On the same page of the text, OLAUS MAGNUS has figured a sea-serpent in the act of swallowing a man from a…
- 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 150
- 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
On the same page of the text, OLAUS MAGNUS has figured a sea-serpent in the act of swallowing a man from a boat, which has just anchored on a rock, wherein the serpent has its hole
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 onlyOn the same page of the text, OLAUS MAGNUS has figured a sea-serpent in the act of swallowing a man from a boat, which has just anchored on a rock, wherein the serpent has its hole. I give a facsimile of that figure in Fig. 14.--Mr. HENRY LEE who mostly sees calamaries and no other animals in the tales and figures representing the Great Sea-Serpent, tells us that: “the presumed body of the serpent was one of the arms of the squid, and the two rows of suckers thereto belonging are indicated in the illustration by the medial line traversing its whole length (intended to represent a dorsal fin) and the double row of transverse septa, one on each side of it”.--As to the snatching away a man of the crew, I quite agree with Mr. LEE, as already said above, but as to the figure of the serpent itself, I am strongly convinced that OLAUS MAGNUS or his draughtsman had no other intention than to delineate a large snake, and they gave it the large scales, mentioned in the text, but the scales are badly drawn.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis 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 onlyLattice compares morphology, behaviour and setting while keeping misidentification, folklore, exaggeration, error and known animals available as alternatives.
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