Hans and Poul Egede's "most dreadful monster": the Davis Strait sea serpent of 1734

In 1734 the Danish-Norwegian mission in Greenland was pushing north. Poul Egede, son of the missionary Hans Egede, had just been ordained. With his fellow missionary Andreas Bing he sailed from Godthaab, now Nuuk, toward Disko Bay. That July he would found the colony of Christianshaab, now Qasigiannguit, with his first sermon as a priest.

July 6, 1734. Off the west coast of Greenland, in the Davis Strait. Hans Egede gave the position as "the 64th degree of latitude".

Then it appeared. In the English translation of Egede's journal: "On the 6th of July, 1734, there appeared a very large and frightful sea monster, which raised itself so high out of the water that its head reached above our main-top. It had a long, sharp snout, and spouted water like a whale; and very broad flappers."

The body seemed covered with scales or "shell-work". The skin was hard, "very wrinkled and uneven". "The lower part was formed like a snake." It was as thick or bulky as the ship, and three or four times as long.

Then it dived. It "cast itself backwards and raised its tail above the water a whole ship-length from its body." In the version later told by Crantz, the tail "was like that of a serpent". That account speaks in the plural. "We judged the body to be equal in bulk to our ship."

For a long time readers assumed Hans Egede saw the creature himself. He never said so. A study from St Andrews concluded that his son Poul "probably saw" it. Bing made the only eyewitness drawing. It survives through Bishop Pontoppidan's Natural History of Norway (1755), where Pontoppidan noted reddish, "fire-like" eyes and fins placed "below the waist". The crew went unnamed and uncounted.

There was no official inquiry. The story spread through the mission's own books. Hans Egede's Det gamle Grønlands nye perlustration appeared in Copenhagen in 1741, and A Description of Greenland followed in London in 1745. Crantz retold it in his History of Greenland in 1766. By 1877 Chambers's Journal was quoting a garbled version that placed the monster "in the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope". Godthaab, it is worth remembering, means Good Hope.

In 1883 Henry Lee redrew Bing's sketch in Sea Monsters Unmasked and argued the beast was a giant squid. In 2005 Paxton, Knatterud and Hedley proposed a whale instead. Perhaps a humpback, a North Atlantic right whale or one of the last Atlantic grey whales. The "tail", they suggested, may have been the penis of an aroused male. "Known animals can look strange… and be mistaken for unknown ones," the St Andrews press release noted.

In 2021 Robert France reviewed 36 interpretations offered over three centuries. He proposed an animal entangled in fishing or hunting gear, or a basking shark. In 2023 Ulrich Magin suggested a baleen whale distorted by an Arctic mirage. Cryptozoology reference works link the case to the "super-otter" type of Bernard Heuvelmans.

France calls it Egede's "most dreadful monster", the foundational sea serpent. It stands at the head of a long line of sightings, from Gloucester in 1817 to HMS Daedalus in 1848. No photograph. No carcass. Only a drawing, a few sentences, and a head rising above the main-top.