The Great New England Sea Serpent: An Account of Unknown Creatures Sighted by Many Respectable Persons Between 1638 and the Present Day

Cortez

Introduction

One of the great unsolved mysteries of sea serpent lore....

The Gloucester monster simply cannot be encompassed

by any rational explanation.

—Richard Ellis, Monsters of the Sea, 1994

In August 1817, members of the New England Linnaean Society found themselves in the unique position of conducting the first ever scientific investigation of an unknown marine creature, supposed to be a sea serpent, that had appeared in the harbor at Gloucester, Massachusetts.

This was not the first sighting of a strange creature in the Gulf of Maine; nor was it the last. However, that August remains singular in that it was the first time that men of scholarship and means had an opportunity to conduct a scientific study of a creature thought to exist only in myth.

Eager to collect evidence with regard to the existence and appearance of any such animal, the members of the investigative committee of the Linnaean Society set about gathering sworn statements from a variety of credible witnesses. Residents of the town of Gloucester, who were less inclined to scholarship, pursued the evidence with every available weapon. The creature remained elusive.

As recorded in the published report of the Linnaean Committee in 1817, the witnesses’ accounts agreed that the creature was said to resemble a serpent in its general form and motions, to be of immense size, and to move with wonderful rapidity; to appear on the surface only in calm bright weather; and to seem jointed or like a number of buoys or casks following each other in a line.

Similar descriptions of a creature bearing little resemblance to any known animal had been reported as early as 1638 and would be repeated over and over again for the next 150 years.

My first encounter with the great sea serpent came when I was ten or eleven years old. What had taken me to the Swampscott Public Library, and what drew me to Waldo Thompson’s little clothbound book entitled Swampscott: Historical Sketches of the Town (1885), I cannot now say. I do know that the sixth chapter, The Sea Serpent, Seen in 1638 at Cape Ann; in 1793 at Mount Desert; in 1819, 1820 and 1849 at Swampscott (which curiously makes no mention of the Linnaean Society’s investigation), had a deep and lasting impact. I simply never looked at the ocean in the same way again.

In the years that followed my introduction to the creature in Thompson’s book, the Loch Ness monster was undergoing intense scrutiny. New books appeared almost annually, each confidently predicting that the next expedition to the loch would produce evidence of an unknown animal hidden in its peat-stained depths. I read the accounts with enthusiasm, but it was the ocean that I scanned with eager eyes—hoping, always wondering. So, when the opportunity to prepare a manuscript on the New England sea serpent presented itself, I was primed with almost thirty years of avid interest in the subject.

Beneath the murky waters of sea serpent lore are shoals of misinformation. Apart from the principal researchers on the subject—Dr. Antoon Oudemans, Rupert T Gould, and Bernard Heuvelmans (who coined the term cryptozoology in an effort to apply scientific principles to the study of hidden animals)—few writers, it seems, have looked at charts or maps, local history, or original accounts. Many have been content to quote (and sometimes misquote) earlier authorities, extracting the juicier bits without attribution. No one has been more shamelessly plundered in this way than Heuvelmans, whose 1965 work, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, is an encyclopedia of worldwide sightings, thoughtfully and scientifically analyzed.

As disgraceful as this piracy is, it seems to me a far greater crime to copy the material and still get it wrong. Misspelled place and proper names, misquotes, and misleading partial quotes, used either to bolster the thesis that sea serpents exist or make ridiculous even the myth, do neither side any favors.

Though the guilty shall remain nameless, one particularly egregious error involves testimony originally collected by a folklorist who dedicated his small book to another well-known folklore writer. The better-known writer in turn quoted the testimony but got one essential word wrong. Instead of the witness seeing three bends in the creature, the second writer (in a much more widely available book) wrote that the witness saw three heads. This mistake not only makes the witness seem like a fool, it lends false support to the theory that most sightings are the figment of a vulgar mind.

I encountered one historian who trod right on the line of plagiarizing Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, then credited the book to Robert Louis Stevenson.

Another writer reported the early-nineteenth-century sightings off the Fox Islands in Maine as having taken place at the Fix Islands. Not only are there no Fix Islands in Maine, there are none anywhere in the world. In reporting other sightings, the same writer roamed the globe in the most confusing manner possible, hopping back and forth across the Atlantic (where many seaports have the same names) without mentioning that he was changing continents.

This book, then, is an attempt to present in a coherent context an account of the creature(s) seen in the Gulf of Maine and adjacent waters. To avoid any unconscious bias on my part, I have left most of the testimony and newspaper reports intact. Wherever possible, with the aid of willing colleagues, I have used original sources. Errors (there are bound to be a few) are my own. Tracking the ownership of the sea serpent images used in this book, even those reproduced in relatively recent publications, has often proved as difficult as finding the elusive creatures themselves. Every effort has been made to obtain the images from their original sources or from an authorized library or institution.

Of the other sea serpents observed throughout the world (they are numerous; I refer the reader to Gould’s The Case for the Sea-Serpent and to Heuvel-mans’s book, which though out of print can be found in many libraries), only two, the Daedalus and Valhalla creatures, make their way into these pages in detail. Although these sightings took place far from the Gulf of Maine, they enter this story because of the players: the Valhalla encounter because it involved two trained naturalists, and the Daedalus sighting because it pitted a British naval captain against one of the most celebrated comparative anatomists of the day.

In the interest of space, sightings in Connecticut, New York, and the Chesapeake Bay area are mentioned only briefly. A compelling amount of material exists for those locations, which are the particular province of my esteemed colleague Gary S. Mangiacopra. Gary, more than anyone, has done exhaustive research on these sightings, yet even he, with all his years of applied study, assures me that we have barely scratched the surface.

It is clear from the information we do have that throughout the nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth, fishermen, coasters, local residents, and newspaper editors—even those who didn’t believe in sea serpents—were well aware that something unexplained was making apparently seasonal visits to the New England coast.

How many more sightings occurred, and when and where they did, may never be known. Still we have tantalizing references in the extant material to first one this year or also first seen last year, indicating that there may be dozens (maybe hundreds) of other reports in the morgues of local daily and weekly newspapers and on microfiche in libraries from Cape Breton to Cape Hatteras. Many of the newspaper accounts cited in this book, which had been previously overlooked, were collected in a single scrapbook at the Cape Ann Historical Association. Several others were found by Wayne Wilcox in yet another scrapbook at the Calais Free Library in Calais, Maine. This leads me to hope that other similar archives may yet be revealed.

For the sea serpent doubter, this means little. Even if one were to uncover every scrap of yellowing newsprint with a fading report of an unknown creature, there will always be some who will not be convinced. Not that there haven’t been mistakes and misidentifications; there have been. I have included some. However, as will be shown, most of the sightings included in this book come from seemingly trustworthy witnesses who at first thought they were seeing something they could explain—an overturned dory, a school of porpoises, an unmarked shoal, a whale—and only upon closer examination discovered that whatever they were seeing was not explainable as one of those.

Science wants—demands—a specimen: a perfectly reasonable and responsible position. No definite identification can be made without something to examine. But the absence of a carcass or skeleton is not proof positive that what the witnesses have described can be explained as mirages, seaweed, drifting spars, or sharks, dolphins, or whales (take your pick) swimming in a line, especially when those witnesses are experienced fishermen with considerable knowledge of local marine life.

Nothing but a specimen living or dead will convince the skeptics. But this book was not written to persuade. The people who live by and of the sea in New England have been seeing something strange in the water for three hundred years, and whatever it is, or was, they called it a sea serpent. This book, then, is for all the people who look at the sea and wonder.

1

1751 -1815

On the Surface of the Dark Water

All this evidence, I think, cannot fail to establish that a large

Sea Serpent has been seen in and near the Bay of Penobscot.

—Rev. Alden Bradford, Wiscasset, Maine, 1804

What combination of vision, courage, hubris, and avarice must the early European explorers have possessed to sail west across the wide Atlantic toward what they believed was the Orient, leaving behind them the known world. Before them, they hoped, lay the enticements of Asia: ancient cities, silks, and spices. In between, if what maps they had or had seen were to be believed, lay huge wastes of open ocean inhabited by the most dire beasts imaginable.

The Basques could have told the explorers that the North Atlantic offered no passage to Asia. They’d been fishing the cold waters of the Grand Banks for several centuries, growing rich on Catholic Europe’s observance of restrictions against eating flesh on Fridays.

A series of shoals rising from the continental shelf, the Grand Banks were, until the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Here, between Grand Bank, off the southeast coast of Newfoundland, and Georges Bank, off Cape Cod, the cold Labrador Current meets the warm Gulf Stream in shallow water, producing a plankton-rich environment that draws the great baleen whales, basking sharks, herring, halibut, haddock, mackerel, and the sacred cod.

Detail of a map of Iceland by Ortelius circa 1570 depicting the creatures believed to inhabit the sea.

But the Basque fishermen who came ashore only to dry or salt their catch left no records of their voyages. At the end of each season they abandoned their shelters and stages, filled their holds with cod, and kept the news of the bountiful Banks and the incidental continent to themselves.

So the merchant explorers who came in search of gold or silk or sassafras found not the riches of Cathay but a vast land of thick forests, islands covered with birds, and waters filled with infinite numbers of fish. Each claimed the land for the king or queen who had sanctioned his voyage, mapped and named prominent features of the coast, then sailed home with news of a great continent awaiting conquest.

if there was an oral tradition of a monster in the sea among the native people of Maine, it may no longer be known. Of the twenty or so related Al-gonquian tribes that once inhabited Maine, only the Penobscot and Pas-samaquoddy survive in numbers. A virulent epidemic in 1616-17 (probably a combination of illnesses brought by the Europeans) virtually wiped out the coastal tribes from the Penobscot River in Maine as far south as Cape Cod, Massachusetts. However, a petroglyph on a large rock jutting into the Kennebec River at Embden, Maine, certainly suggests that someone long ago either saw or dreamed of a creature remarkably similar to the one that hundreds of people would later describe. In addition to the dragon on this large rock that juts into the Kennebec at what was probably a portage point, there are hundreds of figures, including humans, animals, canoes, and abstract motifs.

Many centuries after an unknown shaman pecked the enigmatic dragon into the rock on the riverbank, a Penobscot Indian by the name of Joseph Nicolar recounted a tale in which the Wabanaki folk hero Klose-kur-beh¹—the man from nothing—slays a sea serpent with the help of May-May, the Wabanaki name for the red-headed woodpecker.

Roslyn Strong, of the New England Antiquities Research Association, who has investigated the pet-roglyphs and the Klose-kur-heh legend, points out that the serpent depicted at Emhden has an unusual feature for a North American dragon: an arrow shape at the tip of its tail. (Roslyn Strong)

This sea serpent tale does not appear in other written versions of the Klose-kur-beh adventures; nevertheless, Nicolar stresses in his preface to The life and Traditions of the Red Man (1893) that he has recorded all the pure traditions which have been handed down from the beginning of the red man’s world to the present time.

As Nicolar tells it, Klose-kur-beh is the man to whom the Great Spirit gave the knowledge of tools necessary for survival: the canoe and the bow and arrow. After passing along these skills to the man and the woman, Klose-kur-beh began a journey to subdue the animals of the earth. After many adventures, Klose-kur-beh built himself a canoe and:

. . . upon returning to his people ... by way of the sea he found the waters very dark in color. ... As he moved along he saw a serpent at a long distance, as it lay on the surface of the dark water. Upon nearing the monster it raised its head and began to run out its fire-like tongue rapidly at him; by this action he was well aware that this was another deadly enemy; so he steered his canoe directly for the monster and the serpent reared up in a fearful manner and seemed ready to crush the canoe and the man, but at that moment May-May [the] Red headed wood pecker, flew between the man and the serpent. . . . Be quick and take your bow and shoot the arrow at the smallest part. . . .

Six times Klose-kur-beh shot at the serpent and six times the arrow bounced off. On the seventh try.

. . . the bird flew in advance of the arrow and with its beak pointed to Klose-kurbeh where to aim. Klose-kur-beh obeyed and sent the arrow swiftly to the spot very near the end of the tail; this broke the serpent’s back bone which caused him to recoil in death.

Klose-kur-beh then dipped the arrow in the blood of the serpent and marked the head of the woodpecker as a sign of true friendship, whereupon May-May told Klose-kur-beh:

I have been watching your enemies and I have seen that the serpent was very mad . . . and his wrath was so great that he came here where he thought no power could reach him because when the rush of clouds and wind comes he can sink himself to the bottom out of harm’s way, and here he has been waiting many times seven moons for your coming . . . but now the monster is gone and his dead body you will see no more.

Nicolar’s portrayal of the sea serpent is markedly similar to eyewitness descriptions of an unknown marine creature in the Gulf of Maine written both before and after Nicolar’s book was published. Was the dragon among the Embden petroglyphs meant to depict Klose-kur-beh’s serpent with his arrow in its tail, was it simply a creature of imagination, or was it a representation of a living creature known to the Penobscots?²

One might be forgiven, after reading the following accounts, for supposing that the only individuals with any real interest in sea serpents in eighteenth-century Maine were men of the cloth. In fact, it is quite likely that these encounters would be totally unknown today but for the interest of the clergy. Although recording strange phenomena may seem to be an unusual use of a minister’s time, it was not uncommon. During this era, the clergy were among the few with sufficient education, interest, and leisure to dabble in natural history and write about the world around them.³

The majority of Down-Easters would, in contrast, have been fully absorbed in the hardscrabble pursuit of making a living. Although many could read, far fewer wrote more than was necessary in the keeping of daybooks in which they recorded their finances and family events. Many had come to Maine (then still part of Massachusetts) after the Revolution, having obtained their land as compensation for service in the Continental army. Others who settled in the region did so as a means of evading the restrictions of living in the more puritanical society of the Commonwealth.

Establishing themselves near the banks of rivers, these hardy, headstrong souls perched their small, family-centered communities on the edge of what was still largely wilderness. They fished, farmed, and felled trees, using the rivers to transport timber to local mills, then to the shipyards at Bath (Maine), Boston, and Essex (Massachusetts). They trapped or traded for furs, wove their own cloth, grew their own food, and were, except for procured luxuries such as rum and sugar, almost wholly self-sufficient.

Still, many of these communities were so small that they could not provide a living for a whole minister. It is likely that Machiasport, situated on the far northeastern Maine coast, was one of these. It was there in 1801 that the Reverend Abraham Cummings discovered that a proselytizing ghost by the name of Nelly Hooper Butler had turned up among his flock.

The ghost, at first known only from the odd and irritating noises emanating throughout the home of one Captain Abner Blaisdel, had finally identified herself on January 2, 1801, through a disembodied voice in the cellar.

Curious people began turning up at the Blaisdel home, where Nelly held forth in a voice described as shrill, but mild and pleasant. However, it was not until May that she took form, appearing as a shining white garment to an assembly of twenty.

Nelly’s gatherings grew to include as many as two hundred listeners. She preached and made predictions (including the death of Mrs. Blaisdel and the remarriage of Nelly’s widowed husband to Blaisdel’s daughter Lydia), apparently knowing a bit more about the moral behavior of the congregates than was comfortable.

The Gulf of Maine, including major fishing hanks. Map by Marie Litterer

At last, the Reverend Mr. Cummings, who did not believe in ghosts, decided that something ought to be done. Nelly was, after all, trespassing on his territory. Cummings began interviewing eyewitnesses and found, among the hundred or so who gave sworn testimony, that their stories were remarkably similar. Many included Nellys oft-quoted claim: Although my body is consumed and turned to dust, my soul is as much alive as before I left my body.

In spite of this earnest message, Cummings was convinced that the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by Captain Blaisdel. On his way to confront Blaisdel, Cummings had an encounter of his own. A group of white rocks rose from the ground, took the outline of a globe, then resolved into the shape and dress of a woman. Though very small at first, the apparition grew and now appeared glorious, with rays of light shining from her head all about, and reaching to the ground.

Nelly Butler never appeared or spoke again, and the Reverend Mr. Cummings, formerly a skeptic, now a convert, spent the remainder of his life as a missionary.⁴ It was while engaged in some duty relating to his mission a year later that the reverend, accompanied by his wife, daughter, and a young woman of their acquaintance, had an encounter with an extraordinary sea monster.

It will surprise no one that the story of Cummings’s visitation at Ma-chiasport does not ordinarily precede the story of his observation of an unknown marine creature in Penobscot Bay. The former can do nothing to enhance the credibility of a witness with regard to the latter, an already suspect phenomena. We are fortunate, then, that the ghostly encounter does not seem to have negatively affected his trustworthiness with the Reverends Alexander McLean and Alden Bradford. If circumstances had been otherwise, this narration of the incident, and the others that Cummings subsequently recounted, might never have come to light.

My Dear Sir,

With peculiar pleasure I comply with your request though the urgency of my affairs must excuse my brevity. It was sometime in July 1802 that we saw this extraordinary sea monster, on our passage to Belfast, between Cape Rosoi and Long Island [now Cape Rosier and Islesborol. His first appearance was near Long Island. I then supposed it to be a large shoal of fish with a seal at one end of it, but wondered that the seal should rise out of the water so much higher than usual; but, as he drew nearer to our boat, we soon discovered that this whole appearance was but one animal in the form of a serpent. I immediately perceived that his mode of swimming was exactly such as had been described to me by some of the people on Fox Islands [North Haven and Vinalhaven Islands], who had seen an animal of this kind before, which must confirm the veracity of their report. For this creature had not the horizontal, but an ascending and descending serpentine motion. This renders it highly probable that he never moves on land to any considerable distance and that the water is his proper element. His head was rather larger than that of a horse, but formed like that of a serpent. His body we judged was more than sixty feet in length. His head and as much of his body as we could discover was all of a blue colour except a black circle around his eye. His motion was at first but moderate, but when he left us and proceeded toward the ocean, he moved with the greatest rapidity. This monster is the sixth of the kind, if our information be correct, which has been seen in this bay within the term of eighteen years. Mrs. Cummings, my daughter and Miss Martha Springs were with me in the boat at that time, and can attest to the above description.

I continue yours in Christian affection,

Abraham Cummings

Rev. Abraham Cummings’s report is remarkably lucid and, apart from the details he furnishes about the creature, reveals something about the author himself. He is an able boatman, familiar with the region and local wildlife. Although he has heard reports of a sea monster, he has not really believed them and so does not leap to conclusions upon seeing something unusual. He at first supposes that he’s seeing a shoal of fish and a seal, both of which are commonplace. It is only after his observations convince him that he is seeing a single creature that he permits himself to make a study of its form, color, and movement and to indulge in some speculation about its nature. The skin of the creature being all of a blue colour is unusual but the rest of the description will soon become familiar. It is interesting to note that although his parishioners have seen the creature, it is his encounter which must confirm the veracity of their report.

When the story of this sighting came to the attention of the Reverend Alexander McLean, he wrote to Cummings asking for additional details, which were duly supplied in the above letter. McLean then forwarded the letter to the Reverend Alden Bradford, of Wiscasset, along with a note, which read in part:

One of the same kind was seen above thirty years ago, by the deceased Capt. Paul Reed, of Boothbay,