Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Titanic anniversary note: the Carpathia's sea serpent

Captain reported in detail

The hero of the Titanic affair was Captain Arthur Henry Rostron of the Carpathia, the first ship on the scene of the disaster.  A little-known fact about Roston (I'd never come across it until now) is that his memoirs include a detailed sighting of a "sea serpent."  There are quite a few puzzling incidents like this in ship's logs, although they definitely tail off in the past half-century.
COMMENT: I think there is still some mystery behind the sea serpent stories.  We might well find some kind of enormous eel or eellike fish has escaped the nets of science. (For a fictional treatment, see Arthur C. Clarke's The Deep Range). 

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