THE SEA SERPENT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1090, 6 January 1912, Page 4

THE SEA SERPENT.

The story of the sea serpent seen in the Tasman Sea by officers of the Strathardle will be greeted with innumerable jokes at their expense. The public has got into its head that the sea serpent is a joke. But while scientists are not agreed that there is such a creature, the evidence for its existence is not to be despised. There is the story of the officers of H.M.S. Daedalus, which encountered an enormous serpent In the South Atlantic in 1848. The creature, which resembled a snake or an eel, and showed about 60 feet of body, passed quite close to the ship, and those on board had a good look at it. In 1875 the British ship Pauline witnessed, off tha Alrican coast, a struggle between a whale and a gigantic serpent, which wound itself round the whale and crushed it in bosconstrictor fashion. Two years later the officers of her Majesty’s yacht Osborne, a vessel which one would not expect to be the home of fishermen’s tales, saw a serpent off the coast of Sicily. This creature was of immense length, and, like the one seen by those on the Strathardle, had a head like a crocodile. Many other cases are on record in which mariners have reported with circumstantial detail having seen serpent-like animals in the ocean.