The British Officers' Sea Serpent of St. Margaret's Bay

Halifax, Nova Scotia. 1833. Five men from the British garrison set out in a small boat on a fishing excursion. Their destination was Mahone Bay, south-west of the town.

Three were officers of the Rifle Brigade: Captain W. Sullivan, Lieutenant A. Maclachlan and Ensign C. P. Malcolm. With them were B. O'Neal Lyster, a lieutenant of artillery, and Henry Ince, the Ordnance Storekeeper at Halifax.

May 15th. The party was crossing St. Margaret's Bay. An immense shoal of grampuses appeared around them, in an unusual state of excitement. At a distance of 150 to 200 yards, the men saw "the head and the neck of some denizen of the deep, precisely like those of a common snake, in the act of swimming." The head was held so high, thrown forward by the curve of the neck, that they could see the water under and beyond it.

It did not linger. "The creature rapidly passed, leaving a regular wake." Measuring from the start of that wake to the raised forepart, they judged it about 80 feet long, "and this within rather than beyond the mark."

They took careful note. The head was about six feet long, considerably larger than that of a horse. The visible neck was about the same. "The neck in thickness equaled the bole of a moderate-sized tree."

Head and neck were dark brown or nearly black, streaked with white in irregular streaks. They put the extreme length between 80 and 100 feet. And they were honest about the limits. "It is most difficult to give correctly the dimensions of any object in the water."

All five men signed a written account, adding their ranks and the dates of their commissions. It reached print in The Zoologist in May 1847. By one account, all the officers named were still living when it appeared. Serving officers and an ordnance official, putting their names to a monster. It became one of the most quoted "respectable witness" sea serpent reports of the 19th century.

The retellings did not stay faithful. Chambers's Journal in 1877 named three of the officers, had the animal "gambolling in the sea near Halifax" and made it at least one hundred and eighty feet long. One web retelling turned the army party into men of Her Majesty's Navy, though William IV was on the throne. The Dartmouth Heritage Museum, following Dianne Marshall's book, tells of five Halifax men, an agitated school of dolphins and a creature about 100 feet away.

No one has accused the officers of inventing the story. The debate has been about what they saw. The grampuses offer one answer. A file of cetaceans swimming in line can read as one long body, and Henry Lee, in Sea Monsters Unmasked (1883), argued that many serpent reports were known animals misidentified. Others have pointed to the oarfish as a source of sea serpent tales. No text has been found that takes this particular sighting apart.

Charles Gould retold the account in Mythical Monsters in 1886. It belongs to the tradition that A. C. Oudemans surveyed in The Great Sea-Serpent (1892) and Bernard Heuvelmans in In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968). That same summer, a serpent was reported at Nahant, Massachusetts. Fifteen years later, the officers of HMS Daedalus would make their own famous report. In Nova Scotia, Andrew J. Hebda's The Serpent Chronologies (2015) catalogues the province's sea serpents. The five men in the boat on St. Margaret's Bay stand near the head of that line.