The Barque Pauline Sea Serpent Off Cape Roque

1875. The barque Pauline of London was carrying coal from Shields to Zanzibar. One retelling says she had just come through a severe storm. Her master was George Drevar.

8 July 1875. Latitude 5°13′ S, longitude 35° W. Off Cape Roque, the north-east corner of Brazil.

The crew were watching three large sperm whales. Then something else appeared. One of the whales "was griped round the body with two turns of what appeared to be a huge serpent." The head and tail stood out about 30 feet beyond the coils. Its colour was "much like a conger eel." The mouth stayed open the whole time, so the head seemed the largest part of the body.

Drevar estimated the length at "about one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy feet", allowing for the two coils. He put the girth at seven or eight feet. It lasted about 15 minutes. Then the serpent dragged the whale under. Head first.

13 July 1875. A similar serpent appeared about 200 yards off, "shooting itself along the surface, the head and the neck being out of the water several feet." Moments later the chief officer, Horatio Thompson, with Owen Baker and William Lewarn, saw it "elevated some 60 feet perpendicularly in the air." Drevar, as later quoted, likened the head to pictures of a dragon, with a bull-dog expression of the forehead and eyebrows.

The crew's honesty was doubted. So on 10 January 1877, in Liverpool, five men swore to what they had seen before the magistrate T. S. Raffles. They were Drevar, Thompson, second officer John Henderson Landells, seaman Owen Baker and steward William Lewarn. The Liverpool Journal printed the declaration on 13 January 1877. The Graphic, the Illustrated London News and regional papers followed with engravings and reprints. In Zanzibar, the Rev. E. L. Penny drew the creature from the crew's description. Drevar later wrote that the whale was taken down "where no doubt it was gorged at the serpent's leisure."

Doubt arrived with the story. In 1877, sceptics argued that it "was no serpent at all, but only a bottle-nosed whale attacked by grampuses", meaning orcas. Henry Lee discussed the case in Sea Monsters Unmasked in 1883. A. C. Oudemans reproduced Penny's drawing in The Great Sea-Serpent in 1892. More recently, Robert France of Dalhousie University proposed a dying whale caught in discarded fishing gear or rope, with the rope pulling it under.

For Drevar, the story did not end at sea. He later survived a shipwreck in the Cape Verde Islands. In 1881 he was tried at the Old Bailey for libel against, and threatening the life of, Henry Cadogan Rothery, Commissioner of Wreck. Part of the quarrel was over the existence of the great sea serpent.

In 2021 the researcher C. G. M. Paxton examined the case in the Mariner's Mirror. He concluded that Drevar's actions "seem to have been driven by mental illness caused by the stress of shipwreck coupled with a fervent religiosity with regard to the sea serpent." The sighting itself was never officially investigated. What remains is a sworn account from the deck of a coal barque, and a whale that went down head first.