Creature record / 1879
28 January 1879. About ten in the morning. The steamship City of Baltimore was pushing west through the Gulf of Aden at ten knots, bound for the Red Sea. On the poop deck stood Major H. W. J. Senior of the Bengal Staff Corps, travelling on furlough. Off the starboard quarter, three quarters of a mile away, something long and black was darting out of the water. It was coming closer. Fast. Within a minute he could name it. The veritable sea-serpent. A head and neck rose twenty or thirty feet into the air, jaws opening wide. The ship's surgeon and a lady passenger saw it too. Senior wrote down what he had seen. Both of them signed it.
The City of Baltimore was a steamship heading west, toward the Red Sea and Suez. In January 1879 she was crossing the far western Gulf of Aden, a short way from the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Her exact identity is still uncertain. A record from 1878 lists a Hall Line steamer of that name sailing from Bombay to Liverpool. Aboard was Major H. W. J. Senior of the Bengal Staff Corps, travelling on furlough. His address on leave was Rosebank Villa, in Cotham, Bristol.