The Cape Ann Sea Serpent, Coiled Like a Cable on a Rock (1639)

John Josselyn was an English traveller and naturalist. He arrived at Black Point in the Province of Maine on 14 July 1638. He spent the following year in New England and returned to England in October 1639. Down the coast lay Cape Ann, in Massachusetts. The English had settled it in 1623, and its name was already in print on William Wood's map by 1634.

26 June 1639. Josselyn's journal entry opens with the weather. "June the Six and twentieth day, very stormie, Lightning and Thunder." That day some neighbouring gentlemen came to the house where he was staying, "to welcome me into the Countrey." They brought a story with them.

A boat had passed a rock at Cape Ann. Aboard were Englishmen and two Native Americans. On the rock lay a "Sea-Serpent or Snake." It was "quoiled up like a Cable," like a ship's rope coiled down. The English wanted to shoot it. The Native Americans talked them out of it. If the creature were "not kill'd out-right," they warned, "they would be all in danger of their lives." No shot was fired.

That is all. No size. No colour. No sound. Nothing about it moving, swimming or reacting to the boat. Only a snake-like body, coiled and still, on a rock by the sea.

The serpent was not the only wonder told that day. In the same entry, a "Mr. Mittin" described meeting "a Triton or Mereman" in Casco Bay. It grabbed his canoe. He cut off one of its hands, and it sank, "dying the water with his purple blood." Josselyn printed both stories in London in 1674, in An Account of Two Voyages to New-England.

Josselyn was not a witness. He wrote down what he was told. The tellers are unnamed, and it is unclear whether any of them were in the boat. Nothing was collected and no picture was made. Several modern retellings date the event to 1638, probably because of the book's title, which names Josselyn's first voyage that year. The text itself places the entry in 1639.

Doubters have had their say. The Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology notes that the coiled description "is regarded as being unrealistically serpentine." The New England Historical Society called Josselyn "credulous." Explanations offered for later Cape Ann sightings, a humpback whale, a basking shark, an oarfish, were never proposed for this one. No hoax has ever been alleged.

The Cape Ann account is usually called the first recorded sea serpent report from American waters. It opens a long tradition that peaked at Gloucester between 1817 and 1819. Then the Linnaean Society of New England investigated the sightings and named the animal Scoliophis atlanticus.

The legend now fills books such as Richard Ellis's Monsters of the Sea and Wayne Soini's Gloucester's Sea Serpent. The Gloucester Hornpipe and Clog Society sang about "his snakeship." A bronze serpent stands at the Cape Ann Museum. And it all begins with one coiled shape on a rock, seen from a passing boat.