GUEST BLOGGER RICHARD HOLLAND: Big eels in British Columbia

Once again we hand you over to guest blogger Richard Holland, editor of Paranormal Magazine, and all round good bloke. He is a regular visitor tho these pages, and I am sure that you will all agree with me that this is jolly good news for all of us..

Flicking through an old copy of ‘Wide World’ magazine (May, 1926), I find a few newspaper clippings which I hope will prove of interest. The subject of the sea serpent was a chestnut in ‘Wide World’, with correspondents regularly sending in info from around the globe to the editor’s mail bag. The first clipping, from a British Columbia publication, should especially appeal to Mr Downes, who has had notable success when it comes to elongate Anguilla:

‘SEA SERPENT TRACKED TO LAIR AT LAST – The age long sea serpent mystery appeared to have uncoiled itself today when John P Babcock, Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries, was notified that Queen Charlotte Island Indians had identified the notorious sea serpents of their neighborhood as huge eels which live there in large numbers.

‘John J Can Valkenburg who has been investigating the sea serpent story all Summer and who claims to have seen one of these interesting creatures, is responsible for tracing the monsters to their den. From ancient Indians living in the Queen Charlotte Islands he has learned that for many years the natives have been accustomed to catch astoundingly large eels at rare interviews. These eels, the Indians say, live in a dark, slimy cave at the northern part of the Islands. Here many years ago an Indian brave, aided by six logs [dogs?], did battle with one of the monsters and killed it after a fierce fight. The eel killed in this encounter was nearly forty feet long.

‘The Indians’ description of the eels, says Mr Van Valkenburg, tallies precisely with the strange creature which he saw swimming near his home a few weeks ago. “They have a very large head, big nostrils and the mouth is equipped with very long, sharp teeth,” he states. Mr van Valkenburg announces that he will shortly make an expedition to the home of the eels, invade their cave and kill one if he can, thus solving the sea serpent mystery for all time.’

Or not. Needless, to say, there is no follow-up. The editor does inform us, however, that: ‘Another correspondent in British Columbia tells us that some time ago he met two prospectors who had a nerve-trying encounter with a monster “snake” of this kind while cruising in the same vicinity in a rowboat. Both were reliable men of excellent repute.’

Several months later, in the August 1926 issue, we have a new sighting reported, and this time it includes a sketch of the thing. The following report was reproduced from the ‘Tacoma Ledger’ and refers to a sighting by Captain House, an officer of the Fishery Protection service, of the Canadian Government vessel, the ‘Cloyah’. He spotted the monster when the ‘Cloyah’ entered Wright Sound, 50 miles south of Prince Rupert, BC, en route to New Westminster. Capt House’s report reads as follows:

‘The first appearance was the object rising spirally out of the water and then straightening out to about thirty feet high above the surface, retaining this position for half a minute. The last position was when it recoiled back into the water, churning it to a white foam, and submerged in the same way as it came up, at a rapid rate of speed.

‘As the sun was shining through the clouds the body took on a bright glistening green and bronze colour. The head appeared to have several dark ridges, also long pieces of thick skin, much like kelp, hanging from its head, also shining as if water was dripping from it.’

Capt House’s sketch of the twisty critter is reproduced here.

The thing caught further south, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, was no less impressive but no one dared be so bold as to pronounce it ‘eel’, or ‘serpent’ or even ‘fish’. From the ‘Boston Globe’:

‘SEA MONSTER AT BOOTHBAY HARBOR. Aug 25 – The strangest denizen of the deep that was ever seen by fishermen or anyone else in this vicinity was towed here today from Monhegan Island by Capt Cass Brackett. It measures 33 feet long, is estimated to weight about eight tons, has an enormous girth and a mouth so big that it is said an ordinary sized flour barrel could be hidden away between its toothless jaws.

‘Scientists from the numerous resorts in this vicinity came here today to look at the monster and went away with the statement that while it resembled a whale and looked something like a shark they weren’t quite sure whether it was a descendant of the sea serpent or the devil fish.’

Surely they couldn’t confuse a fish with a cephalopod? A fish-cum-squid would be a curiosity indeed. Perhaps a ray is meant by the term ‘devil fish’? I know such vague archive reports have little value alone but I offer these here in the hope that they are not well-known and may therefore be useful to anyone studying the fishy cryptids of these particular regions who can add these snippets to their sum of knowledge.

Richard Holland, Editor of Paranormal Magazine (www.paranormalmagazine.co.uk) and Uncanny UK (www.uncannyuk.com).

GUEST BLOGGER NEIL ARNOLD: From the Mountains to the Fountains.

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Neil Arnold to the CFZ bloggo with this first guest blog. I have known Neil for fifteen years now since he was a schoolboy with ambitions for adventure and I was an earnest young hippie who merely wanted to start a club for people interested in unknown animals. Nothing much has changed over the years. We are just both a tad older...

I have read with intrigue the musing of author Frank Buckland. In his 19th century book Curiosities of Natural History he tells a fascinating little tale pertaining to London, and it’s many water fountains dotted around the West End.

Buckland, in the chapter Fish and Fishing, from the first series volume, speaks of how goldfish, once confined to a lake near Tsientsing mountain in China, originally made their way England, and also how such fish ended up in fountains around London.

He states, “They were first brought to Europe in the seventeenth century, and continued very rare in England till the year 1728…”

Buckland adds: “When they were cleaning out the basins of the fountains at Charing Cross (London), I asked the foremen if he ever found any fish at the bottom, when the water had been drawn off. He told me that sometimes goldfish were found, and that he imagined they got there out of the glass globes of the men who go about the streets selling goldfish, and who come to Charing Cross fountains to change the water.”

It was believed by the foreman that these fish might have escaped, especially when these fragile bowls often cracked, when being knocked against the basin. However, Buckland also goes on to speak of eels being found in these basins, and believes he may well have had something to do with such finds. He says, “Some four years ago, I bought in Hungerford market a quantity of small eels, and taking them home, placed them in a large tub; but they did not thrive, so I tied them up in a handkerchief, and transferred them to the Charing Cross basins. I heard no more of them till a friend told me of a paragraph he had seen in a newspaper, stating that some good-sized eels had been found in the basins at Charing Cross; and that the newspaper correspondent accounted for their presence by supposing, ‘…that they had escaped from the fish-mongers shops at Hungerford market, and had gone to the nearest water by instinct’.

This of course seems unlikely as the nearest water would most certainly have been the more accessible Thames, and Buckland argues, “..imagine an eel escaping from a fishmongers, crossing over the crowded Strand, and climbing up the sides of the stone basins to get into the water. I know that eels will travel from place to place; but I much doubt their ever taking such a journey as attributed to them by the newspaper correspondent, who needed not to have resorted to such an ingenious, but impossible theory, had he seen me put the eels into the basins some months before.”

THE PASSENGER

The passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was once the commonest bird on the planet. Flocks numbering one billion were known from North America. During migration these flocks could be one mile wide and 300 miles long. They became such a threat to farmers that in 1703 the Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec formally excommunicated them!

In 1854 in Wayne County, New York, a local resident wrote that. `There would be days and days when the air was alive with them, hardly a break occurring in the flocks for half a day at a time. Flocks stretched as far as a person could see, one tier above another.' On 8 April 1873 at Saginaw in Michigan there was a continuous stream of passenger pigeons overhead between 7.30 in the morning and 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Other reports describe flocks a mile wide flying overhead for four or five hours at a time during their migration in the early spring from the south to their breeding areas in New England, New York, Ohio and the southern Great Lakes area. The flocks were so thickly packed that a single shot could bring down thirty or forty birds and many were killed simply by hitting them with pieces of wood as they flew over hilltops.

It was these great numbers that were to be their downfall. The species would only breed in titanic flocks. In smaller numbers, they seemed to have no interest in breeding, possibly because they felt unsafe.

The trees on which these flocks fed and in which they roosted were cut down. The pigeons laid only one egg per year and were apparently very easy to hunt. Indians captured them in nets and Europeans shot them as target practice. The birds were a cheap source of meat once railways linking the Great Lakes area with New York opened in the early 1850s. By 1855, 300,000 pigeons a year were being sent to New York alone. The worst of the mass slaughter took place in the 1800s and 1870s. The scale of the operation can be judged by figures that seem almost incredible but which were carefully recorded as part of a perfectly legal and highly profitable commerce. On just one day in 1860 (23 July) 235,200 birds were sent east from Grand Rapids in Michigan. During 1874 Oceana County in Michigan sent over 1,000,000 birds to the markets in the east and two years later was sending 400,000 a week at the height of the season and a total of 1,600,000 in the year. In 1869, Van Buren County, also in Michigan, sent 7,500,000 birds to the east. Even in 1880, when numbers had already been severely reduced, 527,000 birds were shipped east from Michigan. Once the numbers had fallen below a tipping point there was no going back.

On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo, Cincinnati, Ohio.