RARE WHALE REDUX

Ten years ago, Nigel Wright and I wrote the following passage for our book The Rising of the Moon. Why are we resurrecting it now? Simply because, dear Fleur is (as you know) currently working as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, and has been involved in curating the skeleton of the very beast this article is about. So, we are pleased to reprint it, together with pictures of the whale's vertebrae..

The Exmouth Herald for September 25th 1987 reported:

“Please could we have our whale teeth back

Callous looters hacked off the lower jaw of a rare whale washed up near Exmouth to steal its two front teeth. After the 20-ft long Cuvier`s beaked whale was found dead at Otter Cove on monday, Exeter's Royal Albert Museum and the British Museum in London sent experts to retrieve it for research. But during Tuesday night, the whale floated back out into Lyme Bay because nobody had secured it. In the meantime, Customs officers who had arrived to take charge of the carcase on Tuesday mornmg found that the teeth which are Government property were missing.

Mr. Kelvin Boot, from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, said: ''This whale is one of the rarest as far as beaching goes. There are no records of one being stranded in Britain this century. There was a sightng in the 1960's, but that is not like having the actual whale to investigate. It is a very significant find. Perhaps we should have chained it to make sure it didn't float away, but I am confident that it will turn up again on a beach along the coast. The Marines are on stand-by to tow it oft as soon as it is sighted.

We will then dissect the whale, taking samples of various organs to check for heavy metal pollution in the sea and to discover what it has bcen feeding on. So little is known about this particular beaked whale. I just hope we can get it back. We may never get the chance again.

Fortunately for the scientists the whale obliged on Thursday morning, when it was washed up at Budleigh Salterton. Mr. Keith Green, an Exmouth-based Customs and Excise officer, said:"We would like to hear from anyone who has any information on the whereabouts of its teeth - they are still the property of the crown. All whales, porpoises and dolphins stranded on the British coast are the property of the Receiver of Wrecks, a department of the Customs and Excise service.

Under its rules, the mammals' teeth have to be removed and sent to the British Museum to establish the age and sex of the whale.”

Here, we would like to note that whereas the newspaper`s conclusion that the lower jaw was hacked off by souvenir hunters is probably correct, this IS remarkably reminiscent of another scenario commonly reported in UFO related animal mutilations. The coincidence between the locations and the timing (as we shall see there were UFO reports in 1987 as well) is worth remarking upon.

As Nigel pointed out, they would have, made spectacularly uninteresting souvenirs and having come face to face as it were with another suppurating cetacean ten years later, he feels it unlikely that any but the most psychotic of curio hunters would have summoned up the intestinal fortitude to hack the jaw off the great beast. I have to agree with him, and would add that the task would have been a particularly onerous and time-consuming one, and would also add that Otter Cove is a particularly isolated spot that can only be reached by driving through the grounds of a local holiday camp. (14) (15)

If the mutilation was carried out at night (which it would have to have been in order to escape the prying eyes of gleeful holiday makers) it would seem almost impossible (having visited the location) that:

a. The operation (which would have needed a chainsaw to complete) could have been carried out without attracting attention.

b. That the perpetrators (whoever they were) could have taken the immense jaw up the treacherous cliff path without having incurred an unreasonable degree of danger.

or

c. Anyone would have bothered.

A refutation of the `callous souvenir hunter` scenario can be found in this folllowing account of the species:

“Cuvier's Beaked Whale. Order Cetacea : Family Ziphiidae :
Ziphius cavirostris
G. Cuvier

Cuvier's Beaked Whale (Ziphius cavirostris) Description. A moderately small beaked whale with upperparts ranging in color from dark brown to lead gray or blackish in color; underparts paler, but not whitish; occasionally head and upper back whitish; beak moderately prominent and the forehead rising rather sharply; lower jaw longer than upper; pectoral fin relatively small and the dorsal fin placed on posterior third of body; prominent keel extends from dorsal fin to tail; skull with length of rostrum less than twice its breadth at notch; lower jaw of males with one large tooth (about 7 cm in length and 4 cm in diameter) at the tip; in females the teeth are small and seldom break through the gums so that the animal appears to be toothless; two converging grooves on throat. Total length of adults, 5-7 m. Weight, 2.5-4.5 metric tons.

Distribution in Texas. Sparsely distributed throughout tropical and subtropical waters of the world. In the western North Atlantic, these whales are found from Massachusetts to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

Habits. Little is known of this whale beyond information revealed by stranded specimens. They are often observed in groups of 10-25. These whales are deep divers and may remain below water for 30 minutes or longer. They are known to eat squid, fish, crabs, and starfish.

The reproductive habits are almost unknown. There does not seem to be a distinct breeding season as calves are born year round. Calves are about 2.1 m long at birth. The length of gestation is unknown.” (16)

D.J.Coffey (1977) also notes that:

“...the male has a pair of teeth at the point of the lower jaw. In the female these do not erupt” (17)

As every report on this particular stranding has stated the animal was a female. This satisfactorily refutes any allegations that it would have been mutilated by souvenir hunters even if they had had the time, the opportunity or the motive, which is very questionable.

Another story in the Exmouth Herald a week later proclaimed:

“Hankies out for whale

Exmouth foiled out a carpet of polythene to bring ashore its most unusual visitor. a rare Cuvier's beaked whale on Friday morning. The 20ft. whale had been washed up dead on rocks at Otter Cove near Exmouth, and became a television celebrity overnight. But before experts from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter could begin examining the five-ton female whale, thieves sawed off part of her lower law and two front teeth.

The whale was then washed away on the tide but found again in the estuary of the River Otter, at Budleigh Salutation. On Friday's high tide, Royal Marines from Limestone Camp secured lines around the whale and towed her out to sea as staff from the Exmouth Dock Company laid out a polythene carpet down Mamhead slipway on the pierheard.

As the whale was brought alongside by the Marines a line was thrown ashore to waiting dockers. A crowd of more than 100 watched the whale being pulled up the polythene carpet until the line broke. It was then a case of the one that got away as the whale drifted out to sea before the Marines nudged her back on to the slipway with inflatable boats. A new line was attached to the whale, which was pulled slowly up the sllpway and on to the road.

Several people reached for their handkerchiefs as the whale was lifted on to a waiting lorry - not to wipe away a tear, but to cover their noses. The carcass was then taken to a knacker's yard at Newton Abbot where staff from the museum began the task of stripping off the flesh. Mr. David Bolton. one of the museum team, said.' "We now know that the whale had a number of broken ribs and there was evidence of internal bleeding. This points to it having been hit by a ship or thrown across some rocks. "The whale had a punctured lung and a more detailed examination of the skeleton will provide some idea of her age.” (18)

The Ziphiidae, the family to which Cuvier`s beaked whale belongs is poorly known and full of so many zoological surprises that it has excited cryptozoologists as well as their brethren in the more mainstream branches of the narural sciences for many years.

Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist known universally as “The father of Cryptozoology” (19) waxed lyrical on the subject in 1968:

“No family of whales is so mysterious as the Ziphiidae, or 'Beaked Whales', which are really dolphins. Hyperoodon is the only one of its five genera which is at all common and the only one which has been known since the beginning of the last century. There seem to be several different species of Hyperoodon, or Bottlenose, reaching a length of about 30 feet, but the one most unlike the others is known almost entirely from skulls washed up in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet Hyperoodon has been caught only in the North Atlantic.

Cuvier's Whale (Ziphius) was first thought to be extinct when Georges Cuvier described in 1823 a partly petrified skull that had been washed up in the Mediterranean in 1804. Nearly half a century after the first stranding another was washed up in the same place. Later a whole specimen with an identical skeleton was found in New Zealand. Oddly enough in old specimens the skull is almost petrified, fossilised before its time, and in other respects it seems designed to fool the naturalist, for it is light above and dark below, thus breaking all the rules of animal coloration.

Mesoplodon is perhaps the most puzzling genus of all. It was first known from a carcase washed up at Elgin in Scotland and examined by Sowerby. It was brown and had a strangely curved lower jaw with only two teeth. In 1825 a similar beast, but with no teeth at all, was stranded alive at Le Havre. It lived for two days, and sightseers who had odd ideas about cetacean's diet-tried to feed it on bread soaked in water. Henri Ducrotay de Blainville studied it and christened it Aodon dalei on account of its absence of teeth, but subsequent scientists have said that it was just a Sowerby's Whale that had lost its teeth with age. It could well have been a female, for they are often found to be toothless. In 1850 Paul Gervais gave the species the name Mesoplodon bidens, which it has kept ever since. Meanwhile several different species of Mesoplodon have been reported, but their descriptions are based on so little evidence that it is hard to say whether there are ten or fifteen of them. One of the rarest is Gervais's Whale (Mesoplodon europaeus) of which only six specimens are known. The first was found floating in the English Channel in 1840; but the next three were washed up on the coast of New Jersey in 1889, 1933 and '935, and the last two, a mother and child, in Jamaica in 1953, which was rather unfortunate for a supposedly 'European' animal. Blainville's Whale (M densirostris) has an even more bizarre distribution. Only seven specimens have been found, but they could hardly have been farther apart: in the Seychelles, on Lord Howe Island, south of Africa, near Massachusetts, in Madeira and New Jersey. M stejnegeri is known only from two specimens from the Pacific coast of North America, and M. hectori from two specimens in New Zealand. The description of M bowdoini is also based on two New Zealand specimens, but as they were only skeletons we still know nothing about their external appearance. And I need hardly say that we know absolutely nothing about the habits of the various Mesoplodons, which are sometimes more than 15 feet long.

We hardly know more about the two species of Berardius, Arnoux's and Baird's Whales, which were first described in 1851 and 1883, and which may be over 40 feet long. The second has teeth which no mammalogist would have believed in had they been described by a layman, for they are embedded in cartilaginous sacs, and it seems that they can be erected at will. New species of Ziphiidae continue to be discovered. As recently as 1937 Oliver had to create a new genus, Tasmacetus, after three Beaked Whales of a hitherto unknown type were stranded in New Zealand. They were between 23 and 29 feet long; yet people still say that the sea cannot hold any large unknown animals.” (20)

In the thirty years since Heuvelmans wrote the above passage, the Ziphiidae have given up a few of their secrets and presented us with many more.

REFERENCES

14 [URL: www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot/ziphcavi.htm]
15 COFFEY, D.J. An Encyclopaedia of Sea Mammals (Hart davis/McGibbon, London, 1977)
16 The Exmouth Herald October 2nd 1987
17 I don`t know who first coined this appelation but I think it was French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal
18. HEUVELMANS B In the wake of the Sea Serpents (Hart-Davis, London, 1968 1st English ed.)
19. Chris Basford pers.comm.
20. As cited in Sightings, Dec 1997

Rising of the Moon is, by the way, available through Xiphos books

GUEST BLOGGER NIGEL WRIGHT: The Exmouth Mermaid - the mystery deepens

However long one is in this weird game of being a paranormal journalist, things can still catch you out. So it is with the story of the Exmouth mermaid, as I reported in my last blog for this column. Now, one would think that, after twelve years or so of writing for a living, I would have leaned to double check my sources etc. Well, I have been somewhat caught out by this one! The story of the Exmouth mermaid of 1812 is, in its essence true, but the one thing that does not ring true is the illustration that accompanies it.

It all started due to a reader of the article asking me for a higher resolution copy of the picture. This is a perfectly fair request, and one that I was happy to oblige with. Upon deeper research on the net, I found that the picture involved almost perfectly matched a drawing of a mermaid, famous in cryptozoology circles, called the “Feejee” mermaid. This was exhibited by the famous showman Barnum, in the US in the 1840”s. “Odd!” I thought, so I dug even further. Now, this is where the tale darkens somewhat. What on earth was a picture of an 1840’s exhibit doing, illustrating a story in an 1822 newspaper? For a moment my mind raced with fantasies of time warps etc! Oh!..The follies of old age! But, I am sad to say, the answer lay in the timeline of the relic itself. Let’s have a look at that timeline:-

1822…an American sea captain, Samuel Barret Eades brought to London a wonderful relic, which he had come across in the far east. This relic had been got from Dutch fishermen, who, in turn, had obtained it from some Japanese fishermen. This was the mermaid!. It was exhibited at the Turf coffeehouse, at St. James Street. Now, the same paper that had reported the Exmouth case, The “London Mirror” also reported on the number of visitors to this exhibition, some 400 a day!

1823...The exhibition comes to an end, when Eades is sued by the co-owner of the ship he had sold to but the mermaid in the first place. The relic disappears from public view then until the 1840’s, when it is sold to Barnum by Moses Kimball, owner of the Boston museum.

So, there is the answer!. For whatever reason he had at the time, the editor of the “London Mirror” decided to illustrate the 1812 Exmouth story with a picture of the “feejee” mermaid, which was at that time being exhibited at St James Street!. Journalistic license indeed!

The moral of this story? Well always double, double check your sources! And remember, there is always more than one ending to any story!

NIGEL WRIGHT: A fishy tale of the old Devon coastline

Nowadays we have become accustomed to hearing of strange and wonderful creatures, which arise from the depths of the world’s oceans and seas. However, I have come across a rather weird story that predates any of these modern stories. I live in Exmouth, a rather pretty town, located on the mouth of the Exe estuary, in Devon. Sometime ago I was researching for an article on local strange legends, when I came across this particularly good account of what appears to be, a first-hand account of a mermaid sighting!

The one really good thing about this account is the illustration which accompanies it. It is taken from the national paper of the day (The Mirror). Now for the exciting thing!...the date…1812!, August 11th to be exact. I think the best thing to do now is to allow you, the reader, to have a look at the original account, in full. It is in the words of one of the witnesses, a Mr. Turpin. He begins:-


"The day (August 11)," says he, " being very fine, I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen in a sailing excursion. When we had got about a mile to the southeast of Exmouth-bar, our attention was suddenly arrested by a very singular noise, by no means unpleasant to the ear, but of which it is impossible to give a correct idea by mere description. It was not, however, unaptly compared by one of our ladies to the wild melodies of the AEolian harp,* combined with a noise similar to that made by a stream of water falling gently on the leaves of a tree. In the mean time we observed something about one hundred yards from us, to windward. We all imagined it to be some human being, though at the same time we were at a loss to account for this, at such a distance from the shore, and no other boat near. We hailed, but received no reply, and we made toward this creature as soon as possible; when, to the great astonishment of us all, it eluded our pursuit by plunging under water. In a few minutes it rose again, nearly in the same place; and by that time we had got sufficiently near for one of the boatmen to throw into the water a piece of boiled fish, which he had in his locker. This seemed to alarm the animal, though it soon recovered from its fears, for we presently observed it to lay hold of the fish, which it ate with apparent relish. Several other pieces were thrown out, by which the creature was induced to keep at a short distance from our boat, and afforded us the opportunity of observing it with attention, and found, to our astonishment, that it was no other than a Mermaid. As the sea was calm, and in a great degree transparent, every part of the animal's body became in turn visible. The head, from the crown to the chin, forms rather a long- oval, and the face seems to resemble that of the seal, though, at the same time, it is far more agreeable, possessing a peculiar softness, which renders the whole set of features very interesting. The upper and back part of the head appeared to be furnished with something like hair, and the forepart of the body with something like down, between a very light fawn and a very pale pink colour, which, at a distance, had the appearance of flesh, and may have given rise to the idea that the body of the Mermaid is, externally, like that of the human being. This creature has two arms, each of which terminates into a hand with four fingers, connected to each other by means of a very thin elastic membrane. The animal used its arms with great agility, and its motions in general were very graceful. From the waist it gradually tapered so as to form a tail, which had the appearance of being covered with strong broad polished scales, which occasionally reflected the rays of the sun in a very beautiful manner; and, from the back and upper part of the neck, down to the loins, the body also appeared covered with short round broad feathers, of the colour of the down on the fore-part of the body. The whole length of the animal, from the crown of the head to the extremity of the tail, was supposed to be about five feet, or five feet and a half. In about ten minutes, from the time we approached, the animal gave two or three plunges, in quick succession, as if it were at play. After this, it gave a sudden spring, and swam away from us very rapidly, and in a few seconds we lost sight of it."

What a fantastic, detailed account that is. It really does give the reader a very good idea of the creature Mr.Turpin said he witnessed. What was it?, I really have no idea, but I love the story for what it is, a really good, detailed account of a very fishy encounter, just out from my lovely home port.

NIGEL WRIGHT: TWO DIFFERENT EFFECTS OF THE SAME EVENT?

UFOLOGY
AND
CYPTOZOOLOGY
ARE THEY TWO DIFFERENT
EFFECTS OF THE SAME EVENT?

It is true that many worthy researchers before me have tried to discover the connections between supposedly different types of paranormal phenomena. There is tantalizing glimpses of connections via such effects as EMF disturbance etc, but the many various types of paranormal events led most to conclude that we were dealing with many different forms of phenomena.

However, I for one never held this “many strands” viewpoint. For me the one main clue lay in the fact that different forms of paranormal event often occurred in a given area, at the same time. These phenomena of contained sightings led to the “windows” theory in ufology, that is to say, an area that is susceptible to multiple UFO sightings in any one period of time. Because of the separatist nature of the many disciplines involved in paranormal research, the investigators tended to concentrate, quite rightly, on their own subject matter, seldom did anyone try to see if any other form of paranormal event had taken place in that given area, at the same time as the UFO sightings. In our book “The Rising of the Moon” Jon Downes and I discovered that in our own “back yard” as it were, just such events did happen!

Not only did the area of East Devon suffer multiple UFO sightings at given times, but it also had cases of big cat sightings, ghosts, and disappearances, all occurring within the same time frame. These differing cases of paranormal and cyptozoologial events occurring at the same time and place MUST have a connection.

Not just East Devon suffer these “coincides” of multiple paranormal events. Let’s take a look at Cannock chase, in the Midlands. I first visited this area whilst I was part of a CFZ team, looking for weird crocodiles on the loose! When Jon said that he was going to visit the chase, I was delighted! Since this area is well know to most British ufologists as being of great interest. Upon first glance I recall saying to someone just how much the chase resembled Woodbury common, near my home in Exmouth, Devon. Woodbury common had been the location of many a UFO and big cat report. The geology of the two different places looked to me, as an untrained layperson, as being very similar. Both contained forests of pine trees, separated by gravely areas. At the time it did not immediately occur to me that the two might also have more than their geology in common. However, after returning home, and pondering over the sample EMF readings that Jon and our team had taken at sites at Cannock, these having shown “blips” of EMF activity at sites known to have suffered paranormal events, that I began to wonder if Woodbury and Cannock chase were related in some way?

HALLELUYAH IT'S RAINING FISH

During the summer of 1983 I was working in Exmouth. I became friends with one of my co-workers there, a Mrs Rowley, and I often used to visit her at her home where I would stay for an evening meal with her and her two young daughters. One early evening in July the elder of the two girls, who must have been about twelve came running in, greatly excited to tell me that there were three “horrid snakes” in the garden. Replete from an excellent meal, her mother and I wandered out into the garden expecting to find that the girls had discovered a nest of slow-worms, or perhaps grass-snakes. Much to our surprise, there, arranged neatly on the lawn in an almost perfect triangle were three dead, and very dessicated pipe fish.

Several species of pipefish (peculiar creatures closely related to seahorses) live in British waters and they are not particularly rare beasts, but they are one of the last things that one expects to find strewn neatly across someone`s lawn in the midst of comfortable suburbia. Mysterious falls of living creatures (sometimes called fafrotskies – an acronym meanining Falls of Anomalous Fish Right Out of The SKIES) are a well known phenomenon and one which which was particularly dear to Charles Fort. Fort was an American philosopher of nearly a century ago who dedicated his life to cataloguing unexplained phenomena. Since his death the adjective Fortean has been coined to describe the study of such things.

Fort had several bizarre and gloriously imaginative theories to explain such strange falls from the heavens. His most imaginative idea was the concept of what he called the 'Super-Sargasso Sea'. Just as the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic is supposed to be full of shipwrecks and all manner of objects caught up in its gulfweed, so the 'Super-Sargasso Sea' might be a repository for terrestrial and extra-terrestrial matter high above the earth's surface. Sometimes the sea would suck things up; at other times it would spew them back down to earth. Other explanations for such phenomena are numerous, but Dr Mike Dash calmly and logically manages to demolish the most widely accepted of them:

“........Another explanation is often advanced to account for the fall of frogs and fishes: the hapless animals were scooped up from a river or a pond by a passing waterspout, and deposited later some way off. This theory has something to recommend it: for one thing it has long been recognised that a number of falls really are caused by waterspouts. A whirlwind dropped fish at Quirindi, New South Wales, in November 1913, and fish fell from a waterspout in Louisiana in June 1921. Nevertheless, the waterspout hypothesis has weaknesses. There do not seem to be any accounts of rains of tadpoles, nor of smelly mud, broken bottles, old bicycles and the rest of the detritus that normally lurks in ponds alongside the frogs and the fish.”

If the Celestial Sargasso Sea is an inate part of the way things are, then surely the”my” pipefish would not have been dried and dessicated when we found them - they would have been fresh and possibly even still alive. The children had been playing in the garden all afternoon and were adamant that they had not been there earlier.

The same would seem to be the case if they had been transported there by virtue of a mysterious waterspout. Firstly, there had been no rain for days, and secondly, even if there had been an isolated shower which had managed to evade the detection of both us and the metereological Office, and even if this reticent rainstorm had contained a number of fish, then why were both the fish and the grass around them as dry as a bone?

The last theory that anyone has come up with is that the fish could have been dropped into my friend`s garden by a passing seabird. My only answer to that is that if one is forced to hypothesize a mysterious flying piscivorous predator that lived exclusively on dried and dessicated fish then we would be faced with a putative phenomenon far more bizarre than the one that we are actually examining.

Like so much in this world, fafrotskies in general, fish falls in particular and my experience with the three pipe fish specifically are just part of the way things are, and are presently completely inexplicable. The world is, after all, a very strange place.