Owen's scrapbook includes this 1877 engraving of a 60ft(18m)-long sea serpent with an alligator-like head and a single set of 10-foot (3m) long flippers, depicted alongside the ship Sacramento on its passage from New York to Australia. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
THE GREAT naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the term "dinosaur", wrote the first scientific descriptions of dinosaurs and was a founder of the first Natural History Museum (NHM) and its first director. Well over a century before Fortean Times started collecting clippings, Owen was on the case with his scrapbook of reports of sea serpent sightings, spanning the four decades from 1830 to 1870. This can still be found in the NHM's Library. Owen was somewhat fortean in his interests, although sceptical in his views on sea serpent sightings in particular. This caused Prince Albert to dub Owen "The Sea Serpent Killer."
The Owen scrapbook is a ledger with inventories scrawled into it by hand, then re-purposed to paste in sea serpent-related newspaper cuttings, articles copied out by hand and letters. The ledger now has “SEA-SEPRENTINES OWEN COLL.” embossed on the spine. A frontispiece written in a cursive hand (not Owen's) reads: “Ms. Notes, Newspaper cuttings, relating to the alleged appearances of the 'Sea-Serpent' Collected by Sir R. Owen.” A few loose cuttings from after Owen’s death in 1892 have been added between the pages. One of the post-Owen clipsters was even more brutal than Owen – a press clipping from 1912 shows a round, speckled floating hump, the words "Dead narwhal" have been written in the margin.
The spine of the Owen scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Handwritten frontispiece to the scrapbook, in another hand than Owen's. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
The scrapbook opens with a handwritten account pasted in, with the heading “Sea-serpent.” Describing a sighting by a Captain Sullivan and three soldiers on a fishing expedition at Mahone Bay near Halifax, Nova Scotia in May 1833, it was written by the witnesses three years afterwards.
Land and Water, at the time a trade paper for the fisheries industry, was on the case re: sea serpent reports. The trade press took a keen interest in sea serpent sightings, apparently with an eye to the possible commercial exploitation of any such vast unknown creatures as may be out there. The scrapbook also includes a review of Henry Lee’s Sea Monsters Unmasked, launched at the International Fisheries Exhibition.
Lee, who worked with octopi at the Brighton Aquarium, wrote as people were beginning to accept that squid up to 60 feet (18m) long could exist and their existence could explain sea serpent sightings. An 1877 letter to Land and Water describes how a “sea serpent” seen off Inverness turned out to be a basking shark, while an 1872 cutting from Land and Water references Captain Sullivan’s Mahone Bay sighting from way back in 1833.
A clipping from the Cape Argus of March 14 1857, sent in by the Secretary of the Geological Society, describes in a long front-page article “The Great Sea Serpent” seen in Table Bay, with testimony in letters from witnesses. An accompanying illustration shows a collosal tadpole with a long, sinuous tale. There is an extract from an untitled article cut from the Telegraph of 8 May 1847, above which Owen has scrawled “Sea-serpent”. Where the article describes how “the crowd stared at the “hideous creature”, Owen’s marginal note asks “!Why hideous?” and adds “a desire for the truth would have led to other witnesses”.
Owen's marginal note on the crowd's reaction to a "hideous" sea serpent reported in the Telegraph of 8 May 1847. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Anonymous pamphlets dissing scientists and their discoveries whilst praising the works of a certain Sir Richard Owen were a phenomenon in Victorian science. These pamphlets turned out to be fairly obviously written by Owen himself. Such a pamphlet demolishing Darwin’s 1859 On the Origin of Species – pointing out some actual flaws or omissions in Darwin's arguments but mostly motivated by professional jealousy – is one such example. Another anonymous pamphlet, also driven mostly by spite and disparaging naturalist Gideon Mantell’s pioneering work on the dinosaur Iguanadon, turned out to be by Owen as well.
This is probably why an NHM librarian has included along with Owen’s scrapbook an anonymous 1849 pamphlet An Essay on the Credibility of the Existence of the Kraken, Sea Serpent and Other Sea Monsters, marked “R. Owen” on the cover. The librarian concluded that this was by Owen, who clearly had form in this genre.
Cover of the anonymous An Essay on the Credibility of the Existence of the Kraken, Sea Serpent and Other Sea Monsters, thought by a former NHM librarian to be the work of Sir Richard Owen. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Despite his scepticism, Owen collected many sea serpent reports in what is probably one of the first cryptozoological clippings libraries. His network of sources and clipsters was impressive – aside from the Secretary of the Royal Geological Society, Owen’s clipsters also included James Emerson Tennent, former governor of what's now Sri Lanka and author of The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing it in Ceylon.
There are in addition same handwritten letters – including some by seamen who saw the "Bombay to Liverpool Sea Serpent" in December 1857. These are copied in several different hands other than Owen’s. A hand-copied letter of April 1873 from Admiral Sir G. Rodney Mundy KCB begins: “Sir, in accordance with your memo of this date, I beg to submit an outline of the head and shoulders of the Fish seen and noted in the log of the HM Ship under my command..." Owen apparently had a source in the Home Office who forwarded to him many handwritten copies of testimony from sailors. These usually began “I am commanded to give an account..." and listed precise coordinates.
A letter, likely a handwritten copy of a letter from Admiral Sir G. Rodney Mundy KCB to the Admiralty, forwarded by a contact of Owen's in the Home Office, describing a sea serpent sighting of which “I am commanded to give an account." Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
There are even cuttings in French. An undated Chronique Local from the newspaper Phare de la Loire describes a “serpent du mer” seen from the French ship Tocantin off the California coast. Owen has underlined phrases including “palettes servant de nageoires” (paddles serving as fins). There’s a page torn from a French book with an illustration of a giant horned tadpole with dreadlocks menacing a ship. A loose scrap of paper has notes in French on a sighting from 1690.
An illustration of a menacing giant horned tadpole, cut from a French book and pasted into Owen's scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Noteworthy illustrations include a magnificent front-page engraving of whiskery sea monster seen by the crew of the ship Hydra, from that fortean favourite The Illustrated Police News. There’s a beautiful 1877 newspaper engraving of a 60ft-long sea serpent with an alligator-like head and a single set of 10-foot (3m) long flippers, depicted alongside the ship Sacramento on its passage from New York to Australia. There are many sketches of multiple humps seen from a great distance.
A whiskery sea serpent seen from the ship Hydra makes the front page of an 1877 edition of the Illustrated Police News. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
The "Bombay to Liverpool Sea Serpent" observed by the crew of the Castilian on 13 December 1857 off St Helena, was reported with a long extract from the ship’s log. The Castilian sighting generated much letter-writing to the Times, clippings of which are in the scrapbook. The Castilian crew apparently came forward soon after the famous HMS Daedalus sighting was reported. Reports of the Daedalus and Castilian sightings in The Times prompted a letter from a Mr Frederick Smith, of February 12 1858, to write in about a sighting at Lattitude 26 South, Longitude 6 East, off the West African coast, of a barnacle-encrusted “extraordinary-looking thing of considerable length.” A Daily Telegraph cutting from September 1879 describes testimony from the captain of the ship Privateer, who observed 100 miles off France’s Atlantic coast a huge, black “snake or or eel”. Owen's scrapbook catalogued waves of sea serpent sightings, fuelled by press coverage. The Standard in particularly was a source of many contemporary sea serpent reports back around 1859.
The Telegraph of 9 February 1859 quotes a report in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet newspaper of an Atlantic sea serpent at lattitude 6 degrees, 30 minutes North, longitude 3 degrees, 20 minutes West, in which “the sea-serpent seems at length to have received its solution in a very natural way.” According to one witness, Eric Manusson, the crew spied “exactly ahead of the ship, an object resembling a sea serpent of unusual size and length, moving itself up and down.” Manusson describes how “the crew and myself were struck with astonishment, the wonderful animal, which appeared to us all like a living creature, at least two hundred fathoms long, (1,200 feet or 265 metres,) covered with shiny scales… on approaching nearer we could see distinctly that the body possessed life and motion,” they prepared for an “inevitable collision.” Only then did it become clear that the “serpentine mass was nothing else than a swarm of herrings making their way in this singular manner through the sea."
An unsourced newspaper cutting showing multiple humps observed at sea, from Owen's scrapbook. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
There are several cases in which sightings – including an 1861 one from a ship off the coast of Salem, Massachusetts – in which huge serpents with coils or humps are revealed when the boat closes with them to be shoals of “horse mackerel”, a generic term for a variety of larger fish found in shoals in open water that are up to around a metre in length, including the then-abundant jack mackerel. Other articles and illustrations collected in the scrapbook suggest other misidentifications – large rays (then known mostly as remains found in the stomachs of whales), giant squid, also known as a giant “cuttlefish” or “calamary,” dolphins or leatherback turtles.
Several of Owen’s cuttings explain the sea serpent as being a giant oarfish (Regalecus) or one its smaller close relatives the ribbon fish (Gymneterus sp). These had already been scientifically described and were turning up occasionally. The creature caught in Bermuda’s Hungary Bay (or “Hungry Bay”) by a George Trimingham featured in a front-page article in The Bermudian under the headline “The Great Gymnetrus”, which found its way into Owen’s scrapbook. A 12-feet (3.57m) long giant ribbonfish caught off the Northumbrian coast in March 1849 and touted as “The Wonder of the Sea! The Gymnetrus Northumbricus or Sea Serpent” was still being referenced decades later in cuttings stuck into the same scrapbook.
Sea serpent sightings also generated Victorian satire. An article cut and pasted into the scrapbook, undated and unsourced, has “Our Own Ananias” adrift at sea in a small boat, interviewing the sea serpent on “Silly Season matters”, in which the sea serpent mentions his old chums “The Toad in a Lump of Coal”and “The Shower of Frogs.”
One of the highest-profile Victorian sea serpent sightings was the one from HMS Daedalus in 1848. The Times of November 14 1848 published a response to the Daedalus sighting by Owen, who revealed that as custodian of the Hunterian Museum he had received “numerous inquiries” on the subject and that “I continue to receive many applications for my opinion of the ‘Great Sea Serpent’”.
Owen’s letter to The Times argued that from its description, the Daedalus monster couldn't have been a reptile and was a mammal, probably a large seal. Despite admitting that that "I am far from insensible to the pleasures of the discovery of a new and rare animal; but before I can enjoy them, certain conditions – e.g., reasonable proof or evidence of its existence – must be fulfilled."His argument for scepticism towards sea serpents was based on the lack of physical evidence, the lack of bones sent to a museum or found in a collection, "a larger body of evidence from eyewitnesses might be got together in proof of ghosts than of the sea serpent."
Owen's letter to The Times, widely reprinted in other newspapers, earned him the moniker "The Sea Serpent Killer." His scepticism soon caused other naturalists to adopt a default position of rejecting all testimony on unidentified animals by locals and amateurs.
An original drawing by a witness. Image courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
The great sea sepent of Table Bay from the Cape Argus 14 March 1857. Image courtesy trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Manuscript: A collection of manuscript notes, newspaper cuttings, etc, relating to the Sea Serpent.Brought together by Sir R. Owen, c.1841-1881, Owen, Richard, item barcode: 000234930, Natural History Museum Library and Archives,
Update (05/10/25): The "Silly Season" the period from late June to early September when newspapers had little to report on by way of Parliamentary proceedings or politics, became a fixture of the press calendar from around 1860. In the decades preceeding that, the months that came to be known as the silly season was known as the Sea Serpent Season, as space that needed filling in newspapers would often be filled with comical reports about sea serpent sightings, with humourously sacracstic commments on these. See History Today's article on this. (Paywall).
Copyright Matt Salusbury 2025
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