As long as there are sailors in the oceans, shanties sings songs and pirates talk about enjoying rum, there are strange and fantastic sightings of creatures ranging from krakens to sea snakes and mermaids. Kraken’s report – a deadly, giant monster that was rather inconvenient predator for human flesh – dates back to 1180, when the king of Norway wrote about a sea monster in Suez. Not long ago sailors claimed that the creatures were the size of an island, attacked ships with their huge arms and evolved into a legend, creating a giant whirlwind capable of sinking entire ships that could drag entire ships to the bottom of the ocean. .
For other creatures – especially sea snakes – the mystery cannot solve without a good long look at the whale stiffies. At first glance at such a sea snake, the Danish Lutheran missionary Hans Egede wrote that on July 6, July 1734, he and his crew saw “a terrifying creature they had never seen,” with the monster raising its head so high. It seemed to be higher than the crow’s nest in mainmast.
The head was small and the body was small and wrinkled. The unidentified creature was using giant fins that propelled it through the water. Later the sailors also saw its tail. The monster was longer than our entire ship.” In the description, the animals described as snakes and painted like this.
IG and Nobel laureate Charles Paxton once saw this and other scenes of sea snakes in 2005 for a possible interpretation of the account. They conclude that – compared to modern photographs and descriptions – several of the accounts were actually whale boners. “A more serious objection to a cetacean is that the back of the animal was described and painted like a snake. There is an urgent needs to rise,” he and several other authors wrote in the Archives of Natural History.
“However, there is an alternative explanation for the snake-like tail. The whale woke up; usually the retracted penis was visible. The North Atlantic right whale and (Pacific) gray whale can be at least 1.8 meters long and 1.7 meters long, respectively. In addition, an innocent witness can take the tail.” A separate incident that can more conclusively attributed to the rise of a large old whale, in 1875 sailors aboard a Pauline merchant ship saw a sea snake that they described as a “white pillar”. This particular snake was in the middle of a snout of a sperm whale, which at the time was “fierce in excitement”.
