Captain Abijah Kellogg and the Lake Ontario sea serpent (1833)

Early nineteenth-century newspapers loved a sea serpent. The historian Richard F. Palmer, who reprinted this account in 2001, called such stories "the 'UFOs' of our ancestors." On Lake Ontario, in July 1821, the crew of the canoe Lightfoot reported a 37-foot creature, and their affidavits reached print. In 1829 two children near Niagara described "a hideous water snake, or serpent, of prodigious dimensions." Then came a sea captain.

June 15. About 7 o'clock in the evening. Captain Abijah Kellogg was sailing the schooner Polythermus, of Sackets Harbor, New York, from Rochester toward Kingston harbour in Upper Canada. The islands called "the Ducks" lay two miles off, north by west.

On the weather bow, something lay still in the water. It "looked like the mast of a vessel." Then it moved. It was steering toward the schooner.

Kellogg put the schooner up to the wind, lashed the helm and climbed the main rigging to wait. The animal passed immediately under the stern, "taking no notice whatever of the schooner or those on board." It swam with an undulating movement, keeping most of its body under water, but now and then showing its entire length. Kellogg put that length at about 175 feet, with a body the circumference of a flour barrel. It was dark blue, spotted with brown, and its head was "peculiarly small and could not well be distinguished."

It stayed in sight "full fifteen minutes." When last seen, it was "making the best of his way down the St. Lawrence."

Kellogg was not alone. Two young men of the crew and three passengers saw it too, and they were "willing to be qualified to the truth of what has been here stated." They would swear to it. No signed affidavit has been found. The Oswego Palladium printed the story on July 1, 1833, under the headline "The American Sea Serpent in Lake Ontario." The editor hesitated in print, fearing readers would think it "but the creation of our imagination."

The item ends with a credit to the British Whig, a Kingston paper. But that paper is recorded as founded in 1834. Either the year, the credit or the transcription is wrong. Only a scan of the original page can settle it.

No official inquiry followed. No hoax has ever been alleged against this report. The well known Kingstie hoax came a century later, at Cartwright Bay in 1934, and three local men confessed to it in 1979. Joe Nickell described a barrel filled with empty bottles for buoyancy. That is another story.

The timing still invites questions. In July 1833 the schooner Charles reported a sea serpent off Nahant, and the headline's "American Sea Serpent" points to that famous Massachusetts creature. Editors were primed for such tales, though nothing shows the Lake Ontario report was copied. Joe Nickell and Benjamin Radford, in Lake Monster Mysteries, trace many lake monster reports to otters and other known animals. No one has offered a specific explanation for this one.

Kellogg's account is the earliest named-witness report in what came to be called the Kingstie run of sightings near Kingston. One count speaks of hundreds of sightings between 1833 and 1933. In 2004 the name returned at Little Cataraqui Creek. It all begins with a captain in the rigging, watching a blue serpent slip away toward the St. Lawrence.