The HMS Daedalus Sea Serpent: A Royal Navy Captain's Monster That Was Never Explained
Late in the afternoon of 6 August 1848, HMS Daedalus, a Royal Navy frigate sailing home through the South Atlantic between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena, met something its officers could not explain. A midshipman pointed it out first, and within moments the captain, Peter M'Quhae, his first lieutenant and the ship's sailing master were all at the rail watching a long, dark animal move through the water. It held its head and neck roughly four feet above the surface, and about sixty feet of its body was visible at once. It never dived or thrashed; it simply passed the ship on a steady course for some twenty minutes, close enough that M'Quhae felt he could have recognised a human face at the distance.
What he described was frankly serpentine: no fins visible, a snakelike body as thick as a man, dark brown above and yellowish-white at the throat, with something like a horse's mane or a mass of seaweed washing along its back. Back in England, M'Quhae reported the encounter formally to the Admiralty. His superiors passed the account up the chain, and in October 1848 The Times printed his official letter, turning a naval report into a national sensation.
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