The Sea-Serpent and the Whale: [Part 2 of 2]
A Monster’s Hunger is Sated
Drifting back to an astonished Captain Drevar on board the vessel Pauline, we find that the view from his binoculars registered a healthy shock: the python’s sheer size, which he could approximate even as the huge serpent coiled itself around the sperm whale ever tighter. The log reads:
‘Allowing for two coils round the whale, I think the serpent was about 160 or 170 feet long, and 7 or 8 feet in girth. It was in colour much like a conger-EEL; and the head, from the mouth being always open, appeared the largest part of its body.’
The length of the beast may have been one thing. But the breadth! What the captain was witnessing was the wrath of a monstrous serpent as thick around as a tree trunk, and as wide as a modern living room.
While doing the research for this piece, I found it wasn’t all that difficult to believe in Captain Drevar’s report. What was still difficult to understand, though, was how a sea-serpent 200 feet in length could overpower such an aquatic steam-engine as the sperm whale.
If Drevar’s measurement is correct, then it tells us everything we need to know already. The muscle-power of a python with that girth would be unfathomable. It would be able to crush not just sperm whales, but even larger ones [baleen/blue whales]. It would be able to destroy ships with a simple flick of its tail. It could terrify small Pacific Island communities by plundering the fish traps and demolishing — or devouring — the sailing vessels of the indigenous people.
An ambush by the ‘Pauline Python’ would be fatal one hundred percent of the time. Short of employing torpedos, no weapon existing to date would be able to subdue it; no ropes, no restraints, no knives or machetes. No facility would be able to harbor it, regardless of how many trillions of dollars for equipment marine biologists and their sponsors might scrape together.
The Pauline Python was, indeed, so massive that it may have made a light brunch of even the largest great white shark.
Helpless to do anything other than gape, the captain continued to peer through his binoculars at ther Pauline Python, which throttled its helpless quarry and then began to sink out of sight. This left both a shocked Drevar and a supremely-distressed pod of sperm whales to work out what they’d just witnessed on their own.
The seas calmed, and eventually the churning swells diminished. There was no more froth on the water’s surface. The pod of whales went its own way while Captain Drevar was left to think about how, exactly, he would pen these extraordinary events in his log-book.
Ultimately, that day would not be his only encounter with the colossal sea-python. Five days later, as the Pauline glided along its route in the south Atlantic, Drevar would record yet another encounter.
‘At seven a.m., July 13,’ reads the log, ‘[at] the same latitude, and some eighty miles east of San Roque, I was astonished to see the same or a similar monster. It was throwing its head and about 40 feet of its body in a horizontal position out of water as it passed onwards by the stern of the vessel. …[the stripe on the stern] might have looked like a fellow-serpent to it, and, no doubt attracted its attention. As I was not sure it was only our free board it was viewing, we had all our axes ready, and were fully determined, should the monster embrace the Pauline, to chop away for its backbone with all our might, and the wretch might have found that for once in its life that it had caught a Tartar.’
If the captain felt that the Pauline was in trouble, he needn’t have worried. The serpent chose its own course, though whether it submerged or not, Drevar did not let on.
Interestingly, the Pauline was not the only vessel to have had a run-in with the whale-eating sea-python. Four years later, Japanese sailors on board the ship Kiushiu Maru would report to have witnessed a similar battle in the ocean before them.
So: do giant pythons actually barrel though the open sea? Although some cryptozoologists believe that what the captain witnessed was a sperm whale’s struggle with a giant squid, I’m not so sure. For one thing, Captain Drevar had those binoculars. In the nearly fifteen-minute spectacle, he was able to determine the color of the beast, the bottom and top sides, and a massive head with a mouth that was constantly ‘open’. Those descriptions don’t seem to match those of a giant squid. Furthermore, the creature had been spotted again by the Japanese vessel, years after the incident. This means that whatever was attacking those whales lived in the vicinity so that it could use them as a food source.
More than a hundred years on, the ocean is combed by more fishing vessels, cargo ships, trawlers, cruise liners, and privately-owned fishermens’ boats than at any time in history. There have been no more reports of monster pythons chasing whales or cetaceans, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t ‘there’.
Beneath the ocean exist caverns and hide-aways that scientists can only dream of. Any giant sea-python wishing for a hiding lair would have a plethora of choices waiting for her. Although she is likely an air-breather, over the milennia her species might have evolved enough to enable themselves to prowl the sea without needing to surface for days.
There are also tens of thousands of uninhabited islands scattered throughout the Deep Blue, any of which would make a perfect home for a sea-python’s nest. There, her eggs could mature and hatch without worry, for even as babies, these giant pythons would have no natural enemies.
I can see them in my mind’s eye, slinking out of their calcium cocoons and into the frothing surf. The ocean, which sees all and knows all, would offer them her blue duvet without accepting or rejecting, and the life-cycle of the giant sea-python would begin, again.
Sources: The Guardian, Wikipedia, ABC News, Cryptozoology A to Z
