Gloucester's 1817 Sea Serpent Came With Sworn Depositions

In August 1817, something immense kept surfacing in Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. Witnesses described a serpent-shaped animal that moved astonishingly fast and sometimes looked like a chain of floating barrels. Then a group of Boston naturalists decided to take it seriously.

At a meeting of the Linnaean Society of New England on Aug. 18, 1817, U.S. District Judge John Davis, physician Jacob Bigelow and attorney Francis C. Gray were appointed to investigate. The committee ruled that only people who had actually seen the animal could be examined. Witnesses were questioned separately, their statements read back to them, then signed and sworn before a magistrate. Every witness also faced the same list of 25 questions, from how fast the animal moved to whether it had a mane.

On Sept. 27, a Gloucester man pinned a strange snake with a pitchfork in a field near Loblolly Cove, and a neighbor finished it off with a rock. It was about 3 feet (0.9 meters) long, and its spine rose and fell in a row of humps. Townspeople wondered whether it was the sea serpent's offspring. The committee cut it open, named it a new genus, Scoliophis atlanticus, and argued that the snake and the harbor giant were the same species. In the 1860s, the Boston Society of Natural History reexamined the preserved specimen and found a common black snake with a deformed spine.

The Society's report came out before the end of 1817, depositions and all. The same review blamed the sightings on a humpback whale, an explanation offered 46 years after the fact. What was actually in Gloucester Harbor that August has never been established.

Two centuries later, the most durable thing in Gloucester Harbor may be the paperwork.

Read the full story at Massachusetts Historical Society, October 29, 2019

Hot Take: The specimen fell apart, but the method held: separate interviews, the same questions for every witness and a signature before a magistrate.