The Moha-moha of Sandy Cape

Sandy Cape is the northernmost point of K'gari, the island once called Fraser Island or Great Sandy Island, off Queensland. A provisional school ran at the foot of the Sandy Cape lighthouse from 1870 to 1918. In 1890 its teacher was Miss S. Lovell, a naturalist, usually given as Selina Lovell.

8 June 1890. A beach at Sandy Cape. Lovell and a small group had a visitor. "We have had a visit from a monster turtle fish," she wrote. "I send a sketch of it."

It was about 30 feet long. The body was dome-shaped, about 8 feet across and 5 feet high, smooth and slate-grey. The neck was long and turtle-like, greenish-white with large white spots. The face was lizard-like, with rounded jaws about 18 inches long and one very black eye ringed with white. Behind it ran a fish-like tail about 12 feet long, silver shading to white, ending in a chocolate-brown fin. Its scales were the size of a thumb nail, overlapping like roof tiles.

For half an hour it let her stand within five feet. When she tired of watching, it "put its large neck and head into the water and swept round seaward." It raised its body about five feet out of the water and laid its tail over the dry shore. Then it gave the tail a half-twist and "shot off like a flash of lightning." The tail was seen in the air about a quarter of a mile away, near where the steamer lay at anchor.

The local Aboriginal people had not seen it that day. From her sketch, they named it at once. "Moha, Moha," they said, laughing. She glossed it as "dangerous turtle". They said it had attacked a camp about eight years earlier, seizing people by the leg. On 9 July 1891, Lovell reported, it turned up in the bay again. It did not come ashore.

Her letters ran in the London paper Land and Water in 1891. The editor, Buckland, decided it was Carettochelys, the Fly River turtle of New Guinea, and called a fish and tortoise combination scientifically impossible. That turtle grows to about 3 feet. A. C. Oudemans took up the case in The Great Sea-Serpent in 1892. William Saville-Kent asked for more and received a statement signed by Lovell and all the witnesses. In 1893 he named the animal Chelosauria lovelli, "the Great Barrier sea-serpent", and suggested, mockingly, that it might go into turtle soup.

In 1968 Bernard Heuvelmans found contradictions between her letters. Heuvelmans called Lovell an "arrant liar" and said no animal has scales like those described. Malcolm Smith noted the name was invalid without a type specimen, and that "moha" probably came from Saville-Kent misreading her handwritten "moka". R. L. France proposed a turtle tangled in a fishing net, trailing broken floats and brown seaweed. Others have suggested an elephant seal, a surviving armoured fish, or a pliosaur.

Some writers wonder whether Miss Lovell existed at all. The record of the lighthouse school weighs against it. The question is not settled. France grouped the case with the Soay Beast and other famous sightings of unidentified marine objects. And in Hervey Bay, a stainless steel and timber Moha Moha sculpture has stood on the Esplanade at Scarness since about 2006.