Research source

If they do not draw on their own invention, they tell the old stories they have heard when on fine evenings…

Date of account: Late nineteenth-century survey
Source: The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise
Reference: The great sea-serpent: an historical and critical treatise · selected passage 19
Rights: public_domain
Language: English edition of a European scholarly compilation
Translation: English edition of A. C. Oudemans's historical survey
Record updated: 2026-08-24

Record summary

If they do not draw on their own invention, they tell the old stories they have heard when on fine evenings they were together with the old tars talking and chatting on the fore-deck

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

If they do not draw on their own invention, they tell the old stories they have heard when on fine evenings they were together with the old tars talking and chatting on the fore-deck. Of the latter many have no other origin than the imagination of a sailor’s brain; they are merely hoaxes; others again are exaggerated and garbled reports of what they have seen with their own eyes, or of what their comrades or their captain saw! There are the tales of the Unicorn, of the White Whale, that terrible “Moby Dick” of the Polar Regions, there are the fables of the Mermaids and Mermen, there are the exaggerations of the Kraken and the Sea-Serpent!

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This is a historical compilation of unusual-animal reports and argument. Witness testimony, repetition between publications and the author's zoological assumptions all affect independence and reliability.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares morphology, behaviour and setting while keeping misidentification, folklore, exaggeration, error and known animals available as alternatives.

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