{"id":15,"date":"2010-08-24T20:48:38","date_gmt":"2010-08-24T20:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rring.wp.trincoll.edu\/?p=9"},"modified":"2011-12-13T20:46:04","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T20:46:04","slug":"a-coiled-fish-of-the-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/2010\/08\/24\/a-coiled-fish-of-the-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"A Coiled Fish of the Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

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[Posted by Henry Arneth, Trinity ’09 and a member of the Watkinson staff]<\/p>\n

Shelf reading in Watkinson Library one day, I spotted an interesting spine; upon closer inspection, I discovered that the \u201ctext\u201d I was looking at was actually a collection of scientific pamphlets from the early 19th century that had been bound together.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t resist, and opened the cover; it fell open to the pamphlet I was intrigued by immediately!\u00a0 When I first read the spine, I expected to see a comparison to the Loch Ness creature, or even the creature rumored to be in Lake Champlain\u2014but then I had been conditioned to expect a sea serpent to be more like a dinosaur or similar creature! I scanned the opening:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the month of August 1817, it was currently reported\u2026that an animal of very singular appearance had been recently seen in the harbour of Gloucester, Cape Ann, about thirty miles from Boston.\u00a0 It was said to resemble a serpent in general form and motions, to be of immense size, and move with wonderful rapidity; to appear on the surface of the water only in calm and bright weather; and to seem jointed\u2026\u201d; \u00a0I was hooked!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Then came some first-hand accounts of the creature; the voices of the men came alive in their words: \u201c\u2026between 80 and 90 feet in length\u2026\u201d (Solomon Allen, 3rd); \u201c\u2026his head appeared to be shaped like a sea turtle\u2026\u201d (Amos Story); \u201cI saw him open his mouth, and his mouth appeared like that of a serpent; the top of the head appeared to be flat\u201d (Epes Ellery); \u201c\u2026I supposed, and do believe the whole belly was nearly white\u201d (Nathan Gaffney).\u00a0 All that ran through my mind was \u201cCould it be true?\u201d as I read the depositions the taken by the Linnaean Society members.<\/p>\n

It seemed the \u201csea serpent\u201d was very much like what is now known as a sea snake, and in the end, according to the report, a smaller version that was referenced in the pamphlet as being the \u201cprogeny\u201d of the considerably larger, first sighted creature, was killed in Cape Ann and later dissected.\u00a0 Included in the pamphlet was an illustration of the drawings made at the time of dissection.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>For the Linnaean Society of New England, this must have been an incredible discovery; up to that time I\u2019m sure that there had been nothing like a sea snake seen on the New England Coast before: \u201cIn consequence of these reports, at a meeting of the Linnaean Society of New England, holden at Boston\u2026a committee [was appointed] to collect evidence with regard to the existence and appearance of any such animal\u201d and the pamphlet was the result of the report by that committee.\u00a0 In fact, sea snakes aren\u2019t common in New England; their primary home is in the warm waters around Australia.\u00a0 However, the Cape Ann area is where the first American \u201csea serpent\u201d was reported\u2014in the 1630s!<\/p>\n

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The early 19th century was still a time of discovery, and with men living on the sea as they did\u2014particularly in Gloucester and Cape Ann, the sighting of an animal of this size and nature, a creature never seen before in their nets, would certainly cause concern.\u00a0 One of my first thoughts was that this unfortunate snake got caught in one of their nets and was pulled out of its natural habitat\u2026but then how\u00a0to account for the length of the snake?\u00a0 The witnesses claimed that it was 80 to 90 feet long and that the head was the size of a barrel.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Posted by Henry Arneth, Trinity ’09 and a member of the Watkinson staff] Shelf reading in Watkinson Library one day, I spotted an interesting spine; upon closer inspection, I discovered that the \u201ctext\u201d I was looking at was actually a collection of scientific pamphlets from the early 19th century that had been bound together.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/rring\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}