For at least a century and a half, the sea-going folk of Nova
Scotia, on Canada's far eastern coast, have been encountering some
very strange - and very large - creatures.
One of the first known sightings occurred in 1845, when fishermen
John Bockner and James Wilson saw a 100-foot-long "serpent" in St.
Margaret's Bay. They reported their sighting to the Reverend John
Ambrose, who not long afterwards had his own run-in with the
monster.
In 1855 residents of Green Harbour were terrified to see, in one
citizen's words, "a hideous length of undulating terror" pursue
local fishing boats, apparently intent on bodily harm. As the
fishermen raced desperately for shore, their families watched
helplessly. One observer described the creature in an issue of the
nineteenth-century American magazine Ballou's: "Near what might be
the head rose a hump or crest crowned with a waving mass of long,
pendulous hair like a mane, while behind, for forty or fifty feet,
slowly moved, or rolled, the spirals of his immense snake-like
body. The movement was in vertical curves, the contortions of the
back alternately rising and falling from the head to the tail,
leaving behind a wake, like that of a screw-steamer, upon the
glassy surface of the ocean."
As the creature got closer to shore, observers could hear a sound
like escaping steam emanating from the beast. They could now see
glistening teeth, protruding ridges over evil-looking eyes,
dark-blue scales on the head and back, and dirty-yellow on the
bottom. The head they saw was six feet long.
The creature finally gave up the chase and the exhausted fishermen
arrived safely on land. But it was seen again by three mean in a
boat the next day. They rowed as fast as they could and were not
pursued.
Then, in 1883, six military men fishing in Mahone Bay were startled
to see what looked like an immense version of a "common snake" with
a head six-feet long sticking out of the water. The rapidly moving
creature had a neck as thick as a tree and was dark brown or black
with irregular white streaks. Although they couldn't see all of its
body, the witnesses agreed it must have been something like eighty
feet long.
In 1894 a man named Barry observed a similar beast as he was
relaxing on a wharf in the coastal town of Arisaig. About 120 feet
away and approximately 60 feet long, the creature was moving with
an undulating motion. A tail "like half of a mackerel's tail" was
visible as well.
Reports of these giant "lunkers," as the Nova Scotians call them,
have continued well into our own time.
On July 5, 1976, Eisner Penney of Nova Scotia's Cape Sable Island
saw an enormous something and told some friends about it. They
scoffed at him but a few days later one of them, Keith Ross, along
with his son Rodney, had an encounter of their own. "It had eyes as
big around as saucers and bright red-looking," he said. "I mean,
you could see the red in its eyes like they were bloodshot. It had
its mouth wide open and there were two big tusks - I call them
tusks - that hung down from its upper jaw. It passed astern of us,
so close. And we could see its body, about forty or fifty feet long
with grayish, snake-like looking skin, full of lumps or bumps and
barnacles. And it appeared to us to have a fish's tail, an
up-and-down tail, not flat like a whale's."
Ross's boat roared away and soon lost the creature in a fog. He
detected another boat on shipboard radar and made his way toward
it. Ironically, Eisner Penney was on that boat. As Ross told him
what he'd just seen, they heard the creature passing not far away.
The creature was seen again a few days later by fisherman Edgar
Nickerson.
No one has any idea what these creatures are, although similar
beasts have been reported around the world. In the 1800's they were
called "sea serpents" and were the object of spirited controversy
among zoologists. Whatever the Nova Scotia lunker may be, it seems
safe to say they are not serpents, even oversized ones: Snakes
cannot undulate vertically. Nor, of course, do they have fish-like
tails.