In the summer of 1984 a Bermuda trawler owner, John P. Ingham, was working on what he hoped would be a profitable theory. He thought that very large – and commercially attractive – shrimps and crabs might be found, if he could only get traps down to 1,000 fathoms or so – more than 6,000 ft (1,800 m) – off the Bermuda shelf. The theory was working: he had brought up 1/2 lb (500 gm) shrimps, and crabs 2 ft (60 cm) across. Ingham now proceeded to construct really strong traps built of 1/4 – and 3/8 – in iron rods, braced with 2-in (5-cm) tree staves. They measured between 6 and 8 ft (1.8 and 2.4 m) square by 4 ft (1.2 m) deep. The traps were lowered and raised by winch from John Ingham’s 50-ft (15-m) boat, Trilogy.
By the beginning of September Ingham had already had a couple of worrying incidents. First he lost a trap after a sudden strain on the line. There was nothing obvious to explain it. Then, a few days later, on 3 September, the crew were hauling up a new pot and had reached about 300 fathoms when they felt the line being pulled out. There was a series of jerks, and once again the line parted. On 19 September 1984 Mr Ingham had a trap set at 480 fathoms -around 2,800 ft (850 m) down. This time, even with the full force of the winch, they could not break the pot clear of the bottom at all. Trilogy is equipped with a sophisticated type of sonar known as a chromascope, and Skipper Ingham went inside to use it. He set the ‘scope on what is known as ‘split bottom mode’.
There, clearly outlined on the ocean floor, was a pyramid-like shape, measurable on the chromascope as fully 50 ft (15 m) high: something was surrounding their trap. Ingham and his crew decided not to force the issue this time. They would settle down and wait, with the rope snubbed as tight as possible on the winch. After about twenty minutes, Ingham suddenly had the eerie feeling that the boat was starting to move – that it was being towed.
Again he went inside to check his array of navigation instruments. The positions given by the Loran are extremely precise. The instrument confirmed his view. The boat was moving steadily south at a speed of about 1 knot, After about 500 yards, whatever was towing the Trilogy decided to change direction and turned inshore. A short distance further on it abruptly turned again. By now Ingham was convinced that some creature had hold of his pot and was steadily advancing, trap, 50-ft boat and all, towards some private destination.
At one point Mr Ingham put his hand on the rope near the water line. ‘I could distinctly feel thumps like something was walking and the vibrations were travelling up the rope.’ The 50-ft sonar lump, the peregrinations of the boat, the thumps, the previous lost traps – Ingham was now convinced that he was in the grip of some truly gigantic sea creature. Suddenly the creature appeared to let go. The rope became slack and the crew had no trouble hauling up the trap. It was bent on one side and the top had been stoved in.
Neither cameras nor underwater scanners operated by scientists have accompanied Mr Ingham, but the circumstances point firmly to an octopus: a creature on the ocean floor with the power to retain a trap against a large ship’s winch; an accumulation of bite-size shrimp and crab -kindly if regretfully arranged by Mr Ingham; the location off the Bermuda shelf: all lead inexorably to the idea of a large octopus. No other creature known or imagined could conceivably give such a show of strength in such circumstances. Perhaps the homeland of the great creature which was so mysteriously washed up almost a century ago in Florida has now at last been located.
Mermaids
Recent research has solved one of the world’s other sea mysteries, the mermaid stories. Two Canadian scientists from Winnipeg, Drs Lehn and Schroeder, ascribed visions of mermaids to a precise optical illusion.
—-
[See Second Set Of Plates pl27 to pl38]
—-
They knew that sightings of mermaids could be traced back to medieval Norse texts, such as The King’s Mirror, which were otherwise very accurate in their descriptions of sea creatures. Only the mermaid and the kraken – the sea monster – are not recognized by today’s marine biologists. The author of The King’s Mirror gives a very vivid and precise description of a merman:
This monster is tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water. It has shoulders like a man’s but no hands. Its body apparently grows narrower from the shoulders down, so that the lower down it has been observed, the more slender it has seemed to be. But no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped. No one has ever observed it closely enough to determine whether its body has scales like a fish or skin like a man. Whenever the monster has shown itself, men have always been sure that a storm would follow.
The author then describes its mate, the mermaid, which has breasts, hair, large webbed hands and a tail like a fish. This description tallies closely with a creature in the north Pacific, known to Japanese chroniclers as umibohzu, or the priest of the sea.
Lehn and Schroeder suggested that in the cold northern waters, the warmer air which predicates a storm would mix in a layer over the sea, creating a swirling mass of air of changing temperature which could act as a distorting lens, exaggerating the height but not the width of an object. Seen through this natural hall of mirrors, the head of a walrus or the top of a whale could assume the lowering shape of a merman or mermaid.
It was only a theory, though tested through a computer programme developed for ray-tracing. But the two doctors finally got a chance to prove their point when one spring day the atmospheric conditions on Lake Winnipeg seemed perfect: on land it was a hot day (28°C) but some thin ice still remained on the lake. They went out in a boat and, sure enough, a mermaid appeared – and stayed long enough to be photographed. It was convincing enough to make a modern mariner believe he had met a siren. In fact it was a boulder sticking out of the water half a mile away.
This new proof of the accuracy of the Norse seamen in their observations seems to dispose of the Atlantic mermaid at least; though it suggests that their description of the great kraken – now the one unrecognized phenomenon in The King’s Mirror – might also be frighteningly accurate.
But the explanation of a cold-water mirage hardly sufficed for the vivid encounters repeatedly described in the tropical waters of Papua New Guinea.
Roy Wagner, Head of the Anthropology Department of the University of Virginia, had heard tales of the ri back in 1979. A local magistrate told him he had met a ri near a reef while on a fishing expedition off New Ireland. The creature had risen from the sea and stared at him. It had a monkey-like face rather than a human one. As it went on staring, the magistrate flung his spear at it. ‘But I couldn’t make up my mind whether to hit him or not, so I threw it crookedly. You would expect it to be frightened off, but no. It just surfaced farther on, and stared at me again.’
Wagner collected a number of similar stories, and then one day in Ramat Bay, he himself saw a long dark shape, which all the locals said was a ri or mermaid. All the descriptions agreed that the ri had long dark hair on its head, was light-skinned and that the females had breasts like women. Wagner was sufficiently intrigued to organize an expedition in 1983 with Richard Greenwell of the International Society of Cryptozoology.
This only added to the mystery, for they did indeed observe at relatively close quarters a large creature rolling and blowing on the surface and then disappearing for ten minutes or more beneath the water – behaviour which did not tally with that of any known creature of any size. The ri clearly existed, but it remained the ri – an unknown creature, and still a mermaid to the Papuans.
Two years later a much more lavishly equipped expedition set out in the 65-ft (20-m) Australian dive boat, Reef Explorer, with side scan sonar and video cameras, not to mention ship-to-shore telephones and air-conditioned cabins. When they got to Nokon Bay, New Ireland, they saw an animal rolling and playing on the surface. It clearly had no dorsal fin but seemed to have flukes. At that point a local villager, Tom Omar, came canoeing out to them. This was the ri or ilkai, he pronounced. The female, he said, had a woman’s breasts, hair and hands. Indeed, there was a family of them in the bay – male, female and child, he reported.