When Summer time Meant Sea Serpents

From the 1860s, late July by way of to mid-September turned often called the ‘foolish season’. With Parliament and legislation courts in summer time recess, and with little in the way in which of main political information to report, a burgeoning story-hungry newspaper business needed to hunt down different content material. Usually credited with coining the phrase ‘foolish season’, a July 1861 article within the Saturday Overview claimed that in late summer time The Occasions would ‘sink from nonsense written with a goal to nonsense written as a result of the author should write both nonsense or nothing’.

Foolish season was marked by uncommon or sensational tales, and one such late summer time favorite that helped fill clean column inches was sea serpent sightings. The phrase ‘sea serpent season’ had preceded ‘foolish season’ into journalistic parlance from the mid-1850s. It was the title of an October 1871 article within the Pall Mall Gazette telling of a sea monster sighting at Diamond Rocks, Kilkee, County Clare, on the west coast of Eire the earlier month. A gaggle of respectable women and gents had been having fun with a coastal stroll when a ‘sea monster’ all of a sudden loomed out of the water 70 yards away. The creature was described as having a ‘dreadful look’, with an unlimited head, a mane of seaweed-like hair behind, massive eyes, and ‘an enormous physique … beneath the waves’. The encounter induced one girl to almost faint and left all within the celebration shaken. The sighting, first reported within the Limerick Chronicle, was illustrative of the tendency of the British press, needing to fill house, to build up sea serpent tales from across the Atlantic.

Sea serpent sightings didn’t happen yearly, however Bernard Heuvelmans’ complete examine, Within the Wake of the Sea-Serpents (1968), indicated the continued attraction of the phenomenon. Heuvelmans recognized 166 recorded worldwide sightings at sea and ashore between 1801-50, 152 between 1851-1900, and 190 between 1901-50. Most of those sightings (53 per cent) occurred in summer time, though many of the newspaper experiences got here in autumn.

The tone of later experiences was typically humorous and understanding. The willingness to entertain the thought of sea serpents not often prolonged to a way of real risk, however nor was it explicitly dismissed as a hoax. When a 20-metre serpent was sighted in a Norwegian fjord on 6 September 1878 holidaymakers, the Each day Telegraph reported, spent a number of days chasing it in boats. The article debated how finest to seize or kill the creature; having outlined the drawbacks of making an attempt to make use of a cannon on a small boat, it will definitely really helpful utilizing a torpedo, suggesting the serpent would assume it a relative and welcome it with open mouth. Likewise, in a snippet within the Western Gazette in 1906, entitled ‘The Sea Serpent Season’, a vacationer requested a sailor if he had ever seen a sea serpent in his travels, to which the sailor replied that he had not since he had given up ingesting.   

As early as September 1863 it was famous that the foolish season noticed ‘all who can afford the comfort, gravitate in direction of the seaside’. Even when rising numbers of coastal guests by no means noticed one, newspaper accounts of sea serpents helped prime them with the concept the coast was the place they may. On the seaside resort of Cushendall, Ballymena, in June 1899, guests and locals noticed ‘what seemed to be an enormous sea monster floating leisurely about’, roughly a mile from shore. A customer named Andrew Ross proposed that it must be captured utilizing rifles and knives however native ‘salts’, claiming they’d by no means seen something as massive, dismissed the thought. This account preceded the late summer time foolish season. Sea serpent experiences usually began to seem from July onwards, though this regularly shifted to June within the early twentieth century. So early in the summertime, one suspects the story might have been meant to assist appeal to guests with the prospect of catching sight of one thing marvellous. A protracted sighting, witnessed by a big crowd, generated the air of a sensational novelty.

Sea serpent sightings continued nicely into the twentieth century, though Heuvelmans’ examine suggests a decline from the Thirties onwards. The beginning of that decline coincides with the emergence of another cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster. Constructing on supposed sightings in 1933, the well-known hoax {photograph} of ‘Nessie’, revealed within the Each day Mail on 21 April 1934, gained some credibility by being shot by a medical physician, but additionally by being revealed exterior the foolish season. Subsequent experiences made direct reference to ‘Nessie’, fairly than to generic sea serpents. A bit within the Night Telegraph in October 1936 reported on a ‘Signorita Nessie’ that had been seen within the River Po close to Ferrara and requested whether or not the Loch Ness Monster was holidaying in Italy. One other from August 1939 requested if Nessie had migrated to Canada, primarily based on a number of current sightings of ‘an unlimited marine monster’ across the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. ‘Nessie’ additionally turned consideration from the open seas to inland waterways. From the perspective of scientific investigators, trying to find an aquatic ‘monster’ in a Scottish loch (or its equal in North American lakes) might have appeared a barely extra possible prospect than making an attempt to grapple with the probabilities of proving whether or not sea serpents existed someplace within the huge oceans of the world.

In the present day, foolish season coastal tales have misplaced a lot of the whimsy that surrounded experiences of Victorian sea serpents. Summer time information tales now discuss of harmful sea creatures being sighted off the south coast. In October 2000 and August 2008 The Argus reported on the hazard of Portuguese man o’ conflict jellyfish in Sussex coastal waters. In September 2024 the Brighton Journal ran a chunk on why sharks are washing up on Brighton seashore. Now not flirting with the marvellous or a willingness to droop disbelief, such tales have grow to be a commentary on how warming seas are attracting the northerly migration of marine creatures beforehand unknown to British shores. In comparison with the playfulness of our Victorian ancestors, our foolish season dangers turning into critical. 
 

Karl Bell is the writer of The Perilous Deep: A Supernatural Historical past of the Atlantic (Reaktion Books, 2025).