S. W. Hanna's "Young Sea-Serpent" in the Nets at New Harbor, Maine

New England already had its sea serpent. In 1817, sightings off Gloucester, Massachusetts, gave American naturalists a name for the creature: Scoliophis atlanticus. Decades later, they were still looking for it. Then, in August 1880, a fisherman from Pemaquid, Maine, pulled something strange out of the sea. His name was S. W. Hanna. He knew the local sharks well. "There is hardly a day that we do not come in contact with them," he wrote.

Hanna's nets were set off New Harbor. The body lay "in only 4 fathoms of water and it being a small shoal, with deep water all around it." The animal was dead. Its mouth was open. It was about 25 feet long and 8 to 10 inches thick, round in the body and shaped like an eel. The back was "of a slate or fish color" and the belly grayish to white. The skin bore no scales. It was more like a dog-fish or shark, he said, "though a great deal finer in quality."

The head held his attention. It resembled a shark's, only more stunted. A very small mouth sat at the very end of the snout, which overhung it by half an inch to an inch. Inside were "fine, briery teeth." Just behind the head were two soft side fins, like a cod's. Three strokes marked the side of the neck.

Hanna examined it for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he put it back in the sea. "I did not save the fish for the reason that I did not know what I had caught." It had torn his nets very badly. Landing it would cost him $20 that day. "In fact, I considered it a streak of ill-luck rather than good fortune." Nearer to Boston or New York, he admitted, he probably would have saved it.

The Sea-Side Press ran a short paragraph. Hanna, it said, had caught "what might be called a young sea-serpent." J. M. Allen of Hartford, Connecticut, wrote to him. Was it like a snake's head? Were there any gills? Could he draw it?

Then came Spencer F. Baird, U.S. Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries. Baird wrote twice in September 1880. He asked about the gills, the snout, the mouth and the tail. "I notice you mark three strokes on the side of the neck as in the shark," he wrote. Hanna answered every question. He sent a pencil drawing, made "as near as I can recollect." And he rejected the shark outright. "There was nothing in the tail that had any resemblance to that of the shark."

Baird lamented that the body had not been kept. The whole exchange was printed in the Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission. Then it simply stopped. No conclusion was ever published.

In 2017, Rachel Fritts revisited the case in Hakai Magazine. Her answer was an oarfish, Regalecus. The length, the eel shape and the small mouth beneath a projecting snout all fit. The oarfish was already described in Europe. American naturalists, still hunting their serpent, had overlooked it. Not every detail sits comfortably. Oarfish are usually silvery, with a red crest and a fin along the whole body, and are generally described as toothless. Hanna reported a slate back, a cod-like dorsal fin and teeth.

No specimen survived. No photograph exists. What remains is one fisherman's careful testimony, a sketch from memory and the questions of a federal commissioner. Whether A. C. Oudemans or Bernard Heuvelmans ever recorded the case in their sea-serpent studies is still unconfirmed.