During the next ten days the captain of the Reef Explorer, Kerry Piesch, and other members of the expedition managed to get near the creature with underwater video and still cameras. One photo was clear and unmistakable: the animal was a dugong – a rare but not unknown sea creature. The theory that the ri was a dugong had been considered and dismissed, as the ri’s behaviour was quite unlike anything hitherto reported about dugongs.
In particular, it was thought that the dugong could dive for only a minute or so at a time; the New Ireland animal was under water for upwards of ten minutes. But as the pictures and the video accumulated, there was little room for doubt. Then came a sad conclusion. One morning the villagers were seen pulling a large creature out of the water. It turned out to be a dead female. No breasts, no hair, and undoubtedly a dugong. She had been shot by a high-powered rifle.
No culprit was found, though the villagers blamed neighbours from the next bay. The corpse, laid out on the beach at Nokon Bay, effectively ended the hunt for the Papuan mermaid. But it was not hard to see how that strange body, with its hand-like flukes, cavorting out of the water in the haze of a tropical sea, might well answer the pervasive and attractive myth of men and girls cast or lured into the ocean and transmuted into mermen and mermaids to fascinate mariners for centuries past.
The Kraken
If the mermaid seems to vanish into the mist of imagination, the classic sea monster seems as persistent as ever. Many of the sightings round the British Isles now seem ascribable to the wonderful leathery turtle. This huge creature, as big as a mini car and weighing perhaps 800 lb (360 kilos), now seems to be more common in British waters than was previously thought, for it is born thousands of miles away in the Caribbean or even Malaysia. Virtually nothing is known of its journeys across the oceans, but it seems unlikely that it would intentionally venture into the chill waters of the North Atlantic.
In 1985, however, another great leathery turtle came ashore near Mousehole in Cornwall. It was nearly 7 ft (2.5 m) long and weighed just under 7 hundredweight. It had apparently choked on a plastic bag, mistaking it for the jelly fish which are its principal food source. Many of the descriptions of classic British sea monsters, such as the Soay monster, suggest the leather back turtle as a convincing explanation. But no one has yet proposed a satisfactory solution to the traditional sea monster with horse’s head and humps, which has been seen by seamen and shore watches all over the world and seems as common as ever.
At least six people saw the Stinson Beach monster north of San Francisco one afternoon in October 1983. Matt Ratto was a member of a construction crew working on the highway. They had binoculars which were apparently used for observing frolics on the beach during their lunch breaks. However, this time they were at hand for more serious viewing when one of the crew called up on the two-way radio and told Ratto to look out to sea.
The mystery animal was only 100 yards off shore and about a quarter of a mile away when Ratto focused on it. It was being followed by a large flock of birds and about two dozen sea lions. Ratto and his fellow crew members all agreed that the creature was about 100 ft (30 m) long – they had the sea lions with which to compare it. Ratto said: ‘There were three bends like humps and they rose straight up. Then the head came up to look around.’ Truck driver Steve Bjora thought it looked like a huge eel. ‘The sucker was going 45 to 50 miles an hour. It was clipping. It was boogeying.’
Safety inspector Marlene Martin of the California Department of Transport apparently told her family it was the biggest thing she had ever seen in her life: ‘It made Jaws look like a baby.’ A teenager on the beach below, Roland Curry, also saw the animal, and reported that it was his second sighting within a week. The first time, it was visible for only about thirty seconds and the head came up for a couple of seconds before the animal dived.
Later the same week a surfer, Young Hutchinson, reported that a sea serpent had surfaced within 10 ft (3 m) of his surfboard off the Santa Ana River: ‘At first I thought it was a whale, but I’ve seen a lot of whales and it didn’t look the same at all. The skin texture wasn’t the same and there were no dorsal fins. In fact it was like a long black eel. It was really moving. We got the hell out of there and paddled for the shore.’
The local scientists all offered the usual explanations of pilot whales and porpoises in a line jumping from the water. But these do not seem adequate for a creature viewed for some time by a group of people, one of whom had binoculars, and then at very close quarters by an apparently levelheaded surfer. In the chronicles of sea monsters, Stinson Beach, 1983, seems a hard one to explain away.
A more enigmatic recent report comes from Iceland. Two bird-watchers, Olafur Lafsson and Julius Asgeirsson, were on the beach twenty miles north of Reykjavik, when they saw two creatures emerging from the sea and gambolling about on the beach. Asgeirsson said: ‘They were larger than horses, they moved about like dogs, but they swam like seals.’ The animals soon went back into the water, leaving behind tracks in the sand. ‘The footprints were larger than those of horse hoofs and split like those of a cloven-footed animal, but with three cloves instead of two.’ No explanation beyond the shrouded visions of the old Icelandic sagas has yet appeared.
One putative source for the eel-like sea monster has been thoroughly discredited by recent research. Over the last century a few examples of giant eel larvae have been trawled out of the oceans. One captured by the round-the-world Dana expedition in 1930 was nearly 6 ft (2 m) long. Comparisons with other eel larvae suggested that it might grow into a serpent of mammoth proportions if it progressed in similar fashion.
There was speculation about giant eels of up to 150 ft (45 m), which might well fit the bill as sea monsters. However, Dr David Smith of the University of Texas has shown that not only do the giant eel larvae not go on growing, they actually get shorter when they transmute into a fish, becoming spiny eels of only 2 or 3 ft (60 to 90 cm) in length.
Mermaids and giant eels have receded in recent years; the giant octopus seems a little closer; but the regular surprises, from the coelacanth to the megamouth, indicate that the huge, barely explored territories of the great oceans are well capable of retaining many secrets even in the age of high-powered submarine technology.
Arthur C. Clarke comments:
A few years ago an oil company engineer passing through Sri Lanka told me a story which makes a splendid sequel to our programme ‘Monsters of the Deep’ (Chapter 4 of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World).
Everyone must have seen pictures of the enormous oil-rigs which are used for ocean drilling; some of them are as big as skyscrapers. Well, it seems that one of these rigs had a problem. The divers couldn’t go down to inspect it because it was covered by an octopus! I could not discover exactly -or even approximately – what percentage of the rig was so ornamented. Of course, objects are magnified under water, and the first diver down probably did not stop to make accurate measurements.
As an inoperative rig costs a few hundred thousand dollars a day in lost revenue, the oil company, sadly but understandably, did not call for marine scientists to come and examine this splendid specimen whenever it was convenient. They shooed it away with carefully calibrated underwater explosions – without, I hope, giving it a headache.
Some new light has also been thrown on the giant squid (genus Architeuthis). These creatures of the deep apparently cannot survive long in warm waters because their blood will not transport oxygen efficiently at more than 10°C. So if you ever meet one on the surface in tropical waters (vide the chapter ‘Squid’ in Moby Dick), it is almost certainly dying. I would not suggest that even the most ardent conservationist attempt mouth-to-beak resuscitation.
Turning to less fearsome sea monsters (not that I would care to meet one when snorkling peacefully along the reef), I am grateful to Michel Raynal of Narbonne, France, for an item about the possible survival of Steller’s sea cow. The translation is so delightful that it would be a pity to correct it: