The Sea-Serpent and the Whale (Part 1 of 2):
Could giant pythons be inhabiting our oceans?
Captain George Drevar of the barque vessel Pauline witnessed the spectacle of a lifetime.
The year was 1875, and the salty freshness of the south Atlantic put a bite into the open air. Cerulean waves bubbled with froth as the Pauline cut through them. Captain Drevar, meanwhile, stood on deck and surveyed the waters that yearned in all directions, like a blue duvet aspiring to the horizon.
The barque was 20 miles off the coast of Cap São Roque [Brazil] when he noticed it: an intense, abrupt churning of the ocean unfolding directly in the captain’s line of sight. Drevar’s logbook would have this to tell us about the bizarre encounter:
‘The weather fine and clear, wind and sea moderate. Observed some black spots on the water, and a whitish pillar, about thirty feet high above them. At the first glance I took all to be breakers as the sea was splashing up fountain-like about them, and the pillar a pinnacle of rock, bleached with the sun; but the pillar fell with a splash, and a similar one rose. They rose and fell alternately in quick succession, and good glasses showed me it was a monstrous SEA-SERPENT coiled twice around a large sperm-whale.’
If the captain’s story is to be believed — and many found it credible — then somewhere out in the Deep Blue lives a beastly serpent capable of crushing the lungs of a fully-grown sperm whale, one of the kings of the oceanic jungle.
The captain’s logbook continues in more frightening detail, though it may be prudent to first take a look at the terrestrial equivalent of what Drevar encountered that day. To understand the south Atlantic serpent and how it was capable of rendering a 40-foot, one hundred thousand pound mammal completely helpless, it is necessary to understand one of the most feared of all snakes: the python.
Two-year-old Shaianna never had a chance. In 2009, Florida couple Jean Hare and Charles Darnell were arrested after their 8-foot-long Burmese python was found coiled around the child’s body in her crib.
Although the couple sounded appropriately devastated in their panicked 911 call, it was too-little too-late: Shaianna could not be saved. Rescue personnel would discover the child buried in the python’s coils, with its fangs driven into the toddler’s forehead.
Shaianna’s grieving grandmother told journalists that she’d begged them not to share their home with such a dangerous animal while Shaianna was living with them, but to no avail. More horrifying still is that the snake’s aquarium apparently didn’t even have a lid. Instead it was shoddily draped with a coverlet and safety pins. A necropsy later revealed that the python had been neglected and was painfully gaunt; neither Hare nor Darnell had fed it in over a month. [In 2011, the couple was sentenced to 12 years in prison for negligence resulting in their daughter’s death.]
A python cannot logically be associated with ‘evil’. By its very nature, a python is what it is and does what it does, but the horror-factor remains. Pythons can eat up to one-and-a-half times their body weight. While some individuals are picky, others will eat just about anything they come across.
In 2018, a woman from Indonesia’s Sulawesi Province named Wa Tiba went to check on her vegetable garden. When a full day passed and she did not return, concerned family members went looking for her and stumbled upon her sandals and a machete lying on the ground. Filled with dread, the search party looked further and finally discovered what had taken their beloved: a 23-foot reticulated python, which had managed to swallow her whole. The snake had to be hacked open with knives to retrieve her; Wa Tiba was 54 years old.
Because human shoulder blades do not collapse easily, it’s usually more difficult for pythons to swallow their human victims, but that doesn’t stop them from trying, and, all too often, succeeding.
The scene which continued to unfold before a shocked Captain Drevar on board the Pauline only grew more macabre. The massive sea-serpent was grappling with its victim, coiling round the panicked sperm whale with increasing vigor. Per the captain’s log:
‘The head and tail parts [of the serpent], each about thirty feet long, were acting as lever, twisting itself and victim round with great velocity. They sank out of sight about every two minutes, coming to the surface still revolving; and the struggles of the whale and two other whales, that were near, frantic with excitement, made the sea in their vicinity like a boiling cauldron; and a loud and confused noise was distinctly heard. This strange occurrence lasted some fifteen minutes, and finished with the tail portion of the whale being elevated straight in the air, then waving backwards and forwards, and lashing the water furiously in the last death struggle, when the body disappeared from our view, going down head foremost to the bottom, where no doubt it was gorged at the serpent’s leisure; and that monster of monsters may have been many months in a state of coma, digesting the huge mouthful.’
Drevar, though, was not the only witness to the blood-fest. Through his glasses, he caught sight of two other whales from the doomed creature’s pod. These normally fearless creatures appeared to be terror-stricken in their helplessness at the fate of their pod member. The log-book further elaborates:
‘Then two of the largest sperm-whales that I have ever seen moved slowly thence towards [our] vessel, their bodies more than usually elevate out of the water, and not spouting or making the least noise, but seeming quite paralyzed with fear; indeed, a cold shiver went through my own frame on beholding the last agonizing struggle of the poor whale that had seemed as helpless in the coils of the vicious monster as a small BIRD in the talons of a hawk.’
It’s almost too tragic to contemplate this Darwinian, adrenaline-filled ‘survival of the fittest’-type struggle in any close detail, but it does pose necessary questions. How, precisely, does a python attack, and what must it be like for its agonized quarry to endure?
If you’re herpetologically-naive, like I am, you might wonder just what the big deal is to find oneself ‘hugged’ in a hungry python’s coils. Small mammals and reptiles are quickly overwhelmed by constrictor snakes; that much is a given. So are small, vulnerable children and even larger mammals, such as pigs, deer, monkeys and cattle (the latter creatures of course having limbs, but no ‘arms’).
But if an adult human found herself in the grasp of a python, especially a small one, wouldn’t it be possible to at least ‘hop’ to the phone and call 911? If her arms were constricted, couldn’t she still hop to a neighbor’s or the street where someone could come to her aid? Couldn’t a very strong person — say, a young wrestler at his prime of both life and career — simply use his own strength to un-furl a hungry constrictor?
Luna Lenay, a Zoology major and constrictor-enthusiast from Quora, described feeding a mouse to her small constrictor snake. As she observed, the snake used its fangs to crush the mouse’s skull with such force that its brains exploded and the eye-balls popped from its sockets (let’s hope the little guy was already dead before this happened).
As to the supreme physical force that a constrictor’s muscles are capable of, Lenay recounts an incident in which she tried to handle her snake while he wasn’t in the best of moods. ‘Two-thirds’ of her cranky pet wrapped itself around her arm in protest; its power, according to Lenay, was so startling that she feared her wrist might actually fracture. The pain, she related, was incredible. Very quickly, Lenay lost feeling in her forearm and hand. By the time her pet was subdued, she was left with ‘blue fingers’ and bruises.
Lenay’s story was one of many, many incidents I’ve been able to research on-line. [Note: to those readers who have snakes, or have had interaction with them, please feel free to share your stories!]
The python, I have learned, has a force not meant to be regarded with laxity.
Sources: CBS 12 News, ABC Science, Daily Mail, Quota, Wikipedia, BBC News
