such a creature until it can be brought under the dissecting-knife; but it has been seen by so many on whom we may rely, that it is wrong to doubt any longer. The truth is, however, that if a naturalist had to sketch the outlines of an Ichthyosaurus or Plesiosaurus from the remains we have of them, he would make a drawing very similar to the Sea-Serpent as it has been described…. I still consider it probable that it will be the good fortune of some person on the coast of Norway or North America to find a living representative of this type of reptile, which is thought to have died out.125
Agassiz amplified this opinion in a letter written on June 15, 1849, concluding that while he was “not at all disposed to endorse all the reports” of sea serpent sightings, “from the evidence I have received I can no longer doubt the existence of some large marine reptile, allied to Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus, yet unknown to naturalists.”126
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:
Captain the Hon. George Hope states, that when in H.M.S. Fly, in the gulf of California, the sea being perfectly calm and transparent, he saw at the bottom a large marine animal, with the head and general figure of the alligator, except that the neck was much longer, and that instead of legs the creature had four large flappers, somewhat like those of turtles … the creature was distinctly visible, and all its movements could be observed with ease: it appeared to be pursuing its prey at the bottom of the sea.127
In 1959, cryptozoology pioneer Willy Ley characterized the Fly report as “very significant, in my opinion,”128 but it is hard to see why he would have thought so. As Ley noted, the case was “deplorably lacking in detail,” but it was worse than that: the story was unsubstantiated hearsay. As Newman put it, “Captain Hope made this relation in company, and as a matter of conversation: when I heard it from the gentleman to whom it was narrated [emphasis added], I inquired.” That is, Newman heard from an unnamed source that Hope had mentioned socially that he once saw a weird-looking animal. Not a lot to hang your hat on—but, oddly enough, Newman went on to argue that the Fly case “appears to me in all respects the most interesting Natural-History fact of the present century, completely overturning as it does some of the most favourite and fashionable hypotheses of geological science.”129 Despite its weaknesses, the report remained influential because it seemed to confirm a hypothesis that many people wished to be true.
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 Big
footers, 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
It must not be forgotten, as Mr. Darwin has ably insisted, that the specimens we possess of fossil organisms are very far indeed from being a complete series. They are rather fragments accidentally preserved, by favouring circumstances, in an almost total wreck. The Enaliosauria, particularly abundant in the secondary epoch, may have become sufficiently scarce in the tertiary to have no representative in these preserved fragmentary collections, and yet not have been absolutely extinct.137
Even more surprising, perhaps, Gosse rested his sea serpent case on an evolutionary argument!
Not that I would identify the animals seen with the actual Plesiosaurs of the lias. None of them yet discovered appear to exceed thirty-five feet in length, which is scarcely half sufficient to meet the exigencies of the case. I should not look for any species, scarcely even any genus, to be perpetuated from the oolitic period to the present. Admitting the actual continuation of the order Enaliosauria, it would be, I think, quite in conformity with general analogy to find important generic modifications, probably combining some salient features of several extinct forms. Thus the little known Pliosaur had many of the peculiarities of the Plesiosaur, without its extraordinarily elongated neck, while it vastly exceeded it in dimensions. What if the existing form should be essentially a Plesiosaur, with the colossal magnitude of a Pliosaur?138
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