Rosetown Review
- Richard Donohue
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Pursuing the Great American Sea Serpent
By Richard Franklin Donohue
Town Historian
“The serpent shook its head and its tail in an extraordinary manner and advanced toward the ship with open jaws. I had caused the cannon to be reloaded, but he had come so near that all the crew were seized with terror and we thought only of getting out of his way.
“He almost touched the vessel and, had I not tacked as I did, he would certainly have come on board. He dived, but in a moment, we saw him come up again with his head on one side of the vessel and his tail on the other as if he was going to lift up and upset us.”
Capt. Joseph Woodward of the schooner Adamant, Aug. 1, 1818, Gloucester, Mass.
As ancient as humankind itself, many of the world’s oldest tales involve sea serpents. In 19th Century America, scientific methods of dissecting these fish stories encouraged the general public to see them as fact rather than myth.
In 1817, a Boston scientific organization called the Linnean Society collected several reports of encounters with a “Great Serpent” off the coasts of Gloucester and Cape Ann. The society’s scientifically based findings led the group to announce the existence of a previously unknown species. They named it Scoliophis Atlanticus but it soon earned the moniker of the Great American Sea Serpent.
Over the next 60 years this serpent, consistently 100 feet long with a head the size of a barrel, appeared along the Massachusetts coast no fewer than 11 times and always in July and August. In 1886, after a nearly 10-year hiatus, it evidently decided to expand its horizons.
On Aug. 12, 1886, more than 50 witnesses saw a “veritable sea serpent” a quarter mile off the coast of Rockland, Mass. Similar to the accounts of 1817, the creature was described as being at least 100 feet in length and as wide as a small man. Its neck bristled with 10 to 15 ridges, its head was the size of a small child and it frequently breached the surface of the water so observers could clearly see both.
G.B. Putnam, headmaster of the Franklin School in Boston, was among the observers and noted that the serpent was followed by a school of porpoises, the sight of which provided assurance that “the former could not be mistaken for the latter.”
In the coming days, fishermen reported seeing the sea serpent along the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, but these sightings were almost entirely attributed to floating clumps of seaweed or the alcohol readily available “on the shore of prohibition states.”
On Aug. 29, a group of sailors and boys swimming in the Hudson River at Rondout, N.Y., claimed to have seen a sea serpent “the shape and general appearance of the well-known anaconda of the Amazon, but much longer.” The animal’s now 20-inch-wide head stood 6 feet out of the water and its mottled brown back featured a fin extending about 55 feet from its head.
Capt. R. Brush of the schooner Mary Ann witnessed the serpent lashing the water with its tail “causing the waves to rise as if made by a passing steamer.” For the next week the serpentine monster with devilish green eyes continued to “disport itself in the waters of the Hudson River.”
Near Kingston Point it chased a pair of young boys in a rowboat and “grew furious when it saw that the young men had escaped,” lashing the water with its tail and spewing from its mouth “a stream of foamy stuff resembling long shavings from a pine plank.”
Earlier in the day, a worker at the Flatbush icehouses thought he was watching “an immense tree floating leisurely along with the tide” until it threw about 20 feet of its length into the air. On Sept. 6, a long-time watchman on a pier in the East River saw a big greenish-blue head covered with short hair and displaying eyes as big as his fists rise five feet out of the water.
While recounting the experience with a policeman, he swore that as sure as he lived, he had seen “the sea serpent or the devil.” A number of gentlemen worked to track the serpent for the rest of the afternoon but eventually lost sight of it as it headed north to Long Island Sound.
On the morning of Sept. 8 two men from Cromwell were attempting to cross the calm water of the Connecticut River to Portland when their boat struck something in the water and was thrown several feet into the air. After landing back onto the water and regaining their senses, they heard “the most terrible commotion in the water around them.”
The men looked over the side of the boat and were astonished to see “a frightful marine monster fully one hundred feet in length” with a head the size of a cider barrel and a huge mouth “from which darted at rapid intervals a fiery red tongue. The creature appeared to be angered by the collision and lashed its tail in the water as it swam northward with its head extended six feet out of the water.
The two men quickly found their oars and raced back to the Cromwell shore where two other townspeople had come to investigate the frantic cries they had heard. As the men explained what they had seen, the creature once again appeared in the distance near the bend at Gildersleeve Island and all present saw the “long black body rise up out of the water to a height probably 10 feet.” Moving rapidly up the river, the animal quickly passed out of sight.
By the afternoon, word of the serpent’s presence had spread throughout the area and “about every able-bodied person in the town” came to the riverfront “armed with some kind of weapon to give the monster a warm welcome.” Finally, around 1:30 the creature raised 25 feet of its body out of the water, once again tossing a small fishing boat into the air and its three occupants in the water.
With its apparent 100-foot length, barrel shaped head and big saucer-like eyes, there was no doubt among the observers that this was the same “veritable sea serpent” that had recently been seen in the Hudson River.
With no further appearance of the serpent in the coming days, theories abounded that the creature had gone as far up the river as it could but ultimately needed to return to deeper waters. Cromwell’s distinction as the last deep-water port up the river would certainly support this idea.
At the same time, skepticism ran rampant with claims that the story was made up by “Middletown hotel men trying to get up a boom.” In subsequent printings of the story, the names of Colonel Stocking and Silas Sage were given to the two men in the initial sighting story, but this is unlikely as both of these men had been dead since 1876.
One Middletown newspaper, a rival to the publication which broke the news, wrote that the reporter was “a joker we like” and claimed that the entire story was nothing but a “yarn.” The Hartford Courant called the tale a manufactured hoax that was “too thin on the face of it.”
At the same time, hundreds of onlookers were reported to have seen the serpent on Sept. 8 including well-known and very much alive Cromwellians Capt. Frank Phelps and Robert Sawyer. Further, Fish Commissioner Robert G. Pike of Middletown contradicted the idea that the story was a hoax when he publicly announced that he knew “the two gentlemen who saw the serpent” and that they were “gentlemen whose statements can be relied upon and who are trustworthy in every respect.”
On Sept. 17 newspapers throughout New England reported that a sea serpent 100 feet long had once again been seen off the coast of Gloucester. Perhaps the summer holiday had run its course.
In the 19th Century advancement in scientific understanding set humanity on course to go as far as we can, even 250,000 miles away from Earth. At the same time, this set in motion a struggle among imagination, intelligence and attention that has equally grown in magnitude, ultimately causing our traditions of collective belief to take a back seat in our society.
The arrival of the Great American Sea Serpent in Cromwell connected the people of the town with thousands of others throughout New England as they all focused on a phenomenon that challenged their common understanding on both a scientific and a folkloric level.
As evidenced by the recent interest in the Artemis II space mission, this spirit of excitement about the unknown demonstrates our continuing desire to believe and the adventurous relationship between science and belief. CL