Sea Monster In The Sound: What The Heck Is That?!
The first one in the written record was spotted by a white man, a sailor named John Josselyn, in 1641: a “sea serpent or snake that lay quoiled up like a cable upon a rock at Cape Ann”. Indians on the spot advised him and his mates not to kill it.
Listen, I know it’s improbable, just like sightings of old Nessie in Loch Ness sound absurd to those who’ve never seen her. Sea serpents, if they exist, apparently live so submerged and so sensitive to man-made machinery, they only reveal themselves on the rarest of occasions. When one does, however, surface, and the chance bystander spies it, that poor schmegeggie of an eye-witness is so shocked when he tells us about it, we believe him just because he’s ripped out of his skull with honest disbelief. . . . wouldn't you be? Consider this dispatch from the editor of the Vineyard Gazette, in 1860, vouching for a certain captain’s “truthfulness and aversion to exaggeration” (we well know this kind of acerbic Yankee: “It was about seventy …
Chip Coblyn
10:24 am on Thursday, January 3, 2013
Sounds like Col. Perkins' horny beast could have been a wayward narwal more ›