The kraken lives
NORMAN COLLINS
In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents Bernard Heuvelmans translated by Richard Garnett (Rupert Hart-Davis 84s)
No more than a small minority of the huroan race has ever seen, or even claimed to have seen, a sea-serpent. Indeed, for all his pains- taking research, Dr Heuvelmans has not been able to amass more than some 500 to 600 eye-witness accounts which he, as a doctor of zoology, is prepared to regard as worth serious scientific investigation. He is, in fact, a born debunker. Even photographs—usually the miss- ing element in any report—of huge rotting car- casses left stranded on this earth's lonelier shores do not necessarily stand up to the Heuvelmans method. Sadly, whole albums of cherished close-ups from the sea-serpent cemeteries of the world will have to be re- labelled simply 'Basking Shark' or, at best, 'Un- known Cetacean' now that the learned doctor has consulted his manuals and applied his lens.
But what of the testimonies that the author does not reject? In the first place, it is a three- centuries-long silly season, spread over all the months in the calendar, from which these re- ports are drawn; and, rather encouragingly for all true believers, as the time approaches the present, the reports of the sightings have become more and more frequent. Secondly, it is not simply a 'something called the sea- serpent,' or even the Great Sea-serpent, to which they all refer. The question, as the author puts it, is this: 'Are there or are there not in the sea one or more species of great animals, elongated in shape and still unknown to science?' Dr Heuvelmans's answer is affirma- tive, and he plumps unhesitatingly for plurality of species.
When he reaches his final analysis, this is what it all boils down to: 82 Long-necked; 71 Merhorses; 59 Many-humped; 28 Super- otters; 26 Many-finned; 23 Super-eels; 9 Marine Saurians; and 6 Yellow-bellies. That is to say, something over 200 'certain,' i.e. scien- tifically acceptable; and almost as many re- jected as no more than 'probable'; 'vague and therefore doubtful'; 'false arising from hoaxes% 'certain or probable mistakes'; 'ambiguous periscopes'; 'incomprehensible, unclassifiable or very suspect'; and four 'uncertain' (though `probable') reports of the Father-of-all-turtles.
And now for a word of caution about the terminology. It is precisely because they are unknown species to which Dr Heuvelmans is referring that even he doesn't know what to call them. And here I am not sure that his compromise is a particularly happy one.
'Super-otter,' for instance, does not mean 'bur old friend Lutra lutra, or even our passing acquaintance Enhydra lutris, enlarged to the size of the biggest of whales, but merely a 'Naval officers do not tell lies to the Lords of the Admiralty,' Dr Heuvelmans remarks. Nor, presumably, do the captains of other lines wish to mislead their own boards of directors. It was Sir Arthur Rostron, the Cunard com- modore, who logged a most unambiguous and obviously living 'periscope' which, in 1907, he saw not fifty yards from the ship's side as the 'Campania' neared home waters.
' Well, there you are: take it or leave it. Or take some of it, and leave the rest. Let me add merely that this is the best, the best- written, the longest (654 pages), the most com- prehensive (ten pages of listed sightings, and a two-page list of strandings); the most critical and the most persuasive book in the entire
creature of those dimensions and in general shape more hike an otter than like anything else. 'Super-otter' is/was an inhabitant of the Norwegian, Baltic and Greenland waters; but, even among sea-serpents, the casualty list is never closed and, we are reminded, 'as there has not been a single certain sighting of the Super-otter since 1848, it may now well be extinct.'
Not so the others. The sea-serpent swum into the twentieth century, survived two world wars, and entered the atomic age with all its attendant reporters. In 1947—to pick one year at- random—the dateline was Vancouver - and the witness was the president of the King's Bench of Saskatchewan : 'His head, like a snake's, came out of the water four or five feet and straight up. Six or seven feet from the head, one of his big coils showed clearly. The coil itself was six or seven feet long, fully a foot thick, per- fectly round and dark in colour . . . I got three good looks at him . . . I'd think the creature was thirty-five to forty feet long. It was like a monstrous snake. It certainly wasn't any of those sea animals we know, like a porpoise, sea-lion and so on. I've seen them and know what they look like.'
Throughout the whole of this century, in- deed, the reports have been coming in at the rate of a couple a year or so from British, North American, South African, Australian and Mediterranean waters, as well as from the Indian Ocean, the Korean Strait and from the great harbourage of Rio Bay.
It is only in the sheer quality of the writing that the earlier reports excel. There is that classic letter from the captain of HMS 'Daedalus,' written in 1848, to Admiral Gage upon the demands of the Lords of the Ad- miralty after they had become disquietened by reports which had appeared in the columns of The Times about a sighting in the South Atlantic:
'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 by com- paring it with the length of what our main top- sail yard would show in the water, there was at the very least 60 feet of the animal a fleur d'eau, no portion of which was, to our per- ception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily hive recognised his features with the naked eye.' library of sea-serpentology. For those who want to continue their pursuit of the creature. there is even a world bibliography that runs to thirty-five pages. The Heuvelmans opus is, thus, not only the monograph of all mono- graphs on the subject, but a worthy memorial to that temerarious minority which, for cen- turies past, has risked scorn, ridicule and derision simply by suggesting that there was something there.
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