Where are you, Steller’s sea cow? (*)
‘You know,’ – told me once Ivan Nikiforovich Chechulin, projectionist of the Karaginskaya culture and propaganda team – ‘in summer 1976, I took part in some operations during the salmon fishing season in the Anapkinskaya Bay. A team of sealers of the collective farm “Tumgutum” consisted of the local population, namely koryaks and Olutorsky Gulf inhabitants. Everybody took part in the fishery from their childhood.
Once, just after a heavy storm we noticed an unknown animal on a tidal belt, its skin was dark, its tail was forked like that one of the whale, the extremities of the animal were flippers. There were slightly noticed outlines of some round ribs. We approached the animal, touched it and were surprised as its head beared an unusual form and its snout was long. None of us has ever seen this animal.
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[*] Kamchatsky Komsomolets, Petropavlovsk, January 1977.
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‘Perhaps, it was a small seal or a bearded seal, or a Steller’s sea-lion’ – asked me half-serious, half in joke. ‘You don’t say that,” Chechulin felt hurt. ‘Don’t we know? Every one of us took part in the sealing hundred times. Small seal’s blubber called by the local population “nymilan” is the best seasoning to “yukola” (local word for the dried and cured salmon) and “tolkusha” (also a local word). All marine animals are known to us.’
I showed several drawings of the Steller’s sea cow to Ivan Nikiforovich, the animal whose description was firstly given in 1741 found on the Commander Islands by an eminent naturalist George Wilhelm Steller. Presently, this animal, the sea cow, bears the name of the Steller’s sea cow. ‘Just the same thing,’ – said I. N. Chechulin examining the picture. – ‘The same tail, the fore flippers and the head … Aren’t they left now?’ – he asked surprised. ‘Not a single one,’ answered me. – Though in 1966, a Museum of local lore was created in an Ust-Pakhachinskaya school.’
TINRO scientists became interested in two school exhibits, those were bones of some marine animals. Later on, the scientists published the results of their investigations in a newspaper Kamchatskaya Pravda where they paid their attention to the fact that one of those bones appeared to be a bone of a sea cow died about 10 years ago.
For the present, the facts testify to another thing. The Steller’s sea cow was fired out by hunters throughout a short term. Inhabiting lagoons in the ashore waters, where it fed on sea algae and eel grass, the Steller’s sea cow was a relic and dying animal.
Presently, the skull of the Steller’s sea cow is exposed in our Museum. A complete skeleton of the animal is kept in Khabarovsk Museum of local lore.
Kamchatka is studied insufficiently in biological and geographical aspects. There can be found hundreds of areas in our country seldom visited by people and where marine mammals can inhabit easily including the Steller’s sea cow. These areas are lagoons, estuaries, lakes with warm water open to the sea.
The opinion of the scientists cannot be considered as a stable one for always. Let it be yet considered that the Steller’s sea cow has died out. But … to prove it finally, it is necessary to organize a special expedition. There is need to organize a great biological expedition which could start its work already in summer months 1977 throughout all regions of the Kamchatka area with application of the method elaborated by the scientists of the Kamchatka Branch of TINRO.
Undoubtedly, the youth of our area will take an active part in these investigations.
Vladimir Malukovich,
Senior Scientific Worker,
Kamchatka Museum Of Local Lore.
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6 – Supernatural Scenes
Fata Morgana
Travellers and explorers love to report curious sights, but some of the things they describe are decidedly stranger than others. Consider these weird tales.
On 24 June 1906 Robert E. Peary, who later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole, spotted through his field glasses, far away on the Arctic horizon, ‘the faint white summits of a distant land’. Four days later, according to his diary, from Cape Thomas Hubbard (on the edge of the polar ice) Peary saw the mysterious mountains again, more clearly, to the north-west. ‘My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy trod its shores, and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.’
Pausing only to name his discovery ‘Crocker Land’, after his expedition’s sponsor, Peary pushed on towards the Pole, convinced that he had found an unknown island or even an uncharted continent. ‘Crocker Land’ duly appeared on US Hydrographic Office maps; but in 1914 an expedition sent to explore it found not a single trace of Peary’s ‘discovery’. After a gruelling journey over 150 miles of treacherous Arctic ice, the baffled explorers concluded that ‘Crocker Land’ simply did not exist.
On the other side of the world, in January 1915, Frank Worsley, captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated ship Endurance, noted as he sailed along the Antarctic coast: ‘Inshore appears a beautiful dazzling city of cathedral spires, domes and minarets.’ And yet, as Worsley well knew, there were no such buildings anywhere in the vast ice deserts surrounding the South Pole.
One August day in the seventeenth century an Italian priest, Father Angelucci, was looking out to sea across the Strait of Messina, which divides the southern tip of Italy from Sicily. Suddenly a shimmering city rose up before him from the midst of the waters. Its pillars, arches and aqueducts were dominated by glittering castles; but within minutes, as Father Angelucci watched in wonder, the magnificent metropolis had vanished.
Almost 300 years later, in the summer of 1929, villagers from Niemiskylia, central Finland, picking berries in the nearby Osmankisuo swamp, watched in amazement as ‘an obscure dark mass’ on the north-eastern horizon turned rapidly into ‘a most wonderful city with its buildings, squares and streets’. In it, they told a reporter from the Iisalmen Sanomat newspaper, they could see people ‘on their Sunday morning stroll’. One well-travelled berry-picker identified the city as far-off Berlin, complete with the Unter den Linden and its famous zoo.
In 1852 a Mr M’Farland, in a report to the British Association, described this charming scene; it unfolded as he stood with a party of friends upon a rock at Portbalintrea, Ireland. They
perceived a small roundish island as if in the act of emerging from the deep, at a distance of a mile from the shore; at first it appeared but as a green field, afterwards it became fringed with red, yellow and blue; whilst the forms of trees, men and cattle rose upon it slowly and successively; and these continued for about a quarter of an hour, distinct in their outlines, shape and colour; the figures, too, seemed to walk across it, or wandered among the trees, the ocean bathed it around, the sun shone upon it from above; and all was fresh, fair, and beautiful, till the sward assumed a shadowy form, and its various objects, mingling into one confused whole, passed away as strangely as they came.
These sights can be explained. The spangled ‘cities’ of the Antarctic and the Strait of Messina, Mr M’Farland’s green and pleasant ‘island’, Peary’s evanescent ‘Crocker Land’, even the ‘Berlin townscape’ that so astonished the berry-pickers of the Osmankisuo swamp, were all mirages created by peculiar atmospheric conditions. The travellers were all fooled because these mirages were of a particularly rare and spectacular type, known as the ‘Fata Morgana’, first accurately described by Father Angelucci and so called because passing Crusaders in the Middle Ages imagined the illusory turrets to be the legendary citadel of Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur’s evil sister and a sorceress with a penchant for luring sailors to their doom. Simple mirages are common.
Drivers are used to seeing what looks like a pool of water ahead of them on a hot, dry road. The pool, of course, does not exist. What they are really seeing is the sky, ‘reflected’ in the layer of air heated by the ground. This is called an ‘inferior mirage’. A ‘superior mirage’ is caused by a ‘reflection’ in a layer of warm air high above the ground. The ‘Fata Morgana’ is a much weirder and far more complicated type of mirage which occurs when unusual variations in atmospheric temperature create blurred and uneven ‘reflections’ of the sea.
Phantom Houses
Explanations for other ‘phantom scenes’ are more difficult to find. Often, after failing to find answers in the natural world, investigators have turned instead to the supernatural, sometimes with unexpected results.
In 1961, in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Rosalind Heywood, a prominent investigator of the paranormal, published a curious story told to her by a Mr and Mrs Fraser.
Six years earlier, on a Friday evening in November, the Frasers had been driving to Herstmonceux, Sussex, for a weekend in the country. About an hour and a half outside London they spotted a ‘lovely old country house’ hotel.