Captain Crum's Bulwagga Bay sighting, the earliest printed Champ report

In 1819, New England already had a sea serpent. Off Cape Ann, near Gloucester, a long creature had been reported since 1817, and the Linnaean Society of New England had looked into it.

Inland, on the New York shore of Lake Champlain, lies Bulwagga Bay. It sits at the village of Port Henry, in the Town of Moriah, Essex County.

Thursday, 22 July 1819. Morning. Captain Crum was putting out from shore in a scow, a flat-bottomed boat. About 200 yards off, a head came up out of the lake. It reared more than fifteen feet.

Crum took what the letter calls "a particular survey of this singular animal." He described it as 187 feet long. Its head was flat, shaped like a sea horse, with three teeth. It was black, with a star in the forehead and a belt of red around the neck. Its body was about the size of a hogshead, with humps on the back as large as a common potash barrel, and its eyes were large and the colour of a peeled onion.

It did not linger. It moved with the utmost velocity, lashing with its tail at two large sturgeon and a bill-fish. One version of the text sends it south. Another sends it towards the shore. For about a minute it kept going. Then it darted under water and was not seen again.

Nobody heard the story from Crum himself. It reached print on Saturday, 24 July 1819, in the Plattsburgh Republican, under the heading "Cape Ann Serpent on Lake Champlain." It was told in the third person and signed "Horse Mackerel." No source gives Crum's first name or identifies the writer behind the pseudonym. There was no other witness, no trace and no official inquiry.

Later readers have wondered how serious it was. The headline borrows from the famous Cape Ann sea serpent, and the signature is the name of a fish. The detail is oddly fine for something seen at 200 yards, and there is the chase with the sturgeon. One folklore writer suggested it was perhaps meant as a joke, while podcaster Kate Shaw called it "just one of those jokey space-fillers from back in the olden days." Joe Nickell, who wrote Lake Monster Mysteries with Benjamin Radford, examined the Champ legend in the Skeptical Inquirer.

Others hold back. Historians question the account without dismissing it outright. As one commentator put it, "That does not mean Crum saw nothing." For Champ in general, sceptics point to lake sturgeon, gar, otters, logs and seiches.

A claim that Samuel de Champlain saw the creature in 1609 proved to be a myth, born in Vermont Life in 1970. That leaves Crum's scow trip at the start of the record. Sheriff Nathan H. Mooney followed in 1883. P. T. Barnum offered rewards. Sandra Mansi took her photograph in 1977. In 2024, drone footage was filmed in Bulwagga Bay itself.

In 2021 the William G. Pomeroy Foundation placed an "Origin of Champ" marker on the shore of the bay. Robert E. Bartholomew retells the letter in The Untold Story of Champ. Port Henry still holds Champ Day. It all began with one captain, one scow and one minute on the water.