Creature record / 1857
December 12, 1857. Evening. The ship Castilian was running home from Bombay to Liverpool, ten miles off the northeast end of St Helena. Strong breezes. Cloud. Twelve miles an hour. On the poop, Captain G. H. Harrington and his officers looked toward the island. Then something reared out of the sea within twenty yards of the ship. It vanished. Half a minute later it rose again, head and neck ten or twelve feet clear of the water. The officers judged it over two hundred feet long. On the forecastle, the boatswain and crew thought it more than double the length of the ship. The captain had no doubt. It belonged, he wrote, "to the serpent tribe."
The Castilian was homeward bound from Bombay to Liverpool. On 12 December 1857 she was passing St Helena, alone in the South Atlantic. Her master, Captain G. H. Harrington, kept an Official Meteorological Journal for the Board of Trade. Journals like it recorded wind and weather. This one would record something else.