Research source

It may be that a real sea-serpent remained a week in the inlet

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 95
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

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

It may be that a real sea-serpent remained a week in the inlet. The Norwegian fishermen know the sea-serpent too well to make mistakes. Another animal would not have been called a sea-serpent, and a short description of it would have been given. But the skin wrongly attributed to the sea-serpent, was certainly nothing else but a putrified long arm or tentacle of a gigantic calamary. The description “soft and slimy mass” proves this sufficiently. The great calamary died in the fjord, or inlet, and its long dead arm was floated ashore by the current, while the body sank. Such great calamaries, the true Krakens, have been measured, and found to have a body of 30 feet in length with long tentacles of 58 feet (see LEE, _Sea Monsters Unmasked_, London, 1883). I give here a figure of the largest ever found. (See our Fig.

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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