Thursday 4 February 2021

Keeping To A Sea Monster Theme,

if you have read Moby Dick,


or watched one of the films, you will have heard of Nantucket, Massachusetts, USA, famous for the book that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick (1851) he wrote it there without having visited the island of Nantucket, but it is also famous for its sea monster, thought to be Scoliophis atlanticus, or what was known as an Atlantic humped snake,

in 1937 fisherman, Bill Manville, claimed to have seen what he described as a monster that was over 100 feet long. In the words of the Nantucket Inquirer & Mirror, it was “a green sea monster — which reared its head several times off his starboard bow before turning seaward.” footprints were found on the beach, photographs of the two giant footprints that appeared on the shores of a beach in August 1937. (Nantucket Historical Association),

the footprints were 66-inches long and 45-inches wide — almost certainly made by the marine monster, 

Nantucket residents didn’t have to wait long for a glimpse of the fabled serpent; it washed ashore at South Beach – indeed over 100 feet in length, and with teeth as long as a man’s arm, for the full story have a look here at the Smithsonian Magazine, as it happens the book Moby Dick was inspired by a real life story, that resulted in the ship the Essex, being sunk by a whale, the surviving crew drawing straws to see who would be killed and eaten next, after the publication of Moby-Dick, Melville finally visited the island, and met face-to-face with Captain George Pollard Jr., the captain who survived one of the most harrowing ordeals at sea in human history.


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