The Brig Daphne Sea Serpent Hoax

6 August 1848. HMS Daedalus reported an enormous serpent in the South Atlantic, and the report went to the Admiralty. A craze followed. Engravings, poems, letters. Then, in October, a second ship seemed to confirm it.

The story arrived as a letter, datelined from the Mary Ann of Glasgow on October 19, 1848, and signed "James Henderson, Master." He wrote that he had met the American brig Daphne of Boston "when clearing out of the port of Lisbon, upon the 30th of September last." The Daphne's mate came aboard with letters. And with a story.

20 September 1848. Lat. 4° 11′ S., long. 10° 15′ E., wind dead north. Open water off what is now Gabon. The Daphne, under master Mark Trelawny, came upon "a most extraordinary animal … having the appearance of a huge serpent or snake, with a dragon's head." From the description given by the mate, the brute must have been nearly a hundred feet long.

A deck gun was charged with spike-nails and whatever other pieces of iron could be found. It fired from about 40 yards. The animal "immediately reared its head in the air, and plunged violently with its body." The charge had taken effect.

As the brig neared, it disappeared. Though evidently wounded, it made rapidly off at fifteen or sixteen knots, surfacing several times as it went. The Daphne pursued for some time. Then the night came on, and the master was obliged to put about and continue his voyage. The mate's account, the letter said, agreed in every respect with the one forwarded to the Admiralty by the master of the Daedalus.

The letter ran in the Globe on 21 October 1848. The Times reprinted it two days later. Then came 26 October. The Glasgow North British Mail checked the story and reported that "there has been no such ship, with the master's name as given at the Broomielaw since the month of August." Two days later, the Illustrated London News carried the letter beside engravings of the Daedalus serpent.

The correction never caught up. Karen Wade, writing for The Sea of Books, found the hoax "reprinted no less than 36 times over the following fortnight." The correction "was only reprinted eight times after its initial appearance."

No inquiry ever examined the Daphne. There is no logbook and no first-hand witness, only an unnamed mate relayed by a captain the Glasgow press could not trace. The Museum of Hoaxes, drawing on Meurger and Gagnon's 1988 study Lake Monster Traditions, calls it "the creation of a journalist." No journalist has ever been named.

The timeline strains too. A brig off Gabon on 20 September would have had to cover more than 2,800 nautical miles to be met near Lisbon ten days later. No merchant brig of 1848 could do that. As for the Daedalus, Richard Owen argued for a seal at the time, and the Skeptical Inquirer later made the case for a sei whale.

The exposure did not stop the serpent. Charles Gould retold it in Mythical Monsters in 1886 as "a similar, perhaps the same, monster," with no word of the hoax. He even placed it 20° further south than the Daedalus, when it was actually about 20½° further north. A. C. Oudemans reprinted the letter in The Great Sea-Serpent in 1892. A sea serpent that never existed had outswum its own correction.