The Largs Bay sea serpent off Aden, 1933

The SS Largs Bay was a "Bay Boat", built by Beardmore at Dalmuir and launched in 1921. She was named after Largs Bay, a suburb of Adelaide in South Australia. Her run linked Australia with Britain by way of Colombo and the Suez Canal.

In the spring of 1933 she was homeward bound for Southampton. That April she had been sold to the Aberdeen & Commonwealth Line. Aden was not one of her usual calls. She would have passed it at sea, on the main shipping route through the Gulf of Aden.

Somewhere off Aden, people on board saw it. A long animal rose partly out of the water, about a cable's length from the ship. Roughly 185 metres. It looked like an elongated fish. It reared itself from the sea. Then it reared again.

The eye-witnesses said they could see about 20 feet of it. Its head was bulging, with a circumference greater than the body. One detail stood out above the rest. "A long spike or tongue projected from the snout."

Nobody recorded the date. Nobody recorded the position. The ship still had the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the long run to Southampton ahead, so the encounter probably came in early to mid May.

Around 22 or 23 May 1933, the Largs Bay arrived at Southampton. On 23 May the Australian Cable Service sent the story out from London. The Cairns Post printed it the next day under the headline "SEA SERPENT / SIGHTED OFF ADEN". The Auckland Star ran it on 30 May and credited the crew. For about three months the same wire story echoed through regional papers in Australia and New Zealand. Every version was one report. There was no second sighting.

Very little. No ship's log entry has been found. No witness was named. No photograph exists. There was no Admiralty or Board of Trade inquiry, and no scientist examined the account. The ship's master from 1929 to 1936 was Captain W. M. Jermyn, so he was probably in command, but no source ties him to the sighting.

None of the sources propose an explanation. A leaping billfish, a marlin, sailfish or swordfish, is the obvious candidate. These fish live in the Gulf of Aden, carry a spike on the snout and leap clear of the water. The difficulty is size. Twenty feet visible is beyond most billfish, though judging size across 185 metres of open sea, with nothing to compare, is hard. A later wiki paraphrase says the animal "breached or spy-hopped", which suggests a whale. But toothed whales have no snout spike.

The case nearly vanished in translation. In In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents, Bernard Heuvelmans wrote in a footnote: "In 1935 a dozen people again saw one in Largs Bay, also in the Gulf of Aden." Heuvelmans had read the ship as a bay and moved the year. Where his dozen witnesses came from is unknown. In 2017 the blogger Malcolm Smith traced the story back to the 1933 press and set the record straight. The Encyclopaedia of Cryptozoology still files it under 1934. Three dates. One sea serpent. And a spiked snout that still has no agreed owner.