In the winter of 1848, her majesty's ship HMS Daedalus was making her way from Cape Town to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic ocean. On August 6th, 6 members of the crew sighted an huge animal approaching the ship, which then passed through its wake continuing on to the southwest. The Captain swore to the Admiralty that what they had seen was a sea serpent perhaps 60 feet long. To date this report remains one of the most credible and well documented sightings of this mysterious and mythical animal ever recorded. But was this creature what the men claimed it be, or was it an animal known but at the time little understood? Let's find out!
In the winter of 1848, her majesty's ship HMS Daedalus was making her way from Cape Town to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic ocean. On August 6th, 6 members of the crew sighted an huge animal approaching the ship, which then passed through its wake continuing on to the southwest. The Captain swore to the Admiralty that what they had seen was a sea serpent perhaps 60 feet long. To date this report remains one of the most credible and well documented sightings of this mysterious and mythical animal ever recorded. But was this creature what the men claimed it be, or was it an animal known but at the time little understood? Let's find out!
The Daedalus Sea Serpent
Narrated by Jay Nix
Tonight on BTF, we’re going to talk about an animal that has been known since time immemorial. While sightings of these creatures are exceedingly rare, they are nevertheless known the world over by a variety of names. The Kraken of Norse sagas was a tentacled terror of the deep which was said to be so large as to be mistaken for an island. Chiwen was a sea dragon prevalent in Chinese mythology, and while it looked frightening, possessed a more benevolent manner. And then there was Leviathan, which appears prominently in the Christian bible and was so terrifying the people believed it to be a demon. And these are just a few examples of these beasts. There are many others. Yet even with such a long pedigree of oral and written history, science has yet to recognize these animals and their existence is to this day still hotly debated. As human civilization expanded to all corners of the globe, these creatures became collectively known by a more generic name. And while this catch-all is considered an arcane holdover from a more unenlightened time, those who brave the seven seas even today will tell you that there is something out there lurking in the depths of the deepest oceans. I’m speaking of course about sea serpents. Not sea snakes, mind you, but monstrous serpentine denizens of the deep, some large enough to attack ships and drag unsuspecting sailors down to a watery death.
Stories about these strange and amazing faunae of the oceans is as old as time. And while it’s convenient to dismiss these tales out of hand as superstition, myth or simple misidentification of known animals, there have been a number of recorded sightings of sea serpents that are not so easily discarded. Solid eyewitness testimony from professional sailors, whalers and even naturalists cannot be rejected out of hand. For example, the entire city of Gloucester, Massachusetts reported a resident sea serpent in the waters off Cape Ann, which was seen repeatedly from 1817 to 1820.
In 1905 naturalists Michael J. Nicoll and E. G. B. Meade-Waldo, fellows of the Royal Zoological Society of London, spotted a long-necked creature off the coast of Brazil from the research yacht Valhalla.
But perhaps the most famous sighting of the great sea serpent is preserved in the records of the British Admiralty. It made international headlines throughout Europe in the middle of the 19th century and to this day stands as perhaps the most credible and well-documented case of its kind on record. This is the story of a sea serpent sighted by the officers and crew of her majesty’s corvette HMS Daedalus.
It was on an overcast winter evening in August 1848 when a midshipman named Sartoris spotted something strange approaching the ship from its starboard quarter. He quickly conveyed his sighting to the officer of the watch, Lt. Edgar Drummond, who then alerted the captain and the sailing master who were walking along the quarterdeck. Along with the quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate and the man at the wheel, Captain Peter M’Quhae leaned over the rail and watched as a large unknown creature cut across the ship’s wake on a southwesterly course. At one point it came close enough to the ship that Captain M'Quhae stated, “had it been a man of my acquaintance I would have easily recognized his features”. But this was something that the men, most of whom were familiar with the varied denizens of the deep, had never seen before. It continued on, apparently unconcerned with the ship or her crew, and within 20 minutes of first being spotted by Sartoris, disappeared from view.
Soon after reaching port in Plymouth on October 4th, rumors began to spread throughout the docks about the sea monster encountered by the crew of Daedalus. As word spread, local papers including The Times began printing the fantastic story staring on 10 October. These articles piqued the interest of the British Admiralty, known for their unfailing lack of humor when it came to ships of the Royal Navy. Thus the Admiralty demanded that the master of Daedalus either post an immediate denial of the story or submit a detailed account verifying the particulars appearing in the paper. Captain M’Quhae was quick to oblige and submitted the following report to Admiral Sir W. H. Gage on 11 October. Here are some of the highlights of M’Quhae’s details and often long-winded account:
“Sir, … at 5 PM on the 6th of August last in latitude 24° 44’ S., and longitude 9° 22’ E., the weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the N.W., with a long ocean swell from the S.W., the ship on the port tack heading N.E. by N., something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approaching the ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lt. Edgar Drummond, with whom and Mr. William Barnett, the Master, (and) I was at the time walking the quarterdeck. The ship’s company was at supper.
On our attention being called to the object it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and as nearly as we could approximate … was at the very least 60 feet (long). It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye; and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the S.W., which it held on at the pace of from 12 to 15 miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose.
The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the head, which was flattened at the top, was, without any doubt, that of a snake; and it was never, during the twenty minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water: its color a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back. It was seen by the quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate and the man at the wheel in addition to myself and the officers above mentioned.
I am having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen which I hope to have ready for transmissions to my Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty by tomorrows post.”
M’Quhae’s response was published in the Times on 13 October and caused a sensation. For the commanding officer of a royal navy warship to attest to the Admiralty about the veracity of sea monster was unheard of. Putting forward such outrageous claims to the hyper-stoic board of admirals who in essence held the fate of one’s career in their hands was a bold and risky move for Captain M’Quhae. But as promised and in order bolster the captain’s position, the Illustrated London News commissioned an artist to render several detailed drawings of the creature from a sketch made shortly after the animal was sighted. However, in what can only be described as an underhanded move, the Times newspaper somehow secured the copyright to the drawings from the artist behind the backs of the publishers of the Illustrated London News and printed the sensational pictures on 28 October.
The drawings showed a large serpentine animal, dark in color on the head and back while lighter on the throat and belly, gliding along the ocean surface. One of the pictures appeared to show the animal passing almost directly beneath the taffrail on the ship’s stern. While the body of the creature certainly appeared serpentine in nature, the head was strangely mammalian appearing like a seal pup with tiny black eyes and smooth rounded face. And unlike his earlier contention included in his report to the admiralty, the animal depicted in the drawings did not exhibit a “flat head”.
After being ignominiously barred from printing the pictures of the creature they themselves had commissioned, the Illustrated London News instead printed the account of the sighting as related by Lt. Edgar Drummond, the officer on watch at the time of the event. While the Drummond and M’Quhae accounts jibe pretty closely, there were one or two minor points of divergence which is to be expected as witnesses tend to focus on different details with relation to a similar occurrence.
As printed in the ILN article, Drummond noted with respect to the animal’s description:
“…the appearance of its head which with the back fin was the only portion of the animal visible was long, pointed and flattened at the top perhaps ten feet in length, the upper jaw projecting considerably, the fin was perhaps twenty feet in the rear of the head and visible occasionally; the captain also asserted that he saw the tail, or another fin, about the same distance behind, and the upper part of the head and shoulder appeared of a dark brown color and the beneath the under jaw a brownish white.
It pursued a steady undeviating course, keeping its head horizontal with the surface of the water and in a raised position disappearing occasionally beneath the wave for a very brief interval. It was going at the rate of perhaps from 12 to 14 miles an hour and when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant, in fact it gave one the idea of a large snake or eel.”
What appeared to the captain as hair like “the mane of a horse”, Drummond saw as a dorsal fin cutting through the water, the wake of which trailing behind the animal’s back giving the appearance of a mane.
These disparities aside, almost immediately upon publication of the story in the Times, readers, sailors, and scientists alike were quick to offer up explanations of what the crew of Daedalus had seen in the waters off Africa. Trees drifting on the current, ice burgs, debris from a shipwreck, dolphins swimming in tandem, and even underwater volcanoes were put forward to explain what was seen that day. There was even an ingenious idea put forward that the creature was merely seaweed collected against the keel of an upturned whale boat that was being dragged along the surface by a submerged whale still attached to the craft by a line and harpoon.
But one rebuke printed years later and written by a Captain Fredric Smith, commander of the merchant ship Pekin, was enough to elicit a response from a member of Daedalus’ crew, which unwittingly cast doubt on the account as put forward by M’Quhae. And we’ll come back to that in a bit.
Smith claimed that while sailing in roughly the same area and only 2 months after Daedalus passed through these waters, he and his crew had sighted a serpentine creature at a distance of about a ¼ mile and lowered a boat to investigate. Armed only with a long line to snag the animal, the first mate and four sailors approached the serpent which remained motionless as the boat approached. Upon reaching the sea serpent the men were relived to find that the monster was little more that a string of floating seaweed, perhaps 20 feet long and 4 inches in diameter. This, declared Smith smugly, was obviously what the officers and crew of Daedalus had mistaken for a sea serpent.
A couple of points about this detraction before we move on. Captain Smith’s story of the seaweed string was suspiciously similar to an account reported by Captain Herrimann of the merchantman Brazilian which occurred in February of 1849, which was in fact reported in the London Sun in July of 1849, shortly after the ship returned to England. Smith, on the other hand, had apparently waited almost 10 years after his run-in with a seaweed monster to make his report as it didn’t appear in print until 1858. It’s readily apparent that Smith let’s call it “borrowed” Herrimann’s tale, professing it as his own in an attempt to discredit Daedalus’ crew and cast himself as the man who solved the mystery.
But as I mentioned, Captain Smith’s plagiarized dismissal of the Daedalus sea serpent was itself the target of a refutation by an un-named member of Daedalus’ crew. In a letter to the Times in 1858, the anonymous officer reminded the captain of the Pekin that the animal that he and the others had seen was not lolling about just below the surface but rather making upwards of 15 knots across a northwesterly wind and directly into a swell from southwest. The officer also pointed out that the head of the creature was raised above the surface of the water during the course of its passage, not submerged beneath it as would be expected with floating vegetation.
Before this seminal event the attitude in Britain concerning sea monsters leaned more toward the skeptical end of the spectrum. But after the pictures were published in the newspaper and the crews’ statements became public, interest in sea serpents hit an all-time high. As was to be expected, there were some who rather than deride the captain’s account came to M’Quhae’s defense and offered up historical context in support of the claim that what her majesty’s servicemen had seen that day was indeed the great sea serpent.
A letter appeared in the Literary Gazette on 21 October 1848 in which an unnamed “learned contributor” referenced the works of Erik Pontoppidan, a Danish Lutheran bishop of the Church of Norway. Pontoppidan’s tome The Natural History of Norway published in 1752, argued for the existence of not only sea serpents but for the Kraken and mermaids as well. This book has been referenced by a slew of authors including Jules Verne who used Pontoppidan’s descriptions when crafting menacing sea monsters in their own writings.
Zoological explanations as to the serpent’s identity ran the gamut and fell mostly along the lines of giant eels, long necked open-ocean seals, extinct serpentine whales, and you get the gist. And in that the encounter occurred off the west coast of Africa near present day Namibia, some even proposed that the sea serpent was an actual snake, a gigantic python or boa that had somehow been swept out to sea. But in that these animals can’t survive after ingesting sea water and have no stabilizing appendages that would allow them to swim in the open ocean like true sea snakes, this proposal hits yet another dead end.
Now there were those who suggested that M’Quhae and his men had made the whole thing up as a practical joke or for attention. But no naval officer in his right mind, British or otherwise, then or now, would jeopardize his reputation and his career over a hoax. The captain and his crew swore in affidavits to the admiralty as to what they had seen. I can’t think of anything more detrimental to a naval career, apart from perhaps mutiny, than lying under oath to the government – or in this case, the crown -- and certainly not for the sake of a joke. No, these were professional sailors with years if not decades of service aboard ship and had sailed every ocean on the planet. And they certainly saw something that winter evening that none of them had ever seen before.
So, what could it have been that the crew of Daedalus saw in August 1848? Was it truly a legendary monster of the deep, or was it perhaps an animal known to science that the sailors mistook for something else? Let’s review what we know. An animal was seen from the deck of HMS Daedalus on a voyage between Capetown in present day South Africa and St. Helena Island in the southern Atlantic. The ship was following the Benguela Current up the Namibian coast on a north-northeast heading and tacking to port. It was 5 o’clock in afternoon on August 6, 1848, with sunset a little more than an hour away, thus the skies were darkening and the light fading. The weather was “dark and cloudy”, it was winter in southern hemisphere after all with a fresh breeze blowing from the northwest (thus the port tack), and an ocean swell was pushing them along from the southwest. Surely not great meteorological conditions for sighting an object at a distance at sea.
And as to the actual sighting of the animal. It was first spotted by Midshipman Sartoris, who brought it to the attention of Lt. Drummond and then Captain M’Quhae. In total there were by all accounts 6 witnesses to the event: Midshipman Sartoris, Lt. Drummond, Captain M’Quhae, Warrant Officer William Barrett who was the sailing master, the quartermaster, and the helmsman. The animal approaching the ship “before the beam”, or from a point ahead of amidships on the starboard or right-hand side of the ship. It was traveling in a southwesterly direction and passed behind Daedalus as she sailed NNE. The average speed of a corvette in the 19th century was about 8 knots in good wind, but Daedalus was tacking north against a northwesterly breeze which would probably reduce her speed to say 5 knots. The animal, on the other hand, was said to be cruising along at 12 to 15 miles per hour and that’s straight up booking it. By the time Sartoris sighted the animal it was already passing by the ship off to the right, heading to a point that would cut across Daedalus’ wake.
Now the entire sighting according to M’Quhae occurred over the span of 20 minutes. That’s a long time to see the animal and study it, wouldn’t you say? However, it was noted that the animal was only visible to the naked eye for 5 minutes. For the other 15 minutes the sailors had to rely on their spyglass to see the animal as it sped out of sight to the southwest. When Sartoris spotted the animal approaching, he alerted the officer of the watch, Lt. Drummond. Drummond then alerted the Captain and William Barrett who were on the quarterdeck, the raised deck aft of the main sail from where the captain usually commanded the ship. Thus, there would have been a lapse, albeit not necessarily a lengthy one, between the first sighting and when the other 5 sailors on deck all laid eyes on the strange creature. So, let’s say the captain and other officers had about 4 minutes to see the animal with the naked eye, not the full 5 as many assume. Still, there were the 15 minutes the animal was in view with the spyglass, right? Well, here’s the thing about that. Remember the third account of the sighting as related by the un-named officer of Daedalus as reported in the Times? In the rebuttal of Captain Smith’s idiotic seaweed hypothesis, he stated that the entire episode lasted about 10 minutes “as we were fast leaving one another on opposite tracks…”. If that’s the case, the amount of time the animal was in view would be effectively cut in half.
Now we come to part where there seems to be more than a little disparity between the accounts submitted by M’Quhae, Drummond and the third “un-named officer”. M’Quhae stated that “It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter (i.e., behind the ship) that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye”. Drummond on the other hand was sure that the animal “when nearest was perhaps 100 yards distant”. But it was the anonymous officer who stated in the press that they were able to “observe it as accurately as we could with our glasses, as it came up under our lee quarter and passed away to windward, at its nearest position being not more than 200 yards from us”. That’s a big swing in distance. The captain stated the thing practically clipped the rudder as it passed under the stern while another officer was certain the animal was 200 yards away. So, which was it?
Let’s start from the closest range and work our way back. Soon after Daedalus arrived in port in October 1848, the Illustrated London News commissioned a professional artist to craft three drawings based on the Captain M’Quhae’s sketches and notes. These were the pictures that were printed in the Times newspaper later that month. In one picture, the animal’s head and back are shown in profile with the ship sailing away in the distance with the sails set almost parallel to the hull on a port tack. In the second drawing, the animal with its facial features clearly defined is seen gliding almost directly under the witnesses as they are gathered on the taffrail at the stern of the ship. And the third drawing might as well be a portrait penciled by a police sketch artist. It is a closeup view of the animal’s head, which looks amazingly like a seal, not a snake as M’Quhae professed in his statement. It is hairless, grey on top with a white throat. It sports a tiny black eye with no corona or iris, and a flat dead-pan expression with a narrow slit for a mouth.
Anatomically, the drawing of the animal makes zero sense. It’s strangely devoid of any particular details apart from the coloring and the eye. And it isn’t as if the artist who rendered these drawings was a hack. Look no further than the ship and the witnesses standing on her deck. It’s easy to make out individual slats of wood in the hull of the ship, twists in ropes that comprise the sail lines, I mean you can almost make out the facial features of the 4 men and a young boy on the deck of the ship. But as for this huge animal, a smooth black head and back, white throat, little black eye is the extent of the details. There is no mane, no fin, no serpentine head.
And then there’s the difference in the morphology or structural characteristics of the animal between the stern shot and the mug shot. In the stern shot, the animals lower jaw seems to retract flush within the upper jaw, with the snout more angular and indeed appearing very eel-like. Yet the mug shot is, so help me, the face of a seal. If you saw this picture out of context with this story, I doubt that any one of you out there would peg this as a sea serpent. It looks like a cute seal without the whiskers. It would be interesting to compare the original sketches that M’Quhae produced on his own with those he commissioned from the artist. It would certainly help answer the question of whether or not M’Quhae altered his views of the creature after the fact. It is also interesting that while both he and Drummond initially described the animals head as flat, that detail seems to have been dispensed with in the artists renderings.
So you have a long serpentine body, maybe with a mane with the small rounded head of a mammal. Now I’m not exactly Dr. Alan Grant here, but I’m not aware of anything like this proto-seal-horse-snake anywhere in the fossil record. But there are, or more to the point there were, aquatic animals that can explain the problem of the sea serpent quite nicely. And for many cryptozoologists, the go-to in this matter is the plesiosaur.
These long-necked barrel-bodied dinos had a relatively small head when compared to the rest of the body and could reach lengths upwards of 50 feet. They were equipped with four elongated paddle-like flippers that the animal used to propel itself through the water. The plesiosaur has been tagged to explain every lake monster and sea serpent the world over at one time or another. Even Nessie, a.k.a. the Loch Ness Monster, is almost always described in this manner – long neck, barrel body and flippers. Its morphology would on the surface seem to make it a supremely attractive candidate for sea serpents. After studying fossils of these creatures, paleontologists have determined that the arrangement of the plesiosaur’s vertebrae pointed to the neck being rather rigid and inflexible and thus if held out of the water would have been at a rather shallow angle to the surface.
But there are a few strikes against the plesiosaur being modern-day sea serpent. For one, it was not a denizen of deep waters. While there is evidence pointing to cases of pressure-induced injuries in plesiosaurs – and how scientists figured this out is nothing short of brilliant – the animals for the most part spent much of their time in the shallower waters where the fish that made up their diet were in ample supply. They were found in coastal waters and even in lakes and rivers, but not in the deep ocean. They were also known to employ the use of gastroliths, or stones that they would intentionally swallow not only to aid in digestion but perhaps to improve buoyancy and stability in water. And these rocks were to be found in shallower water near land, not in the abyssal deep.
Then there’s the issue with their respiration. Plesiosaurs were not fish, but rather air-breathing reptiles that had to surface to take a breath. While it’s not known exactly how long they could hold their breath, they would have to come up regularly for air, and such a large animal living in shallow waters habitually breaking the surface to breathe would be seen every moment of the day somewhere on earth.
And then there’s the little problem of being extinct. Plesiosaurs were creatures of the Triassic period, and populated Pangea roughly 200 million years ago. The fossil record shows that they died out rather quickly at the end of the Cretaceous period when the extinction level event, i.e. the Yucatan asteroid impact, wiped out almost all large animal life on the planet around 66 million years ago. So there haven’t been any plesiosaurs around for a looooong time to be confused for a sea serpent.
Now I can hear the cryptozoological chorus now piping in with, “Well what about the coelacanth”? Okay, for those not in the know, the coelacanth is a fish that lives in deep water off the coasts of Africa and Indonesia. Known from fossils dating back over 400 million years, it was thought to have died out some 70 million years ago about the same time as the dinosaurs. But -- and this is was gets cryptozoologists all giddy -- in 1938 a living specimen was discovered in a South African fish market and since then hundreds of coelacanths have been caught, photographed and even captured alive confirming that reports of its demise were premature. And while this is a great survival story of an animal once thought to be extinct, we have to remember that we’re talking about a deep-water fish about 4-feet long, not an air breathing, surface dwelling 50-foot dinosaur. Coelacanths never came to the surface and were only rediscovered by blind luck as the result of long-line fishing in very deep waters.
But isn’t it plausible that there are other species believed to be extinct still hiding out in the depths of the ocean? Certainly. There’s no doubt about it. Previously unknown animals are also being discovered on land and in the oceans on a regular basis. But to use this as a means to justify belief in the continued existence of dinos like brachiosaurs in the Congo and plesiosaurs in the open ocean is naïve and over-reaching to put it mildly.
Thus, we can also eliminate Elasmosaurus, ichthyosaurus, kronosaurus, and the terrifying Mosasaurus of Jurassic World fame, and every other “saurus” for that matter as there is no conceivable circumstance by which a titanic air-breathing super predator could escape human detection for more than a month in this day and age.
Now that we know what the Daedalus sea serpent wasn’t, let’s get back to figuring out what exactly it was.
An interesting omission in M’Quhae’s drawings is the absence of any dorsal fin. The captain originally stated that he saw two, but later omitted them from the drawings published in the paper. Okay, but Lt. Drummond was equally certain that he saw one about 20 feet behind the animal’s head. The captain also claimed that the animal never once submerged beneath the surface, while Drummond says this happened a few times. The animal’s occasional submerging, or lack thereof in the case of M’Quhae’s report, might be explained in a couple of ways. The Captain may have perceived that the animal was constantly above the surface of the water, but that water washing over the back of the animal made Drummond think that it went under from time to time. Or, if Drummond was right, then the animal did briefly submerge twice or thrice during the time it was visible to the crew of Daedalus. I’m leaning more towards Drummonds view on this and I’ll explain why in a bit.
And then there’s M’Quhae’s on-again-off-again description of the animal’s head as being flat. Drummond stated in his account from the get-go that the animal had a flat head. The captain also stated that the head of the animal was flat, but in the subsequent drawings commissioned to support his account, the head of the animal is rounded. Was this artistic license on the part of the artist, or was this detail altered at the direction of the captain? M’Quhae added in print that he was thrilled with how the drawings commissioned by the ILN turned out and that they were a perfect representation of the animal he had seen off Africa. Keeping this in mind, let’s move on.
Of the three witnesses who wrote accounts of their sighting of the creature, only M’Quhae and Drummond give estimates as to the length of the animal. Captain M’Quhae states that the beast was at least 60 feet long, but it is unclear if he was estimating the visible length of the animal or was guesstimating the entire length based on the portion he saw above the water. Drummond’s guess as to the serpent’s length requires a little extrapolation to come to a solid figure. While he doesn’t specifically give a definitive total length of the animal, he does state that the head was about 10 feet long and that the dorsal fin was perhaps 20 feet behind this. The animal’s overall length would of course extend beyond the dorsal fin toward what would presumably be a tail. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the portion that extended behind the dorsal to the tail comprised 30% of the animal’s overall length. In some aquatic animals like the orca, this number could be more than 50%, but just to play it safe let’s call it 30%. This would mean that in Drummond’s estimation, the overall length of the animal was perhaps 40 to 50 feet. Allowing for leeway in either direction and betting on the over under, it might be safe to assume that the animal was between 40 and 60 feet in length. Good enough?
Alright so we have an aquatic animal, black with an off-white underbelly, swimming in an unaltering straight line in the open ocean, with a flat head and a small hooked dorsal fin. Any guesses as to what this might be?
Well before go into naming a probable culprit, I ‘d like to share a couple of other points related to the case of the Daedalus sea serpent.
The first concerns our star witness in this matter and upon whose account of the sea serpent so much of the public perception of the event has been based. Peter M’Quhae entered the Navy on 22 September 1803 as a volunteer 1st class, a rating for young boys of about 12 years of age who were to be groomed for the officer corps. After his promotion to Midshipman, he served for nearly three years in the Mediterranean, but upon his return was assigned to the home station for almost 2 years before becoming master’s mate for HMS Lavinia in 1808. In October 1809 he attained the rank of lieutenant and in 1814 was promoted to commander. However, soon after attaining this rank and for reasons unknown Peter M’Quhae was effectively beached and didn’t go to sea again until 1831 – a full 17 years after becoming a commander. It seems very odd that an officer who achieved such a meteoric rise in rank should suddenly be put out to pasture and not serve aboard another naval vessel for almost 2 decades. It wasn’t until 1831 that he was assigned to oversee the fitting out of HMS Fly and after a 4-year stint in the West Indies, he returned to England where he was paid off and was again sidelined from shipboard duty. It wasn’t until 1844 he was awarded only his second command and deployed to the colonies of the East Indies aboard HMS Daedalus. Thus, over a career spanning 41 years M’Quhae was only entrusted with command of a ship twice, spending a large chunk of his time in the navy on land. This shows a marked lack of confidence by the Admiralty in M’Quhae’s abilities, and his record suggests that the lords were just trying to keep him out of the way until such time as he could be retired. I don’t know whose cousin or nephew he was, but we should all be so lucky as Peter M’Quhae to accomplish as little as he did yet still rise to the top of the ranks of the Royal Navy.
So we can see that M’Quhae was not the battle hardened old salt with decades of ocean going experience that he pretended or as many mystery writers have publicized him to be. Judging from his record, he seems to have climbed through the ranks of the royal navy based on social standing and preferential treatment, certainly not due to his skill and accomplishment. This was certainly not unheard of in the armed forces or unfortunately in business either as the practice of nepotism is nothing new and is in broad evidence today. But this little expose of the captain should lower his standing a bit and cast doubt on his vast experience when relating the details of the sea serpent sighting. As I mentioned earlier, Drummond had always maintained that the length of the animal was about 60 feet. M’Quhae on the other hand initially claimed the creature was 120 feet long, until conversation with the other officers after the fact convinced him to cut this estimation in half. And M’Quhae’s eagerness to run to the press with the story and offer up for publication official responses requested by the Admiralty is head scratching to say the least. He appears to have been more interested in personal recognition for breaking this story than of protecting the honor of the royal navy and the other officers and men of Daedalus. Thus, our primary “unimpeachable witness” here becomes somewhat suspect on a number of levels.
The second thing I’d like to touch on concerns our other star witness on the deck of HMS Daedalus that fateful day, First Lt. Edgar Atheling Drummond. Drummond did not share his captain’s apparent sensationalistic flare when it came to relating the details of the sighting of the sea serpent in the south Atlantic. He also didn’t agree with his captain on several points with respect to the physical characteristics of the animal. Unlike M’Quhae’s vacillations, Drummond’s account was factual, to the point and never wavered from its original version. Now, Edgar Drummond died in 1893, never knowing definitively what he had seen those many years ago but always believed that it was more than likely a giant eel. And there the case rested, at this zoological impasse for 103 years.
Then in 1996, a letter was published in the obscure periodical The Log of Mystic Seaport and was in essence a response to a re-visitation on the matter of the Daedalus sea serpent. This response was written by a man named Maldwin Drummond, who as it turns out was the grandson of Lt. Edgar Drummond of HMS Daedalus. The letter contained the lieutenant’s account of the sea serpent sighting taken directly from the lieutenant’s diary entry written immediately after he saw the strange animal. But the younger Drummond also included something else taken from his gramps diary; something that no one outside his immediate family had apparently ever seen. It was a sketch that the officer had scribbled in his diary shortly after the sighting of the serpentine animal and which had remained hidden for almost 150 years. Though rough and certainly not on par with the professionally commissioned Illustrated London News drawings, it did show exactly what Drummond had seen that day in eye-opening detail. Interestingly, the aspect of the sketch matched exactly with that of the first picture credited to Captain M’Quhae. It showed the Daedalus under full sail in the background at a considerable distance, sheets billowing parallel to the hull as if they were rigged on a port tack. And in the foreground, Drummond hand penciled in a low black shape protruding from the water, with breaking swells separated by a small crooked dorsal fin about ½ way down the animal’s back, with another protruding from the water further down the animal’s length. It didn’t take a detective to see that this was the sketch upon which M’Quhae based his first professionally rendered drawing, and that the other two drawings had been extrapolated from this in ever more fantastic detail.
Unlike the M’Quhae pictures which show perhaps a third to one half of the animal’s back riding above the surface, the Drummond sketch shows only the head and either 2 fins or 1 fin and the tail peeking up out of the water. The animals head in this version looks like little more than a log jutting out above the waves at a low angle, perhaps 10-15 degrees at best. Notations on the drawing show that he estimated the visible portion of the head was perhaps 3 feet long, with the distance between the head and the fin as well as the gap between the 2 fins at 30 feet each. If we take it that the second fin was indeed the tail, then this would put the overall length of the creature at about 65 feet. This is roughly what M’Quhae settled on after being talked down from his initial estimate of 120 feet.
But this sketch doesn’t jibe well with what Drummond stated in his account. Remember he said that the head was 10 feet long and the fin was perhaps 20 feet behind this. Thus, the dimensions as notated by Drummond in the sketch seem to have been derived as a consensus after consulting with the other witnesses aboard Daedalus that day and not based solely on his own recollections. So, does this disparity necessarily cast doubt on the veracity of the drawing? I don’t believe it does and I’ll tell you why. At the time of the sighting of the sea serpent, Edgar Drummond was the officer of the watch, and in the absence of the captain on deck was in command of the ship. The operation of the vessel and the duties and safety of the crew were his responsibility. So, if something occurred during that watch, the lieutenant would have wanted to make sure that he had acted accordingly with respect to his duties. One of those duties was reporting any operational changes of the ship or non-routine events to the captain for transcription into the log. The sighting of an enormous serpent would certainly fall under that umbrella and as such Drummond may have felt compelled to record the event in his diary for future reference should that become necessary. And as evidenced by including not only his own narrative but a rendering of the animal based on all available witness testimony at the time, Drummond was simply doing what any good officer would do, and that is taking everyone’s opinion into account when coming up with a final description of the animal. In that it was not described as 120 feet long shows that the drawing was made after the witnesses talked M’Quhae off this ledge, but because other details he didn’t claim as first-hand knowledge were noted speaks to this inclusiveness.
And keep in mind that M’Quhae didn’t submit his letters to the Admiralty or the Times and didn’t consult on the artist’s drawings until 2 months after the actual event took place. The animal was seen on August 6th, and Daedalus didn’t arrive in Plymouth until October 4th. That’s a long stretch during which the captain’s memory and imagination could have skewed the details of the encounter to ever more spectacular levels. But in the Drummond sketch we have a drawing rendered immediately after the event took place, and this drawing remained unaltered, unpublished, and unknown for that matter for 150 years until his grandson thankfully brought it to light.
Taking this sketch as the most viable bit of evidence we have in determining the animal’s identity, let’s review.
The animal was obviously aquatic. It was 50 to 60 feet long. It was black or dark brown with an off-white underbelly. And it was swimming in an unaltering straight line in the open ocean. It sported a small hooked dorsal fin, maybe 2. And witnesses were unanimous in claiming it had a flat head.
Let’s start with the most telling aspect of the animal’s appearance and that’s its size. At roughly 50 to 60 feet, we can effectively eliminate about 99% of the world’s fauna from the lineup. And in that this alleged sea serpent was spotted in the middle of the south Atlantic, 350 miles off the Namibian coast where the depth of the water reaches more than 20,000 feet, we going to want to focus on animals that inhabit these waters and display the behaviors ascribed to the Daedalus creature. Note, I said inhabit in the present tense because I want to disabuse any notion here and now about going down the dinosaurian rabbit hole. I get it, I understand the appeal of ascribing extinct saurians to reports of unknown animals, I hear you. I’ve been there. It’s a sexy idea, and it goes to the heart of why I became interested in mysterious animals to begin with when I was a kid. But when one steps back and takes a long, honest look at the argument that these animals have somehow survived extinction, unchanged and more importantly undetected for almost 100 million years, the conclusion can only be that this is an untenable position with zero physical evidence to back it up.
That effectively leaves us with 3 possible classes of animals that could fit the bill as a sea serpent. And those are either Elasmobranchii, Cephalopoda or Cetacea.
Whuuuuut? Okay, take a deep breath and stay with me because I promise this won’t devolve into biology lecture. These classes of animal that I just mentioned are nothing new to you, everyone listening in is certainly familiar with the creatures we’ll cover here.
The first, Elasmobranchii, are a subclass of Chondrichthyes. In English, these are sharks and rays which are members of the family of fish whose internal structure is cartilaginous, so they are made up mostly of cartilage rather than bone. As such, fossils of these fish are hard to come by as cartilage doesn’t fossilize very well, so these animals are known mainly from their teeth. Representing this subclass is the largest known fish on the planet, and that is Rhincodon typus, better known as the whale shark. These monsters make look terrifying but are indeed rather docile skimmers that filter vast amounts of krill, plankton, and other small organisms for their diet as they slowly glide along. These sharks are huge, but the average accepted length for an adult is only around 35 feet. There have been reports of these sharks reaching 40, 50, even 70 feet in length, but these reports are exceedingly rare and for the most part unsubstantiated. Compared to the Daedalus serpent, it would take an abnormally large specimen of a whale shark to fit this bill. But even if the shoe fits on the length, the rest of the outfit really clashes. That’s because the skin of a whale shark is light in color and adorned with white spots peppering its back, which boasts parallel ridges that run the length of the fish’s body. And while it does have a dorsal fin, it is not a small, crooked thing like the one witnessed by M’Quhae and his men. It is a massive triangle, a characteristic familiar in all large sharks. And in the case of Rhincodon typus it’s 5 feet tall. And what about the second fin seen 30 feet behind the first one?
Had the Daedalus animal been a whale shark, the second fin seen by the senior officers would have appeared small when compared to the dorsal if visible at all and would have been located between the dorsal and the tail. Now the tail in and of itself is a big problem because the vertical fluke of a whale shark is sometimes 12 feet from top to bottom and would have stuck out of the water even further than the dorsal. In that this wasn’t what was seen by the men of Daedalus, combined with all the other visual discrepancies, I think we can put to bed the contention that the animal was a whale shark. And in that the whale shark is the only fish which could have possibly reached the length of the animal seen that day, fish by and large can be eliminated from the list of possible suspects.
Now armchair cryptozoologists love to bandy about the hypothesis that Megalodon is responsible not only for this sighting but for many sea serpent sightings. The meg was a truly massive fish that evidence suggests reached the 60-foot cut-off to be considered for this starring role. It was perhaps the most frightening predator to ever live, a shark with jaws opening so wide that a man might stand upright in them and teeth the size of a shovel blade. But if the whale shark’s fin is a Cadillac, Megalodon’s would be an SUV, slicing through the water at up to 8 feet above the surface with its even larger tail erasing all doubt as to what it was. And that the animal was by some estimates no nearer than 200 yards away, that’s quite the distance to spot a shark – even a big on -- beneath the surface of the water. Of course, being extinct for more than 3 million years doesn’t help its case either. Consequently, we can throw megalodon on the reject pile along with the dinos.
Now let’s move onto cephalopoda, or our many-armed friends like squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus. The last two we can discard right away due to their small size. The octopus, even Enteroctopus dofleini, or the giant pacific octopus boasts a radial arm span maxing out at 30 feet. But this is measuring tip-to-tip across the animal’s body. The length as seen while swimming would be roughly ½ this. So, this wouldn’t match the description. Now there are several myths from around the globe of enormous octopi said to haunt caves and island inlets, most notable the Lusca of Andros Island in the Bahamas. This 8-armed horror is said to grow upwards of 75 feet long, but Lusca as has yet never been proven to exist.
I will touch on one fascinating tale, that of the St. Augustine monster that washed ashore in 1899. Naturalist DeWitt Webb, who examined the animal swore that it was a giant octopus measuring over 100 feet in length. In that I’m planning on covering this story in a future episode, I won’t spoil it for you here. So I’ll allow this suggestion just long enough to torpedo it.
It’s a problem of locomotion, in that an octopus propels itself through the water by both forcing water out of a fleshy jet located near the animal’s head and by spreading and then quickly retracting its tentacles to push it along. This herky-jerky manner of swimming is not particularly fast, not smooth and unbroken and due to the physical nature of the drive process can’t be accomplished effectively on the surface. This alone is enough to reject the octopus.
That leaves us with the squid. In this animal there is a candidate that has repeatedly been taken for sea monsters for millennia. In all actuality, it really is a sea monster. Architeuthis dux, or the giant squid, is itself believed to be the origin of the kraken popularized in Norse myth. This tentacled terror is indeed the stuff of nightmares. It has a narrow, missile-shaped body with winglets protruding from the sides. Its eyes are the largest in the animal kingdom, which it uses to spot prey in the inky blackness of the deep oceans. And it is equipped with 8 tentacles and 2 elongated sucker-studded arms capable of snatching its prey and drawing it toward a sharp parrot-beak like mouth. For centuries, the animal was relegated to myth until in the late 1800’s when dead specimens began washing up on the beaches of Scandinavia and along the Labrador coast in eastern Canada. Though the accepted length of Architeuthis is about 16 feet, reports of giant squid reaching incredible lengths have been recorded throughout history. Eyewitnesses tell of gargantuan squid reaching upwards of 150 feet in length, though scientists are skeptical of these dimensions. But Architeuthis proves that yes, Virginia, there are monsters living in the sea. Sailors told of titanic battles between sperm whales and giant squids on the surface and whalers routinely reported sucker scars the size of dinner plates on whales taken in the vast open oceans. But as the body of these animals is comprised wholly of soft tissue with the only rigid structure being the beak, fossils of ancient specimens are few and far between.
The body of the squid is therefore very mailable per se, so its easy to see how it could be mistaken for a myriad of different animals. If a squid should extend an arm out of the water for a moment, this would be a spot-on match for a long-necked saurian or plesiosaur-like creature as the diamond-shaped glove at the end of the arm could easily be confused with the head and neck of such a monster. And unlike their clunky cousin the octopus with its start-stop motion, squid are able to swim along rather steadily and at a pretty good clip. Another quality which they do share with octopus is the ability to change color thanks to what are known as chromatophores. These hue-varying cells in the animal’s skin allow them to change colors and incredibly quickly, so much so that it often looks as though the animal is “flashing”. The animals can control these changes in order to camouflage to their surroundings or as some scientists have theorized to communicate with others of their species.
But -- and you knew it was coming -- giant squids live deeeeep in the abyssal regions of the ocean, thousands of feet down and are rarely seen at the surface. In fact, it wasn’t until 2012 that the first video was captured of a giant squid in the wild and that was at a depth of over 2,500 feet of the coast of Japan. When these animals do come to the surface, it’s been suggested that it’s because they are injured or sick and not necessarily to attack shipping. And let’s say that an Architeuthis was swimming along the surface in a straight line, there wouldn’t be a long flat head sticking out of the water at a low angle. The eyes of the squid are located at the base of the mantle or body, and are the size of hubcaps, not the tiny dots reported by Daedalus’ crew. And in that they in essence swim backwards, any appendages that might break the surface would have appeared at the rear of the animal, not the front. Therefore, while giant squids might sound like a viable target in the hunt for this particular sea serpent, when all is said and done it just doesn’t add up.
That brings us to our final group of candidates, and those are cetaceans. Whales. Now, don’t roll your eyes and poo-poo this suggestion out of hand. Hang with me for a sec and I’ll show you how this is a perfectly plausible explanation for the Daedalus sea serpent.
As you are no doubt aware, whales come in all shapes and sizes. From dwarf sperm whales which are little more than 8 feet long to the blue whale, which at almost 100 feet, is the largest animal ever known to inhabit our planet. There are several good reasons that certain whales would make great sea serpents under the right conditions. But before we discuss those conditions, let me dispel a few myths first that might aid us coming to a consensus with respect to this notion. Firstly, whales are air breathing mammals and although they can dive to incredible depths to feed, they spend most of their time near the surface to respirate. Several species apart from the blues stretch over 60 feet in length which helps with its case. And whales are big believers in earth tones, ranging in hue from white to gray to black. While the popular vision of a whale at sea is the Moby Dick motif of the animal bucking and surging through the surf, rolling and diving in large pods or groups and firing plumes of spray into the air whenever they breach the surface, this behavior is not indicative of all whales.
Some like the sperm whale and the orca are toothed whales that are active predators chasing down and consuming other aquatic mammals, fish, and yes occasionally giant squid. But there are others like the rorquals which are more laid back in their approach to feeding. And it is a subclass of the rorqual that we’re going to zoom in on here. Balaenoptera are whales that are equipped with long strands of fingernail like keratin called baleen which acts as a net or a sieve of sorts. As the animal swims along, it opens its mouth exposing these plates of baleen and as the water rushes into their mouths, the krill, zooplankton, and other small animals are collected in this web. With the food trapped in the baleen, the whale then closes its mouth, expels the water and voilà, lunch time! Whales in this category are very familiar like the blue whale and the minke which I’ve been lucky enough to spot in waters of the San Juan islands near Seattle. But there’s also the fin whale, Bryde’s whale, and the sei whale. And it’s this last whale that we are going to want to take a really close look at. Because when one does a side-by-side comparison of a sei whale and the Daedalus sea serpent, you’ll see that it is virtually a spot-on match.
Sei whales are the 7th largest species of whale known and grow to between 50 and 60 feet, with reports of even larger specimens. From snout to tail the whales are uniformly dark gray to black on top with an off-white underbelly. And while 15-20 meters long, the sei whale is surprisingly light tipping the scale at only about 28 tons. That is due to its long, slender – dare I say – serpentine build which also helps it become the fastest of all whales with bursts registered at 27 miles per hour. It has a small, crooked dorsal fin located on its back perhaps 2/3 aft of the head and is a solitary hunter, usually feeding alone though there have been reported instances of pods gathering to feed together when food is plentiful. But the most indicative characteristic of the sei whale with respect to the Daedalus sea serpent, is its table manners.
As I mentioned, sei whales are baleen whales that filter tiny sea life through strands of baleen as a means of feeding. Their diet consists mainly of zooplankton, microscopic krill, sea snails, pelagic worms and even jelly fish, which drift about the ocean in massive clouds in almost incomprehensible numbers. These zooplankton themselves feed on phytoplankton, or microscopic plants that cluster near the ocean surface where photosynthesis catalyzed by the sun allows them to survive. Plankton is the linchpin in the aquatic food chain and upon which every animal in the sea is dependent. It is carried about the oceans on the many currents that swirl along the continental boundaries. And when the sun begins to set and the zooplankton rises to the surface to feed on the phytoplankton, it would be like ringing the dinner bell for a hungry rorqual that happens to be passing through the area at that time.
Remember, the various accounts of the sighting stated that the serpent was spotted at around 5 PM, just an hour before sunset on an already dark and stormy day. The gigantic cloud of zooplankton would have been making its way up to the surface at that time and thus it would have been happy hour for any hungry baleen whale.
But of the rorquals, sei whales display a unique tendency when feeding and that is as glide through the skimming the surface for food, they upper jaw rises out of the water at a shallow angle to a height of 3 to feet. When in this posture, the narrow upper jaw juts out of the water looking sleek, black, and most importantly flat. Propelled by its powerful tail, the sei speeds through these huge fields of plankton with its snout angling out but still low to the surface. Water breaking over the nose, then across the back and finally around the dorsal fin causing eddies to swirl about, appearing from a distance like a wash of seaweed or perhaps a mane. And in this posture, such an animal would not have been porpoising, that is continually diving and breaching in a rolling manner. It would have held a straight, level unaltering course until it finished its feeding run before submerging.
There is one issue with the appearance of the Daedalus serpent that doesn’t seem to jibe with the sei whale, and that concerns the second fin sighted by M’Quhae. Drummond, and as far as we know the other witnesses, stated that there was no second fin. The captain was apparently the only one to see this. But after originally estimating the length of the animal at 120 feet, then chopping down to 60 feet and stating that the head looked like a snake and then like a seal, I don’t put a great deal of weight behind M’Quhae’s powers of observation. Yet Drummond did include the second fin in his drawing, even though the claimed he didn’t see it. As I said this was probably his attempt to include details as stated by all the witnesses, not just his own as would be expected by the officer of the watch that day.
If we accept Drummond’s matter-of-fact statement as the most credible description of the Daedalus sea serpent, I can think of no animal living or dead that matches this description better than a sei whale, routinely skimming along the choppy ocean as the plankton rose to the surface in a darkening sky and cruising past the ship at a speed it was easily capable of maintaining before disappearing from sight.
When I first started looking into this matter, I honestly thought that finally I had a mystery that as yet had not been adequately explained. But as I dug deeper into the tale of the Daedalus sea serpent, I found that as in so many other supposed unexplained cases, the perpetuation of these myths relies more on ignoring facts than actively seeking them out. Before last Thursday I had never even heard of a sei whale. Now I feel confident I could pass a freshman-level cetology class without cracking a book. I want give special thanks and recognition to Gary J. Galbreath whose 2015 article on this subject, which was published in the Skeptical Inquirer, allowed me and I hope you as well to place this famous and fascinating experience in a proper context.
While many have and will continue to argue for the Daedalus creature being a sea serpent, I’ll just say “show me the money”. Without corroborating indications, sonar tracings, video, physical remains and even fossils describing an animal like the one M’Quhae swore was a sea monster, rationality demands we look closer to home and to what we know about the animal kingdom. An often-persuasive argument is that these were professional sailors, with years if not decades of experience at sea. Surely, they would know a whale when they saw one. But remember, for his 40 years in the navy, Captain M’Quhae spent most of it behind a desk and was only entrusted with two minor commands out of harms way. This is what the British admiralty thought of Peter M’Quhae. And in the 1840’s, the study of whale biology was still in its infancy. For crying out loud, most people at that time still thought whales were fish, not mammals. Specimens of sei whales were almost nonexistent until the early part of the 19th century, the first on record washing ashore on the north coast of Germany in 1819. It wasn’t until 1884 that G.A. Guldberg of Norway proposed the name Balaenoptera borealis, thus identifying the sei whale a separate species. In that cetacean biologists are still trying to unravel the behavior of these enigmatic whales to this day, it’s safe to assume that no one, not even commercial whalers at that time, were familiar with all the peculiarities of the sei whale’s feeding habits.
Accordingly, it appears we can close the case of the sea serpent sighted from the deck of HMS Daedalus on that stormy day in 1848. The witnesses, a half dozen good men and true, related to the world as fair and accurate a description of the animal that they sighted as possible with their limited knowledge of aquatic organisms. While researching this story I came across dozens of other accounts and drawings of reported sea serpents from the age of sail and after reviewing them found that in every single instance, their sea serpent match perfectly with several of the animals we’ve discussed today. One case in particular was that of HMS Plumper, which encountered a creature identical to that of Daedalus off the coast of Portugal in January 1849 – just 6 months after the Daedalus sighting. A drawing of the beast was a spot-on match for Drummond’s sketch and mirrors exactly the nose up attitude of a surface feeding sei whale.
Does this mean that all reports of unknown sea creatures are simple cases of mistaken identity? Absolutely not. The vastness of our oceans is something that’s hard to wrap one’s head around. We’re talking 362 million square kilometers and depths reaching 36,000 feet. There are species out there we don’t know, that is a given. Look no further than the megamouth shark, first discovered after being caught in the sea anchor the US Navy ship AFB-14 off Hawaii in 1976. This 14-foot shark was entirely unknown until being accidentally dredged up that day. Two new six-gill saw sharks have been identified within the past 5 years, and there are new and exciting discoveries being made in the deep on a regular basis. While most of these new species are smaller cousins of previously known animals, the megamouth shark demonstrates that much larger unknown animals are likely lurking in the perpetual midnight of the abyss. Paleontology shows us that massive and mysterious creatures once existed in the open ocean. And I for one hope they still do.