The Gloucester Sea Serpent and the Linnaean Society Inquiry

Sea serpents were not new to New England. John Josselyn reported one from Cape Ann in 1638. Reports came from Penobscot Bay in Maine between 1809 and 1811, and from Plymouth in 1815. Then, in the summer of 1817, one appeared in Gloucester Harbor. By most accounts it was seen by hundreds.

August 10, 1817. Amos Story, a mariner, watched it for an hour and a half. "He moved very rapidly through the water, I should say a mile in two, or at most, in three minutes." Its head was "shaped much like the head of the sea turtle".

Solomon Allen 3d, a ship master, saw it three days in a row. He put its length "between eighty and ninety feet". The body appeared jointed. When it turned, it "resembled the link of a chain". Twenty or thirty people were in view of him.

On August 14, Matthew Gaffney, a ship carpenter, was in a boat with Daniel Gaffney and Augustin Webber. The animal came within 30 feet. Its head was "full as large as a four-gallon keg". Gaffney fired, and it went "settling directly down, like a rock", passed under the boat and surfaced about one hundred yards away. "His motion was vertical, like the caterpillar."

William B. Pearson saw "bunches on his back" and said it "appeared as limber and active as the eel." Robert Bragg saw it throw out a tongue about two feet in length, like "a fisherman's harpoon". On August 28, off Cape Ann, Sewell Toppan of the schooner Laura watched it leave a "very long wake behind him." It came up only in calm and bright weather, and it moved "little mindful of Boats".

August 18, 1817. In Boston, the Linnaean Society of New England appointed a committee. Judge John Davis chaired it, with Jacob Bigelow and Francis C. Gray. In Gloucester, Lonson Nash, Justice of the Peace, took the depositions. Each witness first told the story in their own words. Then came a fixed list of questions. Eleven named deponents described the 1817 sightings under oath.

On September 27, near Loblolly Cove, Gorham Norwood and a farmer called Mr. Colbey killed a small snake with about 40 bumps along its back. It measured 2 ft 11⅜ in. David Humphreys, once aide-de-camp to George Washington, found its colour and proportions "precisely the same" as the great animal's. The committee argued that it might be the serpent's offspring. It named the supposed new genus Scoliophis atlanticus.

A French naturalist in Philadelphia called it "a common land snake of the U. States, of a harmless species", its bumps caused by disease of the spine. It was a black snake, Coluber constrictor. In 1819 the playwright William Crafts mocked the affair in The Sea Serpent; or, Gloucester Hoax. No one has shown that the sightings themselves were faked.

Captain Rich chased the serpent and caught a large bluefin tuna, arguing that tuna swimming in a line looked like humps. Marine biologist Kara Dodge suggested leatherback turtles. In the Skeptical Inquirer in 2019, Joe Nickell argued for a pod of narwhals. Jeff Belanger disputes this. Fate proposed a harpooned sperm whale dragging an overturned boat.

The serpent returned in reports from Nahant and Cape Ann in 1818 and 1819. By 1850 there was a Sea Serpent Polka. Belanger claims a last sighting in 1965. Today the animal has its own stop on the Gloucester HarborWalk. The depositions remain, sworn and signed, a rare record of a sea monster seen by a whole town.