The Royal Yacht Osborne Sea Monster off Sicily

Spring 1877. The royal yacht Osborne, "a paddle royal yacht" under Commander Hugh L. Pearson, was heading home from the Mediterranean. Her course ran along the north coast of Sicily toward Cape Vito.

Saturday, 2 June 1877. About 5 o'clock in the afternoon. The sea was perfectly smooth.

The officer on the watch saw it first. A long ridge of fins, each about 6 feet long, moving slowly along. Lieutenant Haynes later wrote of "a ridge of fins above the surface of the water, extending about thirty feet, and varying from five to six feet in height."

The yacht drew closer. The fins were gone. In their place rose "the foremost part of a gigantic monster." Its skin showed no scales. It looked sleek, like a seal's. The head was "bullet-shaped, with an elongated termination," about six feet in diameter. The neck was comparatively narrow. The body was built like a gigantic turtle. From each side extended two fins about fifteen feet long, and the animal paddled itself along "after the fashion of a turtle."

One account of the estimates put the back at 15 or 20 feet wide. From the top of the head to where the back went under, about fifty feet. That, the witness thought, was about a third of its whole length.

Haynes made sketches and wrote up what he had seen. He dated his account "Royal Yacht Osborne, Gibraltar, June 6." On 11 June 1877 the Osborne reached Portsmouth. Commander Pearson sent an official report to the Admiralty, and the other officers confirmed the account. No Admiralty conclusion has been found.

The Graphic engraved Haynes's two views. One shows the ridge of fins. The other shows the animal end on, with only the head and flippers in view. Scientific American ran the story on 14 July 1877 as "The Sea Serpent Sighted from a Royal Yacht." The New York Independent judged the creature "certainly much longer than any fish hitherto known to the zoologists."

Scientific American offered a cause, not a dismissal. About the middle of May, a submarine volcano had erupted north of Galita, in the Gulf of Tunis. The disturbance, it was thought, "may have driven up the monster from its 'native element.'" The eruption site lay only one hundred miles from the sighting.

Later writers took up the case. Henry Lee reprinted both phases in Sea Monsters Unmasked in 1883. A. C. Oudemans catalogued it in The Great Sea-Serpent in 1892. Bernard Heuvelmans placed it among his "many-finned" sea serpents. Some modern readers see a large turtle in the drawings. Others suggest a humpback whale, whose long pectoral fins could pass for flippers. No one has ever alleged a hoax.

There are no photographs and no physical trace. All that survives is a set of sketches, engraved for a weekly paper. But the witnesses were a royal yacht's officers, watching a smooth sea in the late afternoon. Like the HMS Daedalus report of 1848, the case is a sea serpent formally reported to the Admiralty by naval officers, and it is still debated today.