In October, 1883, there was a story in the newspapers— I take from the Quebec Daily Mercury, Oct. 7, 1883— of an unknown animal, which was seen by Capt. Seymour, of the barkHope On, off the Pearl Islands, about 50 miles from Panama. In Knowledge, Nov. 30, 1883, Richard Proctor tells of this animal, and says that also it had been reported by officers of a steamship. This one was handsome. Anyway, it had a head like that of a "handsome horse." It had either four legs or four "jointed fins." Covered with a brownish hide, upon which were large, black spots. Circus-horseish. About twenty feet long. There was another story told, about the same time. New Zealand Times, Dec. 12, 1883— report by a sea captain, who had seen something like a turtle, 60 feet long, and 40 feet wide.
Perhaps stories of turtle-backed objects of large size relate to submersible vessels. If there were no submersible vessels of this earth, in the year 1883, we think of submersibles from somewhere else. Why they should be so secretive, we can't much inquire into now, because we are so much concerned with other concealments and suppressions. I suspect that, in other worlds, or in other parts of one existence, there is esoteric knowledge of the human beings of this earth, kept back from common knowledge. This is easily thinkable, because even upon this earth there is little knowledge of human beings.
There have been suggestions of an occult control upon the minds of the inhabitants of this earth. Let anybody who does not like the idea that his mind may be most subtly controlled, without his knowledge of it, think back to what propagandists did with his beliefs in the years 1914-18. Also he need not think so far back as that.
The standardized explanations by which conventional scientists have checked inquiry into alleged appearances of strange living things, in the ocean, are mentioned in the following record:
Something was seen, off the west coast of Africa, Oct. 17, 1912. Passengers on a vessel said that they had seen the head and neck of a monster. They appointed a committee to see to it that record should be made of their observations. In the Cape Times (Cape Town) Oct. 29, 1912, Mr. Wilmot, former member of the Cape Legislative Council, records this experience, saying that there is no use trying to think that four independent witnesses had seen nothing but a string of dolphins or a gigantic strand of sea weed, or anything else, except an unknown monster.
It's the fishmonger of Worcester in his marine appearance.
In this field of reported observations, so successful has been a seeming control of minds upon this earth, and guidance into picturing nothing but a string of dolphins or a gigantic strand of sea weed, that, now that the ghost has been considerably rehabilitated— though in my own records of hundreds of unexplained occurrences, the ghost-like scarcely ever appears— the Sea Serpent is foremost in representing what is supposed to be the mythical. I don't know how many books I have read, in each of which is pictured a long strand of sea weed, with the root-end bulbed and gnarled grotesquely like a head. I suppose that hosts of readers have been convinced by these pictures.
But, if a monster from somewhere else should arrive upon the land of this earth, and, perhaps being out of adaptation, should die upon land, probably it would not be seen. I have noted several letters to newspapers, by big-game hunters who had never heard of anybody coming upon a dead elephant. Sir Emerson Tennent has written that, though he had often inquired of Europeans and Cingalese, he had never heard of anybody who had seen the remains of an elephant in the forests of Ceylon. A jungle soon vegetates euphemisms around its obscenities, but the frank ocean has not the pruderies of a jungle.
Strange bones have often been found on land. They have soon been conventionalized. When bones of a monster are found, the pattern-makers of a museum arrange whatever they can into conventional structures, and then fill in with plaster, colored differently, so that there shall be no deception. After a few years, these differences become undetectable. There is considerable dissatisfaction with the paleontologists. I notice in museums that, even when plaster casts are conspicuously labeled as nothing but plaster casts, some honest fellow has dug off chips to expose that there isn't a bone in them.
What we're looking for is an account of something satisfactorily monstrous, and not more or less in the distance: something that is not of paleontologic memory that has been jogged so plasterfully. The sea is the best field for data.
In the Mems. Wernerian Nat. Hist. Soc., 1-418, is published a paper by Dr. Barclay, who tells of the remains of an unknown monster that had been cast up by the sea, in September, 1808, at Stronsa, one of the Orkneys. We've got ahold of something now that was well observed. As fast as they could, observers got rid of this hunk, which for weeks, under a summer sun, had been making itself evidential. But the evidence came back. So again the observers got a rope and towed it out to sea. Sultry day soon— a flop on the beach— more observations. According to different descriptions, in affidavits by inhabitants of Stronsa, the remains of this creature had six "arms," or "paws," or "wings." There is a suggestion of stumps of fins here, but it is said that the bulk was "without the least resemblance or affinity to fish." Dr. Barclay told that in his possession was part of the "mane" of the monster.
A perhaps similar bulk was, upon the 1st of December, 1896, cast upon the coast of Florida, twelve miles south of St. Augustine. There were appendages, or ridges, upon it, and at first these formations were said to be stumps of tentacles. But, in the American Naturalist, 31-304, Prof. A. E. Verrill says that this suggestion that the mass of flesh was the remains of an octopus, is baseless. The mass was 21 feet long, 7 feet wide and 4½ feet high: estimated weight 7 tons. Reproductions of several photographs are published in the American Naturalist. Prof. Verrill says that, despite the great size of this mass, it was only part of an animal. He argues that it was part of the head of a creature like a sperm whale, but he says that it was decidedly unlike the head of any ordinary sperm whale, having no features of a whale's head. Also, according to a description in the New York Herald, Dec. 2, 1896, the bulk seems not to have been whale-like. "The hide is of a light pink color, nearly white, and in the sunshine has a distinct silvery appearance. It is very tough and cannot be penetrated even with a sharp knife." A pink monster, or an appalling thing with the look of a cherub, is another of our improvements upon conventional biology.
For a yarn, or an important record, of a reptile of "prehistoric size and appearance," said to have been found on the beach of the Gulf of Fonseca, Salvador, see the New York Herald Tribune, June 16, 1928. It was about ninety feet long, marked with black and white stripes, and was "exceedingly corpulent." Good-natured, fat monsters, too, are new to me.
I have searched especially for sea stories of hairy, or fur-covered monsters. Such creatures would not be sea animals, in the exclusive sense that something covered with scales might be. If unknown, they would have to be considered inhabitants of lands. Then up comes the question— what lands?
English Mechanic, April 7, 1899— that, according to Australian newspapers, the captain of a trading vessel had arrived in Sydney, with parts of an unknown monster. "The hide, or skin, of the monster was covered with hair."
The arrival of these remains is reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, in issues from Feb. 23 to March 2, 1899. It is said that, according to Capt. Oliver, of the trading ship Emu, he had found, upon the beach of Suarro Island, the carcass of a two-headed monster.
That is just a little too interesting.
We find that the reporter who told this story dropped the most interesting part of it, in his subsequent accounts, which were upon two skulls, a vertebra, and a rib bone: but he was determined to discredit the find, and told that the bones were obviously fossils, implying that the Captain had invented a story of bodies of two animals that had recently been alive.
When we come upon assurances that a mystery has been solved, we go on investigating.
In the Sydney Daily Telegraph, February 28, it is said that an attempt to identify the bones as fossils had been refuted. Professional and amateur scientists had accepted an invitation to examine the bones, and, according to the testimony of their noses, these things decidedly were not fossils. Each skull was more than two feet long, and was shaped somewhat like a horse's, but upon it was a beak. There are beaked whales, but these remains were not remains of beaked whales, if be accepted Captain Oliver's unsupported statements as to hairiness and great size. It is said that no specimens of the hairy hide had been taken, because all parts, except the scraped bones, of these bulks that had been lying under a tropical sun weren't just what one would want to take along in a small ship. According to Capt. Oliver, one of the bodies was sixty feet long. The largest beaked whales are not known to exceed thirty feet in length.
Mr. Waite, of the Australian Museum, examined the bones. He said that they were of beaked whales.
Mr. F. A. Mitchell-Hedges, in Battles with Giant Fish, tells of remains of a tremendous, unknown mammal, which was washed ashore, at Cape May, N. J., November, 1921. "This mammal whose weight was estimated at over 15 tons, which— to give a comparison of size— is almost as large as five fully grown elephants, was visited by many scientists, who were unable to place it, and positively stated that nothing yet known to science could in any way compare with it."
I investigated the story of the Cape May monster, wherever I got the idea that I could find out anything in particular.
Somebody in Cape May wrote to me that the thing was a highly undesirable carcass of a whale, which had been towed out to sea. Somebody else wrote to me that it was a monster with a tusk twelve feet long, which he had seen. He said that, if I'd like to have it, he'd send me a photograph of the monster. After writing of having seen something with a tusk twelve feet long, he sent me a photograph of something with two tusks, each six feet long. But only one of the seeming tusks is clear in the picture, and it could be, not a tusk, but part of the jaw bone of a whale, propped up tusk-wise.
In the London Daily Mail, Dec. 27, 1924, appeared a' story of an extraordinary carcass that was washed up, on the coast of Natal, Oct. 25, 1924. It was 47 feet long, and was covered with white hair, like a polar bear's—
I won't go into this, because I consider it a worthless yarn. In accordance with my methods, considering this a foolish and worthless yarn, I sent out letters to South African newspapers, calling upon readers, who could, to investigate this story. Nobody answered.
In the New Zealand Times, March 19, 1883, it is said that bones of an unknown monster, about 40 feet long, had been found upon the coast of Queensland, and had been taken to Rockhampton, Queensland. "There are the remains of what must have been an enormous snout, 8 feet long, in which the respiratory passage are yet traceable." These could not have been the remains of a beaked whale. Whatever hip bones a cetacean has are only vestigial structures. In a sperm whale, 55 feet long, the hip bones are detached and atrophied relics of former uses, each about one foot long. A hip bone of the Queensland monster is described as enormous.
In looking over the London Daily News, I came upon an item. Trawlers of the steamship Balmedic had brought to Grimsby the skull of an unknown monster, dredged up in the Atlantic, north of Scotland (Daily News, June 26, 1908). The size of the skull indicated an animal the size of an elephant, and it was in "a wonderful state of preservation." It was unlike the skull of any cetacean, having eye sockets a foot across. From the jaws hung a leathery tongue, three feet long. I found, in the Grimsby Telegraph, June 29th, a reproduction of a photograph of this skull, with the long tongue hanging from the beak-like jaws. I made a sketch of the skull, as pictured, and sent it with a description to the British Museum (Natural History). I received an answer from Mr. W. P. Pycraft, who wrote that he had never seen any animal with such a skull— "and I have seen a good many!" It is just possible that nobody else has ever seen anything much resembling a sketch that I'd make of anything, but that has nothing to do with descriptions of the tongue, According to Mr. Pycraft no known cetacean has such a tongue.
I went on searching, trying to come upon something about a hairy monster: furred, anything except scaled, or with a hide like a whale's.
London newspapers, July 6, 1913— a lengthy telegram that had been sent by Mr. Hartwell Conder, Tasmanian State Mining Engineer, to Mr. Wallace, the Secretary of Mines, of Tasmania— that, upon April 20, 1913, two of Mr. Conder's companions, named Davies and Harris, had seen a huge, unknown animal, near Macquarie Harbor, Tasmania. "The animal was about fifteen feet long. It had a very small head, only the size of the head of a kangaroo dog. It had a thick, arched neck, passing gradually into the barrel of the body. It had no definite tail and no fins. It was furred, the coat in appearance resembling that of a horse of chestnut color, well-groomed and shining. It had four distinct legs. It traveled by bounding— i.e., by arching its back and gathering up its body, so that the footprints of the forefeet were level with those of the hind feet. It made definite footprints. These showed circular impressions, with a diameter (measured) of 9 inches, and the marks of claws, about 7 inches long, extending outward from the body. There was no evidence for or against webbing."
In reply to my inquiries, Mrs. Conder— North Terrace, Burnie, Tasmania— wrote to me, as asked to by Mr. Conder, saying that the published description is accurate, and that, unless there be a seal with jointed flippers, upon which the creature could raise itself and run, Mr. Conder "could not be altogether convinced that the animal was a seal."
I have not looked for record of any such known seal. I take for granted that the seal type has conventionalized so that there is no such seal.
It may be that there have been several finds of remains of a large, long-snouted animal that is unknown to the paleontologists, because, though it has occasionally appeared here, it has never been indigenous to this earth. New York Sun, Nov. 28, 1930— "Monster in ice has long snout." Skeleton and considerable flesh, of an unknown animal found in the ice, upon Glacier Island, Alaska. The animal was 24 feet long; head 59 inches long; snout 39 inches long. In some of the reports it was said that the animal was covered with hair, or fur. Conventionally one thinks of mammoths of Siberia, preserved for ages in ice. But, if nothing proves anything, simply that something is found in ice may not mean that for ages it was preserved in ice.
