The SS Nestor sea serpent

September 1876. The steamer Nestor was outbound for Shanghai through the Strait of Malacca. Her master was John Keiller Webster. Her surgeon was James Anderson. The weather was fine and the sea was smooth.

Monday, 11 September. About half-past ten in the morning. The ship lay some fifteen miles north-west of North Sand Lighthouse when the third officer saw something low and flat on the water. He called out: "a shoal!" It was not a shoal.

The officers and the whole watch saw it. "The shape of the creature I would compare to that of a gigantic frog," Webster said. Its head was pale yellowish, about 20 feet long and 12 feet broad, with six feet of the crown above the water. Behind it lay a body "about forty-five or fifty feet long, and of an oval shape, perfectly smooth." Its back rose about five feet above the surface.

Then the tail. "An immense tail, fully one hundred and fifty feet in length, rose a few inches above the water." It was cylindrical, about four feet across. Body and tail carried "alternate bands of stripes, black and pale yellow in colour." The animal seemed to paddle itself by "an undulatory motion of its tail in a vertical plane."

It kept a parallel course for about six minutes. It travelled "for a long time about as fast as the steamer," and stayed in sight for some thirty minutes. Anderson judged its speed at about 10 knots. Yet its movements looked "lethargic" to him. He thought the animal "gelatinous or flabby."

Webster wrote a letter dated 13 September. The Straits Times printed it on 16 September. Two days later, statements from officers and three saloon passengers appeared in the Straits Times Overland Journal. The witnesses were unanimous. In October, in Shanghai, Webster and Anderson made a sworn statutory declaration before Donald Spence, Acting Law Secretary to the British Supreme Court. No official inquiry followed.

On 30 December 1876 The Spectator ran an item headed "In the Straits of Malacca, the sea-monster so repeatedly seen". It likened the animal to "a huge salamander". On 15 January 1877 Richard A. Proctor discussed the case in The Echo. Land and Water took it up too.

Charles Gould reproduced the sworn account in Mythical Monsters in 1886. A. C. Oudemans listed it in The Great Sea-Serpent in 1892. Then came Bernard Heuvelmans. He found the Nestor awkward to classify. In In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents he created a separate type, the "yellow-belly", based mainly on this sighting. Perhaps an unknown shark, he speculated. Possibly an amphibian. Heuvelmans later dropped the type.

In Searching for Hidden Animals in 1980, Roy P. Mackal proposed a giant colonial tunicate, a pyrosome or salp. Fire-salp colonies can reach about 60 feet long and three to four feet across, which would fit the "gelatinous or flabby" texture and the lethargic look. Others disagree because the Nestor animal was far bigger and wider. Tunicates do not show black and yellow banding, and their colonies do not swim with a vertical undulation. No source has alleged a hoax.

There is no photograph. There is no specimen. There is only the word of a captain, a surgeon, the ship's officers and three passengers, sworn before the law. The frog-shaped giant of the Strait of Malacca has never been explained.