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.
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF SERPENTS
Writing in 1893, the great English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (known to history as “Darwin’s Bulldog”) paused to consider the mystery of the Great Sea Serpent. Huxley was a major thought leader in his day (he coined the word “agnostic”), so it pleases me to credit him with one of the most important critical comments ever offered in regard to sea serpents—and, indeed, to paranormal claims in general. Like skeptic Richard Owen before him, Huxley granted that there was “no a priori reason that I know of why snake-bodied reptiles, from 50 ft. long and upwards, should not disport themselves in our seas, as they did in those of the cretaceous epoch, which, geologically speaking, is a mere yesterday.” But Huxley saw a serious problem in the way that eyewitness testimony was used to support belief in the serpent. After reading one compelling eyewitness case, “I was almost convinced,” he wrote—until he compared the testimony with that of a second witness. It became clear “beyond doubt that the circumstance under which the first deponent saw the apparition were such as to make it impossible that he could have properly assured himself of the facts to which he testified. He had done what we are all tempted to do—mixed up observations and conclusions from them, as if they rested on the same foundation.”227 This is a subtle but powerful point. When people say that they saw a sea serpent or any other cryptid (or a ghost, Elvis, or an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker), what they mean—or should mean if they were to take Huxley’s caution to heart—is that they saw a phenomenon that looked a certain way, and also they think it may have been a sea serpent.
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.
Figure 5.31 A detail from a map, showing the widely reproduced (and frequently redrawn) illustration of the somewhat whale-like sea monster described by Hans Egede and his son Poul.
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 metaphor239—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.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Richard Owen’s famous critique of the report of a sighting of a sea serpent by Captain Peter M’Quhae and other officers of the Daedalus contains a sentiment that speaks to my own values and approach to cryptids and other paranormal mysteries:
I am usually asked, after each endeavour to explain Captain M’Quhae’s sea-serpent, “Why there should not be a great sea-serpent?”—often, too, in a tone which seems to imply, “Do you think, then, there are not more marvels in the deep than are dreamt of in your philosophy?” And freely conceding that point, I have felt bound to give a reason for scepticism as well as faith.240
Arguing about the burden of proof is one of skepticism’s great clichés. It is common for skeptics to have to state the obvious: the world is not obligated to accept anyone’s personal claims or speculations. If someone wants others to believe that there is a worldwide population of aquatic mega-serpents, he or she must present evidence that this is the case; others do not have to prove the claimant wrong. Yet when skeptics emphasize this “burden of proof,” we may forget a deep truth: Doubt is cheap. Finding out is hard.
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:
If there is one thing the sceptics doubt more than religion, it is the sea serpent, and now the sea serpent is in a fair way to becoming an established fact. The sceptics by their teachings and writings have made this life of ours drab and dreary enough. It is time the faithful rebelled, and if we can prove that the sea serpent exists there is no limit to the discomfiture that can be inflicted upon those who doubt.242
If only this correspondent had been able to enjoy the chance to gloat! If a sea serpent were ever to be discovered, it would be among the happiest days of my life. But one cannot prove a negative—or at least not easily, and not often. Do we really know that sea serpents do not exist? If there is one lesson to be drawn from what we do know, it is to avoid arbitrarily shoehorning diverse events into our favorite explanatory categories. Each individual sighting is its own mystery, resting on its own particular set of facts, posing its own challenge, requiring its own investigation. Most remain unsolved.
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