The Monongahela Sea Serpent

In 1852 the Monongahela of New Bedford was a real whaler. A ship of 497 tons, she had sailed on 1 October 1850 under a master named Jason Seabury. She was far out at sea when her name reached the newspapers.

13 January 1852. Open ocean, just south of the equator in the east-central Pacific. According to a letter later printed in the press, the whalers put a harpoon into something enormous. It fought.

"The evolutions of the body were rapid as lightning, seeming like the revolving of a thousand enormous black wheels." Its cries were "unearthly," "expressive of acute agony." One reprint says it made off with a mile and a quarter of rope. The following morning, the crew killed it with lances.

It was 103 ft long. Longer than their own ship, which was "100 feet from stem to stern." The head was "10 feet long and shaped like that of a gigantic alligator." There were 94 teeth. Modern summaries of the letter add four flippers, two blowholes and a black back above a paler underside. It was a male, and "just under 50 ft. in diameter."

The crew was still cutting it up when they met the brig Gipsy. Her master, Captain Sturges, took the letter and promised to post it at Bridgeport. The skin, head and bones were being kept, the account said, "because the serpent was too large to get into port."

February 1852. The New York Tribune printed the account over the name of Captain Charles Seabury. It travelled fast, appearing in Galignani's Messenger, the Illustrated London News, the London Times of 10 March, the Spenersche Zeitung, and, by September, the Lyttelton Times in New Zealand. Doubt travelled with it, and the Gipsy's crew told the Philadelphia Bulletin that it had never met the Monongahela. Edward Newman wrote, "Very like a hoax, but well drawn up," while Punch ran a comic song, "The Capture of the Sea-Serpent," sung by the Serpent's Head, which calls itself "a mere chimaera of the sea."

There was no government inquiry. "Neither Seabury, his serpent, nor his detailed account ever appeared." No head came ashore. No skin, no bones. When A. C. Oudemans compiled his catalogue of sea serpent reports in 1892, the case appears to be absent. The accepted view is a fabricated newspaper story. In December 1848, Captain Frederic Smith of the Pekin had hauled aboard a real "monster." It was "a piece of a gigantic sea-weed, twenty feet long."

Then the real ship vanished. In 1853 the Monongahela was lost with all hands in the Aleutians, on her way to the Arctic whaling grounds. Oil casks bearing her markings, sails, spars and planks were found around the Fox Islands. Later writers say her nameboard was found on the shore of Umnak Island.

The loss gave the story a second life. Retellings moved the date to 18 January and named the captain Jason Seabury. They added the Rebecca Sims under Captain Gavitt, whose crew witnessed the monstrosity, and a drawing signed by the crew. The head, in these versions, sat in a pickling vat and went down with the ship. T. W. Paterson called it "a hectic, two-day battle." A hoax nobody could check had become a mystery nobody could close.