The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (88 page)

Bishop Pontoppidan, whom we have already encountered, was not the first to describe the sea serpent. As early as 1539 a Swedish bishop named Olaf Mansson (Latinized as Olaus Magnus) published in Venice a map of the north that clearly showed two sea serpents. And in a
History of the Goths
,
Swedes
,
and Vandals
, published in 1555, he describes a “serpent 200 feet long and 20 feet thick” that lives in the sea caves off Bergen. This story, accompanied by terrifying pictures of serpents devouring ships, was cited by many subsequent encyclopedists. Two hundred years later Bishop Pontoppidan devoted a chapter of his
Natural History of Norway
to various monsters, including the sea serpent, the kraken, and the mermaid. In the case of the sea serpent he took the trouble to obtain a firsthand account by one Captain Lorenz von Ferry, who ordered a boat to pursue the creature, and was able to describe in some detail the horselike head with a white mane and black eyes, and the many coils or folds – he thought there were seven or eight, with about a fathom (six feet) between each fold.

The main interest of Pontoppidan’s comments at this juncture is that his book aroused considerable skepticism in Britain when it was translated in 1765 and that a Captain (later Admiral) Charles Douglas, who tried to find out what he could about such monsters, took a distinctly skeptical view of the evidence of some witnesses. Oddly enough, he recorded that while many Norwegians believed in the existence of “Stoor worms” (sea worms), they were inclined to dismiss the kraken, a giant octopus, as a myth. And it continued to be dismissed as a myth until its existence was finally accepted by science in the 1970s. The legends of the kraken – a vast octopoid monster that sometimes attacked swimmers, ships, and even coastal villages – can be traced back as far as the ancient Roman scholar Pliny, who described a “polyp” with thirty-foot-long arms that climbed ashore to steal fish being salted at Carteia in Spain and that was killed only after a violent encounter. Yet it should be noted that just about every seagoing culture in the world has had its equivalent of the kraken myth.

By comparison, Bishop Pontoppidan’s kraken seemed relatively harmless. He notes that local fishermen had discovered that there was a certain place off the coast of Norway where the recorded depth of eighty to one hundred fathoms would at times diminish to twenty or thirty fathoms, and that during these times the sea around would become turbid and muddy and the fishing in the area spectacularly abundant. This, they believed, was due to the kraken, a vast tentacled
beast a mile and a half in circumference, which swam up from the seabed and attracted the fish by venting its excrement. The monster posed no danger to men provided they removed their boats from the area before it came to the surface. This kraken seemed to be curiously passive – it looked like a group of surfacing islands interconnected by a weedlike substance and surrounded by waving “horns”, some “as high and as large as the masts of middle-siz’d vessels”. After eating its fill of the fish “beached” on its immense bulk, it would sink to the bottom again.

By the end of the eighteenth century science had dismissed such creatures as mythical. But the large number of nineteenth-century sightings of sea serpents off the coast of America began to erode the skepticism, while huge sucker marks found on sperm whales, and fragments of enormous tentacles found in their stomachs, made it clear that the giant squid was no myth either.

In November 1861 crewmen on the French gunboat
Alecton
saw a giant squid near Tenerife and tried to harpoon it. The creature was clearly dying, since they were able to slip a noose around it; but it broke in two as they tried to heave it aboard. The squid was about twenty-four feet long, and the mouth measured eighteen inches across. The
Alecton
arrived at Tenerife with enough of the monster to leave no possible doubt of its existence, and an account of it was read before the French Academy of Sciences on 30, December 1861. Yet a zoologist named Arthur Mangin still expressed disbelief and wanted to know why the creature had not simply dove below the surface. It was more likely, he thought, that everybody concerned in the report was a liar.

But in the 1870s so many giant squids expired on the beaches of Newfoundland and Labrador that it became impossible to doubt their existence. And in 1896 an enormous though mutilated corpse was washed up on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida, and photographed and examined by Dr DeWitt Webb. It took four horses, six men, and a block and tackle to move the six- or seven- ton bulk farther up the beach. The experts decided that it was a dead whale. But seventy-five years later, scientific examination of the few pieces that had been preserved demonstrated that it was a giant octopus (not a squid) that must have been about 200 feet across – big enough that its bulk would have occupied most of Picadilly Circus or Times Square.

Fortunately, actual encounters with such monsters have been rare. But some of the most vivid accounts date from the Second World War. On 25, March 1941 in a remote part of the South Atlantic, the Allied vessel
Britannia
was attacked by a German raider flying the Japanese
flag. The Germans fired on the vessel until she was ablaze, then gave the crew five minutes to abandon ship before they sank her. Because the
Britannia
had an insufficient number of lifeboats, many of the crew found themselves clinging to fragile rubber rafts in the open ocean, hundreds of miles from land and well off the normal shipping lanes. One of these was overloaded with twelve exhausted men, among whom were Lieutenants Rolandson and Davidson of the Royal Navy and Lieutenant R. E. Grimani Cox of the Indian Army, who survived to give an account of their experiences.

They had no food or water and no shelter from the sun. To avoid swamping the raft they had to take turns hanging precariously from its sides, where they had no defense against the attacks of Portuguese men-of-war, which Cox later described as “stinging like a million bees”. By the second day some of the men had become delirious; on the third the sharks started to close in. For three days the wounded and thirst-maddened survivors were picked off one by one. Then, to the sailors’ joy, the circling sharks suddenly disappeared.

One of the survivors gazed into the ocean depths and saw, to his horror, a huge shape surfacing beneath them. An enormous tentacled creature surfaced beside them and flailed its “arms” over the raft. It grabbed an Indian sailor, “hugging him like a bear”, and dragged him into the sea. Satisfied with its prey it moved off but later renewed its attack. Lieutenant Cox’s arm was badly mauled by a grasping tentacle, but this time the sailors managed to fight it off. Several days later Cox, Rolandson, and Davidson, the only survivors of the original twelve, were rescued by a Spanish ship.

When, in 1943, Cox was examined by the British biologist, Dr John L. Cloudsley-Thompson, the latter observed a number of circular scars on Cox’s arm showing that disks of skin and flesh, each measuring about one and a quarter inches in diameter, had at some time been savagely gouged out of it. In Cloudsley-Thompson’s opinion the injuries closely resembled those made by the serrated suckers of a squid; and from their size he deduced that the squid in question would have had to have been approximately twenty-three feet long. Richard Owen and his fellow skeptics would have regarded this as a monster of unprecedented proportions, but the only surprise for Cloudsley-Thompson was that a giant squid so “small” could abduct a full-grown man.

Another account of a giant squid also dates from the war years. J. D. Starkey describes how he would lower a cluster of electric bulbs over the side of an Admiralty trawler to attract fish, which could then be easily caught. One night in the Indian Ocean he found himself gazing at a
“green unwinking eye”. Shining a powerful torch into the water, Starkey saw tentacles two feet thick. He walked the length of the ship, studying the monster, with its parrotlike beak, and realized that it had to be more than 175 feet long. The squid remained there for about fifteen minutes; then “as its valve opened fully . . . without any visible effort it zoomed into the night”.

The major problem, as far as science is concerned, is that it seems virtually impossible to study sea monsters in their natural habitat. Like the notorious Loch Ness monster, they seem oddly shy. One student of “lake monsters”, the late Ted Holiday, even came to believe that some of them must be regarded as paranormal phenomena – a conclusion he reached because of his observation that some of the lakes in which monsters have been observed are too small to support a large creature. Holiday’s encounters with the Loch Ness monster also developed in him a conviction that it seemed to have a sixth sense about when it could show itself without danger of being photographed.

Another “monster watcher” – Tony “Doc” Shiels – reached a similar conclusion. In 1975 and 1976 there were many sightings of a sea monster off Falmouth, in Cornwall; it was christened “Morgawr”, meaning “Cornish giant”. Shiels succeeded in taking an excellent photograph of Morgawr, which had the same “plesiosaur-like” shape as the Loch Ness monster – a long neck and a bulky body with “humps” on the back. Shiels subsequently went to Loch Ness and immediately succeeded in snapping two photographs of the monster. But his book
Monstrum
, subtitled
A Wisard’s Tale
, makes it clear that he believes that his own monster-sightings have involved some kind of encounter with the world of the paranormal.

This need not imply that creatures like Morgawr and “Nessie” are ghosts, as Holiday was at one point inclined to believe. It may merely imply that they possess highly developed telepathic powers that have enabled them, thus far, to avoid the monster-hunters with considerable success. Which in turn may imply that those who wish to study them must also possess such powers.

The mystery of the underwater monsters is still far from solved. But at least there is now enough evidence to make it clear that Olaus Magnus and Bishop Pontoppidan deserve an apology.

51

Who Was Shakespeare?

Early in 1616, a respectable middle-class gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon decided it was time to make his will; a few months later in April he died, apparently after a drinking bout with two old friends from London, the playwrights Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton. And then, for a considerable time, he was more or less forgotten. Within seven years of his death, a monument was erected to him in the parish church. In 1656 the antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who was interested in coats of arms, reproduced an inaccurate sketch of it in his
Antiquities of Warwickshire
. It showed a gentleman with a drooping moustache, whose hands rested on a woolsack – a symbol of trade. Few people in Stratford seemed to be aware that this mournful-looking tradesman was a famous actor-playwright who had performed before Queen Elizabeth.

More than a century later, in the 1770s, a clergyman named James Wilmot retired to his native Warwickshire, and devoted his declining years to the study of his two favourite writers, Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare. Since the village of which he was now the rector – Barton-on-the-Heath – was only half a dozen miles from Stratford, he began making inquiries to find out if any stories and traditions of the great actor-playwright now survived in his native town. Apparently no one knew of any. But from the study of Shakespeare’s plays, Wilmot had concluded that he must have been a man of wide learning, and must therefore have possessed a considerable library. Over the course of many years he made diligent inquiries in the area, investigating small private libraries for fifty miles around. He found nothing whatever – not a single volume that might have belonged to Shakespeare. And finally he was struck by an astonishing conviction: that the man called Shakespeare was not the author of the plays attributed to him. The man who possessed all the qualifications for writing them was his other favourite author, Francis Bacon.

Wilmot was apparently so overwhelmed by this realization – for by this time, Shakespeare was becoming recognized as one of the greatest of English playwrights – that he decided to keep his strange convictions to himself. But almost thirty years later, when he was eighty, some of his caution had evaporated. And when he was visited by an Ipswich Quaker in 1803 Wilmot finally revealed his embarrassing secret. The Quaker, James Cowell, was researching Shakespeare’s life because he had agreed to read a paper about him to his local philosophical society, and no standard biography had yet been published. Cowell was shaken, but more than half convinced. Two years later he read his paper on Shakespeare, and told his astonished fellow-townsmen about the remarkable old vicar and his alarming theories. The Ipswich philosophers were apparently “thrown into confusion”. Perhaps Wilmot heard about their reaction; at all events, he left instructions in his will that all his Shakespeare papers should be burnt, and this was duly carried out. And Cowell’s lecture lay undiscovered until more than a century later, when an eminent Shakespearian scholar described Wilmot in
The Times Literary Supplement
as “The first Baconian”.
²³
Professor Allardyce Nicoll did not intend it as a compliment, for he regarded the proponents of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare’s authorship as cranks.

And why should anyone reach such an apparently eccentric conclusion? Why should the gentleman of Stratford-upon-Avon not be the author of
Hamlet
and
Lear
, just as most people assumed he was? In fact the notion is not quite as absurd as it sounds. The most baffling thing about Shakespeare is the lack of actual connection between the “gentleman of Stratford” and the author of the plays. Shakespeare went to London in his twenties; within a few years he was a successful actor and playwright, and by the time he reached his mid-thirties (in 1601) he was one of the most popular writers of the time. The author of
Coriolanus
and
The Tempest
must have known he possessed genius – he says as much in sonnet 55, beginning: