The captain and the sea serpent

Transcript

The captain took a harpoon. Ahead of his boat, something long and sinuous seemed to move through the sea. It even appeared to have a head and a mane. This is a story Philip Henry Gosse reproduced in The Romance of Natural History. The encounter was reported in February, eighteen forty-nine, after Captain Herriman sailed from the Cape of Good Hope. From his ship, the object looked twenty-five or thirty feet long. Herriman called over his chief officer and several passengers. They agreed: it looked like a sea serpent. Herriman had already read about a famous sighting in the same region. Now, he thought, he might be looking at the same kind of creature. But the ship was becalmed. He had a boat lowered, took a small party with him, and went to look. Up close, the monster became an immense piece of seaweed. The root mass had looked like a head. The current and the lingering swell had supplied its lifelike motion. According to the account, Herriman admitted that without that closer inspection, he would have remained convinced. The story ends with a captain changing his mind. The sea had offered a shape. An earlier story had supplied the monster. A closer look gave him something better: an answer.