The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-05-13 00:00:00

THE GREAT SEA SERPENT.

We extract the following from the Bombay Gazette of the
171 h Wt. (says the Daily Telegraph of AI onday) :
Sm. HYDASPES, March 22.

I must tell you at once that I write on one of the
most worn and commonplace of subjects—the voyage
of aP. and 0. steamer from Bombay to Aden. But
I must ask you, before throwing this letter into the
waste-paper basket, to read it through carefully. If it
be not published, one of the most extraordinary facts
in this world's history may be absolutely lost; and in
the interests of truth, in the interest I may say truly of
science, I ask you to make known what I now state.
As a missionary, I have travelled over a great part of
the world, but I can safely aver that what I saw on
Saturday, the 18th day of March, was incomparably
the most marvellous phenomenon that has ever met
my eyes.
We steamed out of Bombay harbour on the evening
of Monday, the 13th of March, in the staamship Hy-
daspes, Captain Reynould. On Tuesday at twelve we
had made 162 miles, on Wednesday at midday 429, on
Thursday 707, and on Friday nearly 1,000, so that on
Saturday morning we were about 1,550 miles from
Bombay. Nothing of remark had occurred up to Satur-
day. There were a monkey and a Persian cat among
the passengers, which had caused some little amusement;
and 32 children who had caused extreme annoyance to
the male passengers from the constant screams that
they gave forth, morning, noon, and night. The
weather was cool and nearly every one slept below;
only one passenger, a Captain Davidson, and my-
self remaining on deck for the night. I was roused
from sleep every morning at six by the men wash-
ing and scraping the decks, and on Saturday was roused
as usual. I took my plate of broken biscuits to the
stern and sat there munching them and looking at the
sun rising. I was quite alone Captain Davidson still
sleeping in peace on the port eide. There was a thick
bank of clouds on the horizon, and as the sun rose from
the sea behind this dark bank, great masses of colour—
red and blue and yellow—lit up the whole expanse of
sky and sea. I was looking at a strange ruddy blot of
red on the water, right astern, when I saw, apparently
near the horizon, but in the red blot, a dark moving
shadow. It did not seem to move with the other shadows
on the sea, and this fixed my attention to it. Soon
I saw that it was steadily approaching the vessel.
I could distinguish no form only a dark shadow,
but I made out certainly that it was advancing
towards us and at a great rate. Fifteen minutes;
must have passed when I at last became able to dis-
tinguish the form of the advancing object. (I spoke to
the captain afterwards as to the distance the object
could have been from us when I first distinguished it,
and he told me I must have been deceived by the mov-
ing lights in supposing it Leer the horiz)n; and he
guessed, from what I said, that it was then only three
or four miles distant. Mistakes of a like nature, he
said, are commonly made by the inexperienced. I
cannot accurately describe my feeling on beholding
that hideous sight. At first 1 turned to call out, to
bring others to look on with n e ; but, before a cry
could pass my lips, a second feeling of selfish pleasure I
that I alone saw that fearful thing, seized me, and
turned my eyes again to the sea and kept them fixed
there. Within a hundred feet of the stern of our vessel,
not now approaching us, but simply following steadily
in our wake, was this hideous thing. A great mass of
what looked like tangled seaweed, on which a futile
attempt at combing had been made, rose out of the
water. This mass must have been twenty or thirty
feet in length and ten feet in width, and as it came on
it caused a wide ripple in the water that showed
there must be a still greater part below the surface.
From the centre of this mass, raised just clear above
it and facing the vessel, was a great black head.
The top was quite flat, in shape not unlike that of a
monstrous toad. A thick fringe of coarse reddish
hair hung over the mouth, quite concealing it. But
the eyes were the most awful part of this fearful thing.
They were placed far apart, at either extremity of the
flat head, distant from each other at least three feet.
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only, therefore, write as they appeared to me. The
eyeballs were enormous; they must have been four or
five inches in diameter. They scintillated constantly.
Every one knows the extraordinary appearance of a
surface covered with small alternate squares of bright
red and bright blue, the quivering uncertain, unfixed
look such a surface has, the difficulty, the impossi-
bility experienced by the looker on, to fix the colour
of any particular square. The eyeballs of this thing
had such a quivering, uncertain look; but they were
not red, not blue, not red and blue; they were
of a bright, burningly bright, copper hue; they pained
our eyes—and in this we were all agreed—as we looked
at them. In the centre of each eyeball, a mere speck,
but visible from its extreme brightness, was a point of