"Pauline" Witnesses Squid/Whale Showdown

Sea serpents: the monsters of many a tall tale. Eating people. Eating ships. Eating ships with people on them. Surely, at least one person saw one of these terrifying creatures up close and lived to tell his story. Well...not quite. Many people have seen "sea serpents", but as Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1886 demonstrates with the help of illustrations, these people had probably just seen giant squids. Considering that the first recorded sighting of a living giant squid was in 2005, catching a glimpse of this elusive beast is still pretty impressive. Bonus points go to the crew of the "Pauline" for seeing one take down a whale.

On July 8, 1875, the officers and crew of the " Pauline " observed three large sperm-whales, and one of them was gripped around the body with two turns of what appeared to be a huge serpent. The head and tail appeared to have a length beyond the coils of about thirty feet, and its girth eight or nine feet. The serpent whirled the whale round and round, and then suddenly dragged him to the bottom, head first. A rough drawing was made of this extraordinary scene, and a copy of it is here given.
Numerous appearances of the sea-serpent were reported in 1886; but in no instances were the observers near enough to make new discoveries as to its shape or formation. Various hypotheses have been advanced by scientific men to account for these appearances. Thus it has been claimed that a calamary (or giant squid), swimming on the surface of the sea, would present the appearance described by so many observers as peculiar to the great sea - serpent ; and it has been urged that it was the same animal, rising to the surface to blow, that was seen by Mr. Egede.
When swimming, these squids propel themselves backward by the outrush of a stream of water from a tube pointing in a direction contrary to that in which the animal is proceeding. The tail part, therefore, goes in advance, and the body tapers toward this. At a short distance from the actual extremity, two Hat tins project from the body, one on each side, so that the end of the squid's body has been compared to an arrow-head. It is a habit of these squids, the small species of which are met with in some localities in teeming abundance, to swim on the smooth surface of the water in hot and calm weather. The arrow- headed tail is then raised out of the water to a height that in a large individual might be three feet or more, and as it precedes the body, which moves at the rate of several miles an hour, it of course looks, to a person who has never heard of an animal going tail first at such speed, like the creature's head.

Images courtesy of Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1886

Labels: 1800s, Animals, Science