Almost as famous as the Loch Ness phenomenon is the account of the sea-serpent observed by Captain Peter M’Quhae and his crew aboard the frigate Daedalus on August 6, 1848. They were asea somewhere between the island of St. Helena (where Napoleon reputedly died — another mystery) and the Cape of Good Hope (notorious for its connection with The Flying Dutchman). It was five o’clock in the afternoon, and visibility was not ideal: the weather was dull and rainy. A young midshipman reported that he had seen a “strange creature” moving toward the Daedalus’s starboard bow. Various shipmates — including the officer of the watch, the navigator, and the captain — responded to the midshipman’s call. A total of seven experienced naval men were now watching the creature. Their reports clearly indicated something serpentine, estimated at more than thirty metres long and travelling at about twelve knots. With the aid of telescopes, they kept it in sight for nearly half an hour. Despite the poor visibility caused by the dull, damp weather, M’Quhae reckoned that he and his crew were able to see the monster reasonably well. He actually said that if the thing had been a person whom he knew, he would have been able to recognize him — the creature was as close and as clear as that! M’Quhae referred to the face and head as “distinctly snake-like.” According to his account, the neck supporting this serpentine head was about forty centimetres in diameter, and the body went back a long way. The head was just above the water, and the underside of the neck was whitish-yellow. The rest of the creature, as M’Quhae and his team described it, was very dark brown, almost black.
BOTOMS UP!
Co-author Lionel wore a similar diving outfit to Lloyd Scott while filming an episode of Fortean TV on England’s Channel 4. The director wanted him to get into a tank full of fish at the Great Yarmouth Sea Life Centre in Norfolk, England, and submerge, prior to coming up and introducing an item about a mysterious diver. The genuine antique diving suit supplied by a theatrical costume company had long since lost its original lead-soled boots, so when Lionel submerged, his feet shot upward. The big, copper helmet filled with water and held him upside-down.
Fortunately, Alf, his stalwart guitarist, was also in the tank and fished him out again — none the worse for wear!
Co-author Lionel in RCMP officer’s uniform while filming the Ogopogo episode for UK Channel 4, Fortean TV.
The men of the Daedalus were somewhat puzzled by the creature’s ability to maintain its speed and course without any apparent means of propulsion. They said that — as far as they were able to ascertain — it neither paddled with submerged flippers, nor undulated its lengthy body from side to side, as many marine serpents do when swimming.
The creature that M’Quhae and his men reported bore a striking resemblance to the sea-serpent described by Bishop Pontoppidan a century earlier in his book A Natural History of Norway. Pontoppidan had also described mer-folk as noted earlier. Media reports in 1848 were not necessarily accurate, and although the Times of October 10 reported that M’Quhae and his men had seen a beast with a huge mouth full of dangerous teeth, they did not appear to have reported anything about its dentition.
Although their accounts differed in certain details — as honest, independent accounts normally do — the witnesses agreed that the thing they had seen had not struck them as threatening or hostile to the Daedalus in any way. Neither had it seemed to be afraid of the ship. The general impression it gave them was that it was totally preoccupied with some purpose of its own — perhaps something as demanding as searching for a mate, or as simple as a quest for nourishment. M’Quhae made sketches of it, reproduced in the Illustrated London News on October 28 — after the Times had told the story on October 13.
Various theories were put forward as to what M’Quhae’s monster might have been. It was suggested that it could have been a large species of seal, the phoca proboscidea, referred to as a “sea-elephant.” But M’Quhae, who had seen one, was adamant that the creature observed from the Daedalus was very definitely not an elephant seal.
Brilliant professional underwater cinematographer Jonathan Bird encountered an oarfish (Regalecus glesne) in the Bahamas recently. Although this was by no means as long as the monster that M’Quhae and his team described, it was certainly similar to it. The specimen Jonathan saw was around fifteen metres long. The oarfish is very elongated and has yellow lures on the ends of its strange antennae. It swims in an upright position using its dorsal fin only — not its entire body: that also sounds like the movement of the weird creature that the men of the Daedalus reported.
A report from 1953 — about a century after the adventure of the Daedalus — came from a diver working in the South Pacific and attempting to establish a new depth record. He said that he was keeping a wary eye on a shark that was taking an unhealthy interest in him, and wondering just how far it would attempt to follow him down. His explorations took him to the edge of a vast submarine chasm vanishing down into awesome, unknown depths. He said that the water became markedly colder. The temperature drop was very significant and continued to become more pronounced. Clinging tightly to his ledge — to have dropped into the chasm would have been fatal — the diver saw a huge black shadowy shape rising very slowly toward him. About the size of football field, and dark brown in colour, it pulsated as it floated gradually higher and higher — convincing the diver that it was definitely a living creature of some type.
As it drew level with his ledge, he reported that the coldness became even bitterer. The strange mass drifted ever closer to the shark, which the diver felt was immobilized either by the cold or by pure terror. The outer edges of the sheet-like thing from the depths touched the motionless shark. It convulsed but made no attempt to resist or escape. Its weird attacker drew the doomed shark down into itself like an amoeba surrounding and digesting its prey. It then sank slowly back into the abyss. The diver who reported this episode added that he remained motionless on his perilous submarine ledge until the horrific thing from the abyss had vanished again into the depths.
Could whatever that thing was have been responsible for the tragic disappearance of several divers in that area in the late 1930s? The Melbourne Leader at that time reported that the Japanese captain of the Yamta Maru had gone down to salvage pearls from a wreck, and had given an urgent signal to his crew to haul him up fast. All that reached the surface was his helmet and lifeline: of the fearless captain there was no trace.
The same thing happened again in 1938. This time it was Masao Matsumo, another Japanese diver, who went down from the Felton and was never seen again. Like the skipper of the Yamta Maru, Masao gave the signal to be hauled up. His shipmates recovered only his empty helmet and a basket of shells. Fearlessly, his diving colleagues went down more than seventy metres looking for him — but Masao had vanished as completely as the ill-fated captain of the Yamta Maru.
There is a remote possibility that the weird, sheet-like, shark-killing creature seen in 1953 might have had some connection with another oddity reported in the Daily Mail on April 2, 2002. In this account it was stated that a huge dark blob — even bigger than the thing which allegedly came up from the chasm and disposed of the shark — was seen drifting toward Florida. Scientists put forward the theory that this particular “monster” was actually a huge cloud of algae. Scientific expeditions sent out to investigate noticed that other marine life seemed to be avoiding it assiduously. Observed from space satellites, it looked very dark, almost black, but when examined from the scientists’ boat it was dark green. Marine chemist Dr. Richard Pierce explained that the algae cloud would remove oxygen from the water around it after dark, and marine life avoiding the strange, discoloured patch might be doing so because they sensed that the water in its vicinity was low in vital oxygen.